The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (reading a book txt) 📗

thinned, a young homeless woman wearing a large coat over a parka asked him for money. He felt his pockets for change and, finding none, gave her a £20 note. She looked up at him, astonished. Her face was pinched from a winter on the streets and there was a recent cut above her left eye. ‘Why are you out here?’ he asked. ‘Is there nowhere you can go?’

These were questions she wasn’t going to answer. ‘Thanks for this.’ She was shaking. He asked if there was something the matter. She looked away. ‘Twenty quid! It’s been a while since someone’s been that good to me. They think you’re going to spend it on drugs, but I’ll get food with this and maybe a couple of cans of lager. Thanks, mate.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘A need is a need – you spend it on what you want.’ He hoped she might now leave him, but she leaned against the locksmith’s window, produced a bag of tobacco and rolled a cigarette, which she then offered to him.

‘I quit,’ he said, ‘but thanks.’

She had trouble making her lighter work because her hands were cold. He took it and cupped his hand round the flame. The paper flared, she inhaled then spat out bits of tobacco. ‘I saw you before. Why are you here?’ she asked. The money was being stowed in a pocket somewhere beneath the overcoats. ‘My name’s Remy,’ she said.

‘Mine’s Paul.’

‘Why are you here?’

He looked down at the small pale face and lank brown hair and estimated her age at about twenty. The lights of the passing traffic washed her cheeks and glittered in her dark eyes. ‘I’m interested in what goes on in that building over there,’ he said. ‘Hoping to spot someone I know.’

‘Join the queue,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They raided that yesterday and took away a fella.’ She jerked her chin towards the front entrance of the Edgar Building. ‘But they got the wrong place.’ She stopped and examined him. ‘Are you a cop, Paul?’

‘No, Remy, I’m not a cop.’

‘I guessed not. Police wouldn’t give me twenty quid for nowt.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Leeds – my Dad was Belgian.’

‘Really! Why’re you on the street?’

‘I’m not. I’ve got a place. My stepdad’s why I’m down here, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s a cunt.’

Her eyes moved restlessly over the street. In profile, she had a resolute chin and her mouth was clamped determinedly shut. She was far from the victim he’d taken her for at first. ‘Which building should they have raided?’ he asked.

She gestured with her cigarette to the loading bay in front of them. ‘That one. But there’re only a few people in now. It’s a shame, ’cos they used to pay me and my mate to watch for ’em, tip ’em off, like, if there’s anything odd going on.’

‘What goes on there?’

‘Tons of things – art and shit. There are businesses in there. A recording studio, video stuff, anarchists and the like.’

‘Anarchists and the like – what do you mean?’

‘I dunno – political people. There’s two buildings, see, and they’ve got the same fire escape at the back. At the top there’s a kind of bridge. You can go between the two if the door’s not locked. That’s what they did the whole time, went in one building an’ out the other. So when they raided that place they didn’t find anything ’cos everyone’d already buggered off.’

‘Do you know what the police were looking for?’

‘Nope.’

‘So who’s left?’

‘Some geeks.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Because I live in the effing place! You want to see?’

‘That would be great.’

She told him it would cost another twenty pounds, which he gave her. They set off along Herbert Street, with Remy moving at a lick, then turned left and came to a lane, cut through two large buildings, a space wide enough to take a vehicle, but blocked by five large refuse bins and a skip. Glass bulkhead lights illuminated the entrance, but the far end was cast in Victorian gloom. Remy went to a heavy wooden door that appeared to be sealed by two metal bars. But these were easily raised and she scraped it open across a concrete threshold. She looked at him in the dark. ‘I can trust you, can’t I, Paul? You’re not a fucking weirdo, are you?’

‘No, I’m not a fucking weirdo. And, by the way, you were the one who approached me out there.’

‘True,’ she said, and led him into a dark space, flicked her lighter to locate a flight of stone steps that descended to another door, which had been crowbarred from the jamb but still took some opening. It was warm and Samson smelled heating oil. She flipped a switch and three naked lights came on. They were in a long white corridor with a dado line painted in blue and storerooms going off to the left filled with office furniture, old computers and printers. The last room, which was next to an oil-fired boiler, was what she called her ‘gaff’. He saw an executive recliner chair with a ripped seat, six flat black sofa cushions arranged to form a mattress, a table on which stood a kettle without a lid, a carton of milk, pots of instant snacks that required only hot water, and a candle in a jar. There were cans of lager, paperbacks and some magazines.

‘How long have you been here?’ asked Samson.

‘Since Christmas, when the caretaker let me in. I pay him when I can, just a few quid. So it’s like a real home . . . well, sort of. And he doesn’t want anything. Doesn’t want to fuck me. I can be here at night and at weekends but never during the working day. And I can’t smoke down here. Never!’

‘You’ve made it nice,’ said Samson. ‘But it must be lonely sometimes.’

She didn’t react to that observation and he wished he hadn’t said it. As Anastasia used to remind him, loneliness was chronic in the dispossessed and a big cause of mental