“Hurry up,” Andy said. “I’ve got us a taxi.”
Lynn’s cheeks coloured to match the roses on her dress. “A taxi? What’s all this in aid of?”
Kip’s father was standing holding the door open like a butler in a television murder mystery. As Lynn got up from the sofa he bowed and began humming a tune from one of the opera CDs he sometimes listened to in the car. His mother laughed, and a look passed between her and his father that made Kip feel stupid and in the way, as if all his worrying about her had been for nothing. He wished they would keep their business to themselves.
He waited for them to leave, then turned off the television. He fetched the Nikon from his room and began to photograph the back room and the hallway, pretending that the house was the scene of a crime. He did a series of close-ups of the glass tumbler his mother had been drinking from. The tumbler was still half full of tonic water, and there was a fingerprint clearly visible near the brim. Lynn had changed her mind about her shoes at the last minute, and one of the discarded ones, a high-heeled pink sandal, lay on its side in the doorway. If you looked at things a certain way the dirty glass and the fallen shoe looked suspicious, as if someone had left the room in a terrible hurry.
He became so absorbed in the details that there were moments when he forgot he was in his own home. Eventually he laid the camera aside on the sofa and went through to the kitchen. There was potato salad in the fridge, some Polish salami, the remains of his parents’ lunch. He piled it into a bowl and was about to put it all in the microwave when his phone rang. It was Sonia. He picked up at once.
“Did you hear?” she said. “They got him.”
“Yes,” Kip said. “I saw it on the news earlier.”
“Do you reckon it’s him? The guy in the photo, I mean?”
“I doubt it. I’d forgotten all about him, really.” He was caught off guard by a memory of her, leaning against a tree as she pulled on her jeans. Her back was long, with a very slight curvature of the spine. There were exercises she was meant to do to stop it getting stiff but she was always forgetting. The skin over her vertebrae was taut and pearly white, the row of smooth bumps reminding him always of a saying of his mother’s: rare as hens’ teeth, they are. Quite suddenly the last thing he wanted to talk about was Dennis Croft.
“Can you call me back on the landline?” Sonia said. “They’re showing Donnie Darko on Channel 4 in a moment. We could sit and watch it together, if you like?”
“What about your parents?” Kip said.
“They’re out. With some people from Deutsche Bank. They won’t be back for hours.”
He finished microwaving the food then took the hall phone upstairs to his room. He dialled Sonia’s home number and she picked up almost before it had a chance to ring. Halfway through the film Kip got undressed and lay down on his bed, clutching the phone between his neck and his shoulder to stop it slipping.
“You’re taking your clothes off,” said Sonia. “I can hear you doing it.”
“I am not.”
“Liar!”
“Shut up, I’m missing the film.”
He closed his eyes and thought of Sonia lying on top of him. The fact that she was both far away and close made him feel breathless with excitement. He began to rub himself, focusing on the sound of her breathing and trying not to make any noise.
“Kip?” she said some time later. “You okay?”
“You’re rare as hens’ teeth, you are.” A single tear ran diagonally across his face. “Watch the film.”
When the film was over they said goodnight and ended the call. Kip pulled up the duvet and lay in the dark, watching the television with the sound turned down. Eventually he fell asleep. He woke briefly just after two. There was a light on downstairs and the sound of voices. For a moment Kip felt frightened. He remembered the dirty tumbler and the discarded shoe and thought something awful had happened. Then he realized it was just his parents coming home from the Toklins’. They spoke in loud whispers like miscreant school kids. He could tell from the way they were moving that they were both drunk.
He began to drift off again almost at once. His father was humming the Toreador Song out of Carmen. His mother stumbled against the box of newspapers in the hall, swore loudly and then stifled a laugh.
The box shouldn’t even have been there. His father was supposed to take it out on Fridays for recycling.
Just before he fell asleep, Kip decided he would not go to Croft’s house on the Tuesday, after all.
Croft’s house was on Belmont Hill, the Lewisham end, one of a long Victorian terrace, the tall, gabled houses running away down the steep gradient like toppling dominoes. Kip photographed the house from both sides of the road, wondering if Croft were watching him from behind the curtains. He doubted it. He had already made up his mind on the way over that Croft would not be in when he called, that the address on the piece of paper was not even his. He told himself the only reason he was going there was to prove the whole thing was a fake. He pressed the bell, trying to work out what he would say if the door were opened by a complete stranger, a large woman in a flowered bathrobe say, or an old man in a saggy green cardigan with the elbows worn through.
Excuse me, but does Mr Gaumont live here? I promised my uncle I’d change his library books for him.
Kip liked the sound of Mr Gaumont. The idea of him was so convincing that when the door opened and Croft appeared, Kip had to think who he was. It seemed for a moment that Croft was the fantasy, not Gaumont, old Gaumont who was so harmless and so plausible. It crossed his mind that Croft had done away with Gaumont, just as he had done away with Rebecca Riding.
“Hi there,” Croft said. “Come in.”
He took a step back from the door. As Kip entered the house it occurred to him that nobody in the world knew where he was. He found himself wishing he had left a note in his room, or that he had texted Sonia. He wondered how often bad things happened to people because they were afraid of looking stupid, and supposed it was often, more often than you might think anyway.
“Excuse the mess,” Croft said. “This was my dad’s place. He left it in a bit of a state. It’s taking me a while to get things straight.”
There were some black bin bags at the foot of the stairs but other than that there was no mess that Kip could see. The hallway of the house was dark, made darker by the varnished wood panelling and dull red carpet. There was a smell of mothballs and furniture polish, reminding him of the Toklins’ house, which was owned by Lyonel Toklin’s ninety-year-old mother, Violet. Lynn Kiplas always joked that Violet Toklin was so stingy she hadn’t had the place decorated since VE Day, and Kip felt half-inclined to believe her. Croft led the way through to a room at the back, home to an enormous buttonback sofa and a boiler on a tiled hearth protected by a square metal cage. There were piles of books everywhere. Kip noticed a stack of Photography Now and some issues of another magazine that he knew you could only get on subscription from America.
“Can I get you anything?” Croft said. “A drink maybe?”
Kip shook his head, then asked for a glass of water. It seemed safer to ask for something than nothing at all. He perched himself on the edge of the sofa and fiddled with the strap of the Nikon. He was desperate to photograph this room, with its stacks of old magazines and blacked floorboards, the sofa itself, leathery and vast as a beached whale. Leviathan, he thought, savouring the sound of it, a word that seemed to open its jaws and admit the world.
Croft disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with two glasses on a tray and two cans of Coke. He sat down next to Kip on the sofa, placing the tray on a low stool that stood close by.