Chop Chop (20 page)

T
he light twists, the air softens. We have emerged from winter. In his letters, Ramilov is reminding me to tread carefully now, to remember my promise. It would be all too easy, he writes, to get carried away in the telling and let the wrong truths spill out. A pure Ramilov construction that: “the wrong truths.” But he is right insofar as that around this point in the story it becomes harder to always tell right from wrong. A number of things happened which, morally, I am still trying to get a grip on.

My father is responsible for his share of these. “Put me up for a few days,” he said. Almost a quarter of a year later I am still stepping over his snores or stuffing money into his outstretched hand, still waking to his wagers or the breath of his bunions. We are close, my father and I: disgustingly, repellently close. No son should have to endure it. On the other end of the telephone every week my mother says good riddance to the miserable scrounger, she does not want him back. I tell her I understand. Even as he marks the races beside me, his rotten feet poking out from underneath my blanket, this is our conversation. We have tuned our whispers over the years, she and I, tiptoeing around his passive aggression. “Don't wake the blowfish,” my mother warns me if I raise my voice. “The blowfish” is her name for him, as he is prone to alarming spikes. “How is the blowfish today?” she will ask, to which I might reply “Deflated,” “Semipuffed,” “Fit to burst” or “Slow puncture,” depending on the occasion. I accept it may seem odd that we talk this way about the man of the house when he is right there, but he is not so much of a man, and as of this moment he is not allowed in the house.

Sometimes, usually late at night when I am trying to sleep, he despairs of the distance between her and him. Grand, catch-all reasons for the rough patches are offered up.

“I married too young, son, that was my mistake,” he announced one night in the darkness. “You only work out how to talk to women when you're married, and by then it's too late.”

“Is that a confession?” I asked, eyes half open. It was how my father would have done it: blithely, and distributing the blame elsewhere.

“No,” he said. “An observation.”

I thought of my own struggles with Harmony, how I could never tell her how I really felt, and decided that, as an observation, there might be something in it. But I wasn't going to tell him that.

“If you loved Mum you wouldn't be making these excuses,” I said. “You'd be facing up to this mess and trying to move past it.”

“You think marriage is where it stops?” he replied touchily. “The end of line? The happy ever after? No, son, marriage is where it
starts
. Of course I love your mother. I'm just saying it's not easy. I'll bet you any money I love her.”

“What sort of a bet is that?” I said. “How would you possibly prove such a thing?”

“I can prove it,” he grumbled, but I would not take his flimsy bet and told him so.

“Christ, Dad, this is your family, not the horses,” I reminded him. It seemed he only ever tried deep feeling on for size.

“Don't tell me about family!” he cried. “Every day I think about Sam!”

“What about me?” I shouted back. “Do you think about me every day?”

He said nothing for a moment.

“Well, you're still here, aren't you?” he replied at last.

The pain that comment caused soon gave way to regret. He was right—I had no business claiming the same level of love. I had left the soup out of Sam's reach when the blood was flooding his joints. And he had died and I had lived. It was a stupid thing I'd said, the thinking of a small man. Not that it probably bothered my father one bit what I thought. Since my brother's death I think he saw all other emotions in negative and could only trace their outlines, a necessary vagueness that he had cultivated, or that had cultivated him, for his ducking and twisting, half in half out, only-as-honest-as-the-situation-demanded state of existence. Yet you couldn't rule his feelings out. Always with my father there were doubts over his moral orientation, whether there might be some obscure, noble undertow driving the whole thing on. The incident with the apples, for example.

