The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page B

he must buy food for his supper. Sometime or other it must be done, but shops were always open till all hours in these streets. He came into Lisson Grove and turned south, conjuring Elizabeth’s face in his mind, its innocence and its rapture, and as sometimes happened, the tears came into his eyes and fell down his cheeks.
    Other people took no notice. They expected him to be different from them, demented, drug-crazy, drunk, ungoverned, mad. It was because of these things that he was where he was and they were where they were. Only Pharaoh, leaning against the door of a shopclosed for the night, eyed him with some feeling of kinship and, holding out the bottle from which he had been drinking, said, “Here, mate, want a sup?”
    Roman had long ago ceased to worry about catching things from drinking out of other people’s bottles and, though he didn’t want it, God knows what it was, he accepted and took a swig. Rioja and meths, he thought. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, the way he had learned from Dill and Effie, he sat down on the stone step and looked up at Pharaoh. He never stopped hoping to see some change in the man’s face, some improvement. By that he meant that madness would be less evident there, that the slipping away of sanity would have halted so that something human still remained, some kindly light in the feral bloodshot eyes, some relaxing of the mouth so that the lips were neither curled back nor sucked together in a whitened rigidity.
    But there was no change and the sign of humanity Pharaoh had given in offering a drink to a man in tears, was a rare happening. Soon even that would cease. He squatted down and thrust his haunted face into Roman’s, his black beard that he streaked with dark blue dye into Roman’s beard.
    “Have you got a key for me?” he said.
    Roman shook his head. Anyone who looked more closely at Pharaoh—no one ever looked closely—would have seen the hundreds of keys that hung round him, strung there on the rope that served him as a belt, pinned to his clothes with safety pins, brass and steel and chrome, Yale keys and Banhams, front door keys and backdoor keys, keys for opening suitcases and keys for locking padlocks. From the irregular bulges in his clothes Roman suspected his pockets too were filled with keys. He clinked and rattled when he walked, shuffling in and out of doorways, going where his voices sent him in search of the ultimate key.
    Where did they come from? Whose had they been? Pharaoh never said and Roman never asked.
    “The keys of the kingdom,” Pharaoh said.
    His black eyes rolled. When he looked about him he made jerky startled movements. One of his voices told him that when Christ said, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” it was an actual bunch of keys that He handed to Peter. These were lost, had been lost for two thousand years, but it was Pharaoh’s mission to find them. He speculated constantly as to their nature and appearance.
    “They’ll be made of gold, won’t they? Purest gold? Only gold’d unlock the gates of heaven.”
    Pharaoh should not be here at all, an outsider, on the street, but in the kind of place that had no existence these days, a place that was comfortable and clean and civilized, where he could have some dignity, where caring people would look after him and doctors well versed in the tragedy of his existence would put him on a regimen of drugs. Roman had no idea whether he was autistic or schizophrenic or mentally handicapped. He preferred the word “mad” to all these because he knew that he too was mad and that being mad was a prerequisite of what he had done in becoming an outsider.
    Patting Pharaoh on the shoulder—from which the man with the blue-streaked beard started back, recoiling and snarling like a wildcat poked with a stick—Roman got up and continued on his course toward the Marylebone Road and across it back into Gloucester Place. It amused him to reflect that being addressed by