Authors: Tony Parsons
‘Please, Ruby,’ I said, ‘stay home.’
I was begging now, happy to beg, no pride left, ready to try anything. But she ignored me, or she didn’t care, and the stubbly man gave me this smug leer as Ruby slid in beside him.
The door slammed shut and the car pulled quickly away, and I stood there for a long time, even after the brake lights had blinked once and the car turned a corner and they were gone.
Rufus was standing in the doorway. He was dressed in his suit and tie, ready for a night in the supermarket. I put my hand on his shoulder, and his long, gangly limbs seemed reassuringly familiar.
‘Let me have a word with your mum,’ I said. ‘And I’ll get the bus with you.’
He looked sheepish. ‘But, Dad,’ he said, ‘I’ve already got a ride.’
And then I noticed the other car. A baby-blue Mini with dents all over it. The car of a driver who was both careless and unlucky. The shoplifting redhead was sitting at the wheel, scrutinising her blowsy features in the mirror on the back of the sun shade. There was a child seat in the back, but there was no ginger-nut little thug sitting in it. He was probably out mugging old ladies. It was still quite early.
Lara came to the door and we watched them drive away. ‘Did you notice?’ Lara said. ‘He didn’t even put on his seat belt.’
‘Try to make a U-turn…try to make a U-turn…’
There’s something wrong with this sat nav, I thought.
The unfamiliar streets of the Elephant and Castle drifted by my window, jumbled and drab, and the posh lady on the sat nav kept trying to get me to turn around and go in another direction. But I was sure I was heading the right way. I was sure that this was the place.
‘If possible, try to make a U-turn.’
My father’s Ford Capri felt heavy and unfamiliar and sheered from time. The sat nav gave the old banger a veneer of modernity but there was no power steering and hardly any brakes. It was possible that I had missed my destination, distracted by the sheer effort of driving this knackered old motor.
And then I saw her. Right in front of me. The girl. I slammed my right foot down hard on the faint-hearted brakes, and the Capri came to a screaming halt inches from the girl.
She turned to look at me, her face so pale and pinched it looked as though it had never seen sunlight. She stuck up two fingers.
‘
You have arrived
,’ sighed the lady of the sat nav, washing her hands of me.
The address I was looking for was at the top of a low-rise block of council flats. It was a still day, but the wind seemed to whistle down the long walkways. Four blocks of flats faced a common square that was crowded with children, cars, overflowing recycling bins. The block was only five stories high and there was no lift. I took a breath and started climbing.
Everywhere there was music and television and voices. Laughing, threatening, pleading. The smell of food and urine and pets. The sense of lives lived piled on top of each other. I passed an old lady on the stairs and we politely said good morning to each other. At the top floor I stopped and wondered what I was doing. And then I went to the last flat at the end of the walkway and rang the doorbell.
Nobody answered.
I felt relieved, and exhaled a long sigh of nerves and looked out at the city stretching off below me. I turned away just as three young men stepped on to the walkway, one white, one black, one brown. They looked like a Benetton commercial of petty criminals. They were walking next to each other and I had to press myself against the wall to let them pass.
And then I saw him.
And he saw me.
The boy from the back seat of Keith’s car.
And before I knew what was happening, he had slammed me up against some poor bugger’s window and he had the blade of a carpet cutter resting on my right eyelid. His face
was so close that I could smell the lager and Lynx body spray.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘I just want to talk about your brother,’ I said.
He took the blade from my eye.
‘My brother?’ he said.
Then there were shouts from below and his friends were off and running. But there was nowhere to run to, and they scuttled from one end of the walkway and then back the other way, straight into the waiting arms of a dozen or so coppers in uniform. They were up against the wall when the red-haired lad in a suit and tie appeared, an inspector, smiling as if he was among old friends. He nodded at me.
‘You can sling your hook,’ he said, but I just stood there, unsure what was happening. He looked affronted when I did not move. ‘Go back to your life while you have the chance,’ he said, green eyes blazing. ‘God has thrown another log on your fire.’
