England and Other Stories (2 page)

‘Well you can leave that to me. I’ll be the one who won’t have to bullshit. But don’t get me wrong, Don. I’m planning on the same as you. And I’ve promised Brenda.’

Abbot and Yates. No arguing about the alphabetical order. We clean windows, not just any old windows. It took a while to get it off the ground, so to speak, but then . . . All that glittering glass.

Now they live with the gentry in Blackheath. And now it isn’t just him and Bren and Don and Marion, but their kids, a boy and a girl each. Who aren’t even kids any more. They’d grown up in Blackheath and gone to school there, and then they’d all gone, with one exception, to university. University! It had been a good move, to cross the river.

The one exception was Don and Marion’s Sebastian. Sebastian! How did Don and Marion come up with a name like that? Thank God he was known as Seb. Seb had gone straight from being sixteen, or so it seemed, to working in one of those towers. For a New York bank. At twenty-three Seb was making serious money, or crazy money—take your pick—money that made Don and him look pretty silly. That made getting A levels and going to university look pretty silly too. Or as Don put it, and Charlie was never quite sure how Don meant it, Seb was one of the barrow boys, wasn’t he? One of the barrow boys who’d moved on and moved in. Moved on and moved up.

Charlie looks at the towers. His own son Ian is studying in Southampton to be a marine biologist, which makes Charlie feel—in a different way from how Don must feel about Seb—out of his depth. Ha. There was a joke there. And when Charlie had first told Don about Ian’s leanings in life Don had said, ‘My Uncle Eddy was in the marines in the war. I never knew they had their own biologists.’

Charlie and Don could say, ‘My old man was a docker.’ What else could they say? What would their kids say? ‘My old man was a window cleaner’? They wouldn’t even say ‘my old man’. Except maybe Seb. Seb might say it, and laugh.

Down in Southampton, Ian wouldn’t be able to think: My city, my London. He wouldn’t be able to point and say, ‘See—over there.’ When Charlie and Brenda drive down to Southampton Charlie humbles himself and listens while his son talks. Maybe that thing about the Maldives came from Ian. Of course it did. But it’s not difficult to be humble. Perhaps it isn’t even humility. Sometimes while Ian talks Charlie feels a little quick whoosh inside. It’s like the whoosh he feels when with Don on a Sunday morning he hits a really good drive. ‘That one’s shifting, Charlie.’ It’s like the whoosh he once felt years ago, after a fight, when the ref’s arm would go up, lifting his.

My son Ian. A marine biologist.

He sits on the bench in his tracksuit, feeling the circulation in his veins, feeling, as he’s always done, good in his own skin. Charlie is a businessman (a word he can find strange) and a successful one, yet he would still say that the most important thing is your own body. It’s what you have, what you come with, and to be glad of it and trust in it is simply life’s greatest gift.

So it was funny how it was the urge and aim of most people—almost a sort of law of the world—to go up into their heads, into the topmost part of themselves and live there, live in and by their heads, when most people (he was the exception proving the rule) were afraid of heights.

He looks at the towers, a hand screening his eyes from the dazzle, and smiles. Or it looks like a smile. Only Brenda would know that it’s not a smile. Only Brenda would see the two little extra pinches at the corners of Charlie’s mouth and understand this contradiction in his face. He has no repertoire of frowns. When Charlie’s worried or puzzled he smiles, but smiles differently.

He’s worried, and has been now for some time, about his friend Don, about how he’s putting on weight. Don has always been a big man, but big of frame, not flabby or cumbersome or slow. Now he’s spreading, he’s simply expanding. It’s a sort of joke—that he’s putting on pounds—a joke that even Don likes to tell against himself, but it isn’t really a joke at all, and when Charlie plays golf with Don now he knows it’s not just for fun, but it’s important for keeping Don moving. They should play every Sunday. They should play the other nine holes, not just spend them in the bar.

He knows there’s no point, there’s never been, in asking Don to come jogging with him. And how would it look now, how could it possibly work: Don lumbering and sweating beside him while he, Charlie, just hovered on his toes? It has even come to seem a little wrong to Charlie that he should go jogging by himself while Don has this weight problem—which is completely illogical, even vaguely superstitious. Like thinking you shouldn’t go to the Maldives because the Maldives might one day disappear.

