‘The Cream from 1969!’ frothed the announcer. ‘Wow, man, out of sight, too much, heavy, far out and all that stuff.’
Aileen swallowed away the lump of emotion in her throat. A chorus of horns sounded out behind her, and she looked up to find that the vehicle in front had moved forward a few yards. Before she could put the Mini in gear, a brand-new Ford Sierra cut into the space. The driver waved angrily at her as he passed, mouthing inaudible oaths, his eyes full of hatred. High-stress middle management, twenty-five thousand plus a company ulcer, new home on a Wates estate in Uxbridge, thought Aileen automatically.
About half-way along Wood Lane there was a way through the back streets avoiding Shepherds Bush Green. The snag was getting out again the other end, which was why Aileen didn’t often use it, but today the traffic was so bad that she couldn’t see what she had to lose. As she drew near the junction, however, she saw that the traffic this end was not moving at all. After sitting there for ten minutes without progressing an inch, she backed the Mini into a parking space and got out. There was a nice Young’s pub round the corner. She would go and relax over a drink and a cigarette until the rush-hour had passed.
About fifty yards along the main road, a knot of people blocked her path. A policeman was questioning some of them while another stood in the road directing the traffic. Aileen became aware of a siren in the distance and realized that it had been going on for some time without her noticing it. It was presumably an ambulance, stuck in the traffic jam caused by the accident to which it had been called. A white delivery van was stopped at an angle in the middle of the road, almost on the white line. Behind it stood a bus, stalled at the moment of pulling away from its stop. One of the men being questioned gestured towards the van.
‘He didn’t give me a bleeding chance, did he?’
‘How fast were you going?’ the policeman asked, pencil and notebook at the ready.
‘I don’t know! Twenty, twenty-five? It’s a van, not a bleeding Ferrari, you know. Just as I was passing the bus, out he comes like a dog out of the trap.’
‘That’s right,’ the bus driver confirmed. He pointed out a man standing nearby. ‘Him over there, he said something made him run off.’
Everyone turned to look at the man. Amid all the faces marked by anxiety or sorrow, the grin on his lips struck a jarring note. The policeman beckoned him over.
‘What did you say to him?’
The man laughed almost contemptuously.
‘Nothing!’
‘You bloody well did!’ the bus driver exclaimed. ‘I saw you!’
The man looked as though he was only able to restrain his hilarity because not even the most hysterical howls of laughter would be adequate to express the total absurdity of the situation. The whole thing was simply too stupid for words!
‘What did you say to him?’ the policeman repeated coldly.
The man shrugged three or four times in quick succession.
‘I asked if he knew what time it was.’
‘That’s right,’ a woman with a dog put in. ‘I heard him.’
The policeman looked rather exasperated by the woman’s unsolicited testimony.
‘What’s so funny?’ he snapped at the man, whose grin vanished with insulting abruptness.
‘Where do you live?’ the policeman demanded.
‘Paxton Grove. Number twenty-nine.’
Up to this point, Aileen had been hovering on the fringes of the crowd, trying to work her way through. Now she stopped and gave the man a closer look. 29 Paxton Grove was a custodial hostel used to accommodate long-term psychiatric patients whose condition was more or less stable but unlikely to improve. This man was pretty obviously a chronic schizophrenic whose symptoms were being controlled by drugs sufficiently for him to be released into the community.
‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ she told the policeman, exaggerating her qualifications to get his attention. ‘I think I may be able to help.’
He glanced at her briefly and shook his head, pointing towards a blanket-covered bundle lying in the road in front of the white van.
‘Too late for that.’
Aileen was about to explain that she wasn’t that kind of doctor but simply wanted to explain why the man being questioned was acting so oddly, but something about the size of the covered form drew her towards it. Her assumed status as a doctor cleared a passage for her through the crowd, and the police made no move to interfere as she bent to pull back the corner of the blanket. The boy’s head had been broken open and the face smeared like a wet painting, but there was no doubt as to his identity. Steven Bradley’s brief flight was over.
13
She turned away, towards the traffic squeezing slowly past the scene of the accident. A bus was inching its way through the gap between the delivery van in the middle of the road and the line of parked cars opposite. As it passed her, Aileen stepped on to the open platform, went inside and sat down on one of the bench seats. Once clear of the obstacle, the bus accelerated away. The other passengers — a mother and her two children, an old man with a small dog, two pale working-class girls and an Asian youth in a two-tone tracksuit — all turned to face the front again. Overhead, boots pounded on the upper deck. ‘We’re com-in’! We’re com-in’!’ voices chanted rhythmically.
‘Fares, please.’
‘Stamford Brook,’ Aileen replied automatically.
‘Don’t go there.’ The conductor was an elderly black, his voice and gestures robotic with exhaustion. ‘Change in Acton. Fifty pence.’
Aileen handed him the coins.
‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ she said. ‘He ran straight out in front of me.’
The drumming overhead intensified.
‘SCOT-land! SCOT-land!’
The conductor handed her the ticket.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Aileen explained. ‘That’s why I’ve stopped blaming myself, you see.’
One of the working girls turned to stare at her. Then she whispered something to her friend and they both tittered. There was a clatter of boots on the stairs and two youths in T-shirts and skin-tight jeans appeared, waving open cans of lager. One of them had a Scottish flag draped around his shoulders. He waved his fist at the conductor.
‘Hey, you black jobbie, did you no’ hear the bell?’
Aileen took hold of his arm.
‘You’re going to die,’ she told him. ‘I promise you that.’
A can of McEwan’s wrapped in knuckles ornamented with swastikas and death’s heads swayed back and forth in the air a few inches from Aileen’s face.
‘You’s barmy, woman,’ he said, backing away.
The gob of white foam had pushed up through the keyhole-shaped opening in the can. It made Aileen think of the cuckoo-spittle that used to appear suddenly in spring. The long grasses by the stream were all spattered with the stuff. She would lie there for hours, hidden from view, sharing a sinful cigarette with her friend Liz. The clouds scudded along overhead, and in the windswept space between a lark was ecstatically soloing. Her mother used to tell a story about children from London who were evacuated to the Cotswolds during the war. ‘One day, one of the boys came home in great excitement. “There’s a little sparrer stuck up there!” he said. “He can’t get up and he can’t get down, and he ain’t half making a fuss about it!” The little Cockney had never seen a skylark before in his life, you see!’