THE SUMMER I turned thirteen, I’d go round to Bill McCabe’s house and listen to jazz on Saturday mornings. It started with him giving me little jobs to do around the place – washing his car, setting traps for mice, weeding his wife’s rose beds – but that was only a pretext. He’d call me over once or twice a month, and when I’d finished my chores, he’d take me into the front room and play me a record. He’d give me money for the work I did, but the music was my real payment. Every time I went there, he played something different. He had a wide range of stuff, but he liked bebop more than anything, and he’d talk about Charlie Parker the way the teachers in school talked about Jesus. A few of the tasks he gave me to do were pretty pointless. I think he just wanted someone to talk to about jazz, because his wife hated it, and nobody else in that town had even heard of Dizzy Gillespie. Sometimes he told me things, stuff he knew about from his job at Connell’s. He’d show me how mercury worked, rolling it round in a saucer, trying to get me to believe it was metal. Or he showed me how to nip the head off a flower and suck out the nectar, a thin sweetness that stayed in my throat for hours, like the taste of the host at Mass. He’d share these moments of insight, these small revelations, as if they were hugely important, then we’d stand there in awkward silence, wondering what to say next. I didn’t know how lonely he was till it was too late. He once said I took too much for granted, but it didn’t matter, because that was the particular gift of the thirteen-year-old, to take things for granted while he still could. Those were the actual words he used. At the time, I didn’t understand much of what he said. What mattered was the music. If I’m grateful for anything, it’s for those afternoons, sitting in Bill McCabe’s front room, not saying anything, listening to John Coltrane play ‘Summertime’.
It was The Feather Lady who found Patsy Allan one August morning, out by Fulbrook Pond. We called her The Feather Lady because we didn’t know what else to call her. Nobody knew her real name, so we identified her by the battered old hat she wore wherever she went: a man’s felt hat from the look of it, made ladylike by the addition of several peacock feathers tucked into the band. She had gone out to the pond around dawn, as she often did, dressed in her finery, with her nets and baskets, her coat pockets crammed with stale bread and apple cores. At first, she had missed the body, though it must have been in plain view; she was busy, she said, listening for the fishes, scenting the water to see what kind of day it was going to be. It must have cost her something to report what she found. She was one of those women you saw in towns like ours, shy and secretive, cautious of strangers, destined all their lives for a long middle age of cats and books on sugarcraft. Usually she did all she could to keep the world at a distance, to make it seem she was just a visitor, a short-term guest, just passing through and not likely to get in anybody’s way. But when she saw the girl, she knew she had to do something, and she ran along the road to the bakery and called for Mr Gaston, who telephoned the police, then walked back to the pond with her, to see the thing for himself.
The body was exactly where she’d said it was, on the far side of the pond, half-concealed by the overhanging branches of a willow. Whoever had put it there could hardly have believed the police would consider it a simple case of drowning – not with the bruises on Patsy’s face and thighs, the tears in her clothes, the red lines on her wrists where it looked like someone had bound her. Half the town had been searching for Patsy for two days, ever since she’d failed to arrive home from her friend Marianne’s fifteenth birthday party. Different people had gone by the pond at different times, and there had been no sign of a body then, so whoever it was, he must have killed her somewhere else, then carried her to the pond and left her face-down in the water, in her pink and white party dress. He could easily have done this at night. He could have driven up with the girl in the boot of his car and dropped her into the pond when no one was watching. That was the closest I could get to forming an image of the killer: a man in a dark coat, standing beside his car, smoking a cigarette, like the killer in a film. He would have waited till the coast was clear before he carried Patsy to the pond and pushed her in. Then he would have driven away calmly, while the ripples were still spreading over the water.
The adults wouldn’t talk about it when children were around. I remember how odd it was, pretending nothing had changed. I’d hardly known Patsy – she was a couple of years older than me – but all of a sudden I had memories of her, of seeing her in Brewster’s, of the slight singsong in her voice. One afternoon, in the maths class, I suddenly became convinced that the book I was using had once been hers. I looked at the inside cover, but there was only one name there besides mine, a boy’s name, and no other marks except for a faded doodle, a five-pointed star drawn in blue-black ink, formal and precise, like a symbol in alchemy.
