Chapter Two
Sasha
had been right: once you started seeing, you couldn’t stop. He
jogged down the lane that bordered Charing Cross station, feeling
as if either he or it had been newly made. It was a magnet for
down-and-outs, scooping up those who came here from the eastern
counties, just as those from the north arrived and sold themselves
around King’s Cross and sometimes got no further. For every coffee
vendor and stall of trinket souvenirs, there were at least ten
lost-looking souls curled up on the steps and the pavements between
them. God, was it just that he was hungry that his senses seemed so
keen? The contrasting shades of the fruit on the greengrocer’s
stall reached up and hit him. Everything on the stalls, he saw for
the first time, was placed just out of reach of any thin, grasping
hands, and was watched over narrowly by the vendors. The scents of
fresh-ground beans shivered in the back of his throat. And he could
not stop noticing the dispossessed.
Laurie
found it hard to understand. These routes across the city were not
new to him, were his jungle paths. Mayfair and the Strand, across
the Hungerford Bridge to the only part of South London considered
appropriate for young men of his class to visit—the South Bank
development with its film houses and Royal Festival Hall. It wasn’t
that he had not noticed that the steps up to the bridge and the
space underneath it were scattered with huddled human shapes in
blankets; how could he have failed to? Sometimes it was a case of
stepping over oblivious outstretched legs, or the patient companion
dogs who, in this heartland of English values, extracted more
attention and handfuls of change from passersby than their owners.
Had he simply dance stepped or dreamed his way past, distracted by
his companions, head full of whatever film or play he had just
seen?
And yet
each one of these was as real, as individual, as Sasha. As Laurie
himself. And they were legion. If Laurie threw down a twenty—or
even a few pence—here, what would he do for the next and the
next?
Pausing
in the entrance to the Charing Cross Tube station, Laurie felt his
mouth go dry, his head spin as if he had suddenly been placed on
the edge of a yawning precipice. This was the pit of human need,
the world on which his own lay like a glittering crust. It was
bottomless. Laurie could pour a family fortune into it, cause Sir
William to die of apoplexy when he found out, and make no
difference at all. To think of his father was to conjure his voice
in his head, reminding Laurie that not all the flotsam here were
without choice, lost, deserving of sympathy. That the majority were
drunkards, junkies, scroungers. Laurie shook his head. He didn’t
want to hear this litany now. There was a dreadful comfort in it, a
cop-out from all responsibility. Layabouts and crooks could be
ignored.
He
hardly knew what he was doing, continuing his path through the
station and out into the light on the other side, streaked here
with shadows from the riverside trees stripped of leaves. A few
down-and-outs were clustered here too, on the plaza the city
council was so diligently trying to make bright and multicultural.
Almost at random, Laurie cautiously approached an old man propped
against the foot of Nelson Mandela’s statue. Pigeons waddled around
him. As Laurie crouched, they went up in a dusty, clattering rush.
Laurie repressed a flinch. His heart was beating violently anyway.
“Excuse me,” he said, suddenly painfully aware of his own soft but
definitely upper-class accent. “Do you know of a boy sleeping rough
near here—Eastern European, I think, about my age—called
Sasha?”
It was
such a long shot. Laurie was ashamed, almost before the question
was finished. How stupid of him, to assume that this man would know
of the existence of one homeless boy, just because they shared the
same social substratum—about as stupid as the occasional Americans
Laurie had met who asked him if he knew such and such a person
because he too lived in the UK.
The old
man squinted up at him. “Not gonna offer me a bed for the night at
the cost of my dirty old soul, then?”
Laurie
blinked. Then he understood. He had seen, without taking it in, the
usual type of young man who stopped to talk to down-and-outs.
Neatly suited, ties tied tight, often clutching a well-worn Bible.
As far as he had thought of them at all, Laurie had wondered if
they were not simply another kind of predator.
He said
cautiously, a little unnerved by the bitter, amused gleam in the
old man’s eyes, “No. Seems a bit of a steep price. I hope they
throw in supper.” He pulled out a few pound coins from his pocket.
To his surprise, as he straightened up, the old man jerked a thumb
in the direction of the next bridge upriver.
Repeating the question to the hard-eyed young thug who
intercepted him under the arches was more difficult.
“Who wants to know?”
