Concrete Island Read online

  The man was about fifty years old, plainly a mental defective of some kind, his low forehead blunted by a lifetime of uncertainty. His puckered face had the expression of a puzzled child, as if whatever limited intelligence he had been born with had never developed beyond his adolescence. All the stresses of a hard life had combined to produce this aged defective, knocked about by a race of unkind and indifferent adults but still clinging to his innocent faith in a simple world.

  Ridges of silver scar tissue marked his cheeks and eyebrows, almost joining across the depressed bridge of his nose, a blob of amorphous cartilage that needed endless attention. He wiped it with his strong hand, examining the phlegm in the paraffin light. Though clumsy, his body still had a certain power and athletic poise. As he swayed from side to side on his small feet Maitland saw that he moved with the marred grace of an acrobat or punch-drunk sparring partner who had gone down the hard way. He continually touched his face, like a boxer flicking away the sting of a sharp blow.

  ‘Well, Proctor, did you find them?’ Jane asked.

  The man shook his head. He bounced from one foot to the next like a child too busy to visit the lavatory.

  ‘Locked,’ he announced in a gruff voice. ‘Too strong for Proctor.’

  ‘I’m surprised – I thought you could break anything. We’ll look again tomorrow, in the daylight.’

  ‘Yes – Proctor find them tomorrow.’ He peered over her shoulder at Maitland, and she stepped back reluctantly.

  ‘Proctor, he’s nearly asleep. Don’t wake him, or we’ll have a corpse on our hands.’

  ‘No, Miss Jane.’

  Proctor stepped forward with exaggerated caution. Maitland turned his head, realizing that the man was wearing his dinner-jacket. The silk lapels gleamed as they were bunched outwards by the tight fit.

  Jane had also noticed the garment.

  ‘What the hell are you wearing that for?’ she asked sharply. ‘Are you going to a party, or just dressing for dinner?’

  Proctor giggled at this. He looked down at himself, not without dignity. ‘To a party. Yes … Proctor and Miss Jane!’

  ‘God Almighty … Well, take it off.’

  Proctor gazed incredulously at her, his broken face in an expression of pleading and resentment. He clung to the points of the lapels, as if frightened that they would fly away.

  ‘Proctor! Do you want to be seen straight away? They’ll spot you a mile off in that fancy dress!’

  Proctor hovered in the doorway, accepting the logic of this but reluctant to part with the jacket.

  ‘Night only,’ he temporized. ‘At night no one will see Proctor’s jacket.’

  ‘All right – at night only. Don’t let it go to your head, though.’ She pointed to Maitland, who lay half-asleep on the damp pillow. ‘I’m going out, so you’ll have to keep an eye on him. Just leave him alone. Don’t start fiddling around with him, or hitting him again. And I don’t want you in this room – sit at the top of the steps.’

  Proctor nodded obediently. Like an eager conspirator, he sidled backwards through the door and climbed the staircase. Woken by the clatter on the wooden steps, Maitland recognized the industrial boots whose prints he had seen on the embankment. He tried to rouse himself, frightened of being left alone with this punch-drunk resident of the island. He assumed now that the tramp had scaled the muddy slope and replaced the trestles, hiding all traces of his accident.

  As he muttered to the young woman she sat down on the bed beside him. A sweet, euphoric smoke filled the room, hanging in long decks around her face. She cradled Maitland’s head with unexpected gentleness.

  For five minutes she comforted Maitland, rocking his head and murmuring to him reassuringly.

  ‘You’ll be all right, love. Try to sleep, you’ll feel better when you wake. I’ll look after you, dear. You’re sleepy, aren’t you, my baby? Poor bundle, you need so much sleep. Sleepy baby, my rock-a-bye babe…’

  * * *

  When she had gone, Maitland lay half-awake in his fever, conscious of the tramp in his dinner-jacket watching him from the doorway. All night Proctor hovered over him, his heavy fingers roving around Maitland’s body, as if searching for some talisman that eluded him. Now and then Maitland would smell the hot breath of rancid wine in his mouth, and wake to see Proctor’s broken face staring down at him. In the light of the paraffin lamp his scarred face seemed to be made of polished stone.

