CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The paella stall was almost too much for Lance. He couldn't afford to buy anything from it, any more than he could afford to buy one of the sugar-dusted pancakes he had seen on offer outside Magic City, the amusement arcade. But the circular pans of steaming and bubbling prawns in golden sauce, green peas and onions and chicken pieces, and another of gleaming saffroncoloured rice as beautiful as one of Gemma's quilted and beaded cushions, made him sick with longing. He forced himself to turn away and concentrate on the true purpose of his visit.

The woman in the red jacket and the floral skirt spent a long time looking at Lilla's window. Her companion, a man as thin and weedy as she was fat, seemed to be urging her to go into the shop where he would buy her jewellery. Their voices were loud and Lance, in the middle of the roadway, could hear every word they said. He moved closer. Few cars or vans come up or down the Portobello Road, though plenty cross it, but here pedestrians wander unthreatened, chatting, pointing, laughing in amazement. The couple he had his eye on passed him, crossing the road, and homed in on the stall where rings and brooches and long strings of beads were on offer, at half Lilla's prices. The woman was carrying a red shoulder bag, its flap, which fastened with a stud, left open. Lance, who knew something about such things, reflected that this kind of handbag was rubbish, as was the type with a zip. The only reasonably safe kind was the old-fashioned sort like his nan had the sense to carry, which closed with a clip over which a kind of belt came down and and locked into a buckle. There was no way a bag snatcher could get into that.

Before his encounter with Fize and his friends, he had experimented with cutting into a bag with a kitchen knife. The knife had been Auntie Ivy's and was one of several lying among forks and sharpeners, and what Uncle Gib called a fish slice, in a kitchen drawer. You had to work it in a crowded place. Lance had picked the tube – not the tube here really, the underground, for the trains from Edgware Road via Paddington to Hammersmith run along the oldest line in London, passing Uncle Gib's house almost too closely for comfort. Ladbroke Grove was the nearest station to the Portobello Road but Lance got on at Westbourne Park and in the rush hour. The train was loaded with commuters at 5.30 in the afternoon, hundreds of them standing and crushed together. He picked on girls with large bags slung over their shoulders on short straps. These were the most accessible. Aiming for the side of the bag and from the back as the train moved out of Ladbroke Grove, he managed to cut a slit in it about six inches long. The girl didn't feel a thing and no one noticed. The passengers were all too tired and jaded after a day's work.

Lance wasn't tired. He'd done nothing all day except buy junk food and eat it, and watch the telly. He slipped his hand inside the bag and brought out a leather something that felt like a wallet and another leather something, the kind of case people keep credit cards in. It took nerve to remain inside the train after that but he only had to stay until it pulled into Latimer Road. The girl got out when he did but she hadn't noticed anything wrong with her bag. It was an anticlimax and an unpleasant one when, trudging back to the Portobello, he looked at his haul and found the thing he'd thought a wallet was a pouch containing sunglasses and the case he'd thought was for credit cards a kind of make-up with a sponge inside its lid. He threw them away in disgust. Since then he hadn't tried the trick with the knife again. Truth to tell, he was a bit afraid of carrying a knife. Getting caught with a knife when you'd done nothing with it but split a handbag, when you didn't mean to do anything else with it, was a bit of a waste. His injured arm felt heavy and sore, although the plaster had come off, and his ribs ached.

The fat woman in red and her husband – Lance thought the thin guy must be her husband as no man would be seen dead with her unless he was chained too tightly to get away – were now seriously studying the wares on show at the jewellery stall. Lance knew the girl who ran it, although not her name, but he wasn't too pleased at her 'Hi, Lance', uttered loudly and drawing attention to him.

Still no one seemed to take any notice. He muttered 'Cheers', the term that served equally as a 'hello' and a 'thank you' with him, and edged closer to the woman in red. She was holding up a long string of black and white beads, which she suddenly put down and began rummaging in her bag. Lance thought she was reaching for a purse or wallet but no, she evidently left paying for things to her husband. Out came a pack of Benson and Hedges and a lighter. The strain of shopping was too much for her without the stimulus or sedative effect of a cigarette. Another one smoking those stinking things! Just wait till July first when they ban it for ever, he found himself muttering under his breath, you'll know what it's like to have the filth slap a hand on your shoulder then. But would she? Wasn't this an open space where they could kill themselves with the things as much as they liked?

She was putting the cigarettes and the lighter back in the bag now and, no-brain that she was, leaving the flap hanging open. She held up the black and white beads to the girl who'd spoken to him, said she'd have them. Lance slipped his hand inside the bag, drew out a large heavy wallet and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans. Just as he'd thought, the man was paying for the necklace, asking her if she'd like a pair of earrings to match. Lance stepped back, turned and stared into the window of the cheese shop, as if entranced by the Jarlsberg and Roquefort on offer. The heavy wallet made a grotesque bulge in his jeans like he'd got a hernia. One of Uncle Gib's religious pals had a hernia, which gave him a small belly on top of his large natural belly. Slowly, pausing to glance at stalls he'd seen a hundred times before, Lance walked up the Portobello until he could safely turn into Golborne Road away from spying eyes.

