you have a passport then you don’t need a birth certificate,’ said Johnston.
Ben did know that passports were what people took with them abroad. There had been a trip to France, his father with the other children, while he stayed with his mother. He could not go with them, because he couldn’t behave as they did.
He said he didn’t want to go anywhere, only a paper he could take to the office where – he described it, as a place where people were behind glass walls, and in front of them lines of other people waited for money. It took a long time for him to understand Johnston. In return for a passport, which Johnston could get from ‘a friend who does passports’, he, Ben, would make a trip to France, taking something with him Johnston wanted to give another friend, probably in Nice, or Marseilles.
‘And then shall I come back?’
Johnston had no intention of encouraging Ben to come back. He said, ‘You could stay there a bit and enjoy yourself.’
Ben saw from Rita’s face that she did not like this, though she did not say anything. The idea that he would possess something that he could keep in his pocket, and show a policeman, or a foreman on a building site, persuaded Ben, and he went with Johnston to the machine in the Underground where appeared five little photographs, that Johnston took off with him. The passport, when he was given it, surprised Ben. He was thirty-five years old, it said. He was a film actor: Ben Lovatt. His home address was somewhere in Scotland. Johnston was going to keep this passport ‘for safety’ but Ben demanded it to show the old woman. Yes, he said, he would bring it back at once.
When he stood outside Mrs Biggs’ door he knew the place was empty: he could sense that there was nothing alive in there. He did not knock, but knocked on the neighbour’s door, and heard the cat miaow. He had to knock again, and then at last she came to the door, saw him, and said, ‘Mrs Biggs is in hospital. I’ve got her cat with me.’ Ben had already turned to go off down the stairs, when she said, ‘She’d like it if you visited her, Ben.’
He was appalled: a hospital was everything he feared most, a big building, full of noise and people, and of danger for him. He remembered going to doctors with his mother. Every one of them had had that look. The neighbour understood that he was afraid. She and Mrs Biggs had discussed Ben, knew how hard it was for him to inhabit ordinary life – knew for instance that Ben would go down flight after flight of stairs because the lift so intimidated him.
She said, kindly, ‘Don’t worry, Ben, I’ll tell her you came to see her.’ Then she said, ‘Wait… ’ Left him standing there, returned with a ten-pound note, which she slipped into his breast pocket. ‘Look after yourself, Ben,’ she said, as the old woman would have done.
Ben made his way back to Rita’s. He was thinking about kindness, how it was some people saw him – that was how he put it – really did see him, but were not put off, it was as if they took him into themselves – that was how it felt. And Rita? Yes, she was kind, she felt for him. But not Johnston: no. He was an enemy. And yet there in Ben’s pocket was a passport, with his name in it, and an identity. He was Ben Lovatt, and he belonged to Great Britain which for him until now had been words, a sound, nothing real. Now he felt as if arms had been put around him.
Meanwhile, Rita and Johnston had been quarrelling. She said she didn’t like it, what Johnston was doing to Ben. What would happen to him in France? He couldn’t speak the language. He could only just cope with things here. Johnston had ended the argument with, ‘Don’t you see, Reet, he’ll end up behind bars anyway.’ He meant prison, but Rita heard something else, which in fact Johnston had mentioned during a discussion about Ben: one day the scientists would get their hands on Ben. Rita shrieked at Johnston that he was cruel. She insisted that Ben was nice, he was just a bit different from other people, that’s all.
When Ben arrived back in Rita’s room, he interrupted this quarrel. In both their minds was the word ‘bars’, both imagined cages. Johnston did not care what happened to this freak, but Rita was crying. If ‘they’ got Ben in a cage, he would roar and shout and bellow, and they would have to hit him or drug him, oh yes, she knew how life was, how people were, what one could expect.
Ben sat with his passport in his hand, reluctant to give it back to Johnston, and looked under his deep brows at them and knew it was him they had been quarrelling about. In his family they argued about him all the time. But more than by this angry atmosphere, he was being bothered by the many odours in the room. It smelled of her, the female, but he did not mind that, it was what emanated from Johnston that was making him want to fight or run away. It was a strong, dangerous male smell, and Ben always knew when Johnston had been on the pavement downstairs, or listening on the stairs, to keep a check on Rita. There were a variety of chemical traces in the air, as sharply differentiated from human ones as traffic stinks from the meat smells coming on to a pavement outside a takeaway. He wanted to get up and go, but knew he must not, until this business was settled. Rita was trying to stop Johnston from doing something.
Rita said to Johnston that he should try and get Ben a job, and ‘look after him’.
‘Meaning?’ said Johnston.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I can’t stop some bloke tripping him up on a dark night or pushing him under a bus. He upsets people, Reet. You know that.’
‘Perhaps he could be one of your drivers?’
‘Oh, come on, you’re dreaming.’
But now Rita took the passport from Ben, and said she would look after it, and put it into a drawer. Down they went to the cars, which were inserted here and there among the ordinary parked cars.
‘Get in,’ said Johnston to Ben, opening the door. Ben looked at Rita – Is this all right? – and she nodded. Ben got in behind the driving wheel and at once his face was all delight, exultation. He was thinking of the great glittering roaring accelerating motorbikes that had been the one joy of his life, like nothing else he had known. And now he was behind a wheel, and could put his hands on it, moving it this way and that. He was making a noise like Brrrr, Brrrr, and laughing.
Johnston pulled Rita into the scene with a hitch of his shoulder, so she was standing right by the driver’s seat. He wanted Rita to see, and she did.
‘Now turn the key, Ben,’ he said.
He did not point the key out to Ben, but Ben’s face turned to Rita, for instructions. Rita bent in, touched the key.
Ben fiddled with it, turned it, turned it off as the machine coughed, turned it on, so the car was alive, but grumbled and coughed and died. It was a rackety, cheap third-or fourth-hand car, belonging to a driver who was in between prison sentences for stealing cars.
‘Try again,’ said Rita. Her voice was actually shaking, because she was thinking, Oh, poor Ben, he’s like a three-year-old, and somewhere she had been foolishly believing that he could learn this job. Ben’s hairy fist enclosed the key, and shook it, the car came alive, and now Ben began a pantomime of shifting gears, for he knew that that was what you had to do. It was an automatic.
‘Now,’ said Johnston, leaning right in, and pointing to the lever. ‘I’m going to show you what to do with that.’ And he did, again and again. ‘You squeeze these little side pieces together – see? Then let the brake go – now do it. Then, be careful, watch to see if a car is coming.’ All this was silly; Ben could not see, could not do it. He was making his fist close up tight, watching Johnston’s hand, pulling his hand back and then putting it forward near the brake, but he wasn’t really doing it, because
