Ritual

  'I'm cold. Look, I came to talk to you. You asked me. Remember?'

  He pointed down to her feet. 'You stay there. Right there. I'll be back when I've checked we're all decent.'

  He disappeared into the dimly lit corridor with its peeling wallpaper and stained paintwork, leaving her on the doorstep. She waited, stepping from foot to foot, pulling her coat close. There was a cold, stale draught coming from the corridor and the sound of a badly tuned radio scanner from one of the rooms. That would be Tig's mum. Ever since Flea could remember his mother had been addicted to listening to the police. Always said she wanted to steal a march on them if they decided to come and get her, because that was how it was for her now, imaginary armies and men from the institution coming through the streets. Now that the police signals were encrypted she listened to the static instead. That was how out of the box she was.

  After a few minutes Tig reappeared in the hallway, switching on the light and unlocking the chain.

  'Mum's not sleeping. It's always worse when she doesn't sleep.' He stood back to let her in, waving his hand a little sorrowfully into the depths of the hallway. The narrow corridor of carpet was filthy, stains trodden in over years. 'It's always about now I want to use. When she can't sleep.'

  They went into the kitchen with its piles of laundry, its cheap laminate table, salt and pepper and ketchup bottle on a stained plastic mat in the middle. Tig put the kettle on, turned the gas burners on the stove up high to warm the place up, and moved a pile of clothing off one of the chairs, gesturing for her to take a seat. She sat in silence at the table, the smells of neglect, decay and gas filling her head, the little bag of mushrooms still in her fleece pocket, hard and lumpy against her breast, reminding her of Mum and the dog violets. Tig made her a cup of milky tea, then found a packet of peanuts and opened it with his teeth, poured them into a bowl and pushed it in front of her.

  'What is it? Work? Something horrible happen? It's funny – when you come here you don't smell of dead bodies.'

  'I don't spend my whole life moving bodies around, you know.'

  'Just most of it.'

  Well, Tig, she wanted to say, these days the main thing I need my protective gear for is sitting in this flat. But she didn't. She pulled the coat tighter round herself. It really was cold in here, draughty. 'But you're right. I've had a couple of body days. Except not a yuck one – well, it was sort of yuck, sort of not.'

  He picked up a handful of nuts and began idly to sort them in his palm. 'How can something be sort of yuck?'

  'It was a pair of hands.'

  He looked up. 'A pair of hands?'

  'Under a restaurant in the floating harbour.'

  'Without a body?'

  'Without a body.'

  'In Bristol harbour?'

  'That's what I said.'

  'Well, how in fuck's name did they get there?'

  'Wish we knew.'

  'Do they know whose hands they were?'

  'Nope.'

  'So which restaurant?'

  'Down opposite Redcliffe Quay.' She poked at the peanuts, wondering if it was safe to eat anything in this place. 'The Moat.'

  'The Moat?' He gave a low whistle. 'I know the fucking Moat. I know the guy who runs it. African guy – gave me a huge chunk of my startup capital.'

  'Well,' she said, popping a couple of peanuts into her mouth. 'That's a good enough reason for me not to talk to you about it, isn't it?'

  He sighed. 'Just showing interest, that's all.'

  She took another peanut from the bowl and split it in half. Tig's hand was resting on the table, short nails, fading blue prison tattoos on the knuckles: Love and Hate. Not Mum and Dad. 'Tig?' she said, after small silence. 'You know when you used to take drugs?'

  'I ain't about to forget it, am I?'

  'Did you ever feel . . .' She ran her hands down her face, trying to find the words. 'Did you feel like a whole – a whole universe was opening up . . . in here, in your head?'

  He gave a short laugh. 'A whole universe? Oh, yeah. That's how it feels to start with, like there are whole new worlds in there you'd never've got to any other way. But then later, when it turns itself round – because it always does turn itself round – suddenly the universe is what opens up when you're not using. But this time it's a universe of pain. And the only escape is more gear.'

  'But at first, when you're in that universe, did you ever think you could . . . I don't know, that you could connect, maybe? Connect with people who've died?'

