Moderate Violence (2 page)

Ken interlaced his stubby fingers. He was still looking
at the carpet. “Not enough, he thinks.”

“So he’s pissed off as well as pissed, is he?” asked Jo
coldly. “Guinness pissed off, or whisky-and-chaser pissed off?”

He lifted his head and they looked at each other.

“
Neat gin
pissed off?” she suggested. “In the middle of the afternoon?”

Ken didn’t say anything. They went on looking at each
other. Then a sudden deluge of not-giving-a-toss flooded over Jo, and she
opened the door.

Ken took the hint and got up. He nodded towards her
sleeping father. "Maybe stay out of the way when he wakes up,” he said
apologetically, and shut the door behind him.

* * * * * *

The truth was that Trevor was a drunk. Jo
didn’t blame him. If your wife walked out, leaving you to look after your only
child, but was always criticizing how you did it, and you hated being an
accountant as fiercely as it’s possible to hate a job (and only did it in order
to support the wife), you’d probably be a drunk too.

But it was inconvenient, for sure. Sometimes it made Jo
so angry that she would flip impatiently through
Key Pathways in Triple Science
, a textbook unparalleled in
its tedium, looking for ways to poison him, electrocute him or blow him up
without anyone noticing it wasn’t an accident. At other times it made her
sorry, in the way you’d feel sorry for a saucer-eyed African child, helpless in
the face of disaster. But she had given up trying to talk to him about it,
because he would go all daddy’s-girl and hug her, saying that she was the
Sparkliest Diamond in the Princess of Perfection’s Crown. She would unwind his
arms and tell him he stank of beer and fags, and start to do her homework with
hot eyes and a jerky heartbeat. Then, when she came downstairs, he’d be snoring
on the sofa and she’d have to get herself spaghetti on toast for dinner.

Recently, the whole thing had begun to make her feel
numb with boredom. Not resigned, not intolerant, not even resentful. Just
utterly, indescribably uninterested. Life with Trevor was like the soap operas
on TV, which Jo had stopped watching because they were all about divorce and
drunkenness. She resented acting in a soap opera without even getting paid, so
ignoring the problem seemed the best way to go. She was, as Mr Treasure had
reminded her, only sixteen.

This time, it took a long time for Trevor to wake up. Jo
had eaten beans on toast and washed up and watched two episodes of
The
Big Bang Theory
and revised for an hour
by the time he stirred. She was working at the dining table, so she could keep
an eye on him. She’d read somewhere that drunks can choke if they vomit. It
wasn’t that she minded Trevor choking, but that she might be held responsible,
and probably sent to prison for murdering him.

Suddenly he sat up, coughing. Jo resisted the impulse
to impale him with spiky questions, the kind of questions that her mum, Tess,
had always made sound so ugly. And she had no desire to look torn-up and
jagged-edged like Tess had looked when she’d asked them.

“It’s all right,” she said, “you’ve just been asleep. Cup
of tea?”

Trevor had his head in his hands. “No, no,” he groaned.

“Water, then. And a headache pill?”

He didn’t say anything, so Jo got the water and the
pills anyway, and held them out to him.

He looked awful. His eyes, which old videos told her
had been bright and attractive when he was young, hadn’t looked like that for
ages. They were bloodshot, and he needed to clean his teeth, and maybe shave
and comb his hair, too. She looked at his hair. It was the best thing about his
appearance. It still looked like it did in the old videos, since he hadn’t lost
much of it. It was made of a hundred different colours, from almost blond to
dark red, and changed in every light. It was what had made Tess first notice
him. Now it was flattened where he had been sleeping, and it wasn’t very clean.

“Who was in the pub?” she asked, watching him jerk his
head back as he swallowed the pills. That can’t help a headache, she thought. “All
the regulars? You must have had a jolly old time.”

Trevor’s head lolled against the back of the sofa. His
eyes were closed. “Shut up and leave me alone.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’ll get something later.”

“In the pub?”

“Shut
up
.”

Jo began to gather her books from the table. “I had to
go and see Mr Treasure after school, because you forgot to go and see him at
twelve thirty.”

Trevor’s eyes opened. “Oh bloody hell,” he said, and
closed them again.

“He wants you to make another appointment.”

“I’ll phone him.”

“And he says to tell you that he doesn’t like being
messed around.”

“All
right
.”
Trevor’s eyes opened again and looked at Jo. “He’ll be OK when I tell him I was
doing something important.”

“You were in the pub, Trev.”

“I was being made redundant! Isn’t that more important
than going to see some stupid headmaster?”

“He’s not stupid,” said Jo, struggling to stay calm,
“and if you knew anything at all you’d know that headmasters are called
headteachers these days.”

She went upstairs. She wanted to cry but not cry, shout
but not shout, lie down on the bed and run around the garden, all at the same
time. She sat down at her computer. Maybe she’d email her mother and tell her
that Trevor had lost his job. But Tess would only start to bleat about Jo
coming to live with her now Trevor didn’t have any money. It was Trevor’s
inability to be as rich as Tess wanted that had sent her back to Prattland, as
Trevor called Tess’s parents’ house, in the first place.

Ah, life at Prattland! Comfortable, well-appointed,
sherry before dinner and gin and tonic after, the
Daily Telegraph
crossword and Sunday lunch at the golf club,
forever and ever amen. And Granny Pratt’s remarks about Welsh people, with “nothing
personal, Joanna darling,” attached to the end of them.