  A few hours before dawn Jane Sheppard returned. Maitland heard her calling out in the distance as she crossed the island. She dismissed Proctor, who disappeared silently into the seething grass.

  There was a clatter of high-heeled shoes down the steps. Maitland watched her passively when she lurched across to the bed. Slightly drunk, she gazed down at Maitland as if not recognizing him.

  ‘God – are you still here? I thought you were going. What a hell of an evening.’

  Crooning to herself, she kicked away her stiletto-heeled shoes. Where she had been he could only guess from her costume, a caricature of a small-town forties whore – a divided skirt that revealed her thighs and stocking tops, pointed breasts under a day-glo blouse.

  She tottered round to the far side of the bed and undressed, heaving the clothes into the suitcase. When she was naked she slipped under the frayed blanket. She stared up at the Rogers and Astaire poster and took Maitland’s hand in her own, partly to still him, partly for company. During the remainder of the night and early morning, as he lay beside her, Maitland was aware in his fever of her strong body touching his own.

  12 The acrobat

  THE next morning Jane Sheppard had gone. When Maitland woke the basement room was silent. A shaft of sunlight down the narrow staircase illuminated the shabby bed on which he lay. The faces of Guevara and Charles Manson hung from the walls, presiding over him like the custodians of a nightmare.

  Maitland reached out his hand, feeling the imprint of the young woman’s body. Still lying there, he looked around the room, taking in the open suitcase, the gaudy dresses on their hangers, the cosmetics on the card-table. Jane had straightened everything before leaving.

  His fever had subsided. Maitland picked up the plastic cup on the packing-case, lifted himself on to one elbow and drank the tepid water. He pulled back the blankets and examined his leg. Some wayward healing process had locked the hip joint into its socket, but the swelling and pain had eased. For the first time he was able to touch the bruised flesh.

  Maitland sat quietly on the edge of the bed, staring at the Astaire and Rogers poster. He tried to remember if he had ever seen the film, casting his mind back to his adolescence. For several successive years he had devoured almost the whole of Hollywood’s output, sitting alone in the empty circles of huge suburban Odeons. He massaged his bruised chest, realizing that his body was more and more beginning to resemble that of his younger self – the combination of hunger and fever had made him lose at least ten pounds in weight. His broad chest and heavy legs had shed half their muscle.

  Maitland slid the injured leg on to the floor and listened to the traffic sounds from the motorway. The certainty that he would soon be leaving the island revived him. He had now been marooned on this triangle of waste ground for almost four days. He knew that he had begun to forget his wife and son, Helen Fairfax and his partners – together they had moved back into the dimmer light at the rear of his mind, their places taken by the urgencies of food, shelter, his injured leg and, above all, the need to dominate the patch of ground immediately around him. His effective horizon had shrunk to little more than ten feet away. Even though he would escape in under an hour – however reluctantly, the young woman and Proctor would help him up the embankment – the prospect obsessed him like some decade-long quest.

  ‘Damned leg…’

  Inside the packing-case were a primus stove and an unwashed saucepan. Maitland scraped the brown crust of dry rice from the pan, hungrily forcing the hard grains into his bruised mouth. A thick beard covered his face – he looked down a
t the grimy dress-shirt, the blackened trousers slit from the right knee to the waistband. Yet this collection of tatters less and less resembled an eccentric costume.

  Leaning against the wall, Maitland swung himself around the room. The Guevara poster tore in his hands and hung swaying from a corner pin. He reached the doorway, turned himself on his good leg and sat on the lid of a fifty-gallon drum that served as a water butt.

  A dozen steps led up to the bright sunlight. From the steep angle of the sun Maitland guessed that it was about eleven thirty. The quiet Sunday-morning traffic moved along the motorway – within half an hour or so some good-humoured family out for a day’s drive would be startled by a haggard man in ragged evening dress staggering across the road in front of them. The longest hangover in the world.

