One freezing morning Nancy had walked from Poplar to her shop. Dumped across the entrance was a pile of cardboard marked FRAGILE in red. She reached over with her keys, glancing down to keep her balance. That’s when she saw the finger poking out. She gasped, thinking it must be a body from a gangland war. She tapped the surface with her foot, wondering if the man had been cut up into bits, but the finger moved and a flap opened like a trap door and there was this man, his face black and hairy, his eyes hidden by goggles. She’d thought he must have been a fighter pilot from the First World War.
This man rolled onto his side, drawing up his knees. Then he felt his way up the door, using the handle to lift himself out of the cardboard… It was packaging for a fridge.
‘Am I in the way?’
‘Not at all, but you’re nearly in the road. Can’t you see?’
‘No.’
It was arctic and the man’s hands were a dirty blue. Cars whipped over the hump in the road, making them scrape and bang. Nancy said, ‘Won’t you warm up inside?’
‘May I?’
Mr Lawton used to say things like that. May I? She opened up and dragged the cardboard through to the back room. It wouldn’t feel right, throwing it out. When she came back he was standing inside, his hands on what Riley had called a figurine lamp – a woman with scarves all over and a light socket sticking out of her head. His fingers moved so gently building the thing in his mind, that it became beautiful.
‘I’m Mrs Riley.’
‘I’m Mr Johnson.’
Who would have believed it? Over the following months they became friends. He was her one secret from Riley And then he disappeared. In one sense it was for good, because a very different man eventually came back. He seemed frail and uncertain. He sat down with shaking arms.
‘What happened?’ asked Nancy anxiously.
‘I got my head kicked in.’ His goggles moved on a rumpled nose. ‘I can’t remember much of the present. This morning, last week… they’ve gone down the plughole.’
Nancy lit the gas fire, and she thought of the entertainment Uncle Bertie used to kick off when they were in Brighton. It was called ‘Silly Secrets’. Cheerily she said, ‘Shall we play a game?’
‘All right.’
‘You tell me a secret, and then I’ll tell you one.’ The idea was that people confessed to daft things they’d done. (Once, in a shop, Uncle Bertie had used a toilet, only to find it was part of a mock bathroom for sale.)
‘That’s not fair,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘I won’t remember and you will.’
‘I’ll tell no one.
Mr Johnson said, ‘I once had a son.’
Nancy covered her mouth. He leaned forward, vapour rising off him, his goggles full of condensation, and he talked about summers in Southport with the same longing that she had for Brighton. And Nancy waited, sensing that something awful had happened to his boy but he never said what. The next day Mr Johnson turned up and Nancy tipped out things she’d never said and thought she’d never say – how she’d met Riley the life she’d lost at Lawton’s, the children she’d never had.., the trial. And Mr Johnson listened, warming his grey-blue hands: a gentleman who would remember nothing.
Nancy glanced at the sputtering fire. On her lap was a plastic bag. She’d found it a couple of weeks ago when she went into the back room to pick up her shopping. It was full of notebooks, each neatly numbered on the front. They belonged to Mr Johnson, the gentleman who could remember nothing. Nancy had waited for him to come back, but he’d vanished in the mist, just like Riley on his way to Tottenham. She glanced towards the door… and reached into the bag. It was wrong, she knew, but ever since that barrister had died, the trial had returned. Sensations from that time had been prickling her like pins in a doll. The only way to numb the pain was to fill her mind with something else, and the puzzle book was full – she rooted around for number one. On the front was written ‘My Story’.
Her mouth was open and her hair tingled. This wasn’t right.
I call myself George.
She hadn’t known that. He was just Mr Johnson.
I’m a Harrogate boy a Yorkshire lad. There’s a little lane that runs by a bowling green and a tennis court of orange grit. On the other side are houses with mown lawns. At the end of the lane there’s a clump of trees and a fence with a gate. It seems that the sun is always shining here and the flowers are taller than me. Foxgloves, I think they’re called. But my earliest memory of this place is in the rain. My mother had made a canvas shelter for my pram.
Nancy snapped it shut. This was wrong. But she reached in and opened another number, wondering what had happened to Mr Johnson when he’d grown up.
I’d seen her quite a few times, and always at night. She stood beneath a street lamp, hands behind her back like Dixon of Dock Green. The most amazing thing was her white headdress. It was like a tent without guide ropes.
The doorbell sounded.
Nancy dropped the book, composed herself and presently sold a mirror to Mr Prosser – a dealer in quality second-hand. He was always mooching around, asking how her man found such good stuff. She told him nothing. When he’d gone she tied a knot in Mr Johnson’s bag and pushed it into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.
But that left her exposed. She fell back in her seat, eyes clenched and hands over her ears. In that inner darkness, she sensed the patient ‘attendance’ of Mr Wyecliffe. It was a word he’d often used. She’d thought he was a sorcerer. How else did he pull off the impossible?
After being charged, Riley was hauled before a porky magistrate with a runny nose, who, between sneezes, sent her man to Wormwood Scrubs on remand. But Mr Wyecliffe got him out within a week. No special keys or dodgy chains. ‘Just words, well used, ma’am,’ he said, waving a grey handkerchief. ‘All that requires my attendance now is the trial.’ He sniffed and blinked, as if he hadn’t worked out how to do it yet.
