Chapter Ten

Michael Adonis lay on the iron bed in his dark room and heard the door-knob rattle. The room faced the street and from below the street-light made a pale white glow against the high window-panes and filtered a very little way into the gloom so that the unwashed curtains seemed to hang like ghosts in mid-air. The stained, papered walls were vague in the dark and the ceiling invisible. The door rattled again and somebody called softly outside in the corridor.

His flesh suddenly crawling as if he had been doused with cold water, Michael Adonis thought, Who the hell is that? Why the hell don’t they go away. I’m not moving out of this place. It’s got nothing to do with me. I didn’t mean to kill that old bastard, did I? It can’t be the law. They’d kick up hell and maybe break the door down. Why the hell don’t they go away? Why don’t they leave me alone? I mos want to be alone. To hell with all of them and that old man, too. What for did he want to go on living for, anyway. To hell with him and the lot of them. Maybe I ought to go and tell them. Bedonerd. You know what the law will do to you. They don’t have any shit from us brown people. They’ll hang you, as true as God. Christ, we all got hanged long ago. What’s the law for? To kick us poor brown bastards around. You think they’re going to listen to your story; Jesus, and he was a white man, too. Well, what’s he want to come and live here among us browns for? To hell with him. Well, I didn’t mos mean to finish him. Awright, man, he’s dead and you’re alive. Stay alive. Ja, stay alive and get kicked under the arse until you’re finished, too. Like they did with your job. To hell with them. The whole effing lot of them.

He shivered and fumbled around until he found a cigarette and lit it, the match flare lighting his face, revealing the curves of his cheekbones and throwing shadows into the hollows below them and around his eye-sockets. The rattling of the door-knob had stopped and he heard vaguely the sound of footsteps along the corridor. He puffed at the cigarette and blew smoke into the darkness.

You ought to get yourself a goose, he thought. You’ve been messing around too long. You ought to get married and have a family. Maybe you ought to try that goose you met downstairs. Her? Bedonerd. When I take a girl she’s got to be nice. Pretty nice. With soft hair you can run your hands through and skin so you can feel how soft her cheeks are and you’d come home every night mos and she’d have your diet ready and Friday nights you’d hand over your pay packet and she’d give you your pocket money and you’d go down to the canteen and have a couple of drinks and if you got too fired up she’d take care of you. Funny how some rookers are always squealing about having to hand over their pay Friday nights. Jesus, if I had a wife I’d hand over my ching without any sighs. But she’s got to be one of them nice geese, not too much nagging and willing to give a man his pleasure.

Then he sat bolt upright as a woman screamed in the corridor outside and the thought that jumped into his mind was, Oh, God, they found that old bastard. The woman screamed again and a door banged and a man began shouting and then some more doors were opening and banging, and feet pounded upstairs, along corridors, voices started speaking together. There was an uproar in the corridor outside and a man’s voice said over and over, ‘What the hell, what the hell, what the hell.’

Michael Adonis scrambled off the bed, the cigarette falling from his lips to the floor, sending off a shower of red sparks while he plunged towards the door. For a moment he was about to open it and dash out in his excitement, but he checked himself in time and clung to the handle, pressing himself against the woodwork, listening. He felt cold and shivery and then hot, and his mind raced.

There were several people in the corridor outside and above a hubbub of voices a woman was saying hysterically, ‘… old man. I saw who done it. I saw who done it. That skolly …’ A man’s voice told her to shut up and Michael Adonis thought, How could she? She never saw a thing. We were all alone. There was nobody around. How could she have seen me? The bloody lying bitch. The bloody lying bitch.

The man started talking again and the hubbub ceased. ‘… better call the law … No … ambulance no use … dead, isn’t he? … the law … don’t want no trouble …’ Somebody else said something and the man shouted, ‘Christ, we leave it alone and the blerry law will grab the whole building on suspicion. Jesus, don’t I know the law; I been in court four times all.’

Voices interjected, the man spoke again, his voice bearing a note of pride in his knowledge of the workings of the judiciary. Experience gave authority to his opinions. Conversation recommenced and the blur of voices rose, but without coherence in the room where Michael Adonis crouched. After a while it subsided to the muttering sound of distant breakers whispering against rocks, and then there was the sound of footsteps going downstairs, until the silence hung like a shroud on the upper floor of the tenement.

Michael Adonis released the door-knob and found the palm of his hand slippery with sweat. The liquor had gone from his brain now, and his mind was jumpy as a new-born child. He crossed over to the window, his heart beating hard, and stood by one side of the window peering down past the edge of the curtain. The street was quiet in the haze of the electric lights, the catacombs of darkened doorways beyond the grey pavements, and where lights were on in windows, they were yellow glows behind cut-out squares in black cardboard. Far beyond the rooftops of lower buildings neon signs cast a haze like a misplaced dawn over the city.

Then Michael Adonis saw the tenement crowd spill onto the pavement and into the street, eddying for a moment and then drawn in a small whirlpool around the vortex of a man in shirtsleeves and baggy grey flannel trousers. The light made a scar of the bald patch on his head and he waved his bared-to-the-elbow arms while he talked. The crowd stood around him, listening, and sometimes somebody said something, so that his arms and hands gestured again, as if he was making a speech. They went on talking for some minutes and after a while another man broke from the crowd and hurried up the street and into the dark.

Michael Adonis thought, coldly sober now. If they call the law they’ll come up here sure and maybe want to know who lives here in these rooms. If they find me here then I’ll go. I don’t want no blerry questions asked. To hell with them. What’s the bloody law done for them? Why, they can’t have a little drink in and be found on the street without the law smacking them around. Christ, what a people. That smart son of a bitch down there who’s doing all the talking is trying to be a laan, a big shot. What’s it got to do with him? What’d that old bogger ever do for him? To hell with the lot of them. Stabbing a man in the back.

He watched the crowd in the street below for a while and then dropped the curtain and went back to the door. He turned the key and opened the door carefully. There was nobody out in the corridor. The old man’s door looked stark and bare as a tombstone. Michael Adonis went out and shut the door quietly behind him. He walked carefully along the corridor and to the head of the stairs and looked down into the well. Somewhere the radio was still on, playing soft, syrupy music, all violins and horns. He went down the staircase slowly, listening all the time, until he reached the first landing, and then turned quickly towards the back of the building. A filthy window gave onto a low roof behind the tenement and below that into a squalid alleyway. Michael Adonis eased himself onto the roof which sheltered a disused boiler-house, and dropped down into the alley thick with accumulated muck. He ploughed his way towards the exit, stumbling over debris generations old and slimy with stagnant water, past dustbins and piled offal and into a side street. It was blocked at one end by a wall so that he had to walk towards the street where the crowd had gathered. They were a distance below the spot where he emerged and were talking together. He cut quickly out of the cul-de-sac and darted up the street away from the crowd.

A little way up the street Foxy and the two young men watched him go off into the darkness, and the scarfaced youth said: ‘That looks like Mikey, don’t I say?’

‘Ja,’ said Foxy non-committally. And to the boy with the skull-and-crossbones ring he said: ‘Hey, go and find out what those jubas are gabbing about.’

The boy with the skulk-and-crossbones ring sauntered off in the direction of the crowd in front of the tenement.

The scarfaced boy said: ‘I wonder where in Jesus Sockies is. Looks like we get to search for him all blerry night.’

‘He’ll turn up,’ Foxy said, not looking at him but at the crowd. ‘I wonder what that is all about?’