The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell Page B

to put over their heads. This was not true of Roman, who had had a roof, who had had his own home, but who was on the street because he had no more choice than those others, because the outside was the only option if he was to continue to live.
    If he was to live. An alternative there had been, the alternative open to all. “Skipping out” on the canal bank, he had thought many times of sliding into the cold water one night, having first ripped his brain and his senses apart with the meths and water mixture, cloudy white fluid the jacks men called milk. The faith he no longer had stopped him. His Polish mother had brought him up a Catholic and if all of it was gone now, all dispelled by reason and science, vestigial fear remained, some absurd awe of the sin against the Holy Ghost.
    So the street it had to be. Because home was unlivable in, a hollow place that howled at him, empty, empty, never to be filled again. A place so haunted that he had to hide his face from the staring walls and stuff bedding into his mouth to keep himself from crying out. And not just that house of his, but any house, flat, hotel, shelter he might move to.
    It was as if claustrophobia of a kind never before experienced had come to him with loss. Just as an inability to work had come, to go about among ordinary people. He was obliged to avoid every aspect of life as he had known it, if he was to survive and not curl up somewhereinto a fetus that screwed up its eyes and hid its face in its frog’s paws. Only the outside was feasible to him, where those he encountered took it for granted that he was set apart, that he was to some degree mad. This was the point, that he should be the Wandering Jew, or Oedipus. And if he had not put out his own eyes, nor had he his daughter with him as companion.
    It was possible to have been too happy. He knew that now and because, at first, after it first happened, he lamented that he had been as happy as that, wished his had been a bad or broken marriage, his children ugly and stupid, because of these indefensible thoughts he had cut himself off from everything, expelled his family from his mind, and then expelled everything else from his life. The idea was to have nothing to remind him, to make everything different; no roof over his head, no job, no friends, no social life, no familiar things around him. If he was going to run away, and he was, it had to be a proper running away, complete, absolute, the old life shed in every aspect.
    Until the fair girl spoke to him and he spoke to her.
    •   •   •
    He had been up to Primrose Hill where nuns give out tea and bread and butter to the homeless at five in the afternoon. It was in some novel of Graham Greene’s that he had come upon that phrase “a phony and a fake,” and he applied it often to himself. For he had a home he had put into the hands of agents and sold. The money derived from that sale stopped him using the hostels and the day centers, to which others had a better right than he, it stopped him taking money passersby offered him, but he drew the line at the nuns’ tea. He drank the tea and ate the bread and butter and left a pound coin on the table.
    A lot of Irishmen were up there from the gloomy Victorian hostel in Camden Town. Their life expectancy, he had read somewhere in Talisman Press days, was forty-seven. The meths would do forthem, that and the cold and the poor diet. What you learn when you drop out of life! Roman wandered down Regent’s Park Road and took St. Mark’s Bridge over the canal. He counted seven houseboats moored alongside each other in Cumberland Basin and one in front of the Chinese teahouse. On its flat roof a woman lay sunbathing in a green bikini.
    The finger of the minaret pointed into a pale blue sky on which the tiny clouds made a net. He thought of Omar Khayyám and the sultan’s turret caught in a noose of light. The sun made the mosque’s golden roof too bright to look at. He crossed the Outer Circle and