  'Oh please, Flea. I see dead people, is that what this is? Give me a break, there isn't a moonchild, white witch or guru who doesn't tit around with gear and convince themselves they're getting some sort of super vision – some sort of clairvoyance or whatever the fuck they want to call it. I've heard it chapter, verse and fucking book. Think they're going to speak to the dead because they inject some shit into their arm.'

  Speak to the dead, Flea thought, picturing her mother, crouched among the trees. Speak to the dead.

  'Now, if you're asking me can you uncover things you've witnessed,' Tig went on, 'things you've forgotten, things you don't even know you know, then to that the answer's yes. Of course. But it can't tell you things you haven't already learned.'

  She rubbed her arms and avoided his eyes. 'I found mushrooms in my dad's stuff. And I took them.'

  Tig looked at her intently. 'You of all people,' he muttered. 'You of all people.' He drummed his tattooed fingers on the table. Love. Hate. Love. Hate. 'Stupid effing cow. Stupid cow.'

  She gazed at him steadily now, at his weird, fucked-up face, with the eye that went the wrong way and his nose that looked as if it had been punched. The problem with this situation, here with Tig, was clear: she wanted to use drugs to go deeper into her memory, to find the answers she knew were just out of her reach. She was going to use drugs to find the voices. With him it was the other way round. He'd used drugs to shut the voices up. He'd used them to quell the anger. And that was the hitch. He might understand better than others, but he'd never fully see what she wanted.

  After a while he shrugged. 'Oh, well. You've done it now. It's happened.' He sat back, slumping a little. 'So what's worrying you?'

  'I saw my mum. And she was trying to tell me something.' Flea leaned back in the chair, pulling her hair off her face, holding it in a knot and concentrating on the ceiling. 'But I can't quite get at it so I want . . .'

  'You want to do it again?'

  'Not the mushrooms.'

  'Oh, don't tell me you want to be a smackhead like me?'

  She dropped the chair down and met his eyes. 'Do you remember my friend Kaiser?'

  'Yeah. Weird old shit. Friend of your old man's.'

  'He says I won't get there with the mushrooms.'

  Tig nodded, his bad eye droopy now, as if this was too tiring. 'And?'

  'He's come up with something else – told me about it last night. Ibogaine.'

  'Yeah, yeah, I know it. Organic, legal, from Africa. Some places are using it to get people off the gear.'

  'Kaiser says I could spend months using the mushrooms and get nowhere but this'll get me where I want to be. It gets inside and . . .' she made a flicking motion next to her temple, '. . . maybe I'll be able to speak to Mum again. Find out what she was trying to say.'

  'And you believe him?'

  She put her hands between her knees and studied the untouched cup of tea. The sound of the scanner in the bedroom next door hissed through the walls. No, she thought. No, I don't really believe him but it's better than nothing.

  'Ah, well,' Tig said, when he saw she wasn't going to speak. 'Looks like there's nothing I can say. Is there? And people like you, well, you never get hooked anyway. Not in the way people like me do.'

  She gave a sad smile. 'I've got four days' annual starting Friday, no standby.'

  Tig swung out of his chair and got another bag of peanuts from the cupboard. He poured them into the bowl, a little puff of salt coming off them, and gave a sad laugh. 'Friday
it is, then. I won't try to talk you out of it.'

  She sat looking at the peanuts and knew then that things would always be like this, some people getting away with it and some people not. Some people gilded by life, some not. And in spite of everything, in spite of her loss and her anxiety, in spite of the things she believed she shared with Tig, she knew in her heart that she was gilded. That she was gilded and Tig wasn't.

  15

  Now that the sun was going down it was getting cold and the Walking Man had stopped walking. He'd squeezed through a hedge on the roadside on the tiny B route in Somerset, and was preparing his camp for the night in the field on the other side, making a pile of the paper scraps he'd gathered from the roadside that day. At half past eight Jack Caffery pulled up his car opposite, his headlights on.

  At first he didn't get out, just switched off the engine and watched. This was someone he'd been thinking about for months. It was bizarre to be here at last.

