6

It was nearly 11.00 p.m. when Josef got to Lee’s shabby, redbrick apartment block. He mounted the creaking stairs. The stairwell light wasn’t working and the only illumination was from a streetlight filtering through the landing window. The gauzy light reminded him in an obscure way of some distant period in his life and he was briefly flooded with the disappointment peculiar to the consideration of time.

He paused on the landing with a hand on the worn banister and peered upwards into the darkness. Winter had settled into his bones over the past few years and he was aware now of an ache in his right knee. The apartment block hummed with unseen domestic activity, with the gurgle of water in pipes, the metallic swish of cutlery drawers opening and closing. The stairwell smelled of incense and boiled vegetables. Despite the late hour, someone was cooking curry. Probably bloody Pakistanis or Indians, up late on Bombay time or something. He tugged his jacket cuff down over his tattoo.

Lee’s apartment was on the second floor. A box of ancient newspapers rested on the floor outside the door, the relic of an earlier tenant. Josef pressed an ear to the door but could hear nothing. No light seeped under it and there was no response when he knocked. Lee, he said. Are you in there? It’s Josef.

He listened again, remaining utterly still, so that when at last he moved it was as if he were assembled from the darkness. Still nothing. He drew his gun, followed by his collection of skeleton keys. His bladder clenched. There were blokes who needed to shit in the midst of a crime and, in fact, he had once been involved in a robbery that was very nearly ruined by a young guy called Leon stopping to take a crap in an alley. But for Josef, it was different. Without fail, even after all these years, the act of breaking into a house prompted in him the urge to piss. He tried the keys one by one, until the lock gave and he nudged the door open. He waited on the landing with his gun drawn for a full minute before stepping into the apartment. Immediately he could detect, by the bony silence, that the place was abandoned, an impression confirmed when he switched on the light. The furnishings were incomplete, heavy with transience. There was the television on the milk crate, a sagging couch and an ashtray on the windowsill, each stripped of any connection to whoever had used them. The place was chilly, unloved.

The tiny bedroom and kitchen offered no clues. The bathroom showerhead dripped into the stained bathtub with a soft, rhythmic dunk dunk dunk. In the bedroom, just a low wooden dresser and the mattress on the floor. What meaning, if any, could be harvested from these inanimate things? A bunch of rooms that offered nothing of the person who lived here. As he patrolled the apartment, Josef felt a sort of dry pity for Lee, a sense of having interrupted him weeping or reading pornography.

As a teenager, Josef would often break into houses alone. Of course he was searching for money or jewellery and other valuables to sell, but there were other satisfactions to be gained. He would sometimes spend an entire afternoon in a new house admiring the neat and ordered rooms, sitting primly at the kitchen table eating cheese or warming his cold hands among the clothes of strangers. He would doze on couches and wonder who would buy plastic place mats bearing the images of European cathedrals and bridges. He fondled letters from mothers and photographs of lovers. Broken toys. A small globe of the entire world. Even now, more than forty years later, he was unable to detect the scent of musk without being transported, almost bodily, back to the house on Mott Street where he first encountered it on the dressing table of a beautiful widow recently home from Africa; the thin afternoon light glinting on her glassware and the distant bark of a dog. More than once, it was only upon returning to his own house that he realised he had neglected to steal anything.

He often felt more at home in the houses of strangers, but there was nothing here in Lee’s apartment; it was entirely too familiar. He stood in the bedroom with his gun still in hand. Clothes lay on the wooden floor in piles as if their owner had urgently disrobed before fleeing. The walls were grubby, dotted here and there with marks and smudges, like the thumbprints of ghosts. He was preparing to leave when the phone rang. Automatically, he raised his gun. As always, he expected the phone’s plastic form to vibrate in accompaniment to the urgent trill and was slightly disappointed when it failed to do so. It rang about ten times before falling silent. Josef scratched his tattoo. He heard people walk past in the street below. A woman chuckled. He stood still.

