Twist Page 9

  Dodge trotted ahead, pausing to wait for Twist who could not believe how much energy he had left as he bounded up the curved steps and across a mildew-covered driveway to the front doors of what, judging by the shadows of the letters on the wall above them, had once been a country-house-style hotel.

  DANGER! KEEP OUT!

  Dodge moved away from the clapboard sign that hung from the handles of the front doors, moving to the right, and for a moment Twist lost sight of him. Then he heard swearing and he rounded the corner to see Dodge sat on his backside looking up at a rusty ladder that was the lowest part of a metal fire escape that rose up four storeys to the top of the hotel.

  ‘Give me a leg up,’ Dodge barked, and Twist guessed his weight at around eleven stone as Dodge stepped up into his cupped hands, caught hold of the bottom rung of the ladder and pulled himself up onto the iron platform and began kicking it until it gave and slid down, alighting some four feet from the ground.

  Dirty tarpaulins sheltered the metal stairwell and platforms from the elements and from anyone looking up at the hotel from the wasteland outside. It meant that Dodge and his crew could enter and leave without being seen, something Twist imagined might have numerous benefits for people doing whatever it was that they might do.

  When they reached the third floor, Twist saw Dodge run his hand down the far edge of a plywood board until there was a click and the board pivoted out on a pair of hinges to reveal a wooden door behind it which Dodge opened with a key.

  ‘The good thing about this place,’ Dodge said as he held the door open, ushering Twist inside, ‘is that it’s listed.’

  Twist shrugged. Maybe listed meant it was in the Yellow Pages.

  ‘Means the developers can’t knock it down or renovate it without the right papers, which they’ll never get without a unanimous vote from the local council, which,’ Dodge explained, ‘they’ll never get because we have a man inside. Which means, so long as we’re careful, we can continue to live here, rent free, for as long as we like.’

  Twist was just wondering how this place would match up to his engine room in the tower when Dodge pulled the door closed behind them and they were plunged into darkness until Dodge’s iPhone switched on and Twist found himself staring down a corridor piled high with blackened furniture that looked like it had been damaged in a fire at least half a century ago.

  He followed Dodge along the tunnel until he reached the end of the corridor and pulled a king-size mattress towards him to reveal a small, white, padlocked door which opened onto a narrow staircase and a ladder bridging the mid-section, which appeared to have collapsed.

  The stairwell was claustrophobic and mysteriously hot, and the only light came from the dull red glow of LEDs embedded in a keypad that hung down from a tangle of black cables. Twist watched as Dodge punched in a long string of numbers then pulled back a metal grille above him and pushed up a trapdoor, bathing them in what felt like daylight.

  And stepping up into that light was like stepping into an alternative reality. For the fire that had gutted the hotel below had not reached the top floor and the red carpet was as thick beneath their feet as it had been beneath the feet of the Edwardians who had dined here one hundred years ago.

  And when he looked up Twist got a shock, staring at his own frayed and torn reflection in a full-length gilt-edged mirror in front of him.

  ‘Do you think this place is secure enough?’ he asked, clocking the black fisheye lens at the base of the chandelier in the middle of the grand landing.

  ‘Can’t be too careful,’ Dodge commented as he motioned for Twist to proceed across the landing to a pair of massive double doors, passing a set of portraits of eminent Edwardians that looked to Twist’s unschooled eye no less original than the works hanging in the Tate Britain.

  But he stood corrected by Dodge.

  ‘All forgeries,’ Dodge said. ‘Part of Fagin’s collection.’

  Dodge walked to the far side of the double doors and placed his hand in the mouth of a badly stuffed brown bear which stood on its hind legs like some kind of guardian to the inner sanctum. Twist watched as Dodge rummaged in its throat before turning frustrated back to the doors.

  ‘Oi, wankers!’ he shouted through the keyhole. ‘The bear’s stuck.’

  Twist heard a click from the inside as the doors opened a fraction, allowing Dodge to get his body into the gap and prise them apart to reveal the polished oak floor of what must once have been a ballroom or casino, but which now lay empty apart from a bank of oversized white beanbags piled up in the middle of the room in front of a large TV.