Laurie
kept his spine straight, resisted the temptation to look down. He
wasn’t afraid, exactly. Anyone who had incurred the wrath of Sir
William Fitzroy was not easily daunted by the prospect of physical
confrontation. But now, as well as his accent, he was acutely
conscious of his whole presentation—his clothes, the difference
between his own slender but healthy build and the rawboned
emaciation of this gatekeeper. Beyond him, in the shadow of the
arches, Laurie could see small bonfires, a shantytown of boxes,
black plastic bags, ragged tarpaulin sheets rigged into tents. He
supposed this boy took his turn on guard duty, stalling visitors
long enough to let the others conceal what they had to or make
themselves scarce. Laurie didn’t think he was likely to be taken
for an undercover cop or the world’s least convincing social
worker, but he was going to have to say something to account for
himself. “I’m a friend of his,” he said awkwardly, then added, with
surprise at his own cunning, “I owe him a bit of money.”
His
interlocutor snorted. “Oh, right, Prince Harry. Did he win it off
you at a polo match? Give it to me. I’ll see he gets it
safe.”
There was something in this sardonic offer that made Laurie’s
heart give a bump. He is here, then. What
are the odds? Keeping his own tone clear of
answering dryness, he said, “I’d rather give it to him myself, if
that’s okay. Is he around?”
“I’m afraid my lord Sasha is transacting a piece of business at
present,” the young thug informed him, dropping his Glaswegian
accent for a creditable imitation of Laurie’s own. He glanced off
to his left, where the arches plunged down into fire-painted
shadows, and Laurie did too—in time to see what looked like a
well-to-do city trader emerge from behind one of the piers and
scuttle away.
A moment
later, Sasha appeared, pale and unsteady, wiping his mouth. He saw
Laurie and stopped dead.
“What’s the matter?” Laurie’s companion demanded, plainly
amused by his blank-faced astonishment. “Did he give you one on
credit? How good of you to come and settle up.”
Laurie
was suddenly tired of him. His own temper rose only rarely, but
when it did, it burned far more fiercely than his father’s—a clean,
cold flame. He rounded on the other boy. “What bloody business is
it of yours? I’m here to talk to him, not you. Now back
off!”
Interesting, Laurie. He surprised
himself again, glancing around him to where one dangerous-looking
lad had multiplied to half a dozen, with as many again coalescing
from the shadows as he watched. He’d make good pickings, he
supposed, between his watch and his coat and the contents of his
wallet. Still the fear refused to spark in him, even now when it
would have been in his best interests to break and run.
A warm
hand closed on his wrist. It tugged him lightly back and to one
side. Before Laurie could move or react, Sasha had stepped in front
of him, a glimmer of steel flashing back firelight in his fist.
“Forget about it, Len,” Sasha growled, his voice the same exotic
music Laurie had heard the night before, turned ominous and chilly
now with anger. “All of you. Leave him alone.”
Whatever
status Sasha held in this demimonde and whatever he chose to do to
make ends meet, he was well enough respected for the little crowd
to part as he steered Laurie through, back toward daylight. Only a
few catcalls and falsetto cries of “Oh, Prince Harry!” came after
them. He’d put an arm protectively around Laurie’s back, the
gesture at once shaming him and touching him
indefinably.
“Thanks for that. But I can take care of myself, you
know.”
Sasha
nodded, continuing to guide him out, casting the occasional
backward glance. He was nervy even by the standard of the street
people Laurie had observed up till now, his wary gaze scanning the
riverside promenade constantly. “I’m sure. Fencing?
Boxing?”
Laurie
flushed. He had learned judo too, but knew he required a courtly
bow over the mat before engaging in combat.
“Forgive me, but Len won’t say en garde to you. Laurie, what
the hell are you doing here?”
I dreamed of you all last night and thought of you most of
today. You’re like a new source of gravity, drawing me in. I think
I fancy you. Laurie’s mind shied off from
these truths, and he said, almost casually, “I wanted to see you
were okay after yesterday. It was perishing cold last
night.”
“Yes, enough to freeze the balls off brass monkeys,” Sasha
agreed, the expression in his velvety, faraway accent making Laurie
smile. “But I don’t understand how you found me. I…”
He
stopped and carefully let Laurie go. Laurie turned to face him,
aware of a cold place around his shoulders where Sasha’s arm had
been. “What is it?”
“I’ve…seen UK border agents come down here in all shapes and
sizes. Police too. Sometimes they’re women. One came once dressed
as a nun to round up a runaway Catholic. But I’ve never seen one
quite like you.”
Laurie