A Little White Death by John Lawton

Not the money. The security. At least I think that’s the word I mean. After my old man buggered off we seemed to move every couple of years. I’d
get home for the hols – it seemed like every couple of terms there’d be a new house and a new bloke to call “uncle”. I could never hang on to anything. My stuff was forever
going in or out of packing cases. Lost me teddy bear before I was seven. I used to envy you, and what I envied was the security of the home. You and your mother and your loony sisters and your big
brother – I’d love to have had a big brother – and the house. The sheer solidity of it all. The junk of solidity. All that . . . all that sort of Troyness rolling back in time. I
felt more at home in your dad’s house than I did in any one of the places I cannot dignify with the word home.’
    This made some sense. Judy Leigh-Hunt had been cursed with good looks and a string of feckless men, usually purporting to be heroes of the First World War. On open days at school there was no
knowing with which man she’d turn up, and Charlie withstood a lot of ribbing on the subject of his ‘uncles’ – and in the holidays he would find himself dragged from one
watering hole to the next. The cheapskates took him to Scarborough, the spendthrifts to Biarritz. The out-and-out bounders would ditch him entirely, suggesting that perhaps Charlie would prefer to
‘spend the hols with a pal’ – which pal would inevitably be Troy. But in part it was nonsense.
    ‘Charlie, has it ever occurred to you that most of that junk of solidity was fake?’
    ‘Whaddya mean, fake?’
    ‘It didn’t roll back centuries. It didn’t even roll back to the start of this one. The old man left Russia with next to nothing. Most of the junk that you refer to he bought at
one time or another – the solidity of time-treasured possessions, history as furniture, which I think is what you mean, was left behind. Most of it is probably locked away in the cellars and
attics of the old house on Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street.’
    ‘Ye gods, I’d hate to have to pronounce that when I’m pissed. However, what’s your point?’
    ‘That it was his creation. What you saw was the world as he made it. Not as he found it.’
    ‘A lesson for us all, eh?’
    A short sentence shot through with silent sighs.
    ‘If you like.’
    ‘I can make my own solidity, my own junk, my own world?’
    Troy said nothing.
    ‘Out of Russia? I can make my world out of Russia!’
    Charlie was shrilly incredulous. Troy said nothing. He had said quite enough for the half-dozen microphones buried in the plasterwork of the walls and ceiling already. He had been speaking of
the past, of lost possibilities. There was no world to make now. It was, as Charlie insisted, a time of unmaking. All Charlie had made was his bed and he had to lie in it, and if that bed was the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, so be it. He closed the loo door on a ranting Charlie and as he did so heard him sigh, ‘Ah, bliss,’ and, knowing what it presaged, stuffed his
fingers in his ears.

 
§ 17
    Troy waited until they stood on the tarmac at the airport once more.
    ‘I’ve something to ask of you,’ he said.
    ‘Okey doh.’
    ‘Can they hear us?’
    ‘In this wind? This far from a building? Doubt it. If there’s a listening device that can cope at this distance in the open air, I don’t know of it. In a room, no problem.
Train a mike on the vibrations in the window, acts like the ear drum and you can pick up a conversation from a quarter of a mile or more. Out here, the most they could manage is a bugger with
binoculars who can lipread. If you really want to tell me a secret, just button upyour collar.’
    Troy did so.
    ‘A favour, Charlie. Years ago a Pole working for your lot told me my father was a Soviet agent. I want to know the truth.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Charlie.
    ‘Can you find out?’
    ‘Do you really want to know?’
    ‘I’ve just said so.’
    ‘A