Czytaj książkę: «Those They Left Behind»

The Stables Market near Chalk Farm tube is well known across London as a centre of trendy fashion and alternative art, and as a stamping ground for counter-culture types. But it also has a reputation as a bazaar of the weird and wonderful. Numerous of its stalls may seem initially as if they’re selling only bric-a-brac, but look a little closer and you’ll find a bewildering array of curios; everything from tawdry jewellery to antique ironmongery, from Halloween masks to Easter bonnets, from pairs of mismatched gloves to veils of exotic silk. Useful workaday oddments like corkscrews, toilet brushes, photo frames and mousetraps, intersperse with the truly bizarre – a glass eyeball, a bird’s nest, a priest’s stole, a gramophone horn, a corn dolly, a stained lobotomy cap, an edible jockstrap, a pack of pornographic playing cards (well thumbed). Ranges of military memorabilia – medals, ribbons, badges, rusty bayonets, maybe even a replica Luger – sit snugly alongside selections of glow-in-the-dark religious figurines. Mundane items like DVDs are rendered far more interesting by only having cardboard covers and titles handwritten in Japanese. A row of different coloured bottles, all quirkily shaped and made from smoky glass, are perhaps a little more likely to catch your attention when you notice that each one contains a pickled body part; if a notice proclaims them to be ‘Collectibles’, who are you to argue?

The list of goods on sale here is endless, and never less than strange or irreverent.

As such, the Stables would not be the sort of place where you’d expect to find thin, elderly ladies in brown macs, woolly mittens and headscarves tied neatly under their chins. Elsie Dawkins, for example, had been a resident of Camden all her seventy-eight years, and nearly always did her shopping in the markets on Buck Street and Inverness Street; never at the Stables. And yet, this was the second Saturday in a row when she’d ventured onto this unknown territory to gaze at the wares of one particular stallholder, a plump young Asian man who, the first time she’d visited, had offered her a good deal on what looked like a sheep’s foetus in a jar of green fluid. She’d declined because something else had been occupying her attention, though the stallholder’s apparent interest in her custom had suddenly seemed to wake her to the reality of where she was, and she’d hurried away without a backwards glance. However, now she was here again, staring at the same thing.

On an upper shelf at the rear, its arms and legs spreadeagled, sat a life-size replica of a human skeleton. A top-hat with a white feather in it was positioned between its open thighs. All around it, in looping, leathery strips, hung what was apparently ‘Genuine Snakeskin’. But the thing that had really caught Elsie’s eye was actually at the far end of the shelf, in the extreme left-hand corner of the stall.

It was a head.

Not a real head, obviously. By its texture, it was made from flesh-toned plastic, and it was quite old because its painted features had faded, but it was clearly supposed to be male, and was about the correct size to represent an adult. Its hair, which had also been painted, was short and black, and its features had been moulded, so even though the colours – the blue of the eyes, the pink of the lips – were barely recognisable, it was possible to imagine what the face might have looked like. It would have been handsome, Elsie thought; the nose was straight, the jaw square. The mouth was set in a slight frown, but that didn’t put her off.

“Bit keen on Old Bob aren’t you, missus?” the stallholder asked her.

At first she didn’t hear him.

“Hello?” he said.

“Oh … I’m sorry.”

“I say you’re a bit keen on Old Bob?” The stallholder might be Asian, but he spoke with a broad Cockney twang.

“Old Bob?”

“That’s what he was called. Fancy a closer look?”

He retrieved the head from the shelf, and only now did Elsie notice that, from the neck down, it was attached to what looked like several folds of material – a thick canvas, which might once have been white but was now a dingy yellow. The stallholder shook the material out, and Elsie was shocked to see that it was body-shaped, comprising a broad torso with arms and legs stitched onto it, the proportions roughly accurate to an average-sized man. When he turned it around, she saw that, down its back there were zip fasteners, one to each limb and one bisecting the middle of its trunk.

“This is where they used to put the sand in,” the stallholder said. “Or the sawdust, depending on what they had available.”

