Starting Over (18 page)

My mum put her arm around my dad’s shoulders and gently tried to lead him away. But he didn’t want to go. He wanted to see his brother. My mum gave him a kiss on his unshaven cheek. I think she may have laughed.

And I took my father’s hand.

It was not a good place to be buried. Is there such a thing as a good place to be buried? I think there is – but this wasn’t one of them.

The flyover swept over one corner of the graveyard and any chance of peaceful contemplation of eternity was shattered by the roar of lorries rushing their heavy loads to the M25. And it went on forever, this gigantic field of headstones in fifty shades of white, like the cemetery of some forgotten war.

I thought it would take me a while to find his grave. Because it wasn’t a new grave, with freshly dug topsoil, waiting conveniently at the end of a line. It is easy to find new graves. But he had been here a while now, his last resting place surrounded by headstones that were as alike as snowflakes.

Except Frank Twist’s grave was different from the rest. I saw it instantly.

It was the one with all the flowers.

I made my way towards it, and as I got closer I saw that
the flowers were fresh and they were dying and they were everywhere in between. The flowers on his grave looked like something from a natural history programme, where the camera fast-forwards through the mortal span of some living thing. Before my eyes, they bloomed and faded and withered and died and fell to dust. Flowers from service stations and flowers from high-end florists and wild flowers too. I cleared away some of the oldest bouquets and placed my small tribute against his headstone.

Frank Twist
1988-2007
Our beloved brother

I felt like I should do something more. Say a prayer. Stay a while. Or at least feel something more than the numb self-consciousness that I felt standing at his grave.

But here’s the thing – I wasn’t the only one. As I stood at the graveside I could feel them coming from every corner of the cemetery. There were so many who were in his debt, and some of them were coming now, to lay their grateful flowers.

Not a Frankenstein, but an angel.

And so I gave my own silent thanks to this man I would never know, and I went back to my life, and the air was full of diesel fumes and flowers.

There was a white picket fence running around the pool with a wooden gate that flapped in the summer breeze. Winston poked it with the toe of his boot.

‘Look at that,’ he said, and I had never heard him sound so disgusted. He knelt down by the gate and when he stood
up he was holding a rusty, broken lock in his hand. Behind us we could hear laughter coming out of the open windows, and the sound of corks popping. ‘House worth millions and they can’t spend a couple of quid on a decent lock,’ Winston said.

A man came quickly across the lawn, trying not to spill his drink. People were coming home now, coming home from all over the world. The man was tanned and well fed. My age, but from a different kind of life. He wanted to get rid of us before his party began. The pool guys. He didn’t realise that we weren’t pool guys. We were water technicians.

‘Are you going to be much longer?’ he asked Winston. And then, as if remembering his manners, he quickly added: ‘The pool looks bloody great, mate.’

And it did look good. Like a sheet of turquoise glass shot with gold. Not a leaf in sight, I thought proudly.

Guests were spilling out of the house. Thin hard women and their larger, softer menfolk. Above their chatter I could hear a baby crying.

‘You have children in the house?’ Winston said.

‘Only Tarquin,’ the man said, looking back at the house.

‘Can the boy swim?’ Winston said.

‘He’s only one,’ the man said, wondering what any of this had to do with his party. More guests were coming out of the house and the help was moving among them. Filipinas in black dresses carrying trays of drinks and canapés, East European nannies trying to herd the children that frolicked around them.

Winston handed the man the broken lock and he took it with the hand that wasn’t holding his drink. ‘Then we get this sorted out before we go,’ Winston said. He turned
to me. ‘In the back of the van there’s a box of Chubb locks. Bring me one, will you?’

The man attempted a smile. I could tell he wanted to get shot of us. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ he said.

‘No trouble, man,’ Winston said.

He made one last try to get us off the premises before his wingding began.

‘Really,’ he said. ‘It’s not your job.’

Winston shot him a look.

‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘It’s our job.’

I answered the phone on the third ring, suddenly awake, and there she was, unchanged, as she had been long ago.

‘Daddy?’ she said, and the voice was so small and frightened that I remembered a four-year-old child at the dentist, a little shining-eyed girl who had refused to drink anything but apple juice when she was a toddler, and now had cavities in her two back teeth. When you have loved them from day one, somewhere in your heart they never grow up.

