Starting Over (13 page)

My spirits lifted at the thought of being on my bike. As I anticipated pedalling north up the Finchley Road, relishing the sensation of flight, I thought of Kerouac and Cassady driving through Mexico and never wasting one second worrying that their heads might go through the windscreen. Nobody wears a seat belt in
On the Road.
And nobody worries about their mortgage. And nobody frets about their pension plan.

Because there are times in your life when the possibility that you could ever get hurt simply does not cross your mind. Fleeting moments of freedom when you just feel immortal. When you know that nothing in this world can touch you. That, I thought, is the very best thing about being…Now what did I do with that bloody bike?

At first I thought that I had forgotten where I had chained it. Those Camden Town lamp posts all look alike to me. But I got there eventually.

Some rotten bastard had nicked it.

Rufus looked older.

There were dark smudges under his eyes, things on his mind. No colour in his face. I watched my son coming down the stairs of the club and, in those moments before he saw me at the bar, not being at home with my children weighed on me like a crime that I had never been punished for.

This was the strangest bit. The allotted time. Making a date to see your children. Finding a window to see my son and daughter. The scheduled, premeditated time of the rough patch.

He saw me and moved slowly through the crowd.
We embraced awkwardly. He wasn’t an easy thing to cuddle, my son – all awkward arms and stray elbows. But I grabbed him and reached up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek, the baby bristles and the thin film of Lynx aftershave brushing across my lips. I held him for a moment too long and then I let him go, thinking that he was probably shaving twice a week by now.

‘You all right?’ I said. ‘You look – are you all right?’

‘It’s just work,’ he said. ‘That night shift is a drag.’

‘Want a drink?’

‘I’ll get them.’

He bought a beer for me and a fruit juice for himself, and we made our way to the side of the club. A smirking boy came on to the tiny stage. Low-slung jeans, carefully faded polo shirt – his clothes looked older than he did. I realised with a jolt that he was probably younger than Rufus. But already it felt like there was more than a year or so separating him from my son. It felt like the boy up there was from some other kind of life. He took the mic off the stand and it crackled in his hand.

‘Sometimes I think I should just grow up,’ said the boy. ‘You know – get a proper relationship, commit to someone, embrace maturity.’ He lifted his shirt and scratched his stomach. ‘But then I think – wait a minute,
it’s the middle of the conker season.
’

I looked at Rufus. He was smiling. ‘He’s not bad,’ he said, and I wanted him to be up there, and I wanted him to never grow old, and I wanted everything to be restored to the way it had been.

Towards the end of the act a gang of women came down the stairs carrying a giant inflatable penis. They were wearing tiaras and torn stockings. A few of them had magic wands.
One of them stumbled and fell but landed on her giant inflatable penis, and bounced back up. Her friends lurched into each other and howled.

‘Hen night,’ I said. ‘They’ll move on in a bit.’

Rufus glanced at his watch. ‘I’m going to have to go anyway,’ he said, just as he was struck on the head by the giant inflatable penis. He smiled good naturedly and quickly finished his fruit juice. Then we headed for the exit.

At the bus stop the crowds heading for Leicester Square swirled around us and Rufus kept looking at his watch, and it didn’t seem right that he had to worry about being late for work when everyone else was out having fun with a giant inflatable penis.

We went upstairs on the bus. The air was thick with the smell of chips. The bus lumbered through the West End’s neon glow.

‘Everyone goes to Edinburgh for the festival,’ I said. ‘Every stand-up in town. You know what that means, don’t you? When it’s Edinburgh, you don’t go. You stay right here in London, because there’s masses of work.’

‘I thought I might miss Edinburgh anyway,’ he said, looking at me quickly before glancing away. ‘Just give it a miss.’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ I said, although I knew we were saying completely different things. ‘Rufus?’

‘What?’

‘You were good,’ I said. ‘You
are
good. I’m not just saying that because I’m your dad.’

He looked hopeful. But only for a second. ‘Yeah, well. Nobody else thought so.’

He got up. We were near his stop.

‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s something you could go back to.’

He gave me his shy grin.

‘Yeah, Dad. Maybe later.’

There was a lorry being unloaded outside the supermarket where he worked. Rufus went into the back while I hung around just inside the entrance, looking at the front pages of tomorrow’s newspapers. My boy came back buttoning a white coat, a little white hat on his head. A squat shaven-headed geezer in a bad suit was standing beside me, reading tomorrow’s sports pages. He looked up at Rufus.

‘Get a bloody move on, Bailey,’ he said. The paper in his hands shivered with irritation. ‘You’re meant to start at ten. What are you – some kind of comedian?’

