Twist Read online

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘At Fagin’s.’

  ‘The creepy Russian dude in the hotel?’

  ‘Romanian,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Right,’ Twist said, unconvinced, watching her nervously as she stepped closer to him, looking into his eyes.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know he’s eccentric but he’s got that huge big place all to himself and forgive me for saying this but I really don’t think you should stick around here any longer than you have to when there’s lots of room there to do your own thing. No social workers – and believe me when I say: been there, done that too. He won’t tell you how to live your life. He’s cool. A good cook too … so will you be my date?’

  She paused for breath, her eyes glancing down at the floor.

  ‘… I mean, unless you’ve got something better to do.’

  20

  Twist pushed his plate away from himself and gripped the sides of his stomach which was fit to burst. He couldn’t recall last being in such entertaining company and when he looked up he said a small prayer to whoever it was who might be watching over him.

  Three boys, excluding Twist, one girl and at the head of the table the peculiar-looking Romanian called Fagin watching them eat with a silver ladle in one hand and a bottle of what looked like home-made vodka in the other.

  ‘I told you he was a good cook, didn’t I?’ said Dodge.

  Twist looked up and saw that Dodge was dabbing goulash from the corners of his mouth with the linen napkin he had tucked under his chin. It didn’t surprise Twist that he had finished first. He was a little bit faster than the others.

  ‘The French drink wine, the English drink tea and we Romanians drink a lot,’ began Fagin, standing up and working his way around the table, dispensing the spirit from his bottle into each of the diners’ green teacups.

  Twist grew nervous, not wanting to appear ungrateful after the food and the hospitality but nervous about drinking the liquid, recalling the strange effect Fagin’s tea had had on him.

  ‘I don’t drink,’ he said, placing the palm of his hand over his teacup when his turn came, feeling all faces at the table turn to look at him as if he had gone out of his mind.

  ‘Of course, there are times when we must stay sober,’ Fagin countered, ‘just as there are times when we must stay drunk, and there are other times too that we owe a toast for the gifts the Gods have given us and to welcome a new comrade into our humble assembly.’

  Twist could feel Fagin hovering behind his right shoulder, his nose just visible along with his teacup which he raised to meet the others’ cups in turn.

  Twist drew back his palm and watched the clear liquid flow into his cup.

  ‘In Moscow they drink vodka, in Bucharest we drink tuică,’ Fagin declared as Twist raised the cup to his lips and drank what tasted like rotten plums burning in a pot of flaming turpentine.

  ‘Noroc!’ Fagin roared when his turn came, the toast circling the table burning each throat in turn.

  ‘Come, come!’ Fagin shouted, slamming his teacup down on the table top. ‘This is no party. Now we must dance.’

  * * *

  Twist could not recall most of what followed. The shot had hit so hard and fast that it was hard to tell when the music had begun. Like the tuică it was like nothing he had experienced before. A wailing, enchanting gypsy song driven forwards by a deep, driving house rhythm that had everyone on their feet, throwing impossible shapes, backflips and somersaults all somehow in step with the Lord of Misrule, Fagin himself, who strangled an old violin while dancing intricate jigs on the tips of his toes.

  Flashes came back to him now as he sat up in bed. Images of the girl, the one they called Red, who danced them all to submission as she gyrated and spun, challenging the boys to keep pace, making fools of them, her elegant moves in stark contrast to their ape-like manoeuvres.

  Twist’s head hurt as he peered over the top of the duvet at the other boys sleeping in the room off the ballroom where they had danced the night before. As he pushed himself up in bed he felt something hard dig into his ribs. Reaching down he found an art book beside him with the corner of one page turned inwards.

  It came back to him now. Not in snatches but in a complete sequence. How Fagin, taking a break from the violin, had caught him watching Red and beckoned him into the quiet of his office where they had sat, side by side with their backs to the wall.

  ‘When I was your age, I wanted to be an artist, just like you,’ Fagin had begun, ‘but more than that, I wanted to eat. You like the goulash. You want another helping?’