The adults didn’t talk about it, but at the same time, there was an air of expectancy in the town, as if people were waiting for Patsy to come walking back along the High Street in her party dress, afraid she would be punished for having stayed away so long. Just as the police were piecing together the last hours of her life, so we were recreating her from wisps of memory, perhaps from guilt that no one had seen her go, or from a refusal to accept what had happened. It was a forensic process, a reconstruction, a whole community attempting the willed resurrection of someone most of us barely knew.
I never found out how The Strip got its name, or why anybody had even bothered to give it a separate name of its own at all. It was only a piece of land, a huddle of poor houses and overgrown allotments at the end of a long dusty road that ran on for a few miles and disappeared into a turnip field. Officially it was still part of Weldon; at another, subtler level, it had its own special character. It was like a village in a horror film: the windows looked empty; all you could see was rusty machinery and waist-high grass where there should have been lawns; abandoned toys lay in the road, like the evidence from some Sunday-tabloid crime. It was easy to imagine a maniac in every house, to catch glimpses of the sinister, inbred kin in their bare kitchens, talking about poisons and traps, surrounded by damp, half-naked children and ugly, malevolent dogs. When Mr Brewster asked if I wanted a paper round, I jumped at the chance of some extra money. He waited till I’d agreed before he told me where it was, and by then it was too late. I’d heard stories about The Strip – the baby in the dustbin, the woman locked in the burning house – but they sounded pretty unlikely, and besides, I’d already spent the money, in my mind.
The first morning was pretty difficult. There was one street I couldn’t find, and when I stopped a man to ask for directions, he only snarled and kept on walking. There were some nasty-looking dogs, too; but the worst thing that happened was when an old woman came to her door and tried to get me to go inside. She looked a bit crazy: there was a dribble of blood on her dress and I could smell the incontinence from where I was standing. I told her I was busy, I had to deliver the papers, and she started to cry, waving her arms about wildly, as if they were wings and she was trying to get them to work. She started calling me Tommy. I remember the way she looked at me, angry and desperate and confused all at once – she kept telling me to go in, trying to find some bond, some obscure complicity she must have believed existed between us.
After they found Patsy, my mother wanted me to give up the round. I had to go out when it was still quite dark, and I suppose she was afraid the killer would strike again. The Chief Constable had been on the radio, warning everyone to be vigilant, especially young women. It was difficult convincing my mother I wasn’t in any danger. As far as I was concerned, the killer would be long gone and, anyway, The Strip wasn’t as bad as everybody made out.
‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I’m more worried about the cars, at that time of the morning.’
I smiled. For my mother, everything that happened was an accident that could be prevented if you didn’t tempt fate by talking about it. If you took precautions, they had to be for something unlikely, never for the possible. Whenever anything bad happened to someone, she would find some outlandish explanation for why it affected that person, and not somebody else. I overheard her telling my cousin Madeleine that Patsy had been seen with a cigarette in her hand the night she died. For her, that explained everything. She really believed any evil could be avoided, if you took the most absurd measures: she had a cupboard in the kitchen that was full of old medicines – kaolin and morphine, witch hazel, flowers of sulphur, Dettol, California Syrup of Figs, bottles whose labels had been lost, crusted at the rim with thick, creamy sediments. For as long as I could remember, this hoard had been there, unused and out of reach, but magical, like a talisman, protecting us against every imaginable horror, except the mild discomforts they were originally intended to allay.
Every Saturday, cousin Madeleine would come to visit and I would flee to the garden or Bill McCabe’s house. It made me feel special, sitting in his front room by the big old radiogram, listening to Lester Young. I would dream about foreign cities, the smell of the American night, and dark cars parked on empty roads, like in the films. When I listened to bebop, I had a sense of the distance, a remoteness from other people like that dreamy feeling when I’d hardly slept all night; how my skin would feel chalky and warm, and the wind would be cool on my face when I stood at the window. This music was all air and distance and infinite possibility. Looking back, I understand that I didn’t really know Bill, I confused him with his record collection. I was impressed by how much he knew about jazz, and the fact that he didn’t talk much. Mrs McCabe would bring me a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits, then she’d go back to the kitchen or the garden and leave us to it. If I tried to make conversation while the music was playing. Bill just gave me a polite look, smiled, then went back to listening. I know now he was passing on the one thing he valued. I also suspect it wasn’t really personal: if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. The only thing that mattered was the fact that I liked jazz.