  Maitland moved up the steps towards the sunlight. When he reached the top he lifted his head cautiously, peering through the grass and nettles that surrounded the stairwell.

  He was about to step on to the island when he heard a familiar phlegmy breathing. Maitland crouched down, and eased himself across the ground to the derelict pay-box. Lying on his side, he reached out and parted a bank of nettles with his arms.

  Twenty feet away, in a small hollow surrounded by the nettles and high grass, Proctor was performing a set of gymnastic exercises. Blowing hard through his mouth, he stood with his bare feet together, strong shoulders braced as he raised his arms in front of himself. A skipping rope and the steel-capped boots were parked on the well-worn ground of this private recreation yard. He was dressed in the ragged remains of the circus leotard which Maitland had seen hanging from a chair in the air-raid shelter. The silver strips showed off his powerful shoulders, and revealed the livid scar that ran like a lightning bolt from the back of his right ear down his neck to his shoulder, the residue of some appalling act of violence.

  After preparing himself, an elaborate ritual of puffing and panting like the start-up of an old gas engine, Proctor took a short step forward and leapt into a somersault. His powerful body whirled in the air. He struck the ground heavily, barely holding his balance, legs bent and arms wavering at his sides. Delighted by this triumph, he stamped happily in his bare feet.

  Maitland waited as Proctor prepared for his next feat. From the careful build-up, the repeated pacing about and measuring of himself against the air, it was clear that this next acrobatic turn represented his real test. Proctor concentrated all his energies. He marked out the ground, kicking away the loose stones like a large animal searching for the kindest terrain. When he finally leaped again into the air, attempting a backward somersault, Maitland already knew that he would fail. He lowered his head as the tramp sprawled across the ground, scattering his boots.

  Stunned, Proctor lay on his back. He picked himself up, looking dejectedly at his clumsy body. He made a half-hearted attempt to prepare himself for a second attempt, but gave up and brushed the dust from his grazed arms. He had cut his right wrist. He sucked at the wound, and tried a hand-stand, following it with a crude knee fall. His co-ordination was clearly at fault, and the forward somersault had come off by chance alone. Even skipping was too much for him. Within seconds the rope was tangled around his neck.

  Nevertheless, as Maitland realized, the tramp was not dismayed. He licked the cut on his wrist and panted happily to himself, more than satisfied with his progress. Embarrassed by the display, Maitland edged away.

  Hearing Maitland move behind the pay-box, Proctor turned suspiciously. Before Maitland could reach the staircase he had disappeared from sight, vanishing like a startled animal into the deep grass.

  There was a faint movement in the nettle bank behind Maitland. He waited, certain that Proctor was watching him and that if he stepped out the tramp would seize him and hurl him back down the steps. Maitland listened to the traffic, thinking of the tramp’s unconcealed strain of violence, a long-borne hostility to the intelligent world on which he would happily revenge himself.

  Maitland eased himself down the steps. From the bottom of the stairwell he looked up at the sky and the waving grass. He stepped back into the room and swung himself around the walls. As his eyes cleared in the dim light he gazed round at the underground posters, the dingy bed and leather suitcase filled with cheap clothes. Who were these two tenants of the island? What uneasy alliance existed between the old circus hand and this sharp-witted young woman? She appeared to be a classic drop-out, exiting from a well-to-do family with her head full of half-baked ideals, on the run from the police for a drug or probation offence.

  Maitland heard her voice call out across the deep grass. Proctor answered in his gruff simpleton’s tones. Maitland moved back to the bed and lay down, covering himself with the blanket as Jane came down the steps into the room.

  In one hand was a supermarket bag filled with groceries. She was wearing her jeans and combat jacket. For once, Maitland reflected as he noticed the mud on her shoes, the camouflage was not merely a youthful fad. Presumably she knew some private route up the embankment and across the feeder road.

  She peered at Maitland, her sharp eyes taking it everything in a one-second glance. Her red hair was brushed back tightly against her head like a hard-working mill-girl’s, exposing her high, bony forehead.

  ‘How are you? Not too strong, I imagine. Anyway, you slept well.’