  ‘I already had four.’

  ‘A big full stomach, I hope you’re not planning on doing any climbing tonight?’

  ‘Can I crash here?’

  ‘Of course you can. We’re like a family for people who never had one.’

  ‘Is Red …’

  ‘You mean Nancy? Yes, she is a particularly talented member of the family.’

  ‘Nancy?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a beautiful name. But such a proud girl. She needs someone to train with, someone who is her equal. Now the boys … they’re good at what they do but they lack … imagination.’

  ‘I suppose I could stick around a bit. If she agreed to train me …’

  ‘I think she will agree but first you must offer her something.’

  ‘Like I’m loaded.’

  ‘I don’t mean money. She needs an education, Twist … I can’t keep calling you that. It sounds like I’m in a casino. You must have a Christian name. If I say I am Cornelius … who are you?’

  ‘Oliver.’

  ‘I saw you checking out my little art collection earlier. You’ve got an eye for painting, Oliver. You can teach her about art.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I see you like Bacon.’

  ‘Bacon?’

  ‘Francis. Dodge showed me your chef d’oeuvre on the back wall of the gallery … Bacon’s Pope.’

  Twist recalled now his embarrassment, not even knowing the name of the famous painting he had shamelessly photographed and sprayed up onto the rear wall of the Tate Britain until Fagin had opened the book on his lap and leafed through it, finding the original and offering it to him, beginning with a quote and continuing without a hint of condescension in his voice.

  In the midway of this our mortal life,

  I found me in a dismal wood, astray.

  ‘When the poet Dante found himself stalked by a wolf after becoming lost in a dark wood at the foot of a great mountain, he was beckoned into a cave by the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil and led across the river Styx down into a place where the sun never shone …’

  ‘Into hell?’ Twist asked, watching as Fagin made horns of his index fingers.

  ‘… Which has nine layers which they descended, seeing many horrible sights until they reached the sixth level where they found him …’

  Twist recalled Fagin’s paint-stained finger pointing at the picture of the Pope that he had copied from the photograph he had taken inside the gallery.

  ‘… Your Pontiff. Pope Nicholas III who was guilty of simony, which is the sale of a place in heaven to those foolish enough to believe the stairway can be bought and who was therefore punished by being suspended head downwards in a well of fire.’

  Twist looked again at the picture in the book. He wished now he hadn’t told Fagin that he never read the captions in the gallery and mostly only went there to get out of the cold and the rain. And how Fagin’s face had changed then, as if he’d opened a door to a place in his past which he preferred to keep locked.

  ‘I didn’t always live like this, Oliver,’ he’d begun, slowly at first, his eyes looking down at the space between his knees. ‘I grew up in Romania. You heard about the orphanages they got there? Sheesh …’

  Twist had watched as the shadow of the past had fallen on Fagin as he’d begun his tale, which like Dante’s own had started in a dark wood running from the secret police as his parents, uncles and the
ir families had been bundled onto cattle trucks and driven from their ancestral village in the Fagaras mountains on the eve of his fifteenth birthday.

  Only moving at night when the moon was hidden behind the clouds, Fagin refusing to look back, never knowing what had happened to them and cursing the fatalism that had left them rooted to the spot, refusing to believe the dark rumours, until it was too late and the writing was on the wall.

  Twist had remained riveted. It was a story of escape, a coming-of-age story brimfull with adventures, travelling through ravines teeming with bears on the furthest reaches of the Carpathian Alps, learning to be self-sufficient, studying the stealth and guile of the snow fox, avoiding the towns where every fourth citizen was Securitate, a Janus-faced spy for the dreaded secret police.

  And how, wintering in the mountains, sleeping in snow holes and mountain huts with other refugees, he’d pieced together the truth about his family and heard the first stories of the orphanages where, if they caught him, he would be taken, his head shaved and a number burnt into his scalp.

