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‘Later on I see as he’s thrown some old soup tins, a fly paper and a broken milk bottle into the flower bed by the little girl’s shrine,’ she adds, scowling. ‘I thought, Well that’s as why you ended up arse-over-tit, Mr Huff! Shrunken heads or no! You don’t need to be messing around with forces beyond your ken, my friend. The tundra’s your business, Mr Huff, but we has our own ways of going about things up here on Toot Rock. Wispy and prarochial, indeed! Ignore ’em at your peril, sir!’
She shakes her head, scowling.
‘I suppose I should have a quick word with him,’ I murmur, registering the hungry grumble of the Rye bus on the Fairlight Road as Mrs Barrow takes out a scarf and ties it around her head, forming a small knot under the chin and pulling the two ends tight with such a jerk that one might almost imagine the cosmopolitan Mr Huff’s head compressed between them.
‘I won’t pretend as I’m not prone to having the odd grumble about the quality of the furniture in Mulberry,’ she confides. ‘I know as it has historical value, Carla, and all the rest of it’ – she raises a jaundiced brow – ‘but it’s just a pile of old driftwood and matchsticks for the most part. Even so, how one middle-aged man on his lonesome-ownsome can cause so much mess and mayhem is quite beyond me, I swear!’
She reaches out her hand towards the oncoming bus and it slows to a gradual halt with a blood-curdlingly cacophonous squeal of brakes, as if each of her calloused fingers has summoned a banshee from between its wheels.
‘All as I can say is: I hope his poor wife paid you the full deposit – in cold hard cash – before she upped and ran off!’ Mrs Barrow barks over the engine noise, then clambers on board. I pass over her old shopping trolley. It has a tricky wheel on the right-hand side which is sometimes given to seizing up. She grabs it, gives the offending wheel a practised kick, then disappears into the bus with a sharp – and suitably conclusive – bantam-like cluck.
2
Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
In the end it was Carla Hahn who approached me. I knew the only way to draw her in – the only way – would be to ignore her completely. It had taken six weeks, in total. I was sitting on top of the gun emplacement eating a stale, unbuttered roll and a jar of pickled walnuts. She was slightly out of breath after cycling up. I’d seen her from atop my airy lookout talking to Mrs Barrow at the request bus-stop on the Sea Road. Mrs Barrow – like so many of the permanent residents on Toot Rock, not to mention those of Pett Level in the flatlands below (although the weekenders, I confess, are of a different complexion altogether) – appears to hail from an indeterminate epoch. She seems to have no presentiment whatsoever that she’s living in a modern age: the 1980s for heaven’s sake!
This morning, as she skivvied, we had an extraordinary discussion about the Home Computing Revolution. She’d gleaned via the elusive Mr Barrow’s tabloid rag (Mr Barrow is Toot Rock’s very own smooth-skinned McCavity; he may only ever be apprehended as an absence) that something called the ‘Apple Mackintosh’ was, as of this very day, to be made available, for money, in shops, to the general public. She was unable to comprehend how or why this much heralded object would be in any way better or more useful than a standard typewriter: ‘And they only ever as write out bills to torment us poor working folk with those!’ she muttered. I silently held up my book. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she grumbled. ‘Words is words is words is words.’
‘Well, thank goodness Trollope and De Quincey weren’t of your blinkered mind-set, Mrs Barrow!’ I quipped, then went on to laboriously explain the demarcation between mechanical, electronic, analogue and digital technologies – even drawing a little diagram on the inside back cover of my jotter. I cogently summarized Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and Moore’s Law in what I hoped were layman’s terms. I said, ‘This is the Third Industrial Revolution, Mrs Barrow. You are witness to the genesis of a new era: the Information Age – the paperless office, the revolutionary concept of information sharing. This is bigger than people walking on the moon,’ I said. ‘One day our entire lives – everything, literally everything: transport, personal hygiene, sex – will be digitized.’
