Rhinoceros 8
Alan knew the streets well. 1930s housing estate, built for the workers of the foundries at the bottom of the valley. A model township in its day. All the corner houses where fashioned after Cotswold cottages. Villas, they called them. The streets curved and doubled back in parallel so that if you didn’t know your way you could easy take a turn and finish up where you started. The estate looked like a giant fingerprint on maps. But each part of the estate had its separate code. On Acacia Avenue, and the adjacent streets, Ryon was king. He could wave a stick about in the middle of road unchallenged. But go beyond the shops and the take away at the end of his road and he suddenly became a small fish beyond the comfort of its familiar reef. Wave a stick about there and every predator in the area would appear from the shadows. And they wouldn’t just be armed with sticks. Acacia Avenue. As if there’d ever been an Acacia tree.
Alan pulled up outside number 23. It didn’t have a number, but he knew it by the motorbike without tyres on its side in the front garden and the collection of cans and bottles where there might normally be flowers. It never ceased to amaze Alan how neighbouring houses could have such orderly hedges and gardens next to this. You just can’t typecast the people on this estate. Some houses, like Ryon’s, looked like they were about to implode in a cloud of their own neglect. Then next door it was trimmed privets, peonies, a painted trellis and net curtains hiding arrangements of furniture and décor that would grace any catalogue. People in box-worlds of their own making.
Alan rapped the letterbox. “Hello?” came a wary voice from within.
“It’s Mr Scope,” he shouted, glancing around the street.
“Oh come in, love. I thought it was the EWO again.” Mrs Taylor, Doreen, was still in her pyjamas. Leopard print. They stretched across her belly and sagging breasts with the threat of something indescribable if exerted slightly. She was smoking in the kitchen, and the saucer of dog ends attested to the length of this singular activity.
“I heard about last night and thought I’d catch up, see how he is.”
“Stupid bugger. Haven’t I told him over and over? In front of you, Mr Scope, I’ve told him ‘til I’ve gone blue. An’ does he listen? Does he hell. He’s in bed now sleeping like a baby as if nothing’s happened.” She took a drag from her cigarette to fortify herself. Alan knew the rhetoric, and that it’s best to let her run out of steam. “Mind you, you should have seen the state of him when they brought him home. Black and blue. The bastards. Didn’t have to beat him up like that, could have just arrested him. You know Ryon, wouldn’t hurt a fly. I know he was in the wrong, but to batter him like that, it’s no wonder he has no respect.”
“I was hoping to have a word with him.”
“You’ll have more luck waking the dead, love. Snores like a fucking foghorn.” And she cackled then coughed convulsively so that her pyjamas, and Alan, were put at great risk.
“I’m going to arrange a meeting to discuss where we go next, once I get hold of the social worker.”
At this latter suggestion, Alan predictably thought Doreen was going to spontaneously combust. “That useless cow! When was the last time she visited? Said she’d call in weekly, sort out his reparation – not that he’d do it anyway – get him a mentor, sort out his placement, get him some anger management…” Doreen had been counting these out on her fingers and had reached her thumb. “Fucking useless, in a word.”
“Well, if he’s asleep I’ll…”
A shape appeared at the kitchen door and yawned.
“Well, get the flags out,” Doreen announced, “It lives.”
Ryon shrugged. “Giz a fag.” Then he lurched into the sitting room and Alan heard a sofa being stressed and a TV blare into life mid-sentence.
“Go through, love,” and she waved the cigarette at the doorway.
Alan sat on a stool to Ryon’s side while he occupied the cavern of the sofa, its sagging arms, and some of the surrounding space. One wall of the sitting room had its wallpaper scraped off. It had always been thus, since Alan had first known Ryon when he was permanently excluded from the local primary four years ago. The TV, huge and distressingly pixelated, dominated the room. Doreen appeared and threw a cigarette packet and a lighter at Ryon, then disappeared. Ryon’s face was puffed-up a little, and he had a cut on his lower lip. There was a dark shadow around one eye, possibly turning into an impressive bruise. But he didn’t look too bad.
