East of Innocence (13 page)

‘Not this time, sir. No.’ He pauses, looks around, takes his time. It is interesting to see him in tough copper mode; he is good at it, a natural, authoritative without being heavy-handed. I wonder why he is still a sergeant. ‘Are you
the son of a Francis Connell?’ He strokes his moustache with an index finger and thumb. I relax my grip on the door.

‘What’s he done?’

‘Done?’ says Hicklin. His colleague, Dawson, is eye fucking me from behind him. In the morning sun, I notice, with a practised eye, that he’s a good four stone lighter than me. ‘He’s not done anything.’ Hicklin sniffs. ‘Were you at his house at around three o’clock, two days ago?’ He looks up at me. ‘That would be the twenty-third.’

‘Yes.’ I wonder what this is about. If my father has not done anything, then something must have happened to him. ‘Is he all right?’

Hicklin ignores me. ‘I have a witness who saw you arguing with your father.’ I am about to speak when he holds up a hand, takes out a notepad, turns a page. He will not be hurried. ‘This witness claims that you had your father in a choke hold, in his garden. Would you deny this?’

‘Would I? We’re in the here and now, Sergeant. Do you mean do I?’

Hicklin looks at me blankly. ‘Did you have your father in a choke hold?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mind explaining why? I might remind you that there are laws against assault.’ He smiles blandly, robbing the statement of any force or threat.

‘I’m a lawyer,’ I say. ‘But thanks for the heads up.’

‘So you do not deny that you had an altercation with your father?’

‘No. What I’d like to know is why you are interested. And unless you tell me right now, this conversation is finished.’

Hicklin looks me up and down and I am suddenly aware of how I appear. It is hard to achieve a psychological advantage when one of your hands is holding together a purple towel and water is cooling on your shoulders, pooling at your feet.

‘At approximately ten o’clock last night, he was admitted to Queens General suffering from a suspected heart attack. He had also been beaten. Savagely.’

‘Is he going to be all right?’

Hicklin consults his pad. ‘Suspected heart attack. Beaten, savagely.’ He takes a deep breath, puffs it out, shrugs. ‘Christ knows.’

That is below the belt, I cannot help thinking. ‘Well then, Sergeant Hicklin, let’s stop dancing, shall we? Are you here to inform me of my father’s heart attack, or are you charging me with some kind of crime?’ I look over his shoulder at Dawson, give him a do-you-want-some look.
‘What?’
Dawson doesn’t know how to respond and drops his gaze. I look back at Hicklin.

‘No need for hostility, sir,’ he says. I have to give him his due, he is not easily riled. ‘We’re here to take a look at you, ask you some questions. We’re not here to inform you of your father’s heart attack. Do we look like the Red bloody Cross?’ He smiles without malice and I almost laugh; he’s got me there.

The sight of my father, fed with a drip and with a machine breathing for him, his face slack in his sleep and looking like the spent force I suddenly realise he is, gives me pause. He is no longer a monster, merely an old man who has been
on the receiving end of a ferocious beating; and, while one part of me believes that it was almost certainly merited, I cannot get past the fact that he is still my father. It may sound atavistic but I am the only person who can avenge him and, despite all he has done to me, I believe I must.

The doctor told me that, although he looks unscathed, his heart attack was almost certainly caused by a sustained physical attack; underneath his hospital-issue gown he has severe bruising around his kidneys, ribs and thighs caused by a blunt instrument, possibly a baseball bat. Or a police baton.

According to the policemen who visited my home, my father had been drinking in the Good Friends, a pub I know, narrow and dirty and panelled in dark wood. It is unwelcoming to strangers, full of alcoholics who, together, make believe that their lifestyle is no worse than anybody else’s but would still prefer to get on with their serious drinking away from judging eyes. He left at around ten o’clock and made his way home, a distance of half a mile. Along the way he passed a park, little more than a stand of trees and a kids’ playground. It was there that he was found just before midnight, sullenly unconscious and sat up against a little elephant fixed on a heavy-duty spring that kids can ride, bathed in moonlight and looking like an evil visitation in a child’s dream. He was found by two teenagers out for some al fresco petting; the girl said she was so freaked out by the sight that she screamed, almost had a heart attack herself.