As Mrs Barrow brushed out and then re-set the fire I explained how I’d been posted as a foreign correspondent to California during the late 1960s and how it’d been – by a lucky coincidence – the fertile breeding ground, the hub, of all these extraordinary, nay game-changing hypotheses. I told her how the scientists had discovered a way of sending letters to each other via computer: digital letters! Mrs Barrow paid great heed as she flitted about the cottage – a spry grey squirrel in pleated skirt and pop socks – with her bucket, her broom and her mop. Then, once I’d completed my lecture, she placed her hands on her hips, laboriously cleared her throat and said, ‘I remember as when they invented the ballpoint pen, Mr Huff. Everyone making a big old fuss about it, they was. Now it’s just something and nothing. I’m as happy to be using a pencil myself! Nobody cares about the ballpoint pen no more, Mr Huff. This’ll be the same. A flush in the pan. You mark my words.’
‘Those walnuts have been in the cupboard for at least five Christmases, Mr Huff!’ Miss Hahn yells up at me, throwing down her bike into the long grass. I’ve seen her throw it down before. Many times. Toss it down, without a care. I find it difficult to marry this apparent recklessness with her complete fastidiousness in regard to every detail connected to Mulberry Cottage. The lists! The rules! The special requirements! I also observed the pointed way she used my surname. Of course we made the booking for the cottage under Lara’s maiden name: Ashe. I’m no fool. We’d never have got it for the full eight weeks otherwise.
‘They have sentimental value?’ I ask (somewhat facetiously, I confess).
‘Sorry?’
‘The walnuts?’
‘Mrs Barrow tells me there’s a problem with the dining table,’ she says, swiping her short, unkempt, sun-bleached blonde hair impatiently behind her ear. I can instantly tell that she cuts it herself. She’s that kind of a woman. No make-up bar a light smear of Vaseline on the lips and the angular bone of either cheek. Dressed in a pair of men’s baggy, canvas trousers (rolled over at the waist and belted with what looks like a length of old rope) and a drab, linen blouse in grey or brown – or both, or neither – un-ironed but worn and worn into a flat shine, buttoned right up to the neck. Scuffed plimsolls on her feet, no socks. She has broad shoulders and is tanned. She is built like a swimmer. I see the German in her, and I see the Soviet.
Around the nose – the chin. Poor thing.
‘It collapsed,’ I say, screwing the lid back on to the walnuts. ‘I’d placed the television on top of it to try and improve the reception. It caved under the weight. The middle flap seems to’ve been constructed out of plywood. That or the woodworm’s got the better of it. Either way, the table is irretrievably damaged, although – on a positive note – the picture on the TV’s been much clearer ever since.’
‘Your wife left,’ she says, her eyes – the colour of a mean bruise, edged in octopus ink – slitting, infinitesimally.
‘The second week.’ I nod, studiedly indifferent. ‘Mrs Barrow mentioned it? One of the other neighbours, perchance?’
Of course nothing ever happens in this ludicrous place without the neighbours mentioning it! A fool might imagine it to be the kind of wonderful location where a person might be rendered invisible – somewhere an artist or a criminal or a film star might flee in order to cultivate a precious, fragile sense of anonymity; a place where you might melt into the fringes, the margins, the nothingness; a place of privacy – insularity – isolation – retreat. But Toot Rock is not like that. Oh not at all! Not a whit of it.
‘She ran over a cat,’ Carla Hahn says, inspecting my tie with a small frown, her hand lifting, unconsciously, to her own very slightly frayed collar.
Her hands are the colour of boiled gammon! Extraordinary! Raw-looking. I quite pity her those awful hands.
‘Yes. The tail,’ I confirm, ‘in broad daylight. The cat was immensely fat. She was reversing at high speed, drunk as a skunk.’
‘The tail’ – she nods, slightly baleful, now – ‘was later amputated, and at some considerable cost to the owner, I’m told.’
‘You heard all about it, then?’ I smile, sarcastically.
‘He’s my father’s cat.’ She shrugs.
‘Oh. Mrs Barrow didn’t mention that,’ I murmur, somewhat perturbed by this sudden, quite unexpected, turning of the tables.
‘I think you’ll probably discover, on further acquaintance, that Mrs Barrow generally prides herself on leaving out the most important detail in any story. In fact you could almost say it’s her speciality.’ She smiles. Good, straight teeth. But the eyes … Tsk! Watch out for those eyes! Dead as a dodo’s! Deader still! A predator’s eyes (the dodo, to its eternal credit, was a humble vegetarian). These are a carnivore’s eyes. These are the eyes of a pterodactyl, a tyrannosaurus rex.