‘Can you come and get me?’ Ruby said.

‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up in bed, groping for the clock. It was past three in the morning, and I felt my stomach fall away. ‘What’s wrong?’

She didn’t reply. I could hear a rushing sound. This constant noise and then a big rush. And I realised that she was running taps, and flushing a toilet, and trying not to be heard by anyone but me.

‘Can you just come and get me?’

‘Of course, angel.’ Fully awake now, tucking the phone between my shoulder and ear as I pulled my jeans on. She said something but her voice had dropped to a whisper.

‘Speak up a bit, Ruby.’

‘I have to keep my voice down.’

I could feel the panic flying. ‘What’s going on? Where are you? What’s wrong?’

‘Have you got a pen, Daddy?’

‘Just tell me where you are. I don’t need a pen.’

She told me. And then there was a banging on her locked door. And a man’s voice.

Then the line went dead.

My father was shuffling out of the bathroom as I came down the hall.

‘Didn’t wake you up, did I?’ he said.

‘You didn’t wake me, Dad.’

‘I was just having a pee. Unfortunately that seems to take about fifty minutes these days. Sometimes I have a little rest in the middle. Have a cup of tea and a biscuit. Like half-time.’

He followed me downstairs and into the kitchen. He sat down at the table, as if settling for a chat.

‘I have to go out,’ I said, snatching up my keys. ‘I can’t talk now.’

He looked me up and down as if twigging that I was fully dressed. ‘Which one is it?’ he said.

I turned and looked at him. ‘Ruby,’ I said. ‘She’s – I don’t know. There’s some sort of trouble. I’m going to get her.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

‘Not necessary,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

‘Drive you there,’ he said. ‘In the Capri. Or were you going to get your bike out and pedal?’

And so he came with me.

He went up to his bedroom and I could hear him talking to my mum, and when he came back down he had a
tracksuit pulled over his pyjamas. A swatch of old-fashioned striped jims-jams stuck out of his sleeve as he drove us from the suburbs to the city and across the river, peering out of his windscreen as if looking through thick fog, though the night was as clear as glass. I was happy there was no traffic.

We were silent, apart from when I gave him the address and he slowly punched it into his sat nav. The woman’s robot voice directed us to a square in New Cross. The lights were on in a first-floor flat. The windows were open and music was coming out. Hateful music. Pimp this and bitch that and look at the size of my Mercedes Benz.

‘What a bloody racket,’ said my dad.

‘That’s Fifty Pence,’ I said.

‘About what it’s worth,’ my dad said. ‘With inflation. How we getting in there?’

‘I thought we might knock. Ring the bell. What was your plan? Kick the door down?’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

We both got out of the Capri. I saw there was no point in trying to stop him coming in with me. And the truth was, I felt relieved to have him by my side. Even if he was an old man who clearly had his stripy pyjamas on under his tracksuit. Because my dad was scared of nothing.

I pressed the buzzer for Flat 2 and the front door opened without protest. There were drifts of junk mail shoved up against the wall. The place had the flaking, neglected look of rented property. We went up a ramshackle flight of stairs and knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked harder. And then I kept on knocking until the door was opened by an unshaven, blurry-looking man in his twenties. The guy from the car. He looked bigger standing up.

‘I’m here to collect my daughter,’ I said, and that struck him as funny.

He led the way into the flat. My dad followed me and I could hear him coughing behind me. The air was thick with the sickly sweet fug of cigarettes and spliff.

Into another room. Three other men. I was expecting boys. But these were men. One of them was rolling a joint and the other two were playing a video game on a big flat-screen TV. Cities on fire. Robot soldiers moving through the flames, blasting everything that moved. And where was Ruby?

‘He’s here for his daughter,’ the man announced, and they all got a good laugh out of that. They thought that was hilarious. The one rolling the spliff, a fat skinhead, looked up at me.

‘Which one is she, mate?’ he said.

‘He’s not your fucking mate,’ my father said, and they all laughed again. But not so loud.

My dad brushed past me and took the spliff out of the fat skin’s hand. He looked at it for a moment and then crushed it in an overflowing ashtray.