It is fortunate that the teenagers did find him; any longer without medical treatment, the doctor told me, and he would have died. My father’s heart has been weakened
by a lifetime of alcohol abuse and poor diet and, if some alternative therapists are to be believed, too much hatred and far too little laughter. The doctor needs to perform an emergency bypass and asks me to give my consent, my father unlikely to regain consciousness before the operation. I give the form a quick scribble, then leave the hospital. There is nothing I can do there and I am happy to let my father recover, or not, on his own. I am sure he would do the same for me.

The Good Friends opens at eleven, by which time there is already a queue of men outside, some old, some who merely look it, all waiting to nurse beers until the afternoon when they can begin drinking in earnest. Even drunks have some standards, and they do not wish to be legless before lunchtime. I am also in the queue when the bolts slam open and Dean pushes the door from the inside. I know Dean a little; he is close to my age and, although we did not attend the same school, our social backgrounds are close enough that our paths sometimes crossed, often waiting together outside pubs like this one for our fathers to eventually emerge. He sees me and frowns; he may own this pub, but that does not mean that he wishes to see acquaintances, people he likes, drinking in it. He would hope they have higher standards. To drink in the Good Friends is as much a declaration as it is to stand up in an AA meeting and say, ‘Hello, my name is Francis and I am an alcoholic.’

Dean nods greetings to the men who pass him into the pub, suffering their tired witticisms with a patient smile.
It occurs to me that he is running a community service every bit as vital to these men as home visits from a nurse are to the elderly and I feel sorry for him; it must be a bleak kind of life. Dean looks at me and smiles.

‘Danny. How’ve you been? Got a call from the Old Bill, sorry to hear about your dad.’

‘Yeah. Well.’ It is hard to know what to say. Am I sorry? Does it matter all that much to me? I suppose it must, otherwise why would I be at a place like this at eleven in the morning?

‘Want to come in?’

‘Okay.’

I follow Dean inside and smell that old pub odour of sour beer, wood polish and musty upholstery. The pub is dark and every surface looks tacky, as if it, like its clientele, is limned with an ancient veneer of sweat and dirt. Dean walks behind the bar, says, ‘Drink?’

‘No thanks,’ I say and I can see relief in his eyes.

‘So then, what can I do you for?’ he asks.

‘You know what the police are like,’ I say. ‘They won’t want to waste their time on the likes of my father. They been by?’

‘Joking. Quick phone call I got, some geezer with an attitude, asked me what time Frank left, if he left with anyone. Sounded like he had his dinner on the table, couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.’

‘Sounds right. So thing is, Dean, what d’you reckon? Know anyone who’d have wanted to do him?’

Dean thinks for a moment. ‘You know, Danny, he’s in hospital and I’m sorry for him, but I have to say I saw you
growing up and how he treated you, and yeah he drinks in my boozer and I’m happy to take his money but, not being funny, Danny, your dad, he’s a right nasty cunt.’ He looks at me, worried about how I’m going to take his little speech, but I just smile.

‘Can’t argue with you there, Dean,’ I say. ‘So what, did you do it?’

‘No, no fuck, Danny,’ he says. ‘’Course not.’

‘Winding you up,’ I say. ‘But he pissed anyone off especially, that you know?’

‘Oi, oi, Bern, that’s enough of that.’ I look over and see an old man hitting another man over the head with a rolled-up copy of the
Racing Post
. ‘You want to be barred again?’ Dean turns back to me. ‘Fucking want to be in homes, telling you,’ he says. ‘You know he asks me to help him to the loo? Like, seriously, look at me, do I look like Florence fucking Nightingale?’ He doesn’t, he looks like what he is, a pub landlord knocking forty who wants a bit more sun and wants to drink less of his profits.