I followed Rufus out to the street. We went to the back of the lorry and I saw it was full of fruit and vegetables. There were men in the back talking in Polish and a pallet with boxes full of oranges was waiting on the tail of the lorry.

Rufus picked up two of the boxes.

‘Let me help you,’ I said, trying to take a box from him, and he laughed with embarrassment, turning his shoulder to me.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said.

I knew I couldn’t stay. I knew I was in the way. I wanted to talk some more, to make our scheduled time last a little longer, to just be around him.

But he had to go to work.

I watched him carry the box into the supermarket. And I could smell the oranges. The dark and grimy street was full of the smell of oranges. When he came back I hugged him hard and whispered in his ear.

‘Don’t settle for an ordinary life,’ I said. ‘Please don’t ever settle for the ordinary, Rufus.’

He pulled away. I think I had exceeded my hugging quota for the night.

‘But, Dad,’ he said, ‘maybe I
am
ordinary.’

Not to me, I thought. Never to me. But I shook my head and said nothing. And then the shaven-headed geezer in the bad suit was at our side.

‘Get your finger out, Bailey,’ he said to Rufus. ‘You’re not getting paid to hang out with your bloody mates.’

And my son and I smiled at each other.

I dragged the leaf rake across the surface of the swimming pool, skimming up the strays, watching the sun on the surface of the water as it shimmered and rippled with the tiny waves I made. It was a different kind of work from what I was used to, the kind of work where you could shut down your brain and just do it. That was a good thing. I had my shirt off and I could feel the midday sun on my shoulders. My career as a canteen cowboy had made my big hard body soft and weak. But now I felt it aching to fall away. The desk jockey weakness. The old man softness. The station cat pallor. The summer was waiting to take years off me.

Winston struggled with the filter at the far end of the big pool, and I felt myself drift away, with no awareness beyond the distant sound of a saxophone solo on a radio, and the smell of cut grass mixed with the smell of the chemicals that Winston used to turn the water a heavenly shade of blue.

He squinted up at the sun. ‘Put your hat on,’ he said.

I pulled on a baseball cap and looked up at the big house.
There was a woman watching me from one of the first-floor windows. She was young and unsmiling. I pulled down the brim of my hat, picked up my rake and went back to work, slowly dragging the rake across the pool. I liked the sound it made. It sounded like the beach.

When I looked up at the big house again the woman had gone. A housekeeper emerged from the French windows and I thought perhaps she was bringing us tea. She was wearing one of those old-fashioned maid costumes, a black dress with a white pinny, which you saw in a surprising number of these big houses. When she got closer I could see that she wasn’t bringing us any tea. She walked straight past me without a glance and over to Winston. He stood up, holding his aching back, listening to her without expression. Then he nodded once and she started back to the house. Winston crouched over the water filter.

‘Put your shirt on,’ he told me.

For a moment I thought that it was some sort of archaic dress code that I was violating. Maids wore one costume and drivers wore another costume and the pool guys wore another. Or maybe he was worried about me getting sunburned – Winston was always worried about me getting sunburned. But then I got it, and laughed to cover my embarrassment. I pulled on my shirt and looked up at the empty windows of the big house.

She didn’t want to see my scar.

We worked all day, travelling between the big houses in Winston’s neat blue van. We were at a big white house in Holland Park, wrestling with a jammed pool cover, when Winston caught me stealing glances at my watch.

‘Big date tonight?’ he asked, his face impassive and shining
with sweat. Then he laughed at me, and told me to go home, and that he would see me in the morning.

‘Go get your girl,’ he said.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ Lara said.

‘But I wanted to come,’ I said.

When did this start? This sullen small talk? Creeping around each other like a pair of strangers? I preferred it when we felt like throwing things at each other.

I reached for Nan’s hand to help her out of the cab, and she blinked with surprise at the lights and the noise and the teeming theatre crowds of Shaftesbury Avenue. The old lady seemed as fragile as a baby bird in all this bustle and grime.

With Nan in the middle, holding on to our arms for dear life, the three of us began heading towards
Les Misérables
, Cosette’s face up on the billboard as big-eyed and vulnerable as a baby seal that was about to be clubbed to death.

The trip had been arranged months ago. We did it once every year, taking Nan to a show in the West End on her birthday. In truth, over the last few years it had become a bit of an assault course for all concerned. Nan had fallen asleep in
We Will Rock You
the year before last, and had made a number of homophobic comments about Freddie Mercury in the taxi home. But I knew that Lara did not want to give up this annual ritual, because it would be an admission that Nan’s life had retreated to her musty cell at the Autumn Grove Care Home. I wondered if she was really strong enough for a few hours of pre-revolutionary France.