I think I knew at the time that they couldn’t have children. It didn’t seem to bother them, they were far too busy with what they were doing, and I couldn’t see that it mattered. Bill was tall and heavy; he drank coffee all the time; you could never tell what was going on in his mind. When he sat down, he gave himself up entirely to gravity. I felt safe in his house. It was a tidy, comfortable space for people to live in; nobody made a fuss if I spilled coffee or made crumbs. After a while, I started to take it for granted.
We weren’t supposed to talk about Patsy, but we still gathered at the pond in the afternoons to look at the place where the body was found. We’d go in twos and threes – never alone – and stand by the water, talking quietly: conspirators; detectives. Everyone said they’d know the killer on sight: what he would look like, how he would sound if he walked into Brewster’s and asked for a newspaper or a packet of cigarettes. There would be something that gave him away, a softness about his hands, a shadow in his eyes, a fleck of spit at the corner of his mouth. We hung around the pond because we knew from the cinema that the murderer always revisits the scene of his crime; we stood outside Brewster’s in the evening because the man would want to buy a paper every day, to see if the police were on to him. Meanwhile, though we never admitted it, what we really wanted was a chance to see the ghost or, worse still, a repetition, someone we knew, someone our age, gazing up through the water with a scarf around her neck, serene and distant, like the corpses in films. The police made statements from time to time, but as the days passed, we decided they would never catch the murderer.
We each had our own ideas about who had killed Patsy: someone from The Strip; a gypsy; a man from another town; a sex pervert. We had always known there were strangers who passed through our world: they were the ones who lit fires in the woods, the ones who hung rats and crows in the hedges, marking the borders no child should cross. When I wandered too far from home, I knew to turn back when I found those signs. Those people were always gone when I arrived, the only evidence of their passing would be a box of matches or a lacing of fire in the grass. Sometimes they stayed in one place for days at a time. Once I walked out to the derelict church on the other side of the railway line: it had been boarded up for years, but that day I could see someone had been there – the grass was littered with spent cartridges, torn clothes, rain-sloshed photographs ripped from magazines. There was an old sign on the door to say all the valuables had been removed, but the boards on one window had been pulled away, and I could see into the damp, stripped interior. There were delicate heads carved into the stone above the arches and dark veins on the wall where the ivy had been pulled away. In the windows, the jagged remnants of stained glass glittered in the sunlight. The church had been deconsecrated, then taken over by phantoms. It was like entering a forbidden room, just climbing up into the window and looking in; I was a little scared and impressed with myself, when I dropped through and stood in the dark interior, tracing a bright trail of new blood and spent matches to a bundle of old clothes and new magazines in the space behind the altar.
The next victim was a girl from The Strip. Her name was Cathy Reynolds: she was a small, plump girl, not very pretty, just out of school. She had started work at the bakery just two weeks before she disappeared. I’d seen her a couple of times on my round, but she didn’t speak. I said hello and she looked straight through me. I don’t think she was very bright. I was a bit surprised that the killer chose her, to be honest: after all, he could have gone after any girl he wanted.
They found the body in a ditch about two miles from her house, but she hadn’t been killed there. The police said she might have accepted a lift from her attacker, and the man had taken her somewhere and dumped the body several hours later. There were rumours that she’d been tortured: she had cuts and burns on her arms and chest, and some of her fingernails had been pulled out. Two boys from our school found the body and they had seen everything – the cuts, the burns, the bruises on her legs. They told everybody that Cathy was naked.
I saw Mrs Reynolds a few days later. She was sitting in her front room with the light on and the curtains open at six o’clock in the morning: she looked like she’d been there all night. I was delivering across the street and I could see her plain: small and fat, in a pale blue dressing gown, she looked like an older version of Cathy, sitting on the sofa, gazing out at the morning rain. I don’t know if she saw me; if she did, she gave no sign. She had a box of matches in her hand: as I looked up, she struck one and let it burn, without looking at it, then she shook it out, let it fall, and struck another. She must have struck eight or ten matches while I stood watching. Every time she lit one I saw her face: she was ghostly white, it looked as if the skin around her eyes had been dusted with flour or chalk, and I knew something was wrong – she wasn’t just mourning, or whatever, she was really ill. The room was bare: no plants, no pictures on the walls, almost no furniture except the sofa and a low coffee table. I moved closer. I really felt sorry for her.
It was a while before she noticed I was there and even when she did, she didn’t move, she just looked out at me, almost curiously, as if she was wondering whether I was the one who had killed her daughter, and for a moment, I felt quite guilty, as if I’d known what would happen all along, and done nothing to prevent it.