‘He was your father’s cat …’ I ruminate, trying to work out the wider implications of this unwelcome detail, somewhat on the hoof, I’ll admit. ‘And I suppose that horrendously fat dog I see you dragging up and down the beach every morning and evening is your father’s dog?’
‘Strictly speaking, he was my late mother’s cat,’ she explains (ignoring the dog comment). ‘He’s called Rolfie. He’s forty-one years of age.’
‘The average life expectancy of a cat is fifteen,’ I say, incredulous.
‘Yes. I know.’ She nods, solemnly. ‘Rolfie is an incredibly old cat.’
‘So Rolfie has lived almost three times longer than the average cat?’ I persist, then promptly calculate: ‘The equivalent age – in a person – would be two hundred and ten.’
‘Yes,’ she confirms, patently unshaken by the comparison.
I just can’t let this one go. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as a little … uh … improbable?’ I wonder.
‘Yes’ – she nods again – ‘highly improbable. It’s perfectly amazing. A miracle of nature. And then your wife drove straight into him. Drunk. In broad daylight. At high speed.’
‘Oh. Well, I apologize for that,’ I mutter.
‘My father was rather traumatized,’ she idly adds, gazing dreamily at the clouds scudding across the sky above my head.
‘In all my born days,’ I muse, ‘I’ve never heard of a cat living to forty-one years of age. He must be the oldest cat in the world. The oldest cat in the known universe.’
‘You have a ladybird on your fringe,’ she murmurs, squinting slightly. ‘In fact you have two. Yes. Two. They appear to be … to be copulating.’
‘You have very red hands,’ I respond, swiping at my fringe.
‘I’m allergic to disinfectant.’
‘Then why don’t you wear rubber gloves?’ I demand.
‘And latex,’ she adds.
In truth I’m not entirely certain if there are two ladybirds on my fringe. This worries me. I’ve had no previous intimations that Miss Hahn might turn out to be an unreliable witness. Quite the opposite. A little mouse. I was told. A lamb. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was told. Damn. Damn. A propensity towards lying could prove catastrophic to my plans.
‘Anything else?’ I wonder.
‘Sorry?’
Her eyes are back with the clouds again. She seems to find great solace in the clouds, much as I do myself.
‘Allergies?’
‘Uh, nickel,’ she confirms, ‘and arrogance.’ She smiles. ‘You?’
‘Bullshitters.’
‘Oh, me too.’ She nods, most emphatically.
I can see now that this isn’t going to be all plain sailing. A short silence follows, punctuated by the cries of several gulls and the shrill whistle of a farmer in a nearby field, directing his sheepdog from the comfort of his tractor cab.
‘I’ll need to pop around to the cottage and have a look at that table,’ she eventually murmurs; ‘perhaps you might provide me with a convenient time to come over when you know for certain that you’ll be out?’
I’m still fiddling with my fringe.
‘The ladybirds have gone,’ she adds. ‘They flew away home.’
‘I may need to get back to you on timings,’ I say, with a measure of diffidence.
‘Fine.’ She shrugs. ‘Well you have my number, Mr Huff.’
‘Yes I do, Miss Hahn.’
She turns and picks up her bike. She suddenly seems very annoyed, but why exactly I am not entirely sure.
‘You seem rather annoyed,’ I say.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she exclaims, piqued. ‘Do enjoy the rest of your afternoon.’
And off she stalks, red hands and all.
What a curious woman she is! So brusque. A suggestion – a mere shadow – of the Germanic in her accent. Unkempt. Chaotic. Not unclean, just …
Unattractive. Well, not unattractive. But boyish. Uncouth. And untrustworthy, too – possibly. Yes. And tragically repressed! Poor little thing! A hysterical virgin. Ha! Obviously. Obviously. Could tell that from a mile off.
3
Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)
Shimmy is outraged by Mr Huff’s behaviour – so irked, in fact, that I almost regret telling him about it. I am soaking his gnarled old feet in a plastic bowl (the iced water scented with sage and lavender oil), while heating up some minestrone soup for a late lunch.