But I needn’t have worried. As we settled in our seats at the front of the upper circle, the old lady still between us, I remembered how special
Les Misérables
was for Nan and Lara. And for me too.

‘Which one were you again, love?’ Nan said loudly, sucking on a boiled sweet as Jean Valjean toiled under the boiling sun of the chain gang.

‘Ssssh!’ hissed the man in the seat behind me, as Javert appeared, like the Marquis de Sade enlisted in the Metropolitan Police.

‘Hmmm?’ said Nan, oblivious.

‘I wasn’t in this scene,’ Lara whispered, her mouth pressed against Nan’s lughole.

‘What?’ said Nan.

‘There’s no women characters on the chain gang, Nan. I was a peasant and a prostitute.’

Nan reared back in alarm. ‘Who’s a prostitute?’ she said, and the man in the seat behind leaned forward to bellow,
‘Will you be quiet!’

I turned to look at him, torn between the urge to apologise and the urge to throw him off the balcony. I had expected some miserable middle-aged man, but it was a young rugby-player type, all prime beef and Hackett casual, out with his leggy bird. I raised my hands in a plea for calm and attempted to smile. He didn’t smile back. And then his phone went off.

It might have been the
William Tell
Overture. Or perhaps ‘Umbrella’. But it went off, shrill and hysterical, a tinny babble that had half the upper circle turning towards him as he rose in his seat, a big man but out of shape, fumbling in his jeans for the offending mobile. Even Jean Valjean and Javert seemed to cast their eyes towards the heavens, wondering what kind of idiot forgets to turn off his phone.

The phone was fished from his jeans, but immediately squirmed out of his chunky fingers, like a ball slick from the scrum, and he caught it just before it landed in his girlfriend’s
popcorn. Cursing, he finally turned it off, but security had arrived by then. And we all turned to look, even Nan, ignoring Fantine doing her big number, as they led him out, the leggy bird trailing behind him in tears of shame, spilling her popcorn all over the gaff. And for the first time in a long time, my wife looked at me and smiled, reaching across Nan’s boiled sweets to squeeze my hand in the darkness.

Lara stopped and turned on our front doorstep, the key in her hand, and a few houses down I saw a neighbour’s net curtain twitching like a maiden aunt in a knocking shop.

‘Beautiful night,’ Lara said, and I followed her gaze beyond the yellow glow of the streetlamps and the orange pall that always hung over the city at night. ‘Is that a star or a planet?’ she said, pointing with the hand that held the keys.

‘Where?’ I said, trying to follow her finger, squinting into the fathomless abyss above our front garden.

She put her free arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer, close enough that I could smell her perfume and something else, the essence of her that was always there. It was so familiar, it made me catch my breath. I missed her so much.

‘There,’ she said, and I saw what she was pointing at, a white light winking at us from the other end of space.

‘That’s a star,’ I said. I turned to face her, and watched her profile as she kept staring at the sky.

‘How can you be so certain?’ she said.

‘Because it’s sparkling.’

‘You mean twinkling?’

‘Yeah, twinkling. Stars twinkle. Planets don’t twinkle. They just shine.’ She turned her face to me and I kissed her lightly on the lips.

‘George, don’t,’ she said, shaking her head and pulling away.

‘Stars twinkle because they are so far away,’ I said, lunging at her with my lips again. ‘Their light gets absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere, so –’

‘I said no, didn’t I?’ she said, placing her hands on my chest. I could feel the keys pressed against my heart. ‘I can’t be that close to you right now.’

I took my own step back.

‘I thought things would be better,’ she said. ‘Things would be good. That’s what I thought. After what happened to you. I thought it would save us. Not tear us apart.’

‘It did save us,’ I said. ‘Don’t you get it yet? I nearly died, Lara.’

‘Yes,’ she said drily. ‘I was there.’

‘And yet you want – I don’t know – you want me to act as though nothing happened. To fill in tax returns and fix the bloody boiler. Chastise the kids and kip in front of the telly. Sometimes you have to stop and pick the roses.’

‘Smell the roses,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You don’t pick the roses. You smell them.’

‘Why can’t you do everything? Pick them, smell them, take off your clothes and skip through them?’

She grimaced. ‘We can’t just skip through the flowers. That’s not life. Life’s not a laugh a minute.’

I could feel a sulk coming on strong. ‘Yeah, well. It should be.’ But then the thought of sleeping without her tonight was unbearable. ‘Don’t you want me back?’

‘I want you back. The way you were. The way you are. Not some…extra teenager.’

‘What’s wrong with an extra teenager?’ I said, trying to use my charm. It didn’t work.