  Maitland gestured weakly with one hand. Something warned him to disguise his recovery. ‘I feel a little better.’

  ‘I see you’ve been wandering around in here,’ she remarked without any criticism. She straightened the Guevara poster, re-pinning the torn corner. ‘You can’t be too bad. There’s nothing to find here, by the way.’

  She put her strong hand to Maitland’s forehead and held it there, then briskly pulled out the primus stove and carried it into the sunlight at the bottom of the stairwell.

  ‘Your fever’s gone. We were worried about you last night. You’re the sort of man who has to test himself all the time. Do you think you crashed on to this traffic island deliberately?’ When Maitland regarded her patiently she went on, ‘I’m not joking – believe me, self-destruction is something I know all about. My mother pumped herself so full of barbiturates before she died that she turned blue.’

  She lit the primus and set three eggs boiling in the pan. ‘You must be hungry – I bought some things for you at the supermarket.’

  Maitland sat up. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Sunday – the Indian places around here are open every day. They exploit themselves and their staffs more than the white owners do. But that’s something you know all about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Exploitation. You’re a rich businessman, aren’t you? That’s what you claimed to be last night.’

  ‘Jane, you’ve being naive – I’m not rich and I’m not a businessman. I’m an architect.’ Maitland paused, well aware of the way in which she was reducing their relationship to the level of this aimless domestic banter. Yet there was something not entirely calculated about this.

  ‘Did you call for help?’ he asked firmly.

  Jane ignored the question, setting out the modest meal. The brightly coloured paper cups and plates, and the paper table cloth she spread carefully across the packing case, made it resemble a miniature children’s tea party.

  ‘I … didn’t have time. I thought you needed some food first.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’m starving.’ Maitland unwrapped the packet of rusks she handed to him. ‘But I’ve got to get to a hospital. My leg needs looking at. There’s the office, and my wife – they must wonder where I am.’

  ‘But they think you’re away on a business trip,’ Jane retorted quickly. ‘They probably aren’t missing you at all.’

  Maitland let this pass. ‘You told me you’d called the police last night.’

  Jane laughed at Maitland as he hunched in his ragged clothes on the edge of the bed, his blackened hands tearing apart the packet of rusks. ‘Not the police – we’re not very fond of them
here. Proctor isn’t, anyway – he has rather unhappy memories of the police. They’ve always kicked him around. Do you know that a sergeant from Notting Hill Station urinated on him? You don’t forget that kind of thing.’

  She waited for a reply. The sulphurous smell of the cracked eggs intoxicated Maitland. She steered a steaming egg on to his paper plate, leaning across him long enough for him to register the weight and body of her left breast. ‘Look, you weren’t well last night. You couldn’t have been moved. That terrible leg, the fever, you were completely exhausted, raving away about your wife. Can you imagine us stumbling about in the dark, trying to carry you up that slope? I just wanted to keep you alive.’

  Maitland broke the boiled egg. The hot shell stung the oil-filled cuts in his fingers. The young woman squatted on the floor at his feet, shaking out her red hair. The contrived way in which she used her body confused him.

  ‘You’ll help me afterwards to get away from here,’ he told her. ‘I understand your not wanting the police involved. If Proctor –’

  ‘Exactly. He’s terrified of the police, he’ll do anything to avoid bringing them here. It’s not that he’s ever done anything, but this place is all he’s got. When they built the motorway they sealed him in – he never leaves here, you know. It’s pretty remarkable how he’s survived.’

  Maitland crammed the dripping fragments of the egg into his mouth. ‘He nearly killed me,’ he commented, licking his fingers.

  ‘He thought you were trying to take over his den. It was lucky I came along. He’s very strong. When he was sixteen or seventeen he used to be a trapeze artist with some fly-by-night circus. That was before they had any safety legislation. He fell off the high wire and damaged his brain. They just threw him out. Mental defectives and subnormals are treated appallingly – unless they’re prepared to go into institutions they have absolutely no protection.’

  Maitland nodded, concentrating on the food. ‘How long have you been in this old cinema?’