Strangers

She sounded drowsy, too far away from him.

‘Annie?’

He could hear the effort, but she responded at last. ‘Yes. I’m still here.’

‘Talk to me again. About your mother. Anything, just go on talking.’

‘I …’ she sighed, a faint expiry of breath and he knew that he was only imagining the brush of it on his cheek. ‘I can’t talk any more. You talk, Steve. I like to hear your voice.’

When was the last time? That was what he wanted to catch hold of before it was too late, the last time he had felt the rawness of wanting something very much. The last time he had wanted something in the way that he wanted to live now, because he wouldn’t be defeated by a maniac’s bomb. Was that the key to it? Because he wouldn’t be defeated …

Steve felt his head thickening, the thoughts and memories beginning to short-circuit. He forced his eyes open wide, willing himself to hold on to consciousness, and he began to talk.

‘A long time ago. So long I’d forgotten how important it was. I wanted to get away, that was it. My Nan’s flat, Bow High Street, three floors up. From the moment I went to live there, I wanted to get away.’

It had taken long enough, but he’d made it in the end. When the day came he went into the little room that led off Nan’s kitchen and stuffed jerseys and shirts into his blue duffel bag. Nan was sitting in the kitchen watching the television. He could see her bulk past the half-open door, and the tablecloth half-folded back over the Formica-topped table, and the brown teapot and milk bottle, and her cup and saucer waiting to be refilled with thick brown tea.

‘Off again, are you?’ she shouted over the din of the television.

There had been trial getaways before this. Plenty of Saturday-night stopovers in overcrowded flats when those who were left behind after the part petered out had just fallen asleep wherever they fell down. There had even been a week, not long ago, when he had stayed with a girl up near Victoria Park. That had been too good to last, of course. She’d seen through his assumed adult suavity all too quickly.

‘Sixteen? Is that how bloody old you are? Sixteen? Go on, get back to your mother before they come and lock me up for corrupting infants.’

Nan had welcomed him back, and the sharpness of her tongue didn’t disguise her relief. ‘Where the hell d’you think you’ve been? Not a word from you for a week. Didn’t you know I’d be worried stiff? You’ll end up like your Dad, Stevie, after all I’ve done.’

He put his arms around her. She was fat, but she was also frail and she could only move stiffly across the poky kitchen.

‘I will not end up like my Dad. You know that.’

Nan had shifted her dental plate with the tip of her tongue and said acidly, ‘Perhaps not. But there’s plenty of other ways of going to the bad. I daresay you’ll manage to find one that suits you.’

There had been calm after that for several months.

Now, as he closed the empty drawers in his bedroom one by one, he tried calling out, ‘Nan? Nan, I’m going to live up West …’

She couldn’t hear him, of course. The television obliterated everything. So he had finished his methodical packing, even taking down his childhood posters of West Ham United and Buddy Holly and folding them up. Then he went into the kitchen and put his assortment of bags down on the cracked lino floor. He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.

‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’

‘Nan, I want to talk to you. I’m going to live up West. I’ve got a room and everything. I’ll be all right.’

He had been so callous in those days. Nan had just sat and stared at him, with her big pale fingers twisting in her lap.

‘Eh? Live up there? What for? You live here, love. Ever since you were that high.’

She held her palm out, a couple of feet off the lino, and Steve thought, Yes, I do remember. And ever since I’ve wanted to get out. ‘I can’t live here for ever, Nan. I want to get on. I’ll come and see you weekends, I promise.’

Her face went sullen then. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she murmured.

She had done everything, of course. Mothered him and fended for him, and bought his food and clothes for ten years. He couldn’t pay her back for her devotion, he knew that with chilly sixteen-year-old detachment.

‘I’ll come and see you often,’ he repeated. ‘And as soon as I’ve made it I’ll buy you a better place, up near me or here, whichever you like.’

‘Make it?’ she snapped at him. ‘How are you going to do that? What about school? You could go to college. Mr Grover told me himself.’

Patiently he had tried to explain it to her. ‘I don’t need to go to college. It’s a waste of time, all that. I’ve got a job, Nan. I’m not going back to school.’

She was too angry to listen to him. So he had hugged her unyielding bulk, picked up his belongings, and marched out.