“I don’t understand,” Elsie replied.

“No, didn’t think you did. Look …” Again, he shook out the material. “Hollow, see? And they used to put sand or sawdust in it. A different amount each time, to get the weight right.”

“The weight?”

“Only for practise, of course.”

He offered to hand the head over to her. Elsie recoiled, though her gaze remained fixed on the faded, mournful face. The stallholder laughed.

“I hope the hangman wasn’t as squeamish as you. Otherwise he’d never get to test his apparatus, would he?”

Slowly, Elsie turned to look at him.

He explained. “Old Bob here – that’s what they used to call him – Old Bob got dropped the day before each execution so they could see everything was working right.” Again, he offered it to her, but now she was peering at him with mute disbelief. “There was probably a few of them, but this is an original. I think it was Pentonville where this one came from.”

“Oh … my God,” she whispered.

“Fancy cuddling him?”

“Oh God!” Elsie turned and limped hurriedly away, her bad leg suddenly giving her hell in the November chill.

“Rare piece of British culture, missus!” he shouted after her. “I can let you have it for fifty.”

But she didn’t look back. Instead, she stumbled into a deserted side passage, where she was violently sick.

*

Elsie was sitting alone in her small, neat living room when Shirley arrived that afternoon.

“Yoo-hoo, Mrs Dawkins … it’s me!” Shirley called, letting herself in. “Heck, it’s gone cold out. Proper frosty.”

Elsie made no reply. She was in the armchair in front of the gas fire, her bad leg resting on a cushion. She had Tommy’s framed photograph in her hand.

Shirley entered from the hall, taking off her gloves and her heavy Afghan coat. “I met the new priest at St Luke’s today. He’s a nice young chap, Father Ryerson …” She stopped when she saw what Elsie was doing.

Sensing the disapproval, Elsie stiffened. “It doesn’t matter about him. I go to a different church now. St Mark’s.”

“St Mark’s? That’s Kentish Town, isn’t it?”

“The further away the better.”

“Oh, Mrs Dawkins …”

“And I’ve joined the Mothers’ Association there too.”

“The Mothers’ Association?”

“Yes. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“No, of course not. I’m glad you’re getting out. It’s just – well, St Mark’s is quite a way to travel.”

“They only meet once a week.”

“Well if it makes you happy.” Shirley rubbed her hands. “I’ll put the kettle on first, then I’ll start, okay?”

Elsie sat and analysed the photograph. She was doing the same thing fifteen minutes later, when her home-help had finished dusting and moved onto the vacuuming.

“I thought we agreed you were going to stop brooding,” Shirley said conversationally.

Elsie shrugged.

“It won’t do you any good,” Shirley added. “Not after so many years.”

“It’ll be forty years exactly in two weeks’ time.”

“Hardly the sort of anniversary you want to remember.” Shirley stopped behind the armchair. She switched the vacuum off. “Why don’t you put that old picture away, eh? And I don’t mean on a shelf. I mean right away, so you don’t keep seeing it whenever you walk in.”

Rather to her surprise, Elsie sighed and nodded.

“Let’s do it now?” Shirley said. “Let me do it for you? There’s no time like the present.”

Elsie handed the photograph over. Shirley opened a drawer in the sideboard. There was nothing in there except a few yellowed newspaper cuttings. The first bore a grainy black-and-white image nearly identical to the photograph she had in her hand; it showed the face of a handsome, sad-faced young man with short, dark hair. Over the top of it, the strapline read: Camden killer to die. The second cutting had no picture. It was simply text, and was headed: Dawkins hangs today.

*

St Mark’s Sodality, or Catholic Mothers’ Association as its members preferred to call it, was a social group with only slight religious overtones. It consisted mainly of older ladies of the parish, who met on Wednesday afternoons at the church hall, and exchanged gossip over tea and cakes. Most of the chatter concerned family, usually grandchildren. Elsie didn’t contribute much, but for the first time at a meeting of this sort she didn’t feel entirely isolated.