The Four Last Things. Andrew Taylor

with the colours of his school, green and purple. Before he could protest, she yanked down both the shorts and his Aertex pants in one swift movement. She stared down at him. He was ashamed of his body, the slabs of pink babyish fat that clung to his belly and his thighs. A boy at the swimming baths had once said that Eddie wobbled like a jelly.

      Still staring, Alison said, ‘It’s smaller than Simon’s. And he’s a roundhead.’

      To his relief, Eddie understood the reference: Simon was circumcised. ‘I’m a cavalier.’

      ‘I think I like cavaliers better. They’re prettier.’ She scooped up the tin. ‘Go on – pee.’

      She held out the tin. Eddie gripped his penis between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, shut his eyes and prayed. Nothing happened. In normal circumstances he would have had no trouble in going because his bladder was full.

      ‘If you’re going to take all day, I might as well go first.’ Alison glared at him. ‘Honestly. Simon never has any trouble.’

      She placed the tin on the floor, pulled down her knickers and squatted. A steady stream of urine squirted into the can. She raised the hem of her dress and examined it, as though inspecting the quality of the stitching. So that was what girls looked like down there, Eddie thought, still holding his penis; he had often wondered. He craned his neck, hoping for a better view, but Alison smiled demurely and rearranged her dress.

      ‘If you keep on rubbing your willy, it goes all funny. Did you know?’ Alison raised herself from the tin and pulled up her knickers. ‘At least, Simon’s does. Look – I’ve done gallons.’

      Eddie looked. The tin was about a quarter full of liquid the colour of pale gold. Until now he had assumed that he was shamefully unique in having a penis which sometimes altered shape, size and consistency when he touched it; he had hoped that he might grow out of it.

      ‘It’s nearly half-full. I bet you can’t do as much.’

      As Eddie glanced towards Alison, he thought he caught a movement at the window. When he looked there was no one there, just a branch waving in the breeze.

      ‘What did I tell you? It’s going stiff.’

      Eddie was still holding his penis – indeed, his fingers had been absent-mindedly massaging it.

      ‘Empty my pee outside the shed,’ Alison commanded. ‘Then you can try again.’

      Eddie realized suddenly how absurd he must seem with his shorts and pants around his knees. He pulled them up quickly, buttoned his flies and fastened his belt.

      ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering to do yourself up. You’ll only have to undo it all again.’

      He went outside the shed and emptied the can under a bush. The tin was warm. The liquid ran away into the parched earth. It didn’t look or smell like urine. He wondered what it would taste like. He pushed the thought away – disgusting – and straightened up to return to the shed, his mind full of the ordeal before him. For an instant he thought he smelled freshly burned tobacco in the air.

      Eddie and Alison played the Peeing Game on many occasions, and each time they explored a little further.

      Fear of discovery heightened the pleasure. When they went into Carver’s, there was often a woman on the balcony of one of the council flats. The balcony overlooked both Carver’s and the garden of 29 Rosington Road. Sometimes the woman was occupied – hanging washing, watering plants; but on other occasions she simply stood there, very still, and watched the sky. Alison said the woman was mad. Eddie worried that she might see them and tell their parents that they were trespassing in Carver’s. But she never did.

      Eddie’s memories of the period were patchy. (He did not like to think too hard about the possibility that he had willed this to be so.) He must have been six, almost seven, which meant that the year was 1971. It had been summertime, the long school holidays. He remembered the smell of a faded green short-sleeved shirt he often wore, and the touch of Alison’s hand, plump and dimpled, on his bare forearm.

      The end came in September, and with shocking suddenness. One day Alison and her family were living at number 27, the next day they were gone. On the afternoon before they left, she told Eddie that they were moving to Ealing.

      ‘But where’s Ealing?’ he wailed.

      ‘How do I know? Somewhere in London. You can write me letters.’

      Eddie cried when they parted. Alison forgot to leave her address. She slipped away from him like a handful of sand trickling through the fingers.

3

      ‘I feel sometimes a Hell within my self; Lucifer keeps his Court in my breast, Legion is revived in me.’

      Religio Medici, I, 51

      Sleep caught Sally in mid-sentence, as sudden as a drawn curtain or nightfall in the Tropics. One moment she was lying in bed, holding the hand of a policewoman she had never met before; the policewoman’s lips were moving but Sally wasn’t listening because she was too busy wondering why she was holding the hand of a total stranger. Then the sleeping tablets cut in, blending with whatever the hypodermic had contained, probably a tranquillizer.

      Michael had not been there. She hadn’t seen him for hours.

      Her mind went down and down into a black fog. Smothered by chemicals, she slept for hours, so deeply asleep that she was hardly a person any more. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the fog began gradually to clear. She slept on but now there were dreams, at first wispy and insubstantial – a suspicion of raised voices, a hint of bright lights, a sense of overwhelming sadness.

      Later still, the images coalesced into a whole that was neither a picture nor a story. Afterwards, when Sally woke bathed in sweat on a cold morning, she remembered a bell tolling, its sound dulled by the winter air. She saw dirty snow on cobbles, mixed with fragments of straw and what looked like urine and human excrement. A spire built of raw, yellow stone and surmounted by a distant cross rose towards the grey sky.

      In the dream a man was speaking, or rather declaiming slowly in a harsh, deep voice which Sally instinctively disliked. She could not make out the words, or even the language they were spoken in, partly because she was too far away and partly because they were distorted by hissing and cracking and popping in the background. Still in the dream, Sally was reminded of the 78-r.p.m. records she played as a child on the wind-up gramophone in her grandparents’ attic; the scratches had overwhelmed the ghostly frivolities of the Savoy Orpheans and Fats Waller.

      When Sally woke up, her mouth was dry and her mind clouded. The dream receded as she neared consciousness, details slipping away, drifting downwards beyond retrieval.

      ‘Come back,’ she called silently. Her eyes, still closed, were wet with tears. Something terrible was happening in the dream, which at all costs had to be put right. But at least it was only a dream. For a split second relief touched her: only a dream, thank God, only a dream. Then she opened her eyes and saw a woman she had never seen before sitting by her bed. Simultaneously the truth hit her. No, it’s not true, NOT true, NOT TRUE.

      ‘You all right, love?’ the woman asked, bending forward.

      Sally levered herself up on one elbow. Not true, please God, NOT TRUE. ‘Have they found Lucy?’

      The woman shook her head. ‘They’ll be in touch as soon as there’s any news.’

      Sally stared at her. It didn’t matter who the woman was. Who cared? She was younger than Sally, her face carefully made up, her brown eyes wary, the teeth projecting slightly, pushing out the lips and giving the impression that the mouth was the most important feature in this face. The Daily Telegraph was open on her lap, folded to one of the inside pages. She did not wear a wedding ring. Sally clung to these details as though they formed a rope strung across an abyss; and if she let go, she would fall.

      ‘It’s