‘Zis Mr Huff has insulted us all!’ he exclaims, in typically exaggerated fashion (all shrugs, waving arms and eye rolls). ‘First ze careless assault by his drunken wife on poor Rolfie, zen zat monstrous “letter of apology” – a veb of deceit from start to finish; the shiksa vas driving at high speed you say?’
I nod. ‘Yes, apparently.’
‘Mrs Barrow tells me she always stinks of raw spirit!’ he declaims.
‘In her defence,’ I interject, ‘Mrs Barrow often confuses the smell of perfume with—’
‘Ha! Mrs Barrow iz nobody’s fool, Carla!’
‘And on the one, brief occasion that I actually met Mrs Ashe – Mrs Huff as we now know her – I did notice that she applied her perfume rather liberally. She was a quiet woman, very polished, well-groomed, sophisticated …’
‘Und now he haz insulted us all, en masse!’ Shimmy throws up his hands with such violence that the water in the bowl containing his feet starts to slosh.
‘Mind your feet!’ I say.
‘He questions za age of Rolfie? Oi! If he questions za age of Rolfie zen he questions ze integrity of your Mame! If he questions ze integrity of your Mame, he questions my integrity, und yours too, meine Carla!’
‘He simply said that—’
‘He’s calling all of us liars! Feh! Fardrai zich deyn kop! Pass me his letter again, bubbellah!’
I pass Shimmy Mr Huff’s letter. It reads:
Mr Shimmy,
Mrs Barrow informs me that the cat which my wife Lara knocked into yesterday was yours. We are so very sorry. In Lara’s defence, the light was poor. She reversed from the driveway in Mulberry Cottage (where we are currently residing) and out on to the road with considerable care and was horrified when she realized that your cat had failed to get out of the way. It had been lying in deep shadow. It is a very heavy cat, and not, I imagine, especially nimble, although it did run off at some speed after the incident took place. The tail appeared kinked, but Mrs Barrow assures me that the tail has always looked like that.
I do hope the cat is all right. I am not a great fan of cats – of domestic pets in general – but I would never dream of hurting one in any way, shape or form.
Yours, in sympathy,
Franklin D. Huff
‘See zat?’ Shimmy points at the letter, accusingly. ‘Za shmendrick doesn’t even like cats.’
I take the letter back. Mr Huff has strange handwriting. Tiny. Very neat and joined up. Huge loops on the l’s and d’s. Even on the odd t. I immediately sense that this is the handwriting of an immensely inconsiderate man. A fussy but careless man, prone to self-aggrandizement. Of course I have no expertise in handwriting analysis. This is all just going on pure instinct.
‘He really is an awful man,’ I say.
‘Oi! A piste kayleh! A nishtikeit! Arrogant! Insincere! Cold-hearted! Hates animals! Hates Pett Level – our home! Our retreat! Hates life itself, bubbellah!’ Shimmy throws up his hands again.
‘An immensely vain man,’ I agree, ‘with the most horribly condescending manner. The very thought of him crashing around in beautiful Mulberry …’ I shudder.
‘You’re sure ve can’t evict him? I mean ze assault on poor Rolfie? You say he’s refusing to feed ze badgers? Genug iz genug!’
I nod.
‘Ve must seek recompense, Mizinke!’ Shimmy murmurs. ‘Vengeance!’
‘What do you suggest?’ I wonder, slightly uneasy.
Shimmy shrugs, pondering. ‘If ve didn’t own za property zen a small pebble through ze bathroom window. Dos iz alts! Maybe ve remove ze bulb in za porch. Hide his bin. Farshtaist?’
‘Let’s not stoop to his level,’ I counsel, ‘let’s just ignore him, Tatteh, and hope to God he’ll go away. Let’s just be dignified and aloof and ludicrously polite.’
‘If you vant to beat a dog you find a stick!’ Shimmy objects.
‘He’s lower than a dog,’ I grouch, ‘he’s beneath contempt. Who cares if he finds us “wispy” and “parochial”?! We’re a fair, decent, right-thinking, unpretentious people in Pett Level, Tatteh, and that’s what really counts.’