  Twist could see now that they were not alone. There were several guys who looked like they were practicing acrobatics in one corner, while two others lay sprawled across the beanbags, lost beneath a haze of smoke. He didn’t recognise the film that was playing and the two boys didn’t move. They just kept watching the screen and drawing on a three-foot-long water pipe.

  ‘I thought he told you to stay off the camel shit,’ Dodge barked but there was no response and Twist heard him tut to himself then run at the nearest beanbag and kick it so hard that the boy sitting on it rolled off onto the floor and lay there, face down, with the business end of the pipe still stuck in the corner of his mouth.

  Twist looked around for the source of the pale light. It had been dimmed but he still found himself wondering where it came from, and how it was possible to so accurately mimic daylight, as they crossed the room to a door on the far wall beneath a twisted mass of golden orbs bound together like a string of tiny suns glowing softly inside a building where the sun never shone.

  They left the smoke-filled ballroom behind them and entered into a long, green-wallpapered corridor where what Twist assumed must also be forgeries hung inside their wooden frames. He felt a glow of satisfaction as he recognised a Miro, an early Monet and a malignant Bacon, which he stopped to stare at, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be following Dodge.

  ‘Where are you living?’ Dodge said, projecting his voice from the far end of the corridor. ‘He will want to know.’

  ‘I was in Beltham until a month ago when they started letting me out on a tag to attend a youth apprentice scheme. Before that I was in a squat on Pudding Mill Lane. People used to come for lessons from the squatters. A lot of them were in the circus.’

  ‘Did they teach you anything?’ Dodge asked.

  Twist nodded.

  ‘You got no family?’ Dodge asked, watching Twist shake his head. ‘So how did you end up in trouble?’

  ‘Extreme graffiti,’ Twist replied, turning to walk down the corridor to join him.

  ‘Is that why the Fat Man was after you then?’ Dodge said.

  Twist could see Dodge watching his reaction closely. Like it was a test.

  ‘No,’ Twist said, meeting Dodge’s eye. ‘I stopped tagging about six months ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It got boring.’

  ‘Did they teach you a trade in Beltham?’ Dodge asked.

  ‘Apprenticeship was a condition of my parole.’

  ‘What did they give you?’

  ‘Mortuary assistant.’

  Twist saw Dodge’s lips curl into a smile and, not for the first time, found himself surprised at how much interest the living had in the dead.

  ‘No wonder you ran,’ Dodge said, changing tack, Twist reluctant to be drawn into revealing any more about himself to this strange boy who had a knack for getting stuff out of him that was better kept to himself.

  Twist turned to study a Da Vinci print of men on horses who were fighting. They had ugly, spiteful faces and not one of them was wearing any clothing.

  ‘I had to.’ Twist finally replied to the question after giving it some thought, knowing that he must be careful never to let on that he’d broken parole.

  ‘The embalmer was a perv,’ he said, watching Dodge’s eyes widen in surprise.

  ‘He tried it on, did he?’ Dodge asked.

  ‘Not with me, but …�
��

  He struggled to stifle a laugh. Dodge’s face was a picture.

  ‘There was this girl. A pretty one,’ Twist began. ‘The file said she’d drowned because she was pale and had reeds in her hair when they brought her into the mortuary.’

  Dodge was open-mouthed now. Not knowing where this was going.

  ‘The mortician forbade me to go into the mortuary alone. He said it wasn’t respectful. That I was to stay in the embalming room on the nights we worked to clear backlogs. Thing is that he used to go up there a lot. And he went up this time. Just as he always went up when there was a girl …’

  Twist looked up, watching Dodge battling a wave of revulsion.

  ‘Anyway, so this drowned girl came in so I was put to work putting in eye caps to recreate the natural curvature of her eyes and glued her lips together before he took her up to the morgue. She was done, ready to go, so I thought it was weird that he said he was going up to check on her. I followed him up there and I looked in and then …’

  Twist looked at Dodge. His mouth was open, hanging on his every word.

