Blind George, as he was known, woke up on a traffic island. He was lying on a bench. Marble Arch towered huge and white behind a litter bin. A flag fluttered, its line slapping against the pole. Above, the sky was misty blue. An aeroplane crossed in silence, like an ant on lino. George sat up, with a groan, and opened his notebook. A thumb with a cracked black nail smoothed back the pages. He read out loud:
I am going to Mile End Park to confront Riley.
Wait beneath the fire escape in Trespass Place.
The explanation for Inspector Cartwright is in your left inside jacket pocket.
There’s fifty pounds in your right trouser pocket.
Elizabeth.
For years George had kept a record of days gone. Nino, a former traffic warden, had insisted upon the practice. It had been part of his instruction when teaching George about life on the street. Since leaving the world of parking tickets, Nino had moved around the libraries of London, still clutching a floppy pad. He had his own chair in most of the reading rooms. One of them had his name on it – stuck on with tape by the management. He had a habit that drove them to distraction, and kept him on the move: in one place he’d put in a request for a book that was held in another. So all these books were flying about London after Nino, when all he had to do was keep still.
‘Don’t think,’ he’d said. ‘Just write, starting at the beginning, and keep going. You’ll only understand the story looking backwards. If you start thinking, you’ll write the story you want, not the story you’ve got.’
‘Oh.’
‘The street is the place of stories,’ he’d concluded gravely Black, tangled hair covered his face and his skin was grey ‘Stories of harm and stories that heal.’
George had obeyed, because traffic wardens have a peculiar authority. When one notebook was full he’d start another. They were numbered on the cover. He had thirty-eight of them. George’s whole life was laid out in order, all sixty-four years, as best as he could remember them. Almost every day he’d sat on a park bench or in a cafe, and he’d scribbled with haste, not pausing to choose his words. Once he’d got something down, he was like an archaeologist with a toothbrush: he gently brushed away the dirt; he’d change a word or phrase, cleaning up what had been saved. It could take months to get it right.
George’s earliest memory was of an outing in a pushchair. He was sitting behind an improvised cover to keep out the rain. His mother had made it. There was a polythene window sewn into a sort of waxed cotton tent that covered his upper body His protruding legs were warm, covered by a blanket; but he couldn’t see anything because of the condensation. He could hear only the rain and his mother’s feet on the path. They were on their way to see Granddad, whose first name he bore. David. He’d stopped using it a long time ago, out of shame. He’d become George. That burst of anguish took up the first pages of book one, which now lay with all the others in a plastic bag. All them had been filled with a similar, honest desperation: to preserve both the good and the bad. That was something else Nino had said:
‘Don’t decide what to keep. It all counts. Sometimes it is the worst things that turn out to have delivered what is best.’ He’d been solemn again. ‘It only appears when you write it down.’
Filling up these notebooks had a dramatic effect on George. It made him a compassionate observer – not just of himself, but of everyone he’d known. But the scribbling had also made him uneasy about the spoken word, because he’d gone through hell choosing the right ones to keep on paper. Ultimately, the precision had brought him close up to his more recent failures, but without the distortion of self-pity. And then, clear-eyed and calm, he’d scrambled into a skip.
He’d seen two black discs among the wood and bricks: a pair of welding goggles. Instinctively he put them on and pretended to be blind. On the face of it he’d gone mad. But it made sense to George. There were things in his life he could not look upon, and he didn’t want anyone else to either. The street might be the place of stories, but his was going to remain untold. Once the goggles were in place, hardly anyone spoke to him any more. It was as though he wasn’t there. They called him Blind George.
So at first George wrote down his life in order to understand it; but the time came when he did so to keep it together. Long after Elizabeth had found him, and when their project to trap Riley was well underway George got his head kicked in. His memory was sent flying over Waterloo Station like a cloud of pigeons. The details, with Elizabeth’s help, were set down towards the end of book thirty-six. That was after he’d woken to discover that a kind of lake had entered his mind: on the far shore everything was clear, up to the week he’d fallen under those swinging feet; but on this side, where he played out his life, events were like globules of oil. If he didn’t confine them on paper, they could separate, drift off and come back when they felt like it – heavily familiar but incomprehensible. He could hold on to faces, geography and snippets of talk, but he’d found himself in a world where everyone else knew all the missing pieces. People would speak, expecting him to understand. And sometimes he did, but often it was a lottery in which he could make no choices. But it was the keeping of the notebooks that saved him and held everything together. Every page helped to bridge the lake. He just carried on plotting the course of each completed day.