That night I had the first bad dream. I couldn’t remember much when I woke up: I’d been crawling across the floor of the ruined church, grubbing around for candle stubs, finding spoor and the quicklimed flesh of the killer’s other victims. I knew in the dream there were hundreds of bodies there, and I was crawling through their remains, tangles of bloody hair, torn clothes, fingernails, naked arms and legs. Next thing I knew I was sitting at the table in our kitchen at home. I could see clearly: it had been raining, but now the sun was out and the light was strong. A girl was standing by the door, as if she had just come in; she was wearing a long coat and blue gloves, but I could see on her neck, above the collar, a white flap of skin had peeled away, and I knew her whole body was like that under the coat. Only her face was unaffected. She was looking at me: it was as if she had just asked a question that I hadn’t heard, and now she was waiting for my answer.
Without taking her eyes off me, she walked over to the table and sat down. I noticed it was bare, except for a salt cellar lying on its side, and a single fork. She took off one glove and held out her hand. It was white and the skin was flaking. I thought she was going to touch me, but she stayed where she was, reaching out one hand, as if she wanted me to touch her soft, flaking skin, and I almost wanted to do just that, to take her hand and feel the sores, in a moment of unexpected curiosity and love. But I stayed where I was and, for a moment, we remained suspended, like people in a photograph, frozen in a fault of time.
The next day I walked out along the road to the place where Cathy’s body had been found. I didn’t know what to expect, or even where to look, but it didn’t take a detective to find the place. Somebody had been out there before me, having a picnic. I found some greaseproof paper, a slice of tomato, a curl of orange peel in the ditch. I felt ashamed when I saw that. I couldn’t really judge whoever had been there, because I was there too, just as curious, when I had no reason to be. I didn’t know why I had come but, as I stood there, I began searching, my eyes panning over the grass like the camera in a murder film, looking for spots of blood, or the killer’s cigarette butt, or a shred of torn clothing. There was something about the place that reminded me of the fossil room in the museum: I knew something had happened there, but only the faintest traces remained, more atmosphere than anything, like the fact of spines and flattened ribs embedded in the museum exhibits. I was pure attention, but I knew I was missing something, some clue that was waiting to be found. All that was needed was a shift in my awareness, like the shift of the dial on the radio that moved the frequency from a blur of noise and interference to a clear voice coming through on the air. I was listening too, but all I could hear was the wind in the poplar trees, twenty yards along the road. I don’t know what I was listening for, maybe the dead girl’s soul, bleeding away through the grass, seeping into the earth, as subtle and fleeting as melting snow.
The following Saturday, I waited near the fence, but I didn’t see Bill or Mrs McCabe. Mum said they had probably gone visiting but I told her the car was still there. She just looked at me and laughed, then she said I shouldn’t go making a big mystery out of everything.
‘Run down to Brewster’s for me,’ she said. ‘That’ll give you something to do.’
The third disappearance was in the paper. It just said that a young girl had gone missing from home, and there were fears for her safety. Over the next few days, a massive search was in operation, but some time passed before the body was found.
After that, things changed. You could see it in people’s faces: they had begun to suspect everybody, even their oldest neighbours. They felt betrayed; there was nothing that couldn’t be made to look sinister, nothing that wasn’t subject to interpretation. Worst of all, they could see in each other’s faces that they were waiting for it to happen again. Now it was only a matter of time. People were powerless.
As it happened, the third victim was also the last. Her name was Cheryl Aldrich: she was three years below me at school, which also made her the youngest one to be taken. They found her in a derelict house about five miles from town; the body was lodged in the chimney, naked, but wrapped in old papers and rags, and held in place with a stick. She was the first victim the killer had bothered to hide. People were saying he’d kept her a prisoner for at least two days – there were cuts and burns all over her body and several fingers were broken. Whoever it was did other things too. I never found out what, but I knew it was sexual.
Now people were talking about the killer, they were all calling him the Man, with a capital M – it made him sound powerful and immutable, like the Lone Ranger or the Holy Roman Emperor. The children stopped saying they would be able to tell him a mile off, they just talked about Cheryl and said, no matter how careful you were, the Man could always get you if he wanted. We were only repeating what we’d heard, but it appealed to the morbid side of our characters, to know there were no certainties in life. Our parents couldn’t protect us. Cheryl had gone to the shops in broad daylight to fetch a packet of Daz for her mum. The shops were only two hundred yards from where she lived; she had made it there but she hadn’t come home. They had found the Daz on the waste ground near her house. Some parents started keeping their children away from school after that. I had to give up my paper round, but when I told Mr Brewster, he wasn’t annoyed, he just nodded and said he was grateful I’d kept going for so long.