All he felt was relief as he left the Peabody Buildings. He bumped past each pair of heavily-curled brown-painted balcony railings, down the tight spiral of stone steps to the road. He walked briskly up the street to the bus stop and then stood peering eastwards into the traffic for the first sight of the bus that would take him up West for good.

The job was as a messenger for an advertising agency, and his home was a second-floor bedsitter with a restricted view straight down into the Earl’s Court Road. As soon as he arrived, Steve knew that he would never look back. After eighteen months as the Thompson, Wright, Rivington messenger boy he was offered the humblest of jobs in the media buying department. That job led to another and then another, and then to the huge leap upstairs to the circus of the creative floor. From Thompson, Wright, Rivington he was headhunted by another agency, and he began to enjoy money for the first time in his life.

Then, Steve remembered, I wanted everything. I was so busy making sure I got it that I never thought about anything else.

There were plenty of other people like him, and the time was ripe for all of them. His agency career began with the first shy appearances of pink shirts at client meetings, and it blossomed all through the sixties and into the seventies between lunches at the Terrazza and afternoons at the Colony Club, punctuated by parties swaying with girls in miniskirts and location shoots in exotic places and creative crises when somebody, usually Steve himself, managed to come up with a headline in the nick of time. Perhaps it hadn’t really been like that at all. It felt too far back to remember. But it had seemed easy and so congenial that for a long, long time he had gobbled up everything that came his way.

Some time during those years, Nan had died. Steve had been in Cannes at the time of the funeral, doing business, and he couldn’t fly back home for it. But he had paid for everything to be done properly. And he had sent a wreath, which was more than Nan’s only daughter, Steve’s mother, had bothered to do. If she even knew that her mother was dead. Steve himself had hardly seen her since she had taken him, at the age of six, to live with his grandmother.

‘Poor Nan,’ he said softly. And then, is remembering always feeling ashamed?

No, it wasn’t so for Annie. Annie had fulfilled all kinds of promises that he had broken himself. Steve felt the slash of regret and telepathically she whispered, ‘It isn’t too late.’

His reaction to the pain was anger instead of fear now. He heard himself shouting, ‘Where are they then? Why don’t they come for us, before it is too late?’

The mass hanging over them swallowed the sound and gave nothing back. They couldn’t hear anything at all.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Steve said.

‘It’s all right.’ Annie soothed him as if he were Benjy. ‘You believe that they’ll reach us in time. You made me believe, too. They’ll come. We must just hold on … What are you doing?’

Steve was disentangling his hand from hers.

‘I want to find out how long it’s been.’ His fingers felt swollen and hooked with cramp as he fumbled painfully for the watch.

‘We must hold on,’ Annie repeated, as if she was obediently reciting a rote lesson, ‘until they come for us.’

Steve realized how much of her strength she was drawing from his reassurance, and wondered how long that could last. He felt much weaker now, and the pain from his leg clawed across his hip and stomach. He drew the watch out and laid it face upwards on his chest. Again he traced over the tiny hands with his fingertip. Suddenly dizziness enveloped him as he struggled to make sense of what he could feel. The hands were almost vertical, opposite to one another, and he touched the winder button to make sure.

Six o’clock … it could be six o’clock. If it was six o’clock it would be dark outside too. How could they search in the dark? Lights. Of course, they would bring emergency generators. They wouldn’t stop looking until they had found the two of them. Steve struggled to draw sense out of the tiny, baffling circle and suddenly realized with a wave of relief, not six o’clock … It was half past twelve. Saturday lunchtime. Out there people would be cooking meals, telephoning one another, driving past twinkling shop windows on the way to warmth, doors closing against the wind, the sound of voices. The dizziness disorientated him, and he was shivering.

‘Annie …’ He moved involuntarily, too quickly, and the watch dropped out of his grasp. He heard it rattling and then clinking to rest somewhere beneath him. It was gone.

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Go on talking.’

‘I’m very thirsty,’ Steve answered. He was sleepy too, but he wouldn’t let that take hold of him. He began to talk again. His voice sounded slurred and he breathed deeper to control it.

What had happened? Some time during those agency years, without Steve ever having time to recognize it, he had stopped wanting anything. He had stopped feeling hungry. He almost laughed at the obviousness of it now. But the pleasure of being in the thick of such a business, where huge sums of money were treated so anarchically and still successfully, had faded too. It wasn’t just his own appetite that had gone.