“How do you feel?” Alan was grateful for the TV for once, so that he could examine Ryon closely from the gloom by the scuffed sideboard.
Ryon shrugged and continued to stare at the TV. His hands arranged a lit cigarette for himself without his eyes leaving the screen.
“Court tomorrow?”
No shrug. It’s not as if Ryon hadn’t been through criminal justice system many times before.
“I need to ask you something, Ryon. How many other houses have you done recently?” Alan swallowed a little lump of fear and continued, “Or flats?”
His words seemed to hang dangerously in the air, waiting to be transformed into weapons. For the first time Ryon turned to Alan. “You the fucking police or somefink?”
“It’s not that. I just need to know how bad things are. I’ve always tried to be fair by you, Ryon, but it only works if I’ve got the full picture. I hate big surprises in meetings.”
“I might have done some others; what’s it matter, unless you get caught?” This was promising. A complex sentence from Ryon. Keep going.
“You might have left fingerprints. You might still have, um, things you’ve taken.” Christ, this was hard work, though.
“I’m not thick.”
“I’m not saying you are. But I need to know how deep a shit you are in. It just helps to know.”
Ryon took several drags so that the cigarette pulsated like a little warning beacon. “Not that bothered.”
Alan felt his meagre hopes fade with the cigarette smoke caught briefly in the flicker of the light from the TV. “Well, I need to go. Have a think. Come into school after court, let me know what happens.” Alan waited until nothing kept happening. Then he patted his knees, sighed, and stood up.
As he circumnavigated Ryon’s beached form, he was surprised to hear him throw a final rumbling sentence at him. “I stash everything at a mate’s – like I said, I’m not thick.”
***
The court appearance came and went and Ryon failed to show up at school. He was on some kind of curfew which, uselessly, stated he should be in by 10pm. They really had not a scintilla of an iota of a clue, the magistrates and judges, Alan told himself. They probably thought that Ryon dressed in striped shirt and eye mask and slung a swag bag over his shoulder. The other aspect of the bail conditions that amused Alan was the stipulation that Ryon ‘continue to fully engage with education’. What kind of crap had the Youth Offending Team been feeding the court for that pronouncement to be consigned to print? Alan found himself angrily telling off various members of the criminal justice system in his imagination until they all saw the rightness of his arguments.
Still, Alan had hoped to see Ryon at some point over the following couple of weeks. After all, they had practically had an in-depth conversation in his house, so it seemed only reasonable to assume that they might be able to pick up where they left off, perhaps even share a little joke over Ryon’s predicament. Or even Alan’s, if they got that far. As Alan fantasised around the culmination of his worries, with Ryon as his saviour, he seemed to lose his sense of moral imperiative. His mind seemed to be stepping over boundaries with worrying ease. But, Alan told himself, he was definitely not losing his mind. He felt it helped to tell himself this fairly regularly.
Still. It was only a couple of days ago that he had even forgotten where he’d parked his car. He’d walked around the city centre in a daze for over an hour. This was odd in itself. But even stranger was a voice that called him as he stared absently at the entrance to the multi-story car park trying to remember if he had driven into it.
“Is it Alan?” The freckled and, Alan instantly thought in his surprise, lively and pretty features of Jen assembled themselves into both pleasure and concern. Her lips were thin but shapely, and made a variety of pouts and smiles. It was a face Alan could watch for quite some time.
“Oh, hi, you caught me unawares.” Alan felt his pockets without knowing why, and looked up at the car park.
“Have you lost something? “ Jen asked. She went from happy to worried with such fluent ease. Alan’s face would surely shatter into irreparable pieces if he tried that.
“Well, I don’t want you to laugh, Jen, or think I’m absolutely hopeless, like some dribbling old man, but in actual fact, I’ve lost my car.”