  ‘And then he saw me,’ Twist continued. ‘He turned round and I could see what he was doing and I wanted to shout “you sick sod”, but instead I made a big mistake.’

  ‘What?’ Dodge asked, his eyes on stalks.

  ‘I told my parole officer,’ Twist said, hanging his head, ‘and about a week later I had to report to sick bay for a “psychological assessment”. That’s when I knew that dirty bastard had turned my story around and claimed that I was making a “pre-emptive strike” at him because in fact, it was him who had caught me …’

  ‘So you had to run,’ Dodge said.

  ‘It was that or the funny farm,’ Twist went on.

  Dodge looked at him for a long minute, sympathy and shock writ large on his face.

  ‘So what’s his name?’ he finally asked. ‘The mortician?’

  Twist paused, thinking maybe it wasn’t such a good idea telling him, until he knew exactly what kind of outfit he was dealing with.

  ‘Sowerberry,’ he said, ‘of Tottenham.’

  Dodge nodded sagely, as if the addition of Tottenham explained everything, and a silence descended upon the corridor which Twist finally broke.

  ‘So how come you brought me here?’ he asked.

  ‘We lost someone recently,’ Dodge began, warily, Twist thought. ‘And we need to replace him.’

  Twist wanted to ask in what way they had ‘lost’ him but he noticed Dodge’s expression change as the little one, Batesy, appeared behind him, holding what looked like a broken circuit board and beckoning Dodge into a room off the corridor, which was dark apart from the flashing of LEDs and silent bar the sound of whirring as fans struggled to keep banks of hard drives and servers from going into meltdown.

  Batesy sat down and blew the dust off the circuit board in his hand then pulled down a light attached to a coil which hung suspended from the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes as if visualising a non-existent screen and began to type furiously on a keypad with his left hand.

  ‘Batesy!’ Dodge shouted into his ear.

  But Batesy kept his eyes shut and just raised his right hand like a concert pianist, holding a note before returning it to the keypad.

  ‘Don’t take it personal. He can only communicate in XML,’ Dodge said, beckoning Twist out of the room and back along the corridor, stopping by a door three-quarters of the way down on the left.

  ‘Right, you smell and you need some new togs,’ Dodge said abruptly, pulling down the door handle which didn’t budge.

  ‘Here, give us a hand.’ Twist stood alongside Dodge and they pulled together, the door opening a foot, allowing a JJB Sports box to tumble off a stack of other boxes and smack Twist in the face.

  ‘Now I can see why they went under,’ Twist said.

  ‘Got a bit carried away,’ Dodge quipped back. ‘Wait here.’

  Twist watched as Dodge clambered into the breach and disappeared into the mountain of boxes, several of which were thrown from within the room through the gap in the door.

  And despite the demise of JJB Sports he felt a lot better with a pair of box-fresh Nikes and a couple of tracksuits under his arms.

  ‘You got a shower?’ he asked, as Dodge led him back out of the ballroom and turned right down the long carpeted corridor towards a single blue door at the end.

  ‘We’ve got a two-hundred-gallon marble bathtub,’ came the reply. ‘But not until he’s seen you.’

  17

  ‘Is that you, Dodge?’

  Dodge’s hand had barely touched the handle when a voice came from inside the room. It was soft, nasal and strangely accented and Twist watched his new friend pause before pushing down on the door handle and stepping inside.

  The room was not small, about the size of a squash court, and about as high. Right slap bang in the centre was a big desk and behind that a chair upon which a man was sitting, his face and body obscured by an antiques catalogue.

  ‘FBoss,’ Dodge said, as if the man who had just invited them in needed now to be reminded of their presence.

  Twist watched a hand lift from the catalogue and beckon them forwards through the piles of stuff that filled the room and, rather like he had been doing all day, he found himself following Dodge along a narrow, well-trodden path.

  It was as if a giant had filled a skip with stuff, two parts art and antiques, one part garbage and electronic junk, then shaken it like a cocktail and tipped it out into the room. As far as Twist could tell there was no particular order to anything. Paintings, shop mannequins, disembowelled computers, books and obsolete gadgets lay jumbled up on top of one another in various states of disrepair. It was hard at first to know where to look but he still found himself drawn to the rear right corner of the room.