The Saturday after Cheryl was found, I went looking for Bill. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I’d started to wonder if I’d said something to offend him. I knocked at the back door several times. I could hear music but nobody answered. I knocked louder. At last Mrs McCabe came and opened the door a few inches.
‘Hello, Paul,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry but Bill’s sick. Can you come back another time?’
I could tell it wasn’t true, not just because the music was playing, but from the look on her face.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘We’ll have to wait and see what the doctor says.’
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t pretend I believed her. She wasn’t really making much of an effort to convince me, anyway.
‘Come back next week,’ she said. Then she added, kindly, but also to cover up the lie, ‘We don’t want you catching anything, do we?’
I shook my head. She smiled, to show she appreciated my understanding, then she closed the door and turned the key in the lock. I waited on the step for a moment, listening to the music. It was Charlie Parker playing ‘Ornithology’.
Snow came early that year. It took us by surprise: thick and fast for minutes at a time, swirling around outside the classroom window, then slower, more hesitant, as if it had got lost. Sometimes it seemed to be falling upwards. We had to switch on all the lights at two in the afternoon and it was a magical feeling, sitting with our backs to the window, sneaking a look when the teacher wasn’t watching, feeling it settle on the hedges and roads all around us, crisp and white and cold, becoming everything it touched.
The killings had stopped. Some people thought the Man had moved on and, as if to support this theory, a five-year-old girl had been found dead in a field a hundred miles to the south. We heard about it on the radio. There were no real similarities to our cases, but we believed what we needed to believe. People wanted to settle into their old routines – to feel they could let their children go to boys’ club or guides after school, to sleep through the night and not wake up at three in the morning to go wandering around the house, checking the windows were shut, the doors locked, the gardens empty. Most of all, they wanted to believe they knew their own neighbours.
They didn’t, though. Nobody knows anybody for sure – at least, that’s what I thought when I heard about Bill McCabe. I hadn’t been to his house for a long time, at first out of resentment at having been deceived, then later because I didn’t know if I was welcome. I hadn’t even seen him for weeks, then the news arrived that he was dead. My mother told me about it over breakfast one morning. At first people thought it was an accident, but then, when the facts came through, it turned out he’d killed himself. He’d parked his car on the dirt road in the woods, not far from where Cheryl was found, then he’d swallowed a lot of pills and whisky.
As soon as they heard this, people started jumping to conclusions. The little girl in the south was forgotten. Now they had a suspect: for them, the suicide was an admission of guilt and, though there was no evidence to support the idea, they began making connections, finding patterns of coincidences, dismissing facts that didn’t fit in with the theory, drawing together those that did. I was stunned. All of a sudden, in a way he could never have imagined, I stopped taking things for granted, the way Bill said I did. I went round to look for Mrs McCabe to let her know I didn’t believe what people were saying, but she didn’t answer the door and I knew, as far as she was concerned, I was the same as everybody else. The McCabes had lived in our town for years. Their lives had been quiet, perhaps a little lonely. Now they were evil.
It turned out Bill’s death had nothing to do with the murders. He had a secret, but it wasn’t what people thought – he’d been going out with a girl called Amanda Thompson, who worked in accounts at Connell’s. Amanda was half his age: not very pretty, redheaded, freckle-faced, thin. They had been meeting once or twice a week after work and driving out to the woods. They’d sit out there, talking, or just watching the trees darken around them, startled by every bird and passing car on the road twenty yards away, afraid and lonely together. A couple of months before Bill killed himself Amanda had said she wanted to stop seeing him. She told the police she couldn’t take it any more; she wanted a life for herself.
After she said they were finished, Bill must have gone on driving out to the woods and sitting there on his own, with the engine running to keep warm. People noticed the car: one man said he saw Bill walking around in the woods the day before Cheryl was killed and that was enough to start the rumour that he was the killer. Nobody thought to ask why that man hadn’t spoken up before, or what he’d been doing out there in the woods. Even when Amanda came forward, there were people who said it only showed Bill wasn’t the person everybody thought he was, if he could be having an affair with a girl half his age. Some people said Amanda was lucky to be alive.