‘Stunt your growth,’ he said.

He knew how to do it – how to control a room. How to walk into somewhere and get a bunch of strangers to pay attention. He could still do it. But he was old now, and getting sick. And we were outnumbered.

‘Dad’s army,’ said the one who had let us in.

‘Yeah,’ said the fat skinhead, staring at my dad. I could see that he was going to be the one. You can always tell who is going to be the one. He was not smiling now. They all stood up. ‘Upstairs,’ he said. How big was this place? The skinhead nodded at a spiral staircase.

‘After you, fat man,’ said my dad.

They all looked at my dad for a while. And then the four of them started up the winding stairs. We followed them.

Ruby and another girl were sitting close together on a sofa. Ruby looked at me and her grandfather and then at the carpet. The other girl was quietly crying.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

Nothing happened.

The fat skinhead perched on the end of the sofa, and draped a bare, beefy arm across the back. He was one of those guys who do a lot of weights at the gym and feel they have to wear a sleeveless shirt. And I saw the fear in Ruby’s eyes.

‘You all right, angel?’ I said, and she nodded quickly. She made no attempt to move.

‘She’s all right,’ said the fat skinhead.

‘He didn’t ask you, fat man,’ my dad said.

The fat skinhead stood up. ‘Granddad,’ he said, ‘you’re really starting to wind me up. You know you’re trespassing, don’t you? The law would call you a burglar.’

‘I am the law,’ said my dad, and I might have smiled if I hadn’t been so scared.

‘No one’s keeping them here,’ said the one who had answered the door, the stubble-chops from the car. And I saw that, despite his size, he was one of nature’s vicious weeds, the type that always attaches itself to the local bully. He was dangerous because he would go along with anything. But he wouldn’t make the first move. I looked into the eyes of the fat skinhead.

‘Let’s go now,’ I said, not taking my eyes off him, not looking at the girls.

And still nothing happened.

‘They can go whenever they want,’ he said, the voice of reason. He frowned at them. ‘Do you want to go?’ he demanded.

I stared at Ruby. She was looking at the ground.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘She doesn’t know,’ one of the men chortled.

I went across to the sofa and took my daughter’s hand. And I also took the hand of the other girl, who I recognised from the school, and playdates when they were both very young.

‘We’re leaving right now,’ I said, and made for the staircase. My dad stood to one side to let us pass. The men exchanged looks. But then we were going down the stairs, the girls ahead of me, and my dad close behind. I could hear voices, and then men talking among themselves, and then they all piled down the stairs, and I knew that this was it.

‘Naughty, naughty,’ said the fat skinhead, and I turned to look at him as he came towards me.

‘We were just having a party,’ one of the men said.

I stopped, and stood there not moving, just waiting. My dad and the girls kept going. I heard the flat door opening, quick footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t take my eyes from the fat skinhead standing in front of me.

‘Party’s over,’ I said, and when he lunged forward I took the handgun out of my jacket pocket and shoved it into his fat ugly face.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Everybody relax.’

‘That’s my daughter,’ I said, and my voice was shaking, everything was shaking, and I could not stop it now. ‘And if you ever go anywhere near her again I will kill you dead
and they can lock me up and I will still be glad I did it. Do we understand each other?’

He nodded politely, his hands in the air. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘That’s all cool.’

I turned to go. And I should have just gone. But then I couldn’t stop myself from turning back, and raising my weapon. They all curled up in terror, crouching on the floor with their hands in the air. I pushed the barrel of the gun into the fat skinhead’s ear. The room was silent apart from their whimpers and the sound of the fat skinhead urinating on the carpet. Then I pulled the trigger. I pulled the trigger of Rainbow Ron’s gun. There was a metallic click, but it wasn’t like the sound of a firing pin striking the chamber of a real weapon. It was the sound of a toy.

‘Bang, bang,’ I said. ‘You’re dead.’

Then I was off, slipping the fake gun back into my pocket. I could hear the fat skinhead’s friends laughing at him. But he didn’t find it funny. He caught me at the top of the stairs, the wet stain still spreading on his trousers.

‘Hey, pops,’ he said, ‘let me tell you all about your little girl.’