—

One rare Saturday morning off around this time I was at my usual spot by the window, observing the street scene, when I saw Glen, Bob's sworn enemy, emerge at a clip from the supermarket, a great haul of stolen apples clutched to his chest. The apples shone against his rags. He cackled at his heist. With the color and laughter, the goodness of the fruit beside the badness of the landscape, it felt as if spring had finally come to Camden. But as Glen made his way past the betting shop, One-Eyed Bruce, who had been studiously counting his drug money in the doorway, made a grab for the apples and sent them flying. Glen rolled after them and set about scooping them up from the filthy pavement into his sweater but One-Eyed Bruce was quickly onto him, snatching the apples from him as fast as he could grab them and stuffing them into his own pockets. I
settled myself deeper into my seat, savoring the spectacle of two grown men rolling in the dirt for apples, when a third ran out of the betting shop and joined in. To my horror, I realized that this third man was my father.

I dashed down the stairs and into the street where a small crowd had gathered to watch the fracas. Other pedestrians continued to walk past the scrambling figures, sometimes over them, in their hurry to get where they were going. One-Eyed Bruce had pinned Glen on the floor and was punching him in the face. His fists were still full of drug money, and every time he punched the tramp there was a small explosion of notes. My father was in the center of the tussle, gathering up money and apples as fast as he could. When One-Eyed Bruce got bored of punching Glen he lunged over to my father and began beating him. My father dropped the apples and money to fight him while Glen, back on his feet once more, shuffled around picking up the apples and money my father had just dropped. Then One-Eyed Bruce switched his attentions back to Glen and pushed him over before picking up the money and apples, one apparently as important as the other, until my father, rousing himself from the canvas, managed to catch One-Eyed Bruce in the face with a wild, swinging kick, and the money and apples went flying again.

A woman next to me in the crowd tut-tutted.

“Why is that man with all the money fighting over a few apples?” she said aloud to no one in particular. “He could buy a truck full of apples with all that.”

“Because they're his apples,” said someone else. “Why should he let the tramp steal them?”

“People need to have a little pride in themselves,” said a man behind me. “That's what's letting this country down.”

I turned to look at the speaker of these words and saw it was the man who slept in the blood-red Porsche at night, The Last Lehman Brother. With a little less pride, I thought, he might be living in a flat and not out of his sports car. But I was too churned up with the scene in front of me, too pleased with the pummeling of One-Eyed Bruce and at the same time too mortified by my father's actions, to tell the man what I thought. My father did not even like apples. Yet here he was, making a public spectacle out of himself for the sake of them. He, Glen and One-Eyed Bruce continued tussling like this until a pair of police community support officers eventually came by and broke it up.

“I was helping him!” My father kept repeating this claim, holding his sleeve to his mouth to stem the bleeding while he pointed desperately with his other arm at Glen. “They're his stolen apples! I was gathering them for him!”

Considering my father's miserly tendencies, his supine existence, I doubted he would accept injury and public humiliation for a stranger, a down-and-out. Yet it was a tempting story to believe. That a person of such profound apathy as my father could still be riled by injustice, and in his anger, rise up. It underlined the whole neighborhood, the whole nation, with potential. Perhaps fires were burning behind other faces too. And for a moment the concrete sprawl and washed-out streets were colored with their flame. One more kick in the teeth might bring about the revolution. Perhaps my father would be there at the vanguard, a quiver of golf clubs at his side.

At this moment the crowd parted. A huge form was moving through it, pushing all aside. From on high, The Fat Man surveyed the chaos of the scene. Two weeks had passed without any word from him, since the evening Dave had so kindly cooked him a tiger—I had hoped we'd heard the last. He pushed forward to the
front of the huddle, just a yard or so from where I stood, and grinned when he saw me. Was that a nod he gave to my tussling father too? Was there some connection?

Of course I said nothing to him, only nodded dumbly back. By this time The Fat Man had turned his attention elsewhere.

“Officers!” he cried. “This man”—he gestured toward One-Eyed Bruce—“works for me.”

The community support officers looked at him a moment, then turned back to the dispute. The Fat Man would not be dissuaded, however. Arms outstretched, he approached the two men and gathered them in close to whisper something. Immediately they corrected their posture; just like that One-Eyed Bruce was given back his drug money and allowed to go. The terms of his employment were not questioned.