  The Walking Man was used to drivers and their ways and paid no attention. When he turned to gather more wood for the fire Caffery caught sight of his face. Here, he thought, is a man who was born at the bottom of a firepit. He was soot-covered from head to toe: the thick socks he wore over his walking boots, tied in place with a piece of cloth at each calf, were blackened and the three-quarter length jacket he wore, tied with washing-line round his waist, was so grimy you wouldn't know what colour it had once been. He was in his late forties – Caffery knew this from his Criminal Records Bureau entry – but to look at him now you'd never have been able to guess his age. His hair hung past his shoulders and a black beard rambled from just below his eyes to his chest, covering him like a cowl.

  Caffery dragged his coat from the back seat and got out of the car. It was one of those deserted Somerset lanes so narrow the trees link overhead and turn themselves into a tunnel: the only light was a little evening sun coming from the gap in the hedgerow that opened on to the Walking Man's field. Caffery shut the car door, buttoned the coat and crossed the lane, pushing himself through the dead remains of a hawthorn bush, getting his old trousers torn, scraping his right sleeve.

  In the field he pulled a beanie from his pocket and pulled it down over his ears. It was freezing now it was evening; you'd think it was winter again. He stood on the hard, ploughed ground and waited. The Walking Man continued what he was doing, fishing out a filthy cigarette lighter and putting it to the bottom of the pile of twigs. It flared almost instantaneously, years of firebuilding practice. Flames bit and crackled inside the sticks, casting shadows across the twilit earth.

  Caffery came a few steps closer. 'You're the Walking Man.'

  He didn't look up. He threw a log on the fire and gathered another two in his gloved hands.

  'I said, you're the Walking Man. Aren't you?'

  'It's not what I was christened. Not what my mother called me.'

  Caffery folded his arms. The Walking Man's voice was educated, sort of polite, but he didn't seem to care who he was speaking to or what they thought. It was as if he'd known Caffery was coming and wasn't bothered whether they talked or not. He dropped the logs on to the fire and watched them for a few moments. Then, satisfied it was going to catch properly, he forced two sticks into the ground next to it, unwrapped the bedroll from his back and draped it over them – spreading it out to warm. His clothing steamed, his breath hung white in the darkening air.

  'I've been looking for you for a long time,' Caffery said, after a while.

  'And how did you find me?' His voice was light, almost amused. 'I'm not an easy man to find. I move. I walk. That's what I do.'

  'And what I do is find people. I'm the police.'

  The Walking Man stopped what he was doing and, for the first time, looked up. His eyes were dark-lashed and blue and Caffery had a weird moment of recognition: the same eyes. He and the Walking Man had exactly the same eyes. As if somewhere back down the line they'd shared a relative. Someone as far back as Donegal, maybe.

  'I don't like the police.' The Walking Man squinted a little, studying Caffery. He took his time, looking at the beanie, the rough donkey jacket, the Dr Martens. Maybe he was thinking Caffery didn't look like a copper. Or maybe he'd noticed the eyes thing too.

  'So,' he said, after a while, 'my old friends. The police. They know where I am, do they?'

  'They have an idea. A general idea. You don't stray much out of Somerset and Wiltshire.'

  The Walking Man laughed. 'Do they think I didn't spend long enough inside? Or that I'm going to do it again? That I'm going to hurt someone else?'

  'Sightings of you get called in. From the public, from people who don't know who you are, maybe see you sleeping rough and think you're ill.'

  'Or a danger to them?'

  'We don't throw anything away in this job. You're somewhere on an intelligence file.'

  'Intelligence,' the Walking Man said to himself, as if it was the wrong word to use for the police.

  He turned his back on Caffery to organize his dinner. 'In-tell-igence.'

