colourful plants in pots were the only growing things apart from a knobbly wisteria trained against the far brick wall and scrambling across the lintel of a wooden door in the middle of the wall.
People say evenings like this are peaceful but I find them unsettling. I understand why ancient peoples like the Aztecs worried so much about the sun setting. There is a kind of finality about it, an awareness of the long night ahead. There’s a saying, however, about not letting the sun go down on your anger. Today it was going down on mine. I was still angry with Mickey Allerton and I would stay angry, even after all this was over, no matter how things turned out.
I turned back from the window and sat down on the one upholstered chair and took a further look at my temporary home. It was odd to think that this was exactly what it would be for the next two or three days, my home, my space. Yet it had nothing of me in it. Everything was contrary to what I felt myself to be. I am not a frilly-curtain person, nor a lilac-bedlinen one. I averted my eyes from the awful picture on the wall depicting a child with unfeasibly large eyes and a tear rolling down his face. Why would anyone want such a picture? I wondered. How could anyone think it cute? I wasn’t just in a strange city where I knew no one. I was in an altogether alien world. I had a mad impulse to search the room for listening devices, like James Bond in a new hotel room. Perhaps the bug was located behind that picture or the mirror on the dressing table . . .
I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stood still before it, trying to see myself as DS Pereira had. I still didn’t think I looked like someone who might be on the wrong side of the law nor even someone who might once have been homeless. But Beryl’s question had shaken me. There was something about me. I couldn’t see it but others could. It wasn’t anything to do with appearance, looks or dress. It had to be something else: body language, and a kind of wariness.
One of the people who had a flat in the converted house in which I lived kept a cat. My dog Bonnie and this cat lived on terms of mutual respect. They ignored one another. But whereas Bonnie was friendly with the other tenants, the cat avoided us all, everyone except its owner. Whenever I’d tried to make friends with it, it sat down at a distance and stared at me with unrelenting yellow eyes. If I moved towards it, it moved away. When I stopped, it sat down again. There was a distance between us and it was to be kept. The cat had been a stray and the tenant had taken it in. It had been a scraggy, half-wild moggy. Now it was plump and sleek but it hadn’t lost its mistrust, its belief that you only survive if you keep your own space and others keep theirs. Was I like that? Did they read it in my eyes? I didn’t like the idea.
It’s not difficult to become homeless. There is a belief among people who don’t know any better that those who lack a roof over their heads do so by choice. After all, they reason, there’s always help somewhere. But there isn’t. Or if there is, it comes with strings attached. Many people on the street are there because they want to lose themselves, blend in with the anonymity of pavements and shop doorways. There are those whose marriages, careers and lives have fallen apart. There are those who are mentally ill. There are those for whom drink or drugs have become the beginning and end of existence, a never-ceasing cycle. Their days pass in a blur of feverish desire, painful withdrawal symptoms, all-too-short rushes of relief and passages of oblivion. There are ex-cons who will end up back in gaol. There are youngsters running away from abusive homes, others from ‘good’ families against which they have rebelled and become lost, unable to go back to what they have left. Others have fallen out of the system, some have been in council care when children, but when no longer ‘children’ are in
People say evenings like this are peaceful but I find them unsettling. I understand why ancient peoples like the Aztecs worried so much about the sun setting. There is a kind of finality about it, an awareness of the long night ahead. There’s a saying, however, about not letting the sun go down on your anger. Today it was going down on mine. I was still angry with Mickey Allerton and I would stay angry, even after all this was over, no matter how things turned out.
I turned back from the window and sat down on the one upholstered chair and took a further look at my temporary home. It was odd to think that this was exactly what it would be for the next two or three days, my home, my space. Yet it had nothing of me in it. Everything was contrary to what I felt myself to be. I am not a frilly-curtain person, nor a lilac-bedlinen one. I averted my eyes from the awful picture on the wall depicting a child with unfeasibly large eyes and a tear rolling down his face. Why would anyone want such a picture? I wondered. How could anyone think it cute? I wasn’t just in a strange city where I knew no one. I was in an altogether alien world. I had a mad impulse to search the room for listening devices, like James Bond in a new hotel room. Perhaps the bug was located behind that picture or the mirror on the dressing table . . .
I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stood still before it, trying to see myself as DS Pereira had. I still didn’t think I looked like someone who might be on the wrong side of the law nor even someone who might once have been homeless. But Beryl’s question had shaken me. There was something about me. I couldn’t see it but others could. It wasn’t anything to do with appearance, looks or dress. It had to be something else: body language, and a kind of wariness.
One of the people who had a flat in the converted house in which I lived kept a cat. My dog Bonnie and this cat lived on terms of mutual respect. They ignored one another. But whereas Bonnie was friendly with the other tenants, the cat avoided us all, everyone except its owner. Whenever I’d tried to make friends with it, it sat down at a distance and stared at me with unrelenting yellow eyes. If I moved towards it, it moved away. When I stopped, it sat down again. There was a distance between us and it was to be kept. The cat had been a stray and the tenant had taken it in. It had been a scraggy, half-wild moggy. Now it was plump and sleek but it hadn’t lost its mistrust, its belief that you only survive if you keep your own space and others keep theirs. Was I like that? Did they read it in my eyes? I didn’t like the idea.
It’s not difficult to become homeless. There is a belief among people who don’t know any better that those who lack a roof over their heads do so by choice. After all, they reason, there’s always help somewhere. But there isn’t. Or if there is, it comes with strings attached. Many people on the street are there because they want to lose themselves, blend in with the anonymity of pavements and shop doorways. There are those whose marriages, careers and lives have fallen apart. There are those who are mentally ill. There are those for whom drink or drugs have become the beginning and end of existence, a never-ceasing cycle. Their days pass in a blur of feverish desire, painful withdrawal symptoms, all-too-short rushes of relief and passages of oblivion. There are ex-cons who will end up back in gaol. There are youngsters running away from abusive homes, others from ‘good’ families against which they have rebelled and become lost, unable to go back to what they have left. Others have fallen out of the system, some have been in council care when children, but when no longer ‘children’ are in
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