He swings around the drainpipe. It creaks, but holds, and he drops to an external walkway of another housing block. Heavy landing on concrete. Faint smell of things best left unexamined. Chipboard doors and graffiti. A woman with her shopping comes round the corner and jumps on seeing him. (Well, indeed, how did he get here? It’s a fair question.) He taps his forehead to indicate a tip of the hat, and she settles. He resists the urge to help her with her shopping, ducks into a grimy concrete corridor and along to the end to a utility staircase. Doesn’t even have to unlock it—the door is rusted through around the bolt.
Inside, more smells: bleach; spray-paint; elderly pet; marijuana and incense. Caretaker’s closet, lock permanently broken, emptied out and pushed shut. He looks out of the grubby window and sees, spread out below him, the glass skybridge joining the next floor down—which is a shopping centre—to the train station beyond.
And how does he know all this? He has mapped it from the ground, committed it to memory against a rainy day when, for whatever reason, he must make this trip without alerting whatever watchers there might be. His Night Market self, maligned and paranoid and never entirely abandoned, has scouted his entry. He has criss-crossed London, delivering packages and wandering gloomily, and he has catalogued possible escapes and entrances without ever admitting it to himself. Ready. For this.
He knocks the window catch with his elbow, a sharp tap, and it breaks. He worms his way through and lets himself down.
The glass roof sags beneath his feet. For a moment, he thinks it will break. He doesn’t look right or left, and wishes he was wearing rubber soles. His leather ones are soaked and sheer on the muddy surface, and the ground is a long way down. Not that he’s looking. He walks forward slowly, without running. That would be a mistake. He tries to make haste, all the same.
Joe steps onto the station roof and edges around the guttering, hand over hand. The station is two hundred paces long. He counts every single one of them. And then the parapet of the convent is below him, perhaps ten feet, but it looks further, and of course, there’s the small matter of the four-foot horizontal gap. There’s no way to turn around, not without risking a serious mishap. He’s never jumped backwards before, not when it mattered. He wonders whether he should try to spin around, or just use his arms to give himself a little extra momentum, and then he’s in the air, and thinking oh, shit, and he has just enough time to think this is a very strange way to visit your mother. Then he lands, tumbles backwards and knocks the wind out of himself, and lies on the parapet considering that perhaps he could just have telephoned.
Hell, no. Fifth-floor man, my friends. King o’ the skybridge. Yes.
The door from the parapet into the convent is locked. Possibly nuns do experience a high incidence of cat burglary. More likely they’re just punctilious. Or possibly the job of closing up still belongs to Sister Amelia, the kindly but stupendously old former disc jockey who, according to Joe’s mother, likes a tot and a fag on the balcony before bed, and therefore takes pains to be sure the job is done right lest someone else take her pitch.
He lets himself in.
Joe has never seen this upper floor before, and so has no idea what to expect. One thing which occurs to him, briefly, is that it may be some extraordinarily secret bordello for bishops with the urge. Another possibility is that it is a casino or moonshinery for bored Anglicans. Then he peers along the sad, green-painted corridor and knows that it’s nothing so bold; it’s just a very quiet, very lonely place where people who have chosen this particular way to spend their lives contemplate the divine. He wonders whether they all believe. Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there’s a God or not. His grandfather was scathing about “speculative faith,” which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God.
The shape of the corridor suggests that God wants Joe to go down a flight, across the building, and catch his mother when she comes back from evening prayers. If he hurries, he should make it before the place is awash with wimples and he is sternly ejected for possession of external genitals and an unsanctified soul.
Halfway there, he nearly trips over a medical sort of nun who is snoozing on a chair outside what must be the infirmary, and has to sneak by her the way people do in cartoons, actually on tiptoe and for no good reason with his hands held up to his chest, palms out. In a battered brass plaque enumerating the virtues of Saint Edgar, he catches a glimpse of himself in this position, for all the world like a pantomime robber, and sheepishly lowers his hands.
Joe lets himself into his mother’s room and sits on the bed, trying not to notice that the picture of Mathew is on the night table and the one of him is lying on its back by the single chair. He tries to believe that she hugs it, but the chair is not a chair for relaxing but rather one for being penitent, so he suspects she mourns his lack of ambition or his failures, or apologises to him for being a bad mother in her conversations with God. That last one makes him angry, because she was a great mother when she was around: loved him, sang to him, tended and ministered, helped with his homework and stood staunchly behind him in adversity. It was only after she exchanged a gangster for a deity that she began to slip away.
In his earlier life, there were times—perhaps they were even more common, in fact, than the other times—when spending time with his mother was a renewing experience for Joe Spork. They would walk around together, his small hand in her larger one, the cold strap of her watch rustling against his sleeve, and he would feel like a battery plugged into a giant recharging station, warmth and certainty filling him up. After half an hour spotting kites and dogs and ambling with Harriet, he could soak up days of his father’s jittery, electric-fence presence. It worked in reverse, too; Harriet stood taller when she was with her son. She relaxed the muscles of her face, letting go the sultry, coquettish scowl and permitting herself to be domestic, homely, and happy.
Those times faded away in almost perfect synchrony with the change in relative scale of their palms. As Joe’s first equalled and then exceeded his mother’s, so both of them became unwilling to share the inverted contact which told them the years had moved on. The young man became prickly about being seen to be a mama’s boy, and Harriet found it distressing to have such a grown-up son, and then later too full of unwanted memories to be touched by a powerful, wolfish young man so like her dead husband in his prime. By the time Harriet found God in a grimy chapel at Heathrow Airport, they found one another’s company painful, not because it was unpleasant but because it drained what once it had animated. They spoke occasionally, met rarely, and touched little if at all. When Harriet became Sister Harriet, and announced that her retreat from the temporal world would mean she could only see Joe once every six months, it was hard to say whether the announcement implied a greater or lesser distance between them.
And then she’s there, in the room with him. When he was a child, she towered over him and could have worn his pyjama bottoms as Bermuda shorts. Now he looks down at her in her flat shoes, and she’d fit into one leg of his trousers, and with her hair pulled straight back she is hardly as high as his chest.