Authors: Ross Gilfillan
C
HAPTER
3
Changing Man
‘It’s a f-f-flaming disgrace. Now there’s rolls of playground netting in the driveway. And lead flashing on the front lawn. I wonder which church roof that’s from? Somebody should f-f-flaming well report him to the council.’
My father, Charles Johnson, is peering through the small window at the top of the stairs at the side of the house, the only place from which he can get an unobstructed view of our neigh-bours’ garden, or what’s left of it.
‘You did report him, dear.’ That’s my mum, standing a few steps below him, watching him the way a sparrow might watch a hawk. ‘In fact,’ she ventures, ‘I think you’ve reported him a number of times.’
‘I have reported that man,’ Dad says, ‘on twenty-two occasions for sixteen f-f-flagrant violations of local statutes. Six reports concerning a repeated inf-f-fringement of the same bylaw.’
‘Was that the one about storing work materials in your garden?’
‘That’s not a garden, that’s Coventry after the blitz,’ Dad says. ‘Look at it. It’s like living next door to a camp of f-f-flaming gypsies.’
‘I expect he’ll tidy it all up one day,’ Mum says. She’s looking at the world through her rose-tinted varifocals again; she has to, living with Dad. ‘Then he’ll probably want to have a garden just like yours, Charlie.’
‘Charlie? Charlie?’ says Dad. ‘When in all these long years of our marriage have I ever encouraged you to call me Charlie? I hate Charlie. Charles, woman, the name is Charles.’
Mum shuts up, Dad goes on complaining. I’m waiting to go
downstairs so I can pop up town and investigate this new Chinese remedies shop on the high street but I can’t because Dad is there on the bit of landing where the stair turns, standing on a short set of steps so he can see out of the unfrosted top half of the window. I’m dealing with the idea of Clive’s dad having a garden like ours, where the lawn edges have been trimmed with the rigour of a military barber and every line is ruler-straight. There’s not a single weed in Dad’s flowerbeds and he must have used a spirit level to trim the hedge tops.
‘This is too, too much,’ he’s saying. ‘He’s turned that garden into a scrapyard. Literally. Coils of wire, old engine blocks, rusty iron pipes. I tell you, Violet, that man has been a thorn in my side since the day he moved in. And now look at him, wondering around bold as brass in his swimming trunks!’
‘It’s a hot day, love,’ Mum points out.
‘But swimming trunks in Laurel Gardens! Where’s his sense of decency? It lowers the tone, and the house prices too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Don’t work yourself up, love,’ Mum says. ‘Think about your blood pressure.’
But Dad seems to think a heart attack is worth the price of being able to stand at his post, soaking up the squalor surrounding the squat little bungalow next door. This is Clive’s dad’s house and, lately, his workplace, after the credit crunch obliged him to relocate his scrap metal business to his garden and down the sides of his house, and also into the knackered caravan parked by the back door.
‘Look at him!’ Dad says again. ‘Standing there in his little red swimming trunks for all the world to see! It’s disgusting. I’m going to—’
‘Write to the council, I know, dear,’ Mum says, and goes back downstairs, where there’s a big pile of Dad’s white underpants on the ironing board, waiting for her.
This was the scene
chez moi
a few days ago, but it might have
been any time in the last five years. It’s been played out so many times it’s in danger of erasing itself. Ever since Mr Dyson and his then wife Erica moved into Number 9, there’s been friction between the two houses – between Charles Johnson and Roger Dyson, anyway. Dad would happily provide you with a long list of infractions made by his neighbour against the spirit of peace and neighbourly harmony. There is the matter of borrowed tools which have yet to be returned – Dad keeps a list and reported his neighbour to the police on the occasion when his strimmer was borrowed without his permission. (Mum’s permission didn’t count, apparently). And then there is the fact that Roger Dyson is a Southerner, a Londoner in fact, who has come to take possession of a bungalow, a plot of land and, it is rumoured, a considerable windfall, bequeathed him by a distant relation. Dad hates Southerners, Londoners in particular and wishes Roger had stayed distant, too.