I just stared at him, not breathing. He got in my face.
‘Move!’ he said.
I moved.
By now the big houses were all empty.
The rest of London remained, sweating it out on the underground and the steaming streets, but from The Bishops Avenue to Prince Albert Road, and out west to Holland Park and Richmond, most of the houses with swimming pools had been abandoned for the summer. Even the help was gone, packed off to the old country or attending to their employers in some sunny corner of the globe. It was the best time, a peaceful time. With a gaoler’s bunch of carefully labelled keys, I let myself into the garden of the big house in Highgate and you would not believe that a city could be so still.
My body was tanned and hard. I felt lighter, stronger than I ever remembered, as I pulled off my shirt and set up my service tools and chemicals. I knelt by the pool, watching the flow of the water for a few minutes. And then I went to work.
Winston trusted me to do even the bigger jobs alone now, and I moved easily through my tasks. Cleaning the skimmer basket. Checking the water temperature with a floating
thermometer. Rigging up the vacuum hose and sliding it into the pool. I was skimming the surface with the leaf rake, listening to the silent hum of summer in all those abandoned gardens, when Winston came through the back gate, holding a propane gas cylinder like it was a baby. He came over to the pool and set it down.
‘Treat this stuff with respect,’ he said, nodding at the propane. ‘It’s heavier than air. So if it flood a burner tray without being ignited, then it just sit on the bottom of the heater. You can’t smell it because it just sit there. It don’t float out, see? So if you put your face by the opening, trying to work out what wrong, and then it ignite –
boom
.’ He smiled happily. ‘It blow your head off.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised.
Winston nodded, satisfied that he would not be fishing my head out of a swimming pool, and picked up the gas cylinder. Then he stared thoughtfully at the untouched perfection of the water.
‘Everybody be coming home soon,’ he said.
He made it sound like a bad thing.
And then there was a man.
I should have seen that coming. How could I have missed that? With our marriage in limbo, it had never crossed my mind that Lara was going to meet a man.
I watched her as she stood in the doorway of the school hall, and one by one the girls filed out in their tutus and their trainers to where the grown-ups were waiting.
I stood with them, the mums and the au pairs and baby-sitters and a surprising number of dads, until the last of the girls had been collected, and then I slipped into the hall. There was a young woman covering the piano and I waited
until she had gone before I went across to Lara. She was sitting on the steps to the stage, massaging her right side, and I gave her the shoebox I had brought with me. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking. And you are right.’
I looked at the shoebox in her arms. But she didn’t open it.
‘I don’t want to swim with dolphins or argue with philosophers or understand the secret of the universe,’ she said. ‘But I do want to go back to work. I want another chance.’
I looked around the school hall. ‘You’re already working,’ I said, wishing she would open that box.
‘I mean
dance
,’ she said. ‘On stage. Professionally. Do what I was trained to do.’ We could hear the cries of the little girls getting changed. ‘I love my kids. But I mean…’ She smiled at me, her eyes shining with excitement. ‘Getting another go…’
‘Open the box,’ I said.
And she did. It looked like a random collection of photographs. Holiday snaps, school pictures, photo-booth mucking about. But it was more than that. It was the story of Lara and me; it was the history of our family. She held up a picture of Ruby, aged eight, smiling a gap-toothed smile. Red school jumper, grey dress, white shirt. The smile splitting her face in two with gummy delight. We laughed together, remembering her at that age, dumbfounded that the little girl in the picture had once existed. Then Lara put the picture back in the box, and I felt my spirits slide. This wasn’t what I had hoped for.
‘Martin said –’
‘Who’s Martin?’
She shot me a look. ‘Just a friend.’
‘A friend? A friend? What – a man friend? A friend with a penis, is he?’
I grabbed her left hand and she let me. It was still there, her wedding ring, the reflection of the ring I wore on the third finger of my own left hand. But for the first time I saw that the ring could remain there even as the marriage was fading.
Lara sighed. ‘He’s just a friend. The father of one of my girls. A single dad. He may have a penis. I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible.’