“Oh,” and she laughed, quite beautifully. “I’m sorry, Alan, it’s not funny, but you are one of the oddest people I’ve met.”
“Well, I don’t make a habit of this. It’s just today – I’ve a lot on my mind, and where I parked the car got sort of pushed out.”
“Let me help you, then. Let’s work backwards.”
“Backwards? Where from?”
“Here, silly.”
And they did. Together they retraced his steps, and whilst doing so they chatted about Jen’s work at the benefits office, and Alan’s form group, and Jen told him all the things Annie had told her, and let Alan know that half of them needed varying doses of salt and the other half made him oddly endearing. Alan apologised for the abrupt ending to the Indian meal, and bored Jen slightly with the story about George Bernard Shaw who, when asked by a passing motorist the way to a nearby place replied, ‘Well I wouldn’t start from here.’ Which, as Alan tried to explain to Jen, was a sort of philosophical stance for him – that we are where we are. Even when our car is somewhere unknown. Jen nodded sympathetically, but seemed happier to discuss more prosaic matters.
“I think it’s shock, you know,” she said.
“What is?”
“This forgetfulness. And your sudden mood changes. You’re in shock without being aware of it.”
He disagreed, but he was enjoying Jen’s sympathy, rather as he occasionally enjoyed a large meringue with cream.
“Well, I suppose. But I’m on the mend. In fact meeting you has been better than any of the drugs the hospital prescribed.”
“Oh, don’t get into the pills, Alan.” Jen moved swiftly back to concerned. That mouth really is wonderful in its articulation, thought Alan. “You’re a resilient man. You must be to do the job you do. Find the answers in yourself. Now, where were you before Specsavers?”
Blimey, Alan exclaimed to himself, he’d made a lasting social impression on someone. Well, well. And they really did find his car together. When they had finished standing and looking at it they exchanged numbers, and Alan climbed into his battered vehicle with a sense of carbonated liquid fizzing in his head. He even refrained from excessive movement in case he created a dangerous state of euphoria.
The arrow-straight roads along the Don Valley took Alan the long way around to school. He’d only popped out to visit the bank, and was now late, but he needed to think. He passed a huge paper recycling factory that sent sheets of old news flapping into the road like escaped, injured birds. Car lots advertised free credit, and various configurations of steel rods and girders stacked in yards attested to Sheffield’s proud, if overplayed, history. Alan’s thoughts made a wide spiral around events until eventually sneaking up on his real concern, like a cat after a mouse. His teaching assistant would cover afternoon registration, and he could nip round to the back entrance and only miss five minutes of his English lesson.
He turned up the long hill through Wincobank. Again, his thoughts went round, honing in, and he returned reluctantly yet predictably to his fixation on Ryon’s parting comment. It’s significance or irrelevance. The possible worlds it opened up. Somehow he had managed to place Ryon at a fork in the road that his life was following. Turn in one direction, and he could piece back together his career, his social life and whatever aspirations he used to have. Turn the other, and it was a deliciously imagined terminal decline. How he pitied himself when he travelled down that imaginary road. But either way, he had to get past Ryon. And to do that, he needed to confront his own actions that had seemingly placed Ryon in a position of central importance. It was like Ryon had become some sort of centaur of mythology, that Alan had encountered in the maze of his thoughts.
As he crested the steep hill, Alan gazed briefly across at the Tinsley Viaduct, its strings of hurtling traffic ploughing through the waves of hills with the might and arrogance of modern life. Sometimes Alan tried to imagine where they were all going, the Hovis truck, the woman on a business jolly, the sprouts from the Fens, Norbert Detressangle, Ramage, You Shop We Drop. But there were too many going too fast, and his thoughts would drift away. And it was the same now as he bumped recklessly over the traffic calmers, and his mind returned to the labyrinth with Ryon lurking in its shadows, huge and immovable. And here was Alan, stuck, too far in already.