  And so Twist had listened, rapt, Fagin pausing only to dab a tear from his eye and pour tuică into his teacup as he recounted his last night with his grandparents who both refused to leave their home, even after their daughter, his mother, and his father had been taken.

  And his attention to detail, even after thirty years, had surprised Twist and brought the story to life so that he felt as if he’d been back there with him, feeling the frost crunch beneath his feet on the path of his grandparents’ home as he’d tried to tiptoe out without waking them, only to feel the pressure of his Grandfather Bodbeg’s hand on his shoulder when he’d stepped into the silence of the trees and turned to take one last look at his family’s home.

  And to his surprise, Twist found Fagin could still recall old Bodbeg’s parting words as he’d pressed an old service revolver and a bottle of tuică into the young man’s hands.

  As you go forth in life, there will be a great chasm – jump, it won’t be as far as it looks.

  21

  ‘Oi! How about showing us what you can do? There’s a wall on the roof. Here …’

  The challenge had come at breakfast. Now it was half past eleven and he was still staring at the wall, a duffel bag full of cans at his feet and a voice in his ear telling him he was a fake. The only thing he had managed to get up was a smiley face in gold and it sat there now, a footnote to his lack of talent.

  Not much then after all the big talk with Cornelius ‘FBoss’ Fagin. Talk that had gone on into the early hours, sitting with their backs to the wall sipping tuică as FBoss held forth on beauty, art and the corruption of the art world which meant that the few special people with the aesthetic faculties to genuinely appreciate it had deliberately been shut out by the MAN.

  At times Twist had watched him spring up animated from the floor as if the tuică had rolled back the years, forgetting that he was no longer a fifteen-year-old acrobat travelling incognito with a Chinese circus in Yugoslavia.

  ‘People like you and me, Oliver, we’re special,’ he’d kept repeating as he’d navigated his mess of catalogues, pictures and antiques to illustrate whatever point he was making, all the time returning to what he described as ‘the gift’ and the unique qualities of those who possessed it; on the one hand sensitive to the beauty of the world and on the other tough enough not only to survive but to take what they deserved from it.

  With the tuică burning his throat and with tears of laughter in his eyes, Twist had listened to FBoss’s stories. How he escaped the Eastern Bloc disguised as a performing bear in a travelling circus, and all the hard moral choices that had imposed on him, not just as a showman but as an artist.

  Of the hunger that had stalked him like a wolf in those days, a hunger which was not a crime and which had only abated after a chance encounter with a Roma called Armond Griot, who he referred to only as ‘The Master’, and who could whisper to horses and women and who not only possessed ‘the gift’ but had the ability to see it in others.

  Who had spotted Fagin, then aged sixteen, as he’d walked a tightrope stretched between the church steeple and the clock tower of a town hall in a village just north of Seville, and invited him to his birthday celebration in a lemon grove where Fagin had sworn to join Griot and his band of criminal deviants for a year after an eleven-hour drinking bout that had left one man blind.

  Looking bleary-eyed at the wall now, Twist found it hard to believe in any kind of ‘gift’ at all. He wasn’t special and in the cold light of day he wasn’t convinced by Fagin’s stories of ‘The Master’, and his inheritance of his talent for spotting ‘the gift’ in others.

  Stealing back beauty, reclaiming the works of genius from the private collections of the global elite, and Fagin’s Robin Hood of the art world shtick had been all very plausible at four in the morning but now with his head throbbing and a dose of the runs it all seemed a long way from Newham.

  ‘Bit of a hippy, are you?’

  Her voice startled him. It was the girl again, sat directly above him on the top of the wall.

  ‘And I thought you were going to do me some pretty little bunny rabbits?’ she went on, goading him.

  Twist could tell she was being sarcastic but he raised the black can anyway. It was a relief finally having someone to tell him what to do. He crouched and in four coordinated movements a jumping rabbit appeared on the wall.

  ‘Maybe a cute little kitten?’

  Twist flashed the can again and a leopard appeared, stalking the rabbit. He heard her laugh.