Elizabeth had written a great deal in books thirty-six to thirty-eight. She’d recorded everything they’d said and done after his mind went loose. He’d watched her while drinking hot chocolate or whisky. She’d always been careful. She’d treated words like coins. And in her last entry she’d told him to wait.
After Elizabeth had gone to Mile End Park in the morning, George had sat in his sleeping bag beneath the fire escape at Trespass Place. He’d waited until nightfall, counting the hours, his eyes on the arch at the end of the courtyard. But she hadn’t come. Then, like a bubble popping at the surface of his mind, he’d heard something she’d said more than once: ‘George, if anything should happen to me, don’t worry. A monk will come.
A what?’ he’d said, the first time.
‘An old friend. He’s forever puzzled, but he gets there in the end.’
George had read his notebook again. She’d written ‘Wait… not ‘Wait for me.’
The next morning, George looked to the arch, hoping to see a different shape, perhaps someone fat with a white rope around his waist. He watched and waited, through the day and through the night. But when another morning broke, George rose and hurried through the streets. He crossed the river and crept like a thief into Gray’s Inn Square.
George stood outside Elizabeth’s chambers reading the list of gold names on a long black panel. Men and women slipped past him, flushed and serious. He became paralysed by the grandeur of it all. Then through the glass of a door he saw a round man with an orange waistcoat. The eyebrows rode high above piercing, kind eyes. He stepped outside.
‘I’m Roddy Kemble, who are you?’
George panicked. ‘Bradshaw, sir.’
Mr Kemble thought for a moment. He didn’t move, but he looked like a man rooting through a cardboard box, lifting this, lifting that. Abruptly he said, ‘May I ask your first name?’
‘George.’
The man’s arms fell by his side. He seemed to have found what he expected and didn’t want. Quietly, he said, ‘Elizabeth is dead.’
George adjusted his goggles. His mouth went dry and he nodded appreciatively.
‘In any other circumstances,’ said Mr Kemble, ‘I’d offer you a cigarette. But I’ve given up. Would you like a Polo?’
George nodded again.
Mr Kemble peeled back the silver paper. ‘Her heart gave out.’
For a while they stood awkwardly crunching mints, then Mr Kemble said, ‘Have you seen Elizabeth since the trial?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Frequently?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mr Kemble looked like a man whose house had just been burgled. He put a heavy hand on his shoulder and said, ‘It’s time to forget everything, George. Move on, if you can.
‘I stopped going anywhere a long time ago, sir.’
George backed away clumsily Mr Kemble raised an arm, as if he were giving a blessing or launching a ship. If it weren’t for the orange waistcoat, George would have thought he looked sad.
George stumbled up High Holborn and then found his way to Oxford Street, bumping into people and things, until he reached the roundabout and Marble Arch – where he’d last seen Nino, months back, in the summer. They’d sat on a bench and his guide had told him a strange story about right and wrong. George went to the same bench, looking hungrily at the monument, wanting his friend to emerge from beneath one of the portals, his blue and red scarf trailing in the wind. Sleep crept upon him. He woke and saw the arch, the flag and the ant crawling across the sky, and he reached for book thirty-eight.
George left the traffic island and began the long walk to Trespass Place. He thought of Elizabeth, whisky in hand. She’d foreseen her dying and had prepared for it. George had to wait because a monk would come. Another of her phrases floated by; it filled him with hope: ‘No matter what happens, Riley can’t escape.
George made haste, and he beckoned Nino’s story about right and wrong, but it wouldn’t come. All he could recall was the end, because Nino had spoken it with such force. His gaze had been wide as if he were waiting for eye-drops. ‘Don’t be lukewarm, old friend. That’s the only way to mercy or reward.’
When he’d told Elizabeth, she’d scribbled it down on the back of an envelope.
Beneath the fire escape George picked up a sharp stone. On the wall he scratched a few neat lines, one for each of the days he’d been waiting. By extension it was another lesson from Nino: to diligently keep an account of anything that might easily slip away.