  With the bottle-opener hanging on a tape round his neck, he made holes in the lids of four cans and placed each in the centre of the fire. Then he sat down, moving slowly for the bulk of his clothes, and pulled at the pieces of cloth wrapped round his feet. He removed his boots carefully, taking each lace with caution, and placed them on the ground next to his bedroll. Then he took off his socks, three pairs, and inspected his feet. Caffery saw that in the places his own feet were calloused and red, the Walking Man's were black – as if his body was exuding a kind of protective tar. He used the cloth to rub and dry them, then put on two pairs of dry socks and what looked like sheepskin slippers, which he bound at the ankles with the cloth. After that he took care of his boots: running his hands inside each one, tapping them together at the heels, rubbing a thin line of Vaseline from a tiny pot inside each and setting them near the fire to dry. The Walking Man spent every waking hour of every day walking and his boots needed all the attention he could give them.

  'I've come a long way to see you.'

  'Have you now?'

  'It's taken me a long time to get here.'

  'Well, it's taken me a lifetime to get where I am.'

  'I know.' Caffery shifted his weight. It was cold out here, really bitter. 'I'm here because I want you to tell me things. I want you to talk about what you did.'

  The Walking Man laughed again, mild and polite, as if he had told him a gentle joke. 'And where,' he said, 'does it say I talk for nothing? Hmm? Is there a notice on my back says I'm ready to talk to anybody?' He was still laughing. 'You're not the boss of me. Po-lice-man.'

  Caffery unzipped the donkey jacket and pulled out a litre of Scotch from inside his sweater. He held it out. 'Brought you something.'

  The Walking Man stared at it, then at Caffery's face. After a few moments he came over and took the bottle, turning it round and round in his hands. Close up his fingernails were raised and yellow, as if they had something bad brewing under them and might fall off at any time. He smelled of firelighters and smoke.

  'In nineteen eighty,' he said thoughtfully, looking at the whisky label, with its gold and white picture of a tea clipper, 'an average house in Bristol was worth twenty grand. Did you know that?'

  Caffery was never put off track when someone changed direction without warning. It was part of being a cop. 'I didn't. I could maybe hazard a guess about what it was like in London. But not out here. This is new territory to me.'

  'Well, now you're in on the secret. Twenty grand. Now, my parents, see, were doctors – both dead now, of course – and they had one of the biggest houses in Clifton. They paid sixty K for it in nineteen eighty and it came straight to me when they died. Course, I couldn't use it because I was in a high-security wing at Long Lartin until—' He made a sound in the back of his throat and rolled his dark blue eyes. 'But you already know that, don't you?'

  'I've seen the file.'

  'The executors paid off the tax and lodged the house with a man
agement company. They banked the rent for the last ten years of my sentence. It was a beauty of a house – even I could see that. It had six bedrooms and a coach-house, one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in Bristol, so said the estate agents. When I came out of the nick last year I sold it. What do you think they gave me?'

  'I just sold a house in London. It wasn't much but my parents gave fifteen for it in the seventies and I got back more than three fifty. I don't know? Five hundred?'

  'Try four times that. Almost two million. Every month I get more than eight grand interest paid into my account. Do they have that on my intelligence file?' He threw the bottle into the air, let it spin round, light moving against the navy blue sky, and caught it with a neat smile.

  'Here,' he said, jamming it into Caffery's chest. 'I drink cider. But thanks anyway.'

  Flea stayed with Tig until eight. They got fish and chips from the only shop in Bristol that still wrapped it in newspapers. They took it back to his flat, shared a bottle of wine and talked, and all the time she kept prodding herself to ask him about the text – about what he'd wanted to talk about. But the idea kept slipping away and when she did remember, when she was getting up to leave at the end of the evening, he waved it aside. No, he said, it was nothing. Just missed seeing you, that's all.

  She buttoned her coat, found her keys and kissed Tig's cheek – he always froze when she came near him, as if he'd gone into spasm, his arms out at his sides as if he'd been petrified, but she did it anyway. She was turning away, half smiling to herself at the way she could immobilize him with embarrassment, when she saw his mother standing in the doorway. She was dressed in a pink quilted housecoat and her long grey hair was loose round her shoulders. She looked older than fifty, as if only half of her was actually in the world, the rest somewhere else. A skeleton in a nightgown.

  'Mum,' Tig said. 'Mum. Go back to bed. It's late.'