The phone rang again. He crouched beside the mattress and lifted the receiver to his ear. Hello.

Lee, a woman said. Where on earth are you?

Josef stood up, phone in his left hand, gun in the other. No, he said after a pause. Lee’s not here.

There was a brief silence. Sorry? Who’s this, then?

I’m a friend.

More silence. He heard the woman transfer the phone from one hand to the other, the crumpling sound so close it might have been happening in the shell of his own ear. Strange that strangers could be so close. Josef knew that people would speak almost compulsively to fill silences. He hoped she would. It might be his only lead. She would speak or just hang up. He waited, tapping the gun against his thigh, and was surprised to detect a quickening of his heart. The woman said nothing.

Maybe I can help you? he said.

Well. Do you know where he is? She was curt, suspicious.

No. I was looking for him myself.

What are you doing in his house? What’s your name?

I have a key, alright.

I see. Well, he was supposed to be here this afternoon and he hasn’t turned up. I’ve been ringing all evening.

You were expecting him?

Yeah. I’m his sister. He’s coming to stay with us for a while. Who are you?

His sister?

Yeah. Claire. Has he left yet, at least?

I thought . . .

What? Thought what?

You’re his sister? Lee’s sister?

Yes.

He told me his family were all killed in a car crash.

Oh, Jesus. Did he?

Yes.

The woman sighed. No. Not everyone.

There was a man’s voice in the background and again the phone rustled. More muffled voices. He imagined the woman, this sister of Lee’s, pressing the phone against her chest to relay their conversation to a man in a doorway.

Beside his own wan reflection, Josef could see that a large moth had attached itself to the outside of the bedroom window. Even from several feet away, Josef could discern its tiny wings, its rotating antennae and the furry bulk of its body. An aunt used to tell him that a moth attempting to enter a house was a harbinger of death and he wondered how such an apparently innocuous creature—this mute Labrador of the insect world—could signify such a thing. He always thought they looked like royalty outcast, their brown wings tattered robes fluttering about their bodies.

More rustling and it seemed the woman was back with him. He needed to force the conversation. And where are you?

So you don’t know where he is?

Why don’t you give me your telephone number and address and—

No. It’s OK . . . I think I’ll try later. He’ll show up. He promised.

Wai —

The woman hung up. Shit. He’d blown it. Josef tossed the phone receiver onto the mattress. Shit. He shrugged inside his jacket. Again he looked around the bedroom and wondered at the sheer inevitability of a life that now found him standing in this apartment. It seemed he had not travelled very far since his adolescent break-ins. The moth still hung grimly onto the windowpane, its wings ruffling in the wind. He imagined it staring at him with its black eyes, but doubted moths could even see.

So. Lee had a sister. This was interesting.

He shoved his gun back inside his jacket, unzipped his trousers and fumbled until he stood ponderously with hips jutting forward, his cock between thumb and forefinger. A chill murmured through him like a current of polite applause. How painful that one’s body eventually needed quiet urging to accomplish the most rudimentary tasks. Was old age merely an inability to complete those things that for so long have occurred naturally? He waited as his organs awakened somewhere in his abdomen and finally produced a hot, thin arc of piss. He aimed more or less at Lee’s mattress and before long a sizzling pool formed within the folds of a dirty sheet.

He was unsure what to do when he had finished. He zipped himself up and waited while the rust-coloured puddle melted into the sheet and mattress. It didn’t give him nearly as much satisfaction as he had hoped, but perhaps he had expected too much.

It was almost midnight. He needed a drink, but the only thing in the fridge was half a bottle of beer with a teaspoon dangling in its neck. He lifted the bottle out, shook it, then dropped it onto the linoleum floor. It landed with a thud but failed to break. Beer glugged out. Josef shook his head and smoothed his hair. He yawned and leaned against a bench to smoke a cigarette. The puddle of beer collected beneath the sink. His hands shook as he stroked the inside of his left wrist. He paused, stopped breathing. Yes. There it was. The hum, heard through his fingertips, of his tattoo.