The Fat Man began to push through the crowd, smug Bruce at his back, when he turned one final time and pointed a reckoning finger.

“I'm still expecting your donation,” he shouted.

“Monday.” It was my father who answered. “I promise.”

How did they know each other? And why did The Fat Man expect anything of my father, of all people? No one else did. Charity was not his strongest suit, as I have explained. The man had nothing besides nail clippings and bad advice and the handouts I gave him. Unless it wasn't charity. Unless it was something else.

Now the officers had shifted their attentions elsewhere. One of them gave Glen an official warning about stealing while the other returned the now bruised and dirty apples to the supermarket. My father escaped a booking, though he lingered furiously on, arguing even as I took him by the arm and dragged him away.

“They're the little man's apples!” he kept saying, pointing at Glen. “He stole them!”

Yet even in this statement it was unclear whether he was trying to defend Glen or drop him in it.

—

Hard truths were needed. Too much rumor and uncertainty still circulated, too much fear in the bones. I was still checking Harmony's features daily for signs of warmth and finding none—no conclusive data, at any rate. And then, to top it all, Ramilov started acting strangely. He slicked his hair back with water and spit and refused to wear a hat. He stole handfuls of potpourri from the customer toilets and put them in his trouser pockets. He kept a small ramekin of fennel seeds on his section to freshen his breath.

“You smell like a toilet,” said Racist Dave.

“I smell like a nice toilet,” said Ramilov. “Think about that. Every woman loves a nice toilet. They spend more time in the toilet than they do in the sack.”

Ramilov's metamorphosis was for the benefit of a new female at the restaurant, a beautiful young waitress called Vivien. This name he remembered. Vivien was slight and shy and terrified of the kitchen. Someone must have told her the place was full of perverts—maybe she had looked inside. But there were times when Camp Charles or one of the other waitresses sent her to fetch plates from the plonge for polishing or to pass on a message, and then she couldn't avoid the place. Then her fear made her move slower, made her dawdle in the gangways and get in the way of service.

“Get her out of here,” Dibden said to no one in particular. “Some of us are trying to work.”

“If you touch her I'll cut your fucking throat, Dibden,” said Ramilov. “A creature like that must be free.”

Racist Dave and Dibden teased Ramilov about how he had changed for a woman, how he had gone soft, how he looked like
Boris Karloff. I was tempted to join in too; but, as the pair of dark brown eyes in the corner bore witness, I was in no position to start mocking others about romantic entanglement. For some reason, perhaps out of sympathy, Ramilov and Dave and Camp Charles had been very discreet on the subject of my indiscretions. I didn't want to risk anything.

Ramilov paid no attention to the teasing.

“It's called love,” he sniffed. “You don't know what love is.”

He kept saying he was going to ask the girl out, that he would leave his heart on the check spike with her name on it and so on. But weeks passed and he never did. He seemed quieter than usual. For long periods he would sit in the yard with a great melancholy about him, smoking cigarette after cigarette until Racist Dave told him to get his fucking arse back inside. He rarely abused Darik or Shahram, or me, anymore. He was civil to Dibden. Seldom, if ever, did he reach for a man's perineum. I began to worry about him.

One day, while I was sweeping the yard and he was smoking, I asked him what the problem was.

“Damn it, I love her,” he moaned.

“But you've never spoken to her, Ramilov.”

“That's probably why.”

“So just talk to her.”

Ramilov looked amused at the suggestion.

“You should listen to your own advice,” he said.

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Harmony. Such was my shame that I could only mouth wordlessly.

“What about the other waitress?” I said eventually, changing the subject.

“Who?” he asked miserably.

I reminded him of the sexy potato, and the story he had told us about the staff party when he thought he'd broken his cock.
Ramilov said the sexy potato was not the same thing at all. That was lust. Sometimes his hormones got the better of him.

“But this time is different,” he explained. “SHE IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. She's my nemesis.”