Collected Stories (78 page)

‘Alan,’ she moaned.

He slapped the table, and she slid another half a crown across it. He put it in his pocket and skipped to the door.

‘Alan, Alan!’ Her fingers grasped at the air.

‘You can’t make me miss
The Munsters
.’

She knew the house and could move quickly around it. But he was outside before she could touch him again.

Father was still at his desk, and his head was resting on his arms. Ali stroked his hair and then tickled his nose. Father sat up suddenly and looked around in surprise.

‘What time is this to come back?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Don’t go out with Mike too much,’ said Dad, trying to locate his pen, which Ali could see had fallen on the floor. Ali pointed at it. Dad bent down to pick it up and hit his head on the edge of the desk’s open drawer. ‘Those boys are useless. They’re all going to be motor mechanics!’ he added, rubbing his head.

‘I want to find better friends. Just like you want to find a better job.’

‘That’s enough, Ali! We’ve got to work!’

Ali lay down on the sofa on the other side of the room. He pulled his shirt up; his fingers drifted across his body. He touched himself where Miss Blake had stroked him. He smelled his fingers. She was there on him, where Zahida had been earlier. Her money was in his pocket.

He got up. Pretending he was doing his homework, he began to draft his first letter to Zahida. He was already in movement, already leaving there.

Next morning, when he and Mike went past on the way to the open-air swimming pool, and Mike was singing a football song and kicking his kit bag on its cord, Miss Blake was at her gate, rattling the bolt.

‘Mike, Mike,’ she shouted. ‘Where’s Alan?’

‘’Ere ’e is,’ said Mike. ‘Can’t you see ’is stupid brown ’ead? Can’t yer smell ’im?’

‘Morning, Miss Blake,’ said Ali.

‘Alan, Alan!’ She was leaning far over the gate. ‘Don’t you want … want something to eat? A chocolate or something?’ ‘I do, Miss Blake. You know I do.’ Mike was laughing. ‘Just you wait there,’ Ali said. ‘I’ll be back after I’ve had me dip.’

‘But Alan, Alan!’ she called again, more urgently. ‘Won’t you come ’ere and light me snout?’

Ali looked at Mike, and shrugged.

Ali went back to her, drew the packet of Number Six from her hand, popped one in her mouth, took her lighter and lit it. She grasped his hand tightly as he knew she would. When the wind blew out the flame, he handed the lighter back to her. She slipped her hand through the gate and gave him sixpence, which he pocketed. He ran away up the street, to catch up with Mike.

‘Mike, you get going,’ he said. ‘I’ll see yer there a bit later on.’

Miss Blake had already opened the gate; Ali followed her up the path.

Overnight it had been raining but to one side of the precipitous stone steps there was a rail to grip on to. With her free hand she took her son’s wrist, dragging him back when he lost his footing. It was too perilous for her to pick him up, and at five years old he was too heavy to be carried far.

Branches heavy with sticky leaves trailed across the steps, sometimes blocking their way so they had to climb over or under them. The steps themselves twisted and turned and were worn and often broken. There were more of them than she’d expected. She had never been this way, but had been told it was the only path, and that the man would be waiting for her on the other side of the area.

When they reached the bottom of the steps, her son’s mood improved, and he called ‘Chase me’. This was his favourite game and he set off quickly across the grass, which alarmed her, though she didn’t want to scare him with her fears. She pursued him through the narrow wooded area ahead, losing him for a moment. She had to call out for him several times until at last she heard his reply.

Their feet kept sinking into the lush ground but a discernible track emerged. Soon they were in the open. It was a Common rather than a park and would take about forty minutes to cross: that was what she had been told.

Though it was a long way off, only a dot in the distance, she noticed the dog right away. Almost immediately the animal seemed bigger, a short-legged compact bullet. She knew all dogs were of different breeds, Dalmatians and chihuahuas and so on, but she had never retained the names. As the dog neared her son she wondered if it wasn’t chasing a ball hidden in the grass. But there was no ball that she could see, and the little speeding dog with its studded collar had appeared from nowhere, sprinting across the horizon like a shadow, before turning in their direction. There was no owner in sight; there were no other humans she could see.

The boy saw the dog and stopped, tracking it with curiosity and then with horror. What could his mother do but cry out and begin to run? The dog had already knocked her son down and began not so much to bite him as to eat him, furiously.

She was wearing heavy, loosely laced shoes and was able to give the dog a wild blow in the side, enough to distract it, so that it looked bemused. She pulled the boy to her, but it was impossible for her to examine his wounds because she then had to hold him as high as she could while stumbling along, with the dog still beside her, barking, leaping and twisting in the air. She could not understand why she had no fascination for the dog.

She began to shout, to scream, panicking because she wouldn’t be able to carry her son far. Tiring, she stopped and kicked out at the dog again, this time hitting him in the mouth, which made him lose hope.

Immediately a big long-haired dog was moving in the bushes further away, racing towards them. As it took off to attack the child she was aware, around her, of numerous other dogs, in various colours and sizes, streaming out of the undergrowth from all directions. Who had called them? Why were they there?