The solicitor had brought Riley home and stayed for a ‘preliminary conference’. They sat in the living room, drinking Uncle Bertie’s ‘poison’. Riley was humiliated and speechless and couldn’t look in Nancy’s direction. He was quaking.
‘We’ll use counsel,’ said Mr Wyecliffe significantly to break the silence. ‘I’ll get the best.’
‘I know who I want.’ It was the first thing Riley had said. He glanced at a spot near Nancy’s feet and asked for some sandwiches.
When she came back, Mr Wyecliffe was making notes, and Riley appeared deathly calm. The shaking had stopped. He spoke under his breath while the solicitor stuffed his face as if he’d had no breakfast. Her man stared at the carpet and said, ‘How the hell am I to know what the tenants get up to? I’m hardly ever over there. Ask the wife.’
‘I will, in due course,’ promised Mr Wyecliffe. ‘In the meantime, might I have another sandwich?’
Nancy gave him hers.
It turned out the tenants had all been in arrears. Eventually Riley had shown them the door. That’s why they’d set him up, he said.
Mr Wyecliffe nodded slowly stubbing the crumbs on his knee. Licking his fingers, he said, ‘But what of Bradshaw? He’s your real problem.’
‘I’ve thrown his girls onto the street. Now he’s trying to make me pay.’
‘That’s a guess.’
‘Why else would he lie?’
‘Bradshaw is of good character.’
‘So am I.’
‘Indeed.’ After a moment, as if he’d just finished reading the instructions that had come with a gadget from Japan, Mr Wyecliffe said, ‘Okey-dokey Bradshaw is the pimp.’
Nancy had hated the sound of that p-word. It had been used in her own living room, leaving a heavy stain on the air that she couldn’t wipe away It was still there, even though Riley had been acquitted, even though all those terrible people had been lying. Something ghastly had entered her home. It was like waking to a burglary. The tidying up made no difference.
Thoughtfully Mr Wyecliffe said, ‘The claptrap about the Pieman allows them to say very little about you, makes the story shorter, easier for three of them to learn by heart’ – he looked at his empty plate, his features tangled up in his beard – ‘but counsel will not advance a guess at trial.’
Riley leaned back, genuinely calm now – Nancy could tell. ‘Who said anything about guesses?’
Mr Wyecliffe put his papers in his tatty briefcase and said, ‘I ought to observe that no one can save you from the truth or a lie that hangs together. It is a sad fact of life, but the two are often interchangeable.’
‘Just get me Glendinning.’
Nancy held back the tears; and her man watched her, approving of the struggle, relieved by it.
Waiting for the day of the trial was awful, if only because of the unimaginable shame. At such times, your mum and dad were meant to rally round, but Nancy’s had drawn the blinds good and proper – they’d never liked her man, never. And Riley had no one. Even Mr Lawton went peculiar. He’d always been one for having a good grumble first thing – about the downturn and closures – but he went quiet, all stern, and turned his big tweedy back on her when he had to speak. Everyone had crossed to the other side of the road. One day she looked up and saw Babycham’s permed head against the frosted glass of the door. They hadn’t spoken for ages.
‘Look, Nancy’ she said, after checking the boss was out, ‘we’ve known each other since we were this high. Fair enough, we’re not as close as we used to be, but I don’t hold no grudges. We all make our own choices, and you’ve made yours. But still I owe it to you to speak plain. Why do you trust him?’
Nancy was knocked sideways. Not just because she’d implied, all brazen, that Riley was in the wrong It was that word, ‘trust’. Nancy had never quite clocked the obvious: her man was for saying he trusted her when, in fact, it was she who was trusting him.
‘Run for it, girl,’ Babycham said. ‘We’ll all rally round, honest. We’ve had a meeting.’
Confused, angry and feeling sort of cold and stripped, right down to her pants, Nancy gasped, ‘Clear off.’ Finding some breath, she added, ‘Riley always said you were full of wind and bubbles.’
When it grew dark Nancy locked up the shop and walked home along the towpath by Limehouse Cut, past barges and boats moored at the banks of the canal. On the way she found a brick for the herb bed. She dropped it on the pile, had a boiled egg and watched a programme on Liberian shipping regulations. After the news she went to bed and, dozing fitfully waited for Riley.
The room was pitch black when he climbed into bed.
‘Nancy?’ He waited, and whispered again. ‘Nancy?’
She didn’t so much as turn a hair. After a moment he reached over and, for minutes on end, he stroked her nose, her lips… each feature on her face, just like Mr Johnson had done with the figurine lamp. Then he shrank back as if he’d done something wrong.
It was often like this. When Riley had done a clearing he didn’t come home until after midnight – she didn’t know where he’d been, or what he’d done, and she didn’t care – but he’d come to bed with these trembling hands. No one had ever touched her so exquisitely (it was a word she’d heard a doctor use to describe intense pain, but when she’d looked it up in a dictionary, she’d thought of these secret moments).
Nancy fell asleep, savouring the aftermath of this mysterious, most secret affection. Beside her Riley started to moan, and downstairs Arnold was running as fast as his little legs would carry him.