There was no getting round it. Tess’s Home Counties
family had a lot of money and Trevor’s South Wales family didn’t. Tess had met
Trevor in a pub after an international rugby match at Twickenham straight after
she left university. She’d got pregnant with Jo, married Trevor, who was
already working in London as an accountant, and had never bothered to get a
job. Her parents thought, correctly as it turned out, that Trevor would never
earn enough to keep their daughter in the style she liked. So for the whole of
Jo’s life Trevor had gone to work every day while Tess had stayed at home, all
the time taking handouts from Grandad Pratt and complaining about not having
enough money. She said that looking after Jo and keeping the house that Grandad
had practically paid for, was a big enough job, thank you. And now she’d gone.

Since she’d moved out, three months ago, Trevor had
begun to sleep in the spare room. Jo’s narrow room above the hall had become a
junk room and Jo had taken over the main bedroom. The fitted wardrobes, which
had been too small to hold Tess’s clothes, were too big for Jo’s. And the
dressing table that used to be covered with Tess’s expensive bottles made a
good desk. The bed was too huge to fit into any of the other bedrooms, so Jo
had had to keep it.

She’d pushed the bed against the wall and filled up the
empty half with soft toys. Sylvia the Chinese Cleaner who came on Thursdays,
always complained about having to move the toys when she changed the duvet
cover. But Jo took no notice. Sylvia lived with her parents, grandmother,
brother and sister-in-law in a maisonette, so the idea that you can have more
space than you want must have seemed like madness to her.

Jo looked at her reflection in the large, side-lit
mirror behind the dressing-table desk. She hadn’t inherited Trevor’s
red-gold-auburn-copper genes. Tess had given her darkish, straightish hair that
stayed close to her head whatever she did to it. It would never spring up
healthily like Holly’s, or tumble about harlot-style like Pascale’s. Jo thought
her face looked odd too. Fat at the top and thin at the bottom. Was it possible
to have a fat forehead and a thin chin? But at least her skin wasn’t as bad as
this time last year, when Tom Clarke had said that revolting thing about her.

She switched on the computer, shut her eyes, selected a
random DVD, opened the tray and slotted it in. It was
The Fellowship of the Ring
, the first film
of the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy.
Jo had seen it recently when she should have been revising. Watching DVDs on
the computer was easy to hide from Trevor. If he came in she could shrink the
screen and pretend she was working.

She didn’t want to watch the film again, even the
creepy bit with the Black Riders going
sniff,
sniff
. She slid down in her chair and put her chin on her chest. Her
right handed rested on the mouse. With her other hand she turned the DVD case
over and over, slapping it lightly on the desk.

The PG symbol on the back of the case made her think
about Trevor’s puny attempt to tell her off. Parental Guidance, indeed. Why did
parents imagine their sons and daughters might want to be guided by them, or
anyone? And Parental Guidance was even more useless if the parent was drunk. Trevor
might as well have a white stick, for all he could see of what Jo’s life was
like. She smiled, imagining him and his self-pity tap-tapping around like an
idiot in a sightless world.

When she read the guidelines on the DVD case, she
stopped smiling. ‘Some scenes may be unsuitable for young children’. How would
the censors describe that scene downstairs just now, with Trevor moaning and Jo
giving him pills? ‘Moderate drug use’? Jo felt tears behind her eyes, but she
wasn’t upset. She didn’t care if he wanted to kill himself with alcohol. But
she was angry. In fact she was furious. Trevor might even be worse, Jo decided,
than Tess, whose crimes against being a parent were numerous and spectacular.

The top shelf of her bookcase was littered with piles
of DVDs, some in their cases, some not. Jo grabbed some cases, put them on the
desk and began to flip each one over, reading the guidelines on the back. She
had never realized before that they were so…what was that word Mr Gerrard said
in English that made all the babies in the class honk with laughter?
Pithy
. Right, DVD guidelines were pithy. They
said things in a short, no nonsense way. No one would think ‘mild peril’ could
mean anything other than mild peril. A perfectly pithy phrase.

She looked at some more. ‘Coarse’ language was
obviously different from ‘bad’ language, which was different again from
‘strong’ language. It was all clear and simple, like movies themselves. In
movies people weren’t people, they were characters. The actors spoke words
written for their character by the screenplay writer, and the director told
them what to do. Jo wished real life had a script and a director. But no-one
wrote the words for you to tell your headteacher why you couldn’t carry on any
more, and no one told you how to change things.

She frowned at the computer screen. If DVDs could have
little labels that went to the heart of what they were like, maybe people could
as well. She pulled the keyboard towards her, opened a new Word file and typed
‘Trevor’. She paused a moment, and then wrote: ‘Unsuitable for young children’.
He could be
gross
, especially on
whisky-and-chaser days, when he would belch or fart fruitily, and swear at
newsreaders.

Under Trevor’s name Jo typed ‘Tess’. But then she left
a space. Tess was difficult. Jo was tempted to put ‘mild nudity’, since Tess
thought she was still nineteen and didn’t wear enough clothes. But that was
only a small part of the wide-ranging problem of
Tess. She scanned the backs of more DVDs. Labelling people
as if they were movies might seem a horrible thing to do, but the point of
labels was that they told you what to expect. Maybe, thought Jo, if you could
learn not to expect more of people than their label showed, you wouldn’t be
disappointed.

 She typed Pascale’s name under Tess’s. As she did so,
a thought she didn’t want to think forced its way into her mind.

In the back of Trevor’s car last Saturday night,
Pascale had huddled close to Ed. “Your place or mine?” she’d said in his ear.

 “Ready for it anywhere, darlin’,” Ed had replied in an
exaggerated I’m-a-geezer voice.

Jo had been in the front passenger seat, watching
Trevor as he drove, hoping he wasn’t very far over the limit. He had obviously
heard this crass exchange between Pascale and Ed, but had had to pretend not to
have heard it, and Jo had had to pretend she didn’t know he was pretending not
to have heard it.