George rose, picked up his remaining plastic bag and left Trespass Place. As he passed beneath the arch at the entrance he knew he’d never come back. The waiting was over.
Many people think that the homeless live on the whim of the moment. One minute they are there, in a doorway – as they have been for months – the next, they’re gone. In fact, these movements are decisions. Moving on is a kind of obedience -just like leaving home in the first place.
When George found Trespass Place all those years ago, Nino had said that life on the street is like walking round the world. ‘It’s a turning away; but it can become a turning back.’ George had instantly understood the first part, for his arrival beneath Blackfriars Bridge had been an attempt to flee a single conversation.
After the trial, George hardly left his armchair in the sitting room. He faced the window and the treetops of Mitcham. John was fourteen. Of late, he’d taken to roughing up his hair with gel. His skin was raw, as if he scrubbed his cheeks with a nail-brush. He kept coming into the room. He’d sit on different chairs as if he were trying to get a fresh angle on his father. He reminded George of those lifeguards at the swimming pool. They had a way of staring at people who might be in difficulty. They were always young and athletic and confident. John was a small lad, though, with thin arms and long fingers.
One day John was sitting on the rest of an armchair, knotting his fingers together. He was like a man preparing to jump. Countdown was on the television and a cheery presenter was adding up numbers faster than George could think. He felt John leaning towards him.
‘Dad, I believe everything you said in court.’
The local media had pulled George to pieces. The CPS was considering a prosecution – for some unspecified offence.
‘Thanks.’ It sounded trite, but his heart had banged against his chest with a kind of gladness.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Dad,’ said John. He messed his hair up even more, gathering confidence. ‘It doesn’t matter that Riley got off. He was just a dogsbody. The police always get hold of the ones that don’t matter… That’s not your fault.’
George allowed himself to look at his son. It was hard, because of the lad’s earnestness, the passion to save his father.
‘I wonder who the Pieman might be?’ asked John coldly.
The lad had been thinking hard, and he’d come to some conclusions. He’d decided who the real criminal was, the one the police hadn’t arrested. George looked back to the television as the scores were being read out. George, unthinking, said, ‘You’d have to ask Riley’
The remark must have landed like a pip in the mind’s soil, because the boy didn’t do anything for years.
When George had walked out of his own front door, he’d been turning away from that remark during Countdown. He’d also turned away from the ocean of memories that Emily evoked. But no sooner had he met Nino, than the old man set him on course to face them again – and not just in passing, but with all the detail he could summon to the pages of his notebooks. The turning away however, had been essential.
And now, with a similar kind of fortitude, he left Trespass Place, and ‘a royal scheme to bring down the…’ or something like that; Elizabeth had often used towering phrases to describe what they were doing. And he’d known why: she, like George, had never accepted that Riley could not be brought to court for the killing of John. All that – a trial and its aftermath – belonged at a still point on the surface of the earth. George moved on, a plastic bag swishing against his leg.
George must have been walking for about half an hour when he noticed he was heading south, way off his patch. He never went south. Mitcham lay down there. He wondered where he was going; and he thought again of Nino, and what the old man had said when they’d left the spike, the morning after the Pandora tale. ‘The street is the place of stories,’ he’d intoned, leaning on a wall by Camden Lock. ‘Stories of how you got here, and how you might leave.’ But he’d said something else -and it had frightened George: ‘There are stories of how you might stay’
George didn’t want that. All at once, his pace quickening, he wanted to tell the extraordinary story of a man whose turning away had brought him back to where he’d started from: the tale of a man who’d finally made it home.