Mrs McCabe stayed on for a while after Bill died. A few people were kind, but even they were suspicious. It was easy to see that she was in trouble and nobody could do very much to help. In her mind, the solid road she had been travelling for years had suddenly disappeared. Now she had nothing she could trust; she had stumbled on into loose scree and the ground kept shifting beneath her, a single thought became a landslide, and for desperate moments she had to work to keep her balance. I’d see her in the garden, walking around in the snow, looking at the ground as if she’d lost something. I wanted to help her but I didn’t know how.
Around that time my mother had an argument with Cousin Madeleine. Maddy had said she’d be careful who she married and maybe she would live with the man first and get to know him.
‘Don’t be stupid, Madeleine,’ my mother had said sharply, and Maddy had stared at her in amazement. I was surprised too: Madeleine was my mother’s favourite niece, and she was always making a fuss of her. Usually, in my mother’s eyes, Maddy could do no wrong.
‘Well, look at Mrs McCabe,’ Maddy had said. ‘Who would have thought Bill McCabe would turn out like that?’
My mother gave her that look of hers that I knew meant not to talk about it in front of me, and Maddy shut up. Mum sent me out to the shops then and, when I got back, Maddy was gone. I don’t know what happened after I left, but Mum was very pale, and Maddy didn’t come round for quite a while after that. When she did, it was to tell us about her engagement to a man she’d met at work. My mother wanted to know all about him: she looked a bit disappointed when it turned out he was someone she’d never heard of, a man who had just moved to Weldon, to start a new job at Connell’s. Still, they forgot their argument immediately; they just sat down at the table as if Maddy had never been away. I didn’t understand them. It was a whole lot of fuss over nothing.
One Saturday afternoon, as it was just getting dark, I went out into the yard to fetch some coal. I didn’t see Mrs McCabe at first. She was standing near the fence, just outside her back door; perhaps she had been there a while: she looked cold and lost, and I even thought for a moment she’d forgotten her key and couldn’t get in.
I walked up to the fence and called out to her softly.
‘Are you all right, Mrs McCabe?’
She looked at me and shook her head.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ she said.
I thought she was going to cry. I didn’t know what to say to make her feel better; but then, her face brightened, as if she’d just thought of something.
‘Wait,’ she said.
She went into the house and switched on the lights, leaving the door wide open. It was cold, but I waited; I could hear her moving around inside, but I couldn’t work out what she was doing.
When she reappeared she was holding a large cardboard box full of records. I knew immediately what they were. I could see John Coltrane’s face on the top of the pile.
‘These are for you,’ she said.
She held out the box and I took it, caught it really, because I think she would have let it fall if I hadn’t.
‘I’ve got no use for them,’ she said. ‘So you might as well have them.’ She almost sounded angry, but I wasn’t sure if she was angry with me, or Bill, or someone else.
I began to thank her but, before I could say any more, she turned and started back towards the house. I noticed then she was wearing slippers.
‘Say hello to your mother for me,’ she said, as she closed the door behind her.
A week later, she moved. A man came in a blue car and drove right up the path to her front door. He helped her load some boxes into the boot, then they drove away. I was standing in the garden, watching; when they drove by, I waved, but I don’t think she saw me. She had her head down and I think she was crying. I wondered if she was crying for Bill, or for the garden she was leaving behind, or for something else entirely.
I never saw her again. The man came a few more times; Mum said he was Mrs McCabe’s brother. He organised everything: the removal men, the house sale. He even came one day and dug up some of the roses and shrubs; he wrapped them in newspapers and old sacking, then put them on the back seat of the car. Some of the plants were in flower and it looked odd as he drove away: a home-made funeral of old papers and muddy leaves, and a box of tools where the body might have been.
I still have the records. I keep them as they were given to me, in the cardboard box; somewhere in the back of my mind, I think of them as a loan, and I take better care of them than I would do if I’d bought them myself. They are arranged in alphabetical order: I take them out and play them sometimes, sitting in the front room, drinking coffee, watching the snow, or the rain, or the sunlight creeping across the gardens on Saturday mornings. There are forty-two records in all: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Lester Young. I play them in sequence, starting at one end of the box then working my way through to the other. I don’t mark my place: I trust myself to remember where I am. There are some I like more than others, but I never break the sequence and I don’t play the same record twice. I’ve been playing them for years; I never let anybody else listen, though people sometimes see them among my things and ask. My answer is always the same: I’m keeping them for a friend. They’re for me, and the McCabes, and the others who aren’t here any more.