‘A single dad? What kind of man becomes a single dad?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lara said. ‘A good one?’
‘A good one? You don’t know the wife’s story. Let’s hear the wife’s side before we start deciding that this guy is Nelson bloody Mandela.’
Lara shook her head.
‘I haven’t had sex with him or anything,’ she said, and I shrugged as if that wasn’t the issue, while inwardly exhaling a sigh of infinite and eternal relief. If she had not had sex with him, then we still had a chance.
‘Can’t you think about anything else?’ Lara said, as if she could read my dirty little mind, and I happily chomped on the bait.
‘Yes, one minute you’re just good friends and the next minute he’s sending you saucy text messages and giving you Al Green compilations. One minute you’re just good friends and the next he’s got you bent over the dishwasher and he’s taking you roughly from behind. I know exactly how the friendship thing works.’
Lara stood up. ‘You are completely out of line,’ she said. ‘Just because you’re too immature to be friends with anyone who doesn’t look like bloody Keith, that doesn’t mean every other man is the same.’
I stood up with her, the desperation rising. ‘Don’t you like the photographs?’ I said.
‘Lovely,’ she said.
‘Keep them,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’ But she was mad at me. I knew that I should shut my cakehole. Then I opened it again.
‘Is he better than me?’ I said. ‘Just tell me that and I’ll shut up about it.’
She put her hands on her hips. ‘What’s that mean, George? Better than you? A better human being? Better in bed? Why don’t you ask him?’
And there he was, right on cue, looking through the glass window of the door, grinning bashfully as he raised a hand in salute to Lara.
She strode over and let him in and a bundle of pink nylon and blonde curls burst into the hall ahead of him. A girl, about five, wearing her tutu and trainers with flashing lights in the soles.
And then he came in – a big man in a business suit. Cresting forty, I guessed, just like Lara. He looked as though he had played some sport in his youth. He looked as though he still did.
Lara brought him across to meet me. ‘Martin, this is George, my husband,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘I’m George. Her husband. We’re married. What is it, Lara – twenty years now?’
But it didn’t even make him blink. Why should it? They were just friends.
And as I watched him – one eye always on his little girl even as we were shaking hands, making sure his daughter did not stray too close to the edge of the stage, someone clearly put on this earth to protect and provide – I could see the appeal.
I knew nothing of the man.
But I could see he was no spring chicken.
The new security guy watched me as I hovered by the wine rack, visibly tensing every time I picked up a bottle to look at the label. He was a Middle Eastern kid who looked as though he had been in the job for a week, and it had been a hard week. Perhaps there was a gang of hardened Chardonnay thieves operating in the area.
A man in a crumpled suit and tie came quickly down the aisle and it took me a long moment to realise that it was my son.
‘I’ll be ten minutes, Dad,’ he said, and he touched fists with the store detective. ‘You had your break yet, Jamal? Go for your break when you get a quiet minute.’
It wasn’t just the clothes. Rufus had put on some weight. The extreme thinness of youth had gone. And there was something about his hair. There seemed to be much less of it. Was it just his junior management short back and sides? He couldn’t be going bald, could he? He had only just started shaving.
A couple of black teenagers came into the supermarket and Jamal immediately went off to tail them. Rufus was out on the street where a lorry the size of the
Titanic
was making a delivery. I was holding a nice bottle of Estonian white when Rufus came back up the aisle.
‘Nancy prefers red,’ he said. ‘I’ll be out the back. Come through if you like.’
I obediently put the bottle back. Mustn’t upset the great dictator, I thought. I found a decent bottle of Latvian red and when I had paid for it I went through the long thick plastic strips that separated the supermarket from the storage
area. It was much colder back here, but Rufus had taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. And he had done this fussy little old man thing with his tie, tucking it inside his shirt to protect it.
He stood in front of a huge pile of food – fruit, vegetables, bread, muffins, croissants, pancakes, cakes – holding what looked like some sort of aerosol spray. He aimed the aerosol at a loaf of sliced white bread and squirted blue ink all over it.