There, sitting on a wall in a street harmless now but once, long before his time, a notorious crime hotspot, he opened the wallet. No credit cards. She left that kind of thing to her husband. Three twenties and a fiver and, in the purse section where she'd almost broken the zip stuffing it with change, a lot of two-pound coins and one pound coins and fifty and twenty pences. She'd got too much of it to bother with the smaller stuff. He counted. With the notes it came to eighty-eight pounds all told. Not bad, might have been worse.

He wandered down Bevington Road, pausing first to drop the wallet into a bin and then to buy himself a Mars bar and a packet of crisps, finally getting on a bus, from which he was immediately ejected because it was the kind you had to have a ticket for before you got on. Lance felt aggrieved. He had fully intended to pay his fare out of Mrs Red Jacket's change but they hadn't given him the chance. There was no justice.

Ever since his bag-snatching he had been moving away from Uncle Gib's with no apparent purpose. But of course he had a purpose. A moth drawn to a flame, he was making for Gemma's place, for the flats with their balconies and black railings, their gardens full now of red flowers and purple flowers, and the graffiti-scrawled yellow walls that bounded them. After her visit to the hospital he no longer had that hopeless feeling that she would utterly reject him, clutch Abelard to her bosom as if he were one of those paedos, turn from him and slam the balcony door. Was it possible she would have him back? Give that Fize his marching orders and have him back? He'd have to make her believe he'd never smack her again, which was true, he never would. He'd tie his hands behind him, sit on his hands, before he'd touch her.

He was outside the flat now, looking up at her balcony. She must have seen him for she came out. Overflowing with love, he gazed ardently at her. She put one finger to her lips, then mouthed silently, 'I'll come and see you,' and was gone. Back the way she had come, the door closed carefully behind her.

Reuben Perkins and his wife Maybelle were paying a rare visit to Uncle Gib and being served tea in the front room. The two of them were the only people Uncle Gib ever made tea for. Even the Children of Zebulun, attending a prayer meeting, were given orange squash. Mr and Mrs Perkins were provided with tea and Garibaldi biscuits – they had to bring their own cigarettes – because Reuben was Uncle Gib's best friend and now no longer the Assistant Shepherd but the Head Shepherd himself. He and Uncle Gib were remarkably alike and could have been taken for brothers. Both were tall and thin, although Uncle Gib was taller and thinner, both had skull-like faces and a hungry deprived look, thin-lipped, their eyes suspicious and their noses sensitive. Perhaps they had started off looking quite different from each other but prison, the prison diet and each other's frequent company had brought about this similarity. Maybelle Perkins wasn't at all like Auntie Ivy who had been a handsome woman, but squat and round with a square face and frizzy ginger hair.

Conversation, having exhausted the weather, house prices and the general moral decline in society, centred on Uncle Gib's recent tract on teenage single parents and his latest homilies to his correspondents in the church magazine. Both Perkinses approved, both marvelled at his wise advice and his literary skills. Maybelle, on her fourth fag, was commending him for telling a sixteen-year-old girl that if she took the morning-after pill she'd be a murderer and go straight to hell, when a key was heard in the lock and Lance came into the house. The front-room door was open and the fug pervaded the hall. Coughing ostentatiously, Lance stood in the doorway, intending to annoy because he felt so happy and at ease with the world. Neither of the Perkinses had ever met him.

'This your nephew, then, Gilbert?' said Maybelle.

'My late wife's great-nephew,' Uncle Gib corrected her. 'I'm giving him accommodation and his meals all found.'

Maybelle didn't say 'out of the goodness of your heart' but her sweet smile conveyed it.

'A poxy room and an outside toilet,' said Lance and he went upstairs, Uncle Gib's threats following him.

Lying on his bed, he gave himself up to thoughts of Gemma. She'd said she'd come and see him but why hadn't she said he could come and see her? Because Fize was there and for a while at any rate was staying there. Lance didn't like the idea of that and a cloud moved slowly across his clear blue sky. Nor did he care for the thought of Gemma who was so spotlessly clean and beautiful – she often had two showers a day – being entertained in this grotty room. He looked dispassionately around, taking it all in, the paintwork, fingermarked and filthy, the window so encrusted with grime that you wouldn't know it was something made to see out of. Grey net curtains with ragged hems hung limply against the dirty glass. The floor was covered in brown lino, curling at the edges where it met the skirting board, and the walls papered – where the paper wasn't peeling off – in a pattern of flowers and birds, all faded to a greyish-pink and barely distinguishable for what they were meant to be.

