‘Whadda you mean? Who?’
‘I sez one day you won’t come out.’
‘Who?’
‘And her di’n’t. Was it you? Was it you?’
‘Listen,’ Robin said, ‘whatever you’re saying, I think I need to know this stuff. Talk to me.’
But she’d gone. She moved fast, Mrs Villiers. He stood staring down the alley until the whistling came curling around the chimneys like ribbon.
* * *
He carried the stiff greatcoat and the sacks up the wooden stairs to the sitting room. There wouldn’t be room to eat in the back kitchen downstairs, so they’d brought a pine table and some chairs up here. What they hadn’t brought – one for the removal van – was the sofa. The sofa. Just like they only had one bed. The only two items you sleep on, and they’d be the last to arrive.
He went through to the first of the two bedrooms, divided by a blockboard partition which he was sure would disintegrate like a wall in an air raid if you lightly applied a shoulder to it. Not a stick of furniture in either room. The low rooms up here, you could tell they must once have been no more than a loft, maybe a hay store for animals waiting to die.
Back Fold ran with blood. Echoed to the sounds of bellowing.
Robin inhaled massively. He couldn’t stay here.
But, more than that, he couldn’t leave. They had... hell, they had a business to start tomorrow.
Would have to be the bathroom, with its shaving bar which lit up mauve when you pulled the string. No mirror, only a grey-white wall, a basin and a lavatory. The bath ran the length of the opposite wall under a small, square window the one where, if you put your head out, you could see the castle.
He went back to the living room, pulled all the flat cushions off the dining chairs. Back in the bathroom, he tossed them in the bath with the sacks spread on top then shambled over to the lavatory and took a piss, standing to the side so the shaving light would show him where the bowl was. A bronchitic cough when he pulled the chain – or maybe that was him – before the water came coughing out.
He eased off his jacket and rolled it up as a pillow, trapping it under an arm. Unlaced his trainers but kept them on, as he pulled the string to douse the depressing mauve light, before climbing unsteadily into the cushioned bath.
Standing there, putting off the moment when he’d have to try and lie down. Turning around to lean over to the small square window and its view of the castle’s curtain wall and the sloping roofs rammed into it, to a stripe of sky and moonlight like crumpled chocolate-foil left on the stone. Behind it, the castle itself, invisible in the night, maybe dreaming of the old nights of blood and fire.
He turned away from the window, sinking down, in hurting stages, into the bath. Dragging the greatcoat over himself, like a rough sleeper in a high-street doorway, folding his body on to the side that gave him least pain – a close contest at the best of times.
Telling himself he’d had worse beds. Would’ve handled this no problem back in the day, when women eyed him in the street, with his long, dark pagan hair and his wide pagan grin made dangerous by a black stubble which now featured sad, pointillist dabs of white. Looking like the warrior he could never be.
He contrived to fold himself into the enamel bunk, drawing up his knees. Thinking himself back into the warm, pixillated streets and the soft lights. Everything bathed in a pinkening mist as he fell thickly asleep.
Whenever he awoke in pain, he shifted a little and sank back into the sleeping town letting go like a spirit in warm air with no reassembled bones to slow him up. Down Back Fold into Castle Street, and then the market square, under the cliff face of the castle, down to the clock tower, into High Town, Lion Street, Bear Street, history unfolding, the pink deepening until the heart of the town, blood-red now, became his own heart, swollen, throbbing and twisted, as if his chest had been opened, his ribs parted to let someone’s fingers start feeling in between the arteries, gripping the organ like a soft orange and... ah no...
He awoke fully this time, gasps torn out of him like rags, as he heaved himself up too quickly in the clammy bath, his face creamed with sweat, his nose and throat thick with mucus, a familiar agony jagging up his left leg as his eyes opened into cold early light, which...
… was not the early light. The high window was black as the bottom of an old grill pan. Nothing out there, no birds stirring. The only light in the glass was reflected from the room, and it was razored and sporadic, like fork-lightning.
Fearfully, Robin let his head turn to the wall above the metal basin, where the shaving bar, the one he’d extinguished with a tug on its cord, was sputtering like a dud firework.