‘Two’s plenty,’ Lara said, and she slipped the key into the lock. ‘Good night, George. I’m glad you were there tonight.’

‘Don’t you see? This is my chance. To break free. To make a change.’

‘What – you mean getting out of the rat race, and all of that?’ I nodded. ‘By clearing the leaves off of someone else’s swimming pool?’ she said. ‘Very fulfilling. Very bloody meaningful. Let me know when you discover the secret of the universe in your leaf rake.’

‘You think what I did before was more noble?’

‘It paid the mortgage, George.’

‘Don’t you want more than that? Don’t you want more than just meeting the mortgage payment?’

‘No, I don’t want more,’ my wife said, and she gave me a look of married frustration. She opened the door, and the light from the hallway of our home flooded her face. ‘I’m past all of that, George. I just want to hold on to what I’ve got.’

‘But you’re young!’

‘I’m not young, George. I wish!’

‘Seven years younger than me!’

‘Yes, and forty next birthday.’

I frowned. She was right. Lara’s big birthday. Of course. And yet this was somehow still shocking news.

‘We should do something special,’ I said. ‘Go to one of our places.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Do we still have places?’ ‘Forty next birthday?’ I said. ‘How did that happen?’ ‘Search me,’ she sighed.

She kissed me on the forehead. A chaste and friendly goodnight. But the touch of her brought my blood from steady simmer to boiling point, and my hands somehow inveigled themselves under her top, gorging themselves on her smooth,
warm flesh. Familiar and beloved and missed. I said her name and she said my name and then I said her name again. Her face. My hands. Her body. My Lara. And then she stepped back and punched me as hard as she could in the chest. I stood there coughing as next door’s net curtains twitched with alarm.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You sperm-brained little slut, George. Did you just try to put your hand inside my bra?’

‘If you’re sick,’ Keith told me, nodding at me in his rear-view mirror, ‘you’re going to clean it up, and I mean it.’ He bared his teeth. ‘You’re acting like some stupid kid. Next time I’ll let them give you a good hiding.’

That hardly seemed fair. It was the back of his bloody car that was making me feel sick. It was possible that all those bottles of Corona with a pointless wedge of lime stuffed in the top, necked in a dark, cavernous bar with Russian bouncers on the door, may also have had something to do with it. But Keith’s car was not helping.

The Russian bouncers had been escorting me from their bar when Keith happened by. They were about to accompany me down an unlit alley to discuss my version of Whitney Houston’s ‘And I Will Always Love You’ when Keith intervened and tossed me into his back seat.

Now I moved uneasily on the seat, breathing in the trapped air that smelled of all the drunks, no-goods and naughty people who had been there before me. Keith’s partner gave me a snooty look from the passenger seat. He was growing a goatee. It looked ridiculous, as though something had crawled on to his chin and died.

‘What now?’ Keith sighed, and I saw the blue lights flashing ahead of us on a bleak stretch of the Camden Road. A car
was parked across the street and a couple of uniformed coppers were tussling with a pair of bad boys. As their bodies moved and jerked in the changing light, it looked like chucking-out time at a cheap disco.

It wasn’t going well for our lot. One of the bad boys – a short, broad refrigerator of a geezer – had one of the coppers in a headlock, making his superior upper-body strength count. He was attempting to get the copper on the ground. The other officer was doing better, and he had cuffs around one wrist of his suspect – a weasel-faced little runt – but he was holding him by the scruff of his hoodie, clearly torn between helping his mate and holding on to the one he had nicked. He could not do both.

Keith slammed on the brakes and him and goatee boy both leapt out, not bothering to shut their doors behind them.

‘Need my help?’ I said.

Keith jabbed a fat finger at me. ‘You stay right where you are,’ he said. They both jumped on the one who was built like a fridge-freezer, ramming his nose in the tarmac as they administered the cuffs. Then they went to the assistance of the other officer, who had managed to get the cuffs on weasel-face all by himself. A small crowd had gathered by now, drifting out of the nearby flats and a pub that looked as though it had closed down twenty years ago, and the mob were half-heartedly whining about police brutality and human rights. Keith barked at them and they backed away sharpish.

Cuffs on nice and snug, the two pairs of arresting officers stood there for a few minutes, having a chat, holding on to their collars like absent-minded dog walkers. Curious cars slowed down for a gawp at the action. Then Keith and goatee boy said their farewells and slung the one who was built like a refrigerator in the back of the car with me. He acted as
though I wasn’t even there. He was a lot younger than I thought. His pumped body and shaven head were meant to put years on him. And they did when he had a policeman in a headlock. But up close and handcuffed he looked like a scared kid. Then we were on our way again.