‘Sorry, what… Oh, yeah, right, who’d want to bash him. Can’t think of no one in particular, Danny, he weren’t little Mr Sunshine but he kept himself to himself, didn’t make no fuss. Probably just kids, thought they’d have a go at a pissed-up old fart.’ He looks at me anxiously again. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken.’ I hand Dean my card, tell him to let me know if he hears anything. He tells me he will, tells me to take care of myself. As I walk towards the door, he flicks a switch and a jukebox comes on, playing Ultravox. He claps his hand together, says in the brightest voice he can
muster, ‘Right then, gents, what will you all be having?’ My professional life may not be all it once was; but it could be a lot worse.

16

MY MOTHER IS
beautiful.

I am in the attic of my father’s house, a low close cave of heavy insulation and overwhelming heat so that I feel as if I have been slid into a pizza oven, the thirty-year-old dust-blown fluorescent strip giving off a dull malignant glow. Clean light pours up from the house through the open hatch like a distant promise of sanctity from this baking hell. I have been crabbing around from box to box, opening them up in the hope of finding some evidence of my mother and, after worrying a few last crates out from under the eaves, I have at last hit pay dirt. At the bottom of a box is an A3 envelope, card-backed, and inside are a stack of Polaroid photos held by a near-perished rubber band, the photos having survived the passage of time unfaded because they have never been permitted to see the light of day. My mother, banished to the farthest reaches of my father’s existence for over thirty years.

Now I am looking through them, a meagre fourteen photos of the woman who brought me into this world. But fourteen is infinitely better than zero and these amateur
shots have an odd effect on me; at once a throat-tightening sense of wonder that my mother lived, that she had a face and a physical reality, and also a deep pain that this lovely woman never stayed to smile at me as she smiles at whoever took these photographs. Because she is lovely, a tall dark-haired woman with a wide generous mouth and lively, laughing eyes. Wearing a garish flowered too-tight dress, she is anchored in the seventies but her expression is vibrant enough that it can reach through the decades into the here and now. Or am I simply being sentimental, caught in these novel moments, laying eyes on my mother for the first time?

I place the photos back into the envelope and lower myself back down through the hatch, down the ladder and on to my father’s landing. I am sweating through my T-shirt and, even though my father’s house does not have air conditioning, the contrast between the attic and his landing is like coming out of a sauna. I walk downstairs, sit down on my father’s sofa and lay the shots out on the coffee table. I cannot help but feel guilty as I do this; I check the door despite my father lying unconscious in a hospital five miles away, like a schoolboy would who is in possession of his father’s pornography.

Five of the shots were taken on the same day; a trip to the coast, although I cannot tell to which seaside town. She wears a yellow mini-dress and a wide-brimmed straw sun hat which she always has one hand clamped on; she clearly picked a windy day to visit the sea. I assume that it is my father behind the camera because he is not present in any
of the shots; he is not the type of man to kindly ask a stranger to take a photo of the two of them. The sky is a pure blue and framed against it my mother seems to be laughing at some private joke; I smile as I look at her, try to imagine what that laughter would sound like.

I know without a doubt that she is my mother because of one photo in which she and my father are standing together in front of a caravan, she quite visibly pregnant and my father with a proprietorial hand over her belly, a fuck-off expression on his face I would recognise anywhere. How like my father to see the glorious prospect of welcoming a child into the world as yet another excuse to flex his muscles, to invite the world to try it on should it dare. Yet my mother does not appear to notice; she is wearing an expression as blissful as a leading lady on closing night clutching a bouquet of flowers flung by a head of state.

The other shots are a mixture of portraits of my mother on her own and the two of them together, always outdoors, my father in every instance wearing the territorial scowl of an Alpha-male protecting his property. But what I notice above all about them is the absence of other people; in only one or two of the photos are my mother and father joined by others. The overall impression is one of a relationship carried out clandestinely or, alternatively, between the last two people left on earth. Perhaps they simply did not have friends; perhaps they did not have any need of them, they were complete on their own. But knowing my father as I do, surely he would want to have been seen with a woman as lovely as my mother on his arm; he would have wanted, not to show her off, but to
flaunt her, to goad other men with her. Look, here, look what I’ve managed to land. Want a piece? ’Cos she’s not fucking available. That would be my father’s style. He would not have wanted to keep her to himself. What would have been the point in that?