She lost her footing, she was pushed over and lay huddled on the ground, trying to cover her son, as the animals noisily set upon her, in a ring. To get him they would have to tear through her but it wouldn’t take long, there were so many of them, and they were hungry too.

One evening just after my fiftieth birthday, I pushed against the door of a pub not far from my childhood home. My father, on the way back from his office in London, was inside, standing at the bar. He didn’t recognise me but I was delighted, almost ecstatic, to see the old man again, particularly as he’d been dead for ten years, and my mother for five.

‘Good evening,’ I said, standing next to him. ‘Nice to see you.’

‘Good evening,’ he replied.

‘This place never changes,’ I said.

‘We like it this way,’ he said.

I ordered a drink; I needed one.

I noticed the date on a discarded newspaper and calculated that Dad was just a little older than me, nearly fifty-one. We were as close to being equals – or contemporaries – as we’d ever be.

He was talking to a man sitting on a stool next to him, and the barmaid was laughing extravagantly with them both. I knew Dad better than anyone, or thought I did, and I was tempted to embrace him or at least kiss his hands, as I used to. I refrained, but watched him looking comfortable at the bar beside the man I now realised was the father of a schoolfriend of mine. Neither of them seemed to mind when I joined in.

Like a lot of people, I have some of my best friendships with the dead. I dream frequently about both of my parents and the house where I grew up, undistinguished though it was. Of course, I never imagined that Dad and I might meet up like this, for a conversation.

Lately I had been feeling unusually foreign to myself. My fiftieth hit me like a tragedy, with a sense of wasted purpose and many wrong moves made. I could hardly complain: I was a theatre and film producer, with houses in London, New York and Brazil. But complain I did. I had become keenly aware of various mental problems that enervated but did not ruin me.

I ran into Dad on a Monday. Over the weekend I’d been staying with some friends in the country who had a fine house and pretty acquaintances, good paintings to look at and an excellent cook. The Iraq war, which had just started, had been on TV continuously. About twenty of us, old and young men, lay on deep sofas drinking champagne and giggling until the prospect of thousands of bombs smashing into donkey carts, human flesh and primitive shacks had depressed everyone in the house. We were aware that disgust was general in the country and that Tony Blair, once our hope after years in opposition, had become the most tarnished and loathed leader since Anthony Eden. We were living in a time of lies, deceit and alienation. This was heavy, and our lives seemed uncomfortably trivial in comparison.

Just after lunch, I had left my friends’ house, and the taxi had got me as far as the railway station when I realised I’d left behind a bent paper clip I’d been fiddling with. It was in my friends’ library, where I’d been reading about mesmerism in the work of Maupassant, as well as Dickens’s experiments with hypnotism, which had got him into a lot of trouble with the wife of a friend. The taxi took me back, and I hurried into the room to retrieve the paper clip, but the cleaner had just finished. Did I want to examine the contents of the vacuum? my hosts asked. They were making faces at one another. Yet I had begun to see myself as heroic in terms of what I’d achieved in spite of my obsessions. This was a line my therapist used. Luckily, I would be seeing the good doctor the next day.

Despite my devastation over the paper clip, I returned to the station and got on the train. I had come down by car, so it was only now I realised that the route of the train meant we would stop at the suburban railway station nearest to my childhood home. As we drew into the platform I found myself straining to see things I recognised, even familiar faces, though I had left the area some thirty years before. But it was raining hard and almost impossible to make anything out. Then, just as the train was about to pull away, I grabbed my bag and got off, walking out into the street with no idea what I would do.

Near the station there had been a small record shop, a bookshop and a place to buy jeans, along with several pubs that I’d been taken to as a young man by a local bedsit aesthete, the first person I came out to. Of course, he knew straight away. His hero was Jean Cocteau. We’d discuss French literature and Wilde and Pop, before taking our speed pills and applying our make-up in the station toilet, and getting the train into the city. Along with another white friend who dressed as Jimi Hendrix, we saw all the plays and shows. Eventually I got a job in a West End box office. This led to work as a stagehand, usher, dresser – even a director – before I found my ‘vocation’ as a producer.

*

Now I asked my father his name and what he did. I knew how to work Dad, of course. Soon he was more interested in me than in the other man. Yet my fear didn’t diminish: didn’t we look similar? I wasn’t sure. My clothes, as well as my sparkly new teeth, were more expensive than his, and I was heavier and taller, about a third bigger all over – I have always worked out. But my hair was going gray; I don’t dye it. Dad’s hair was still mostly black.

An accountant all his life, my father had worked in the same office for fifteen years. He was telling me that he had two sons: Dennis, who was in the Air Force, and me – Billy. A few months ago I’d gone away to university, where, apparently, I was doing well. My all-female production of
Waiting for Godot
– ‘a bloody depressing play’, according to Dad – had been admired. I wanted to say, ‘But I didn’t direct it, Dad, I only produced it.’

I had introduced myself to Dad as Peter, the name I sometimes adopted, along with quite a developed alternative character, during anonymous sexual encounters. Not that I needed a persona: Father would ask me where I was from and what I did, but whenever I began to answer he’d interrupt with a stream of advice and opinions.

My father said he wanted to sit down because his sciatica was playing up, and I joined him at a table. Eying the barmaid, Dad said, ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’