At the end of the hall were two doors.
I tried them both. The telephone was behind the second.
I saw it from the doorway. Black and lobster-like it sat hunched on a small wooden table draped with a white sheet which looked as if it had been daubed with black ink.
It was still ringing; now, of course, louder than ever.
The thick carpet sucked at my feet as I started to cross the room and I worried I might lose a boot. The air in the room smelt musty and old, as if by opening the door I had broken the seal on a long-kept secret. Perhaps the phone had always been ringing. Air swirled past me as I used my arms like a swimmer to move forward.
I hesitated for a moment as I stood over the little table. What if the phone went dead just before I picked it up? I almost hoped it would.
I lifted the receiver and the ringing stopped. The Bakelite felt clammy in my hand as I raised it to my ear. On the edge of hysteria a woman’s voice just had the chance to utter these words — ‘Carl! Help! Come quickly, Carl! Please!’ — before the connection was severed.
As I stood there in the darkness and the line buzzed, I became more and more frightened.
I didn’t tell you my name, did I? That was deliberate. As you’ll have guessed, my name is Carl.
Chapter Two
The following morning I went back to the area in which Annie Risk and I had got lost. It was a Sunday so I didn’t have to worry about the shop.
I drove around for half an hour, but it was daylight and I could read all the street names and there were numbers on most of the doors. If I did drive down the street where I’d broken into the house to answer the phone, I was unable to recognise it. Certainly I didn’t see any broken windows.
Confused, I went back home and rang Jaz. I asked if he was busy and could I come around for a bit.
‘Yeah, I’m busy,’ he said. ‘But come round anyway, you old bastard.’
I drove down through Barnsbury and Islington. When I got close to the canal, passing between Dalston and Hoxton, I saw a pack of dogs on a tiny patch of waste ground. With their ears pricked up they watched me go past and I was glad I was not on foot. I couldn’t see anyone about, which seemed odd for a Sunday afternoon. I drove on.
Jaz’s flat was tucked away somewhere between Hackney and Bethnal Green, on the second floor of a rundown building backing onto the canal. Different smells rose from the water in different seasons and at different times of the day, but not one of them was sweet.
The flat was large for one but Jaz had explained that was because it was hard to let and I could believe it. So much water came running down the bathroom wall you could take a shower in it, and there were constant scratching sounds which Jaz attributed to vermin without being any more specific. The doors to most of the flats were covered with graffiti. The communal stairs stank of rotting vegetables and animals. Rats, I hoped, because I hated them less than dogs.
I managed to get around to see Jaz maybe once a month. His building depressed me slightly but Jaz only ever wanted to meet there nowadays rather than in the Swan or the Queen’s Head in Islington. The stairs made me nervous, so I always ran up, my boots clumping on the stone steps and echoing throughout the building.
Jaz was a while answering the door. ‘I was in the darkroom,’ he said when he finally appeared. Jaz was a freelance photographer. When we had met as couriers working for the same firm, Jaz took pictures as a hobby. Now, seven or eight years later, it was his livelihood. He’d done occasional fashion shoots and cookery features for the Sunday magazines, but he preferred working in the open air. His most recent project seemed to be all about grim photographs of urban landscapes.
‘Hang on while I finish up in the darkroom,’ he said as he disappeared, leaving me to close the door. The flat was back to its normal grand, lonely self. The last time I’d been there was for the party, when fifty or sixty people had been crammed into the high-ceilinged rooms and all the lights had been replaced by candles.
‘Can I help?’ I shouted to Jaz.
‘Can you fuck,’ came the reply, from behind the closed door at the end of the hall.
I wandered into the kitchen and looked out of the window. Two black dogs picked their way across the bomb site of a council block car-park. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The dogs loped towards three young boys playing with pieces of brick. One of the boys hefted a half-brick and I thought he was going to attack one of the dogs. But the animals trotted past and the boy’s half-brick came down on a beaten disc of metal, an old road sign by the look of it.
‘Nice area, isn’t it?’ Jaz had joined me at the window. ‘Which way did you come today?’
‘Downham Road and Lee Street. Haggerston Road and over the canal.’ The names lifted accurately from my mental map.
‘Not the same though, is it? By car, I mean.’ Jaz went to the fridge and took out a couple of beers. ‘Not like on the bike. Like the old days.’
‘You’re right. I miss it.’ Not strictly true, but I’ll come to that. I moved away from the window and took my Camels from my boot and lit up, offering one to Jaz, who declined and levered the caps off the beers before handing one to me. Then he lit a Consulate, leaning back against the sink, and I grinned. ‘Don’t know how you can smoke those things,’ I said. ‘Like smoking Polos. Don’t know how you can smoke at all. Filthy habit.’
‘Too fucking right.’ It was Jaz’s turn to laugh. I’d been trying to give up on and off for some time.
Jaz went back to the window and I took a drag on my cigarette. ‘Where did you park your car?’ Jaz asked. It was a joke. It wasn’t funny but it was a joke. I knew that the car was parked right beneath where Jaz was standing, that he could see it from the window, and that he knew the car almost as well as he knew its owner. A Mark One dirty grey Escort with two missing wheel trims and a boot lid that wouldn’t shut. The joke was it had been nicked. But I daresay you’d already worked that out.
‘Pretty funny, Jaz,’ I said from my end of the kitchen. ‘No one would nick that car. It’s a state, I know. But it gets me where I want to go.’
‘So where’s that?’
I looked around for an ashtray and decided the question wasn’t worth answering. ‘The other room,’ I said sardonically. Jaz followed me through and again made straight for the windows. For someone who didn’t like to leave his flat he sure liked the view. I went to the other window and put a foot up on the low ledge, staring across the canal at the iron latticework cradling two large, empty gasholders.
I moved away from the window and sank into one of the deep sheet-covered armchairs that were the only items of furniture in the large, bare-boarded room. On the walls were a couple of Jaz’s favourite black-and-whites in cheap clipframes. There was a good one of me sitting on my bike near King’s Cross looking a bit the worse for wear. I gripped the chilled bottle in my right hand and enjoyed the sensation. It was another warm day.
‘That girl at your party,’ I said casually while still looking out over the canal, ‘what was her name? Ann, I think…’
‘I think you mean Annie. And I think you know very well what she’s called. Fucking hell, Carl, you stand out too much to be subtle.’ He dragged on his Consulate. ‘Have you been out with her then?’
I looked at Jaz. He was drinking and watching the scum drift on the surface of the canal. Was I really that transparent or had Jaz been unusually sensitive? For some reason I didn’t want to go into details about Annie with Jaz. Some irrational mistrust or shyness held me back. However, I said: ‘We went out, had a good time. But she’s gone back to Manchester. Why does she want to live up there anyway?’