He needed money. With money you could do anything and he thought vaguely how he could get someone to come in and paint the place, clean the window, find a woman to put up real curtains. Not for himself; for Gemma. Should he go back to Chepstow Villas and try his luck again? He still had the key to that side gate in his jacket pocket. But unless White Hair was a complete nutter he'd have not only bolted it by now, but barred his french windows as well. But what about the other house, the one in Pembridge Villas he'd escaped through? The place with all that bamboo stuff in the garden. Maybe he should go over there and check-up on a few things, like who lived there and when they went out and got back, if there was a dog or a burglar alarm. He could go now and on the way make that detour that led him past her place and perhaps he'd see her again . . .

Elizabeth Cherry was talking to her neighbours through a gap in the ivy and honeysuckle and clematis armandii, which rambled thickly over the terrace at the ends of their gardens. She had known Eugene Wren for quite a long time now, Ella Cotswold was her doctor and it was through her that they had first met. She was reminding them of this fact, how Ella had been paying her a home visit when she had suspected pneumonia and Eugene had come in bearing a bottle of Bristol Cream sherry and some wild smoked salmon to tempt her appetite. The invitation to their wedding, which she had just received, had prompted it.

'How kind, Gene,' she was saying. 'I'd love to come. Where will you be going for your honeymoon? Or is that a secret.'

'No secret,' said Ella. 'Italy.'

'Sri Lanka,' said Eugene.

'I see. Well, one's on the way to the other. I must go in. I'm going round to my sister's later for a drink. You see how my life has become one mad round of amusement.'

They laughed in a polite understanding way and Elizabeth went back into her house. She was just in time to answer the door to a young man with fair hair and an unmemorable sort of face who wanted to know if she needed a gardener, just for tidying up and mowing the lawn. Though eighty-one, Elizabeth performed these tasks herself quite adequately and wasn't too happy about the imputation that she needed help.

'No, thank you. Good afternoon,' she said, disliking even more the way the young man seemed to be peering into her hall, looking this way and that, and taking in more than was good for him. Or perhaps more than was good for her.

But when he had gone she thought, as Eugene had thought before her, that it was silly and verging on the paranoid to suspect every stranger of nefarious behaviour. He was just a poor boy who needed to supplement his probably low income.

It was Saturday evening when Gemma arrived, the very time of all times when Lance calculated she couldn't possibly come. But there she was on the doorstep, looking more beautiful than ever in a diaphanous maxi-dress with low neck and puff sleeves, her long blonde hair piled on top of her head and a rose tucked among the curls.

Lance was struck dumb with joy and longing. He could only gaze.

'Aren't you going to ask me in?' She stepped briskly over the threshold without waiting for him to answer. 'My God, what a pong. You've not taken up smoking, have you?'

Lance found his voice. 'It's Uncle Gib. He gets through fags like there's no tomorrow.'

'Probably isn't, for him,' said Gemma. 'Where is he, anyway?'

'Gone to a senior citizens' social. They're mostly seniors at his church.'

Gemma wasn't interested. 'Where's your room, then?'

An hour later, sitting up in Lance's bed, they started on the bottle of Cava Gemma had brought with her. It wasn't until this point that Lance came round sufficiently from his state of bliss to enquire who was minding the baby.

'Fize is. He's really taken to Abelard, says he's like his own son.'

This, to Lance, was like a jet of cold water in his face and enough to wake him thoroughly from his euphoria. Sympathetically, Gemma poured him more wine. 'You're going to give him the boot, though, aren't you?' said Lance. 'Get rid of him and have me back?'

'Ooh, I don't know, lover. Maybe one day. It'd be like awkward right now.'

'But you said . . .'

'My idea's much better. We'll have an affair, you and me. I'll come round here in secret. Won't that be great?' She looked around the room, curling her lip. 'I'll get this place cleaned up a bit. It's disgusting.'

'It'll have to be Sunday mornings when Uncle Gib's at church.'

'What's wrong with that? Mum'll have Abelard. She don't work Sundays.' Gemma brought her mouth to his in a long deep kiss. 'I've never had an affair,' she whispered. 'It's always been relationships everyone's like known about. Boring, really. This way'll be romantic.'

Another hour later Lance heard Uncle Gib come in. They'd have to be very quiet getting Gemma down the stairs. Faintly he heard Uncle Gib singing 'Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam' and then the television started. Gemma got up and slipped on her dress and shoes with remarkable speed. Her hair had come down and she left it to stream over her shoulders. It amazed Lance that a girl could get up to what they'd just got up to – three times too – and emerge looking like she was ready for a photo-shoot.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs as they put their heads out but it was only Dorian Lupescu on his way to the top floor. He nodded to Lance and Lance nodded to him but they didn't speak.

'Who's that?'

'Guy who lives upstairs.'

'Hot,' said Gemma, casting Lance back into the depths.