Talking to Strange Men Read Free Page B

had come from and began taking a short cut across the green, making his way between the uprights that supported the overhead road. Why had he looked back? Had he remembered what he sawfrom the bus? Had he heard something? A rare car perhaps or a footstep? Or had it been a sound made by one of the cats? Since then, on his frequent visits, he had often seen them, the yellow king cat and his many-coloured wives and offspring and rivals who lived here under the pillars, amid the grass and stunted blackthorn bushes.
    Whatever it was that caused him to turn his head, he had turned it and seen, taped inside the groove of the central pillar, the first – or first to him – of the plastic-covered messages. Misery has to be very deep, has to be at suicide point, before it can quench curiosity. That thought actually came to him when he saw the little package up there. Until then he had believed his unhappiness total, swamping everything else, allowing room only for other old miseries to come in and share its ebb and flow. There was a place in its deep wide sea for his sister and her death but none, he had believed, for an island of interest and speculation. Yet here . . .
    It had been about six feet up. He unpeeled the tape, took the folded sheet out of the envelope and read what was written on it – or tried to read it. He happened to have a ballpoint pen with him and he copied the six coded words, or six groups of letters, on to a piece of paper that he found in his raincoat pocket, a supermarket account print-out. Then he folded up the message once more, replaced it in its envelope and re-taped it to the inside of the pillar.
    At home he had looked once more at the coded message. John knew very little about codes and what little he did know he remembered from schoolboy books he had read when he was very young, twenty-five or thirty years ago. But he was so intrigued by this unlikely message found in this unlikely place that he had shown it to Colin Goodman, though without telling Colin the circumstances in which he had discovered it. Not that he had known then that Colin was interested in codes, though he was aware that he did crossword puzzles, and no mean ones at that,
The Times
, no less, and sometimes the
Guardian.
Codes, however, it turned out were something Colin also dabbled in. He looked at the letters on the supermarket bill and quickly came up with what seemed a sound idea of the kind of code that had beenused, though that was a long way from being able to decipher the message.
    No more appeared for a while after early January, then there were two in mid-February, this one now. It was a strange thing what those messages had done for him, John thought as he walked home. They had distracted his mind. In a curious sort of way, incredible as that seemed, they had consoled him. He was still deeply unhappy, his life emptied by Jennifer’s desertion of everything that made it worth while, his future destroyed, but he had ceased to be obsessed, he was no longer single-mindedly wretched. It was weeks now since he had made one of those shameful vigils outside her house. And in that time he hadn’t thought exclusively of her. Whole minutes, hours even, had gone by in which his mind hadn’t been occupied by her. And as he visited and revisited the green with its steel pillars where the cats lived, watching for new messages, he felt that he had an interest in his life. It was absurd, of course, it was ridiculous that a man of his age should be so absorbed by this mystery but he was and he was thankful for it. Without this to sustain him, wouldn’t he have broken down? Wouldn’t he have abandoned himself to despair?
    Twenty-five Geneva Road was a small semi-detached house in a street of small semi-detached houses, but what distinguished his was its garden. Even from the end of the street, two hundred yards away, you could make out his garden and see what set it apart from the rest. An early-flowering prunus