On the Loose(13)
7
SHRINKAGE
Alma Sorrowbridge longed for the clear skies, white beaches and warm salty sea breezes of her homeland, Antigua. Instead, all she saw when she looked out of the window in Chalk Farm on Thursday afternoon was a man trying to shove a sodden mattress into a van. In her garden, sooty rain pattered on a sprawling bush of half-dead rhododendrons, underneath which a stray ginger cat sat with trembling haunches, trying to pass a stool. Alma pulled her cardigan over her immense bosom and sighed. If there was one thing more depressing than waiting for spring to arrive in London, it lay in the other direction of her view, sitting by the gas fire in a ridiculously long scarf and a ratty quilted crimson dressing gown, moaning about everything and everyone. And when he wasn’t complaining, he was extrapolating on subjects of no interest to anyone but himself.
‘—Looking for a lost Roman city full of treasure somewhere under Watling Street,’ Arthur Bryant was explaining to no-one in particular. ‘There’s still a place called Caesar’s Pond on Stan-more Common where Boudicca’s final defeat took place. It seems absurd to celebrate Boudicca as a rebel leader, considering she lost most of her battles, her troops were barbarians, she slaughtered her own people and she burned down half of London.’ When Alma next tuned in, Bryant’s topic had changed. ‘The Shoreditch Strangler took his last victim home in a taxi, and was almost caught by passing constables because the bollards in Boot Street prevented him from parking near the disposal site. Traditional street bollards were fashioned from French cannons captured at Trafalgar, but now—do you know what I’m talking about?’
‘Bollards,’ said Alma, who was only listening to one word in ten. Living with Mr Bryant, you soon learned to tune out most of his rambling diatribes and concentrate on something more important, like unclogging the sink. She turned to him in annoyance. ‘Why don’t you get out of the house for a while? Go on, go for a walk or something. It would do you good.’
‘I can be just as miserable here as in a park, thank you.’
‘For Heaven’s sake, will you just go somewhere? You can’t just sit around all day. Sometimes I can’t tell where you end and the armchair begins.’
Bryant set aside his copy of British Boundary Lines: 1066–1700 and turned his attention on her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been acting strangely all morning.’
‘It’s you, stuck here at home with no office to go to, just plonked in front of the fire feeling sorry for yourself, reading out loud from all those dusty old books. Look at these things.’ She picked up several at random from the sideboard. ‘Intestinal Parasites, Volume Two; A Guide to the Cumberland Pencil Museum; Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers; The Pictorial Dictionary of Barbed Wire. And why are you learning Hungarian? Filling your head up with all this rubbish—and the mess you make with those chemical concoctions in your bedroom, and the language! I don’t mind a bit of swearing, it’s only natural, but I draw the line when you involve Jesus.’
‘Oh, please spare me the sanctimony. The Christian legend is an embarrassingly childish reiteration of hoary old vegetation myths, the simple impregnation-and-resurrection cycle of pagan tree gods. You should try one of the more complex, grown-up religions from the Far East for a while, rather than worrying over a bunch of ghost stories concocted by bored shepherds in tents. Wait until they confirm life on other planets, that’ll mess up Christianity for you.’
‘Shame on you, you wicked old man! Every time you blaspheme, an angel is stripped of its wings.’
‘A good job, too. Sanctimonious bloody things drifting about with their harps, ticking people off all the time like feathered traffic wardens.’
‘I don’t think you’ll ever get into Heaven.’
‘The only reason why people need to believe in an afterlife is because they’re fed up with this one.’
Alma tried to deflect his remarks by busying herself with the pile of washing stacked on the dining room table. She loved her old friend dearly but he was an affront to her sense of order. Bryant was not a private person. The details of his life were not kept under lock and key, but messily spread about him for everyone to see. Any door he passed through was left open, any chair he inhabited slowly filled with books, magazines, scraps of paper, pens and envelopes containing everything from seeds to microscope slides. He invited everyone into his world, the better to embroil them. ‘I don’t know why I should have to spend my day repairing your pants while you sit there having a go at me,’ she told him. ‘I’m not a wife. I tried that with Mr Sorrowbridge and look where it got me. Go on, sling your hook and give me some room to breathe.’