Then there are the handful of parties Roger has held since he arrived in Laurel Gardens, one with ‘ghastly pop music played at a volume of 85 decibels’. Yes, Dad’s got a decibel counter (85 decibels is exactly the same reading as I got when I measured the racket our own lawnmower makes when he runs it up and down his stripy back lawn, every Sunday). And then there’s the issue of Flossie and Ellen, his two Rottweilers, who keep at bay nosy officials and interfering neighbours alike. They’re noisy brutes, I grant you, and Dad has had to complain more than once about the barking and whining after 5.30 in the evening. They’re a danger to the public, Dad has said, but in actual fact, you’re only in danger of being licked to death.
Everything about Roger Dyson and his way of life repels my dad like a dreadlocked crusty with a mongrel on a string repels a Rotarian. He hates Roger’s business, of course; living next door to a scrap heap has never rated highly on his list of aspirations. He hates his bad language (though this has improved since Clive persuaded him to rename one of the Rottweilers Flossie. It had
been called That Fucking Dog and cries of ‘Where’s That Fucking Dog?’ had regularly disturbed the normal tranquillity of Laurel Gardens). He hates the ‘brazen Jezebels’ who show up in the evenings and leave in the morning ‘looking like the unmade bed they’ve just rolled out of’. He hates Roger’s many tattoos, which he sometimes examines with the aid of binoculars when Roger takes off his shirt to unload his truck or to work in his yard. He doesn’t hate Clive but he has his doubts about him. But fair play to him, we all have those.
Most of all, he hates the idea that he bought our house on the firm understanding that the long-dilapidated wreck next door was scheduled for imminent demolition. He’d understood that planning permissions had already been approved for two neat semi-detached town houses to be built on the site. But it’s five years on and somehow the eyesore is still standing, pretty much unchanged and now the property of someone who no more suits the tone of Laurel Gardens than the bungalow itself does. To say that Dad finds all of this very trying is an understatement of epic precautions, as Clive might have said.
Before we moved into Laurel Gardens, we lived in a crappy pebble-dashed semi on Eccleshall Crescent. A crappy monkey-puzzle tree blocked almost all the light from the front windows, while the back was overshadowed by crappy ’60s hi-rise flats, every one of whose occupants could, even without their telescopes, enjoy whatever was happening in our kitchen and back bedrooms. We’d bought the house as a temporary measure when Dad’s employer, GirdEx, relocated here. All we needed was a base from which Dad could go to work in the week and spend his weekends looking for somewhere more befitting the status of an up-and-coming middle manager.
Then the bottom fell out of ladies’ girdles, GirdEx went into receivership and Dad had to take a job as under manager of the haberdashery department in the amazingly old-fashioned Victoria department store, where he still works, selling knitting
patterns, balls of wool and buttons, mainly. That was when he was visited by the crushing realisation that we might be stuck in Eccleshall Crescent for the foreseeable future, if not longer. He’d disliked it before but now he began to loathe the street and everyone on it, himself included, I think. According to Dad, we lived in a road full of people who had climbed the promotional ladder only to find the last rungs missing and then had settled back into lives of resigned obscurity. He dreaded a similar fate.
We’d been living in Eccleshall Crescent for nearly three years when two things happened. One, a new estate of executive homes started going up on a big plot of land about half a mile from where we were living. Two, Mum’s dad Roy became seriously ill and eventually died, leaving Mum quite well off. Mum might have seized that moment and changed her life; she could have opened a florist’s shop, like she had always dreamed of doing. But there was never any real chance of that, not with Dad being as keenly interested in the development of the new estate as a paedophile in the building of a new junior school.
Dad had gone sniffing around early on, spending hours up on the estate, coming back with mud on his shoes and tales of gravel driveways, double-glazed patio windows and brick-built barbecues. Mention of breakfast bars, fitted wardrobes, en suites with bidets and as someone called Helen suggested he had been looking over the show home too. As Roy’s illness got progressively worse, so Dad’s visits to the new plots increased. Soon whole rows of alternately identical houses had been completed and the first ones sold. People moved in. I expect Dad gnashed his teeth as he watched those early adopters put up their curtains, plant their gardens and wash their Ford Mondeos in their drives. More and more houses were being completed and sold, but Mum’s father, instead of being considerate and dying quickly, lingered on and Dad could only watch helplessly as “Sold” signs were planted outside the last few executive-style homes. By the time Mum’s dad finally died, only one house was
left, the show home which he must have traipsed around a hundred times already, much to the bemusement of the site agent.