  There, a microscope stood on a stainless steel gurney surrounded by glass test tubes in front of which stood an oil painting of a small boy petting a wet dog in front of a roaring fire. But what interested Twist most was not the painting but what was in the glass test tubes. There were pieces of rock, seaweed, tree bark, viscous liquids and a beetle. And the only thing they all had in common was that each had its own quite distinct and entirely unique colour.

  Twist looked at the A-frame upon which the unremarkable picture stood. The oil paint had lost its sheen and the little boy petting the King Charles spaniel had been trussed in a starched collar and tight-fitting formal waistcoat. So it surprised Twist to see a dash of fresh paint in the bottom right corner whose dark grey colour perfectly matched a small circle of wet paint on the easel which hung from one of the A-frame’s pegs beneath the painting.

  ‘Arthur Jofferry. Scottish painter. Circa 1880. Caught syphilis in a brothel in Jaipur and died in India a year later. That was 1825, I think. His lady wife then caught it and outlived him by a year. Fifty tops at auction. Not much demand for him these days. Not much demand for him in 1826 either. The dirty bugger.’

  Twist stopped alongside Dodge, sensing his agitation at being studiously ignored by the man behind the desk.

  ‘Are you the artist?’ the man finally asked in an accent lost somewhere between Bethnal Green and Bucharest.

  ‘No,’ Twist replied, studying the man’s hands as they gripped the edges of the Sotheby’s catalogue, noticing the tip of the index finger of the left hand hovering above the cover. It was stained with paint. The same colour as Arthur Jofferry’s signature.

  ‘I used to be a tagger,’ Twist went on, watching as the catalogue slid slowly downwards revealing four matted grasps of greasy grey hair swept across a bald pate then furtive, dark grey eyes perched upon a nose the like of which Twist had never seen before.

  Hooked and badly broken just below the bridge, it belonged on some nightmarish prehistoric bird, not on a man, and Twist found himself fixating on it until the man scraped the metal feet of his chair backwards, and stood staring across the desk at Twist through red-rimmed eyes.

  He moved slowly, guiding himself arou
nd the edge of the desk, shoulders hunched, eyes occasionally flicking up to meet Twist’s then falling, apparently lost in contemplation as if each new glance had further confirmed a negative first impression. It made Twist feel uncomfortable. Like a specimen, a beetle pinned alive beneath the unforgiving gaze of the microscope in the corner of the room. He wanted to ask why they had gone to so much trouble to bring him here if they were just going to prod and probe. But he lost his nerve and he ended up saying nothing.

  But it did occur to him that he was still in control. And whatever this strange man offered him in the way of money, clothing, food or board, he would smile, thank him and then politely ask to be escorted back through the garden, across the wasteland and back into the real world where all his troubles would be waiting for him, just as he had left them.

  But the man had something. It radiated off him. A peculiar energy that Twist felt drawn to as the man stepped in front of him and offered him his hand which he felt compelled to take. Twist looked into his eyes which shone above the broken ridgeline of his nose, his thin lips stretching into a smile so wide that it threatened to detach the straggly wisps of red hair that he wore on his chin.

  ‘Cornelius Fagin, art collector, at your service,’ he said, bending his knees in a curtsy that would not have looked out of place in the court of Elizabeth I.

  Twist could not help but laugh as Fagin squeezed his hand with unexpected force and he found himself struggling to break his grip.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I hurt you, my dear? You must look after your hands if you’re an artist. They’re the most valuable thing you have,’ Fagin said.

  Twist was just about to make his excuses and leave when the man turned his back on him and began scanning the junk with both hands as if they were a pair of metal detectors.

  ‘Andy Warhol’s mother told him as a child that if he wanted to make friends he should invite them up to tea,’ he said, his hands circling over a cardboard box behind his desk, then reaching down to pull a white china teapot from it which he passed to Dodge.