George wasn’t sure, but he probably followed the exact route back to the river that he’d taken when he’d first left Mitcham. As he walked, Nino’s story about right and wrong came to mind. Elizabeth had loved the ending, but George had never been able to catch the beginning. And now, after she’d gone, it had popped to the surface.
‘I’ve had a very odd dream,’ Nino said, while they sat on a bench near Marble Arch. ‘I was standing on a road between heaven and hell writing parking tickets. A reporter came along. “What are this lot waiting for?” I asked. “Nowt,” he replied. “They can’t go to heaven because they didn’t do anything good, and they can’t go to hell because they didn’t do anything bad. Hardly a scoop, but it’s still a good story.” He showed me the headline on his pad: “They lived without praise or blame.”’
Nino didn’t say anything else.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked George.
Nino became resolute, as if he had been quizzed about the value of double yellow lines. ‘Don’t be lukewarm, old friend. That’s the only route to mercy or reward.’
George had told Elizabeth, and she’d written it down, asking him to repeat every word.
But to what end? Where was she now? And where was he?
George crossed Blackfriars Bridge with a glance towards Trespass Place. On the north bank of the Thames he turned east, following the road to Smithfield and Tower Hill – the route to the Isle of Dogs, and a wasteland of padlocks and chicken wire. The river flowed oily and magnificent on his right; traffic swept along to his left. George’s mind tracked back to the night he’d pulled open a wrought-iron gate at three in the morning. He’d given no thought to praise or blame.
Three made-up girls stood shivering on the other side.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I’ve a kettle and a toaster.’
He followed them down the alley to the door he’d left ajar, looking at their bare legs, the blue veins and the goose pimples. This was late November, the month of biting rain and short days, the month when shop fronts twinkled with the approach of Christmas. George made cocoa. He didn’t tell them that all the beds were taken, that they’d have to leave.
Let them have the length of a hot drink, he thought, it’s not much. George left them so he could make the usual telephone calls. Every project was full, although the Open Door in Fulham could see them at half eight: that was five hours away; five hours to lose heart. George had learned long ago that with some kids you only got one chance to offer them a hand, and even then they didn’t take it. But some did – that’s what brought him to the gate night after night: some did. While waiting for the toast to pop up, George overheard the first name: Riley and then he caught the second: the Pieman. When he appeared around the corner they stopped talking. He said, ‘After this lot, you’ll have to move on.’ There was no protest.
He followed them back towards the gate. Their shoes clattered on the flags like dropped marbles and George felt – as he’d often done – like an accomplice to murder. One of them – the youngest – had a tattoo of a dragon above one ear. Her head was shaved. The three girls must have been a good fifty yards up the pavement when George came running after them.
‘If you want to fight back, I’ll help you.’
Two of them stared; the other laughed. They backed away shrouded by rain.
That should have been the end of it. But a week or so later they’d returned to the gate, again at God knows what hour, wanting to know what he’d meant. George stood on one side, they on the other, separated by bars. There was so much that did not need to be said: about who they were, what they did, even the where, when and how: everything, really except for the why – those impossibly intimate histories that would not be reduced to a common badge.
George said through the bars, ‘What happened at the Open Door?’
‘Getting away is one thing,’ said the one with the dragon, ignoring the question. ‘But you said we could fight.’
He turned the lock and yanked back the gate.
George made more cocoa for Anji, Lisa and Beverly.
‘I believe you,’ he said.
About what?’ asked Anji. She spoke for the others; she was the eldest, a kind of leader at nineteen.
George saw the resentment in their eyes and their obstinate vulnerability. ‘I not only understand,’ he said heavily – for he knew this look; he’d felt the same once – ‘I’ll do something about it.’
Without invitation they started talking about Riley fighting one another for the right to give details of his appearance and habits. George listened with glazed eyes. This man, when a boy had been a kind of brother to him. In the years since, he’d often wondered if Riley was one of those for whom the helping hand had come too late, or if he’d turned away No doubt it was this heavy reminiscing that made George slow on the uptake. When the three girls stared at George, drained and expectant, he said, ‘I’ll call the police tomorrow.’
‘Police?’ Beverly asked, her mouth open, like that of her dragon.
‘Yes.’
‘Us?’
‘Yes.’
And then George understood what had brought them back. ‘Hang on,’ he said in disbelief, ‘you didn’t think I was offering to whack him over the head?’
The three conspirators threw glances at one another. Unmasked, they appeared younger still, and more awkward. Lisa stood, putting on her bomber jacket. ‘We fight back by filling in a complaint form?’
‘No. By taking Riley to court.’
‘That’s easily said. We’d pay and it would cost you nothing.’ Anji followed Lisa to the door while Beverly still slouching, looked George right in the eye. ‘They’d tear us to pieces.’
If precision matters, this was the moment when George lost his senses, when two teenagers stood at the door and a third was about to pull away ‘Yes. But they can’t do that to me.’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
George wasn’t going to answer that question. ‘If I support what you say’ he persisted, ‘Riley will be convicted. There’s nothing they can throw at me. Nothing.’
‘What will it cost you, then?’
‘If it goes wrong, my job.’
‘Why do it?’
Again, he sidestepped the question. ‘It can’t go wrong.’
The next day George woke up profoundly grateful that Beverly had joined her pals at the door. But a week later – again at three or so in the morning – the buzzer had torn George out of a deep slumber. It had been a bad night, with a punch-up over queue-jumping He stumbled angrily to the gate with such a weight upon his eyes that he could barely see. He heard Anji’s voice:
‘We’ll risk it, if you will.’
In a stupor, George leaned his head on the bars. The wisdom of these kids, he thought. They trust only the person whose outlay matches theirs. The gate swung open for the last time; and George made more cocoa and toast.
‘If I do this,’ he said cautiously ‘will you go to the Open Door?’ They all shook on it while George’s gaze rested upon a tiger’s head that snarled behind Beverly’s other ear. It hadn’t been there last time.
Funnily enough, it was the tiger and the dragon who fled on the day of the trial. Anji and Lisa kept their side of the bargain. And then George was called. If he’d even sensed what might be waiting for him in the courtroom, he’d have joined Beverly on the pavement. In the corridor, Jennifer Cartwright grabbed his arm. ‘Where the hell are you going?’
‘Home.’
‘Where?’
‘Back home.’
‘Why?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Two girls have just had their heads kicked in.’ She was seething. ‘You can’t go home.’
George took the bus to Mitcham knowing that Anji, Lisa and Beverly wouldn’t be going to an open door in Fulham. That was George’s fault. In the long run, she’d been right, that policewoman.
Much later George had written in his notebook, ‘Who’d have thought that a question about my grandfather would have set Riley free?’ And it was only then that George realised that his downfall hadn’t begun at the night shelter’s gate, when he was a man, but with a secret, discovered when he was a boy.
And now, walking by the Thames, George asked himself where lay the praise and blame? That was a tricky one, because things couldn’t have been any different. Mercy or reward? Well, that was trickier still.
George followed the cobbled lane that ran between the warehouses and the hoists. He ducked through the mesh wiring onto a quilt of broken brick. A bitter wind swung off the Thames, pulling at his hair and stinging his nose. He stood upon Lawton’s Wharf, his long walk ended. He’d been homeless without knowing where he was going, but now he’d arrived – at the place he’d visited more frequently than any other. He spied a ladder built into the dock wall. He took off the bright new trainers he’d been given on Old Paradise Street and laid them to one side. Slowly he lowered himself into the river. His clothes gathered weight, and the cold clasped his legs and stomach. A painful thought passed across his mind: for Emily he was already dead.