  ‘And a helicopter gunship blowing them both to kingdom come …’

  Twist turned and saw that Dodge had snuck up behind them. He watched as the smile fell from Red’s lips as he approached and he turned, busying himself with the rotor blades of an Apache attack helicopter.

  ‘Come on, Twist,’ Red said, ‘we’ve got work to do.’

  She led him round to the far side of the roof past the giant tin ventilation ducts that looked like the chimneys of an old cruise ship. With no surrounding buildings the roof was invisible to anyone at ground level, which was just as well considering what they did up there.

  Pieces of scaffolding had been bolted together to make a series of bars, about four feet apart, ascending to some ten feet off the ground. Traffic bollards filled with cement were laid out in an S shape and to one side there was a makeshift gym, dumb-bells made of paint cans filled with cement and scary-looking ratchets and pulleys strewn at the foot of a bouldering wall with a plywood overhang.

  The least scary thing was a two-foot-high wall and Twist had to laugh when Red motioned for him to get up onto it. But Red wasn’t laughing and Twist sensed a sudden shift in the mood, the drunken revelry of the night before replaced with a professionalism and a focus that boded badly for the day ahead.

  ‘Head tucked, roll from the shoulder,’ she said.

  Twist looked down at Red.

  ‘I feel stupid,’ he complained.

  ‘You look stupid,’ Dodge replied, grinning gargoyle-like from the top of a ventilator duct, breaking into laughter when Red punched Twist hard in the chest, sending him crashing off the wall to the ground.

  ‘You can’t land right from two feet, you can’t land from twenty,’ she said, watching him pull himself up off the concrete. ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’ve got better things to do,’ she added. Twist followed her with his eyes as she walked away, dropping into a roll as she passed, then Dodge showed them all how it was done.

  ‘As much as I’d love to stay and watch you fuck up, me and Batesy got real shit to do. Recon duty. You just watch your step now, Twist,’ Dodge said, leaping down off the duct and landing on his feet like an alley cat.

  So Twist got back up onto the two-foot wall and launched himself head first at the floor, dropping his shoulder and rolling into a neat tuck turn.

  ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to…’ he said, looking at Red and meaning every word of it.

&
nbsp; * * *

  The two-foot jump and roll rose to four, six, eight and finally ten feet, bruising Twist’s shoulder blades and right hip. Next came the poles that were four feet apart, just too far to step from one to the next, forcing him to jump but maintain a standing position, effectively running up them one to the next, Twist freaking out that he was going to slip, miss his footing and slam his balls up into his midriff.

  And the names were harder to remember than the moves. The tic-tac, cat something and the under bar were the only ones that stuck, which turned out to be a problem because before too long Red was shouting them at him as he ran in circles around her like a dog on a chain.

  And watching her move was perfect hell, watching her perform complex moves without thinking as he over-thought them and slipped up and fell at her feet trying to remember if and when he’d actually signed up for this abuse. Being crap was one thing. Being crap in front of a girl you were into who had been somehow coerced into making you less crap was another.

  He looked up from the floor as she sprinted along a half-inch plank, dived off the end, cleared twelve feet, grabbed a bar using her momentum to swing her legs under it, let go with her hands, hooked her legs over a second, higher bar, spun round it backwards then launched herself up to catch the corners of a wall some fifteen feet up.

  ‘Do it again. Again. Idiot. Once more. Again …’

  The abuse was relentless until he couldn’t meet her eye and the pain made it difficult to respond in words of more than one syllable, lying winded on his back hoping maybe she’d surprise him and tell him …

  ‘No, you’ve got it wrong again, but I do really like retarded mute guys who can’t backflip.’

  22

  Fagin had woken flat on his back a full forty seconds before his alarm had gone off at a quarter to six. After gargling and swallowing what was left of the tuică in the teacup on his bedside table, he’d stepped into his lambswool slippers, pulled on his purple dressing gown and shuffled, more dead than alive, into the storeroom where a bank of computer monitors sat blinking and whirring in the darkness.