But the show house had always been high on Dad’s wish list. He loved that house inside and out and already, its fixtures and fittings, soft furnishings and décor were as familiar to him as if he had been living there for the last twelve months – which he very nearly had. On the afternoon of the day on which Mum’s dad had died, his idea of ‘a little jaunt to take your mind off things, Vi’, was to drive us up to the estate and give us a guided tour of the show house, Mum sobbing quietly as he led us through the kitchen, pointing out the fitted oven and marble-effect worktops and then up the stairs to show off the frilly-valanced beds and swagged floral curtains.
These builders knew how to furnish a house, he told us, nothing mismatched, everything nice, neat and clean as new pin. Lovely pictures on the walls, natty ornaments on the windowsills and even a row of realistic fake books on the living room shelves. On the day Mum’s inheritance came through we were looking around the house again, but not for very long. ‘We’ll take the place, Helen,’ my dad told the site agent, with whom he was now on first name terms. ‘And everything in it.’ Mum was sobbing again, but whether she was still crying for the loss of her dad or the death of her dream, I’ll never know.
But every Eden has its snake, as Dad discovered when he approached the council about the projected demolition of 13, Laurel Gardens – Clive’s dad’s bungalow – and was met with a lot of humming and hawing and not a few blank looks. Yes, the house was supposed to have been torn down, but there had been problems, legal ones, and there were reasons why a compulsory purchase order could not be issued. The matter was far from settled, they told him, but, just for the moment, it was all up in the air. Different departments gave him different answers. Yes, they knew about the scrap business in his garden but for the
moment, the matter ‘fell, unfortunately, between two stools’. He wrote, he called and presented himself regularly at the council offices, but lately he had found that the person he needed to see was usually in a meeting which was expected to last all day, or at lunch, which was often a very late, or an unusually early one. And while he waited for something to be done about what he called the horror next door, he built sturdy fences and dreamed of unexplained gas explosions or uncontrollable conflagrations.
This was how the Dysons came to rule Dad’s life, how they become his passion, his obsession. It’s got to the stage now where nothing happens without reference to the Dysons and by ‘the Dysons’, he means Roger. If it rains then the piles of scrap metal next door will get even rustier and make the place even more unsightly. If the wrong politician wins a local election, it’s because people like the Dysons have voted him in or were too lazy to go out and vote anyway. The states of the roads, the railways, the NHS, and Britain itself are all, somehow, Roger Dyson’s fault. I sometimes wonder what Dad would do without the Dysons. With no Dysons, he’d be hard put to fill all the time he uses up writing complaining letters, making angry phone calls and knocking on doors trying to enlist support for his campaign to get the Dysons moved on (as if they were travellers who were squatting there illegally). In some ways the Dysons have done Dad a lot of good; he’s finally got a purpose beyond his little empire of buttons and begonias.
For Dad, the Dysons’ land is East Berlin before the Wall came down, with him standing 24-hour guard at Checkpoint Charlie; the difference being that anyone escaping into his sector would be shot on sight. But for me the Dysons’ house has always been a much-needed refuge from my regimented life at Stalag Johnson. And if I complain about Dad’s strict timetabling of my bedtime, bath time and getting home pissed time (as if!) then his own daily life is even more controlled. His alarm rings at 06.50, the toaster pops at 07.35, his shaver buzzes from 07.45 to 07.49, the
toilet flushes at 08.00 and the key turns in the ignition of his Rover at 08.10. He says this means he is always at work by 08.29, in plenty of time to make a cup of tea, straighten his tie and be at his counter by 08.55 precisely.
His life runs on rails. Everything has an allotted time and duration. He has one of those diaries where each day is divided into half-hour slots and most spaces are filled in with his neat but rather girlie handwriting, even if the entry for Thursday at 17.30 is only the drive home. It seems a miracle that he ever found a slot for making me. A miracle he found the slot, period. Sick making as it is, my mind has sometimes ignored the
Verboten!
signs with skulls and crossbones on them and drifted over the invisible line, and I have visualized their wedding night. ‘Rightoh,’ he’d have said, as he folded his trousers into the Corby Press at the Travelodge they stayed in, en route to their honeymoon in Eastbourne, an erection of indeterminate size tenting his Yfronts. ‘The sooner this is done and dusted, the better for everyone.’