But Charlie worries about Don. It’s as if all the money is at last turning to fat. Fifty years ago and more, Charlie had thought that he was just a little scrap of nothing and this bigger kid might take him under his wing. And so it was. Though now you could also say it was Don who should be for ever grateful to Charlie. But Charlie feels the strange worrying need, like some unpaid debt, to take his ever bulkier friend under his wing. How?

And now he has the other worry too, this new worry that could knock the first one aside. He’s going to talk to Don about it soon. Don will tell him what else he knows, when they play their round in just a couple of hours. By the sound of it, there won’t be much concentrating on Don’s weight problem or even on the golf. Crisp bright morning though it is.

Charlie is a businessman, yes that’s what he can legitimately be called, but, even though he likes to sit and look at them, he doesn’t keep his ear close to what goes on inside those towers. That’s their business, he just cleans the windows, so to speak. But Don keeps an ear, it’s even an inside ear, because of Seb. Charlie has sometimes had the bizarre vision of Don actually cleaning a window, on the twenty-fifth floor say, something Don could never do (though Charlie could, easy-peasy), and looking in and waving at his son.

Don had called and said, ‘Seb’s in trouble, deep trouble.’

Trouble? Wasn’t Seb making telephone numbers? Wasn’t Seb making them all look silly?

Don said, ‘They’re going to pull the rug from under him. Him and everyone else. Something big’s coming, Charlie, something big and bad. If you ask me, from what Seb’s heard—it’s not just Seb who’s in trouble, it’s the whole fucking world.’

Did Don have drink in his voice? No. Charlie didn’t say anything to Brenda, only that it was Don calling about tomorrow, though Brenda would have thought: Why did Don need to call? It was a Saturday night. Charlie didn’t hear anything on the late-night news. Later, cuddling up, he said, ‘Aren’t you glad, Bren?’

‘Glad what?’

‘Glad I was never a marine biologist.’

‘What are you on about?’

He didn’t really know, himself. There was something about Don’s voice, there was something about that ‘whole fucking world’.

His instinct the next morning was to get up and do the usual jog, to be on his feet, to prepare—to prepare his mind by preparing his body. And it was such a beautiful morning, early September, the tingle of autumn in the air.

Now he gets up from the bench and takes a last look at the towers. They gleam back. Then he turns and jogs again through the glistening trees, feeling at fifty-seven as light on his feet as he did when he was seventeen.

W
HEN
A
ARON AND
I were younger we used to chase women. It’s a phrase. How many times do you actually see a man chasing a woman, say ten yards behind and gaining? We were both runners anyway, literally—athletes. With me it was the hurdles. We both did the same PE course at college, and girls were part of our physical education. I’ll be the first to say that Aaron was better at it than me. In his case it was more that the women chased him, or crawled all over him. It was how he was made. I tended to get his rejects. But even Aaron’s rejects could be something, and one day I married and settled down with one of them. Patti.

After that I didn’t hang out with Aaron so much. In fact we hardly heard from each other. Maybe he thought that by marrying Patti and settling down I was also letting the side down. Well, too bad.

I wouldn’t have said this ten years ago, but I think I’m the type who sees life like a book, with chapters. In one chapter you mess around, then you marry, have kids, get a place of your own, and so on. I’m not like Aaron. I wouldn’t like to guess how many books Aaron’s read. But that’s the point perhaps with physical education, it’s not really about reading.

It was an option anyway. If you did the course and got the certificate you could make a career, a life out of it. It was a chance. Meanwhile we were athletes too.

I never had any illusions about making it to the big competitions. I was just quite good at hurdling, I loved the hurdles. Aaron used to say, ‘Count me out, man. When I run, I want to run. I don’t want to run at something that’ll trip me up.’

I didn’t say, ‘Doesn’t that apply to women?’

They tripped him up and they crawled all over him. And they crawled all over him because he was quite a specimen. It was a vicious circle. But Aaron, I believe—just to talk about his running—could have been championship stuff. I say this as a qualified PE teacher.

Anyhow, the time came, years back, when I’d settled down with Patti, and Aaron and I had almost lost touch. Just now and then Patti and I would have our ‘wondering about Aaron’ conversations. I was always a bit nervous about them, Patti having been one of Aaron’s rejects. I sometimes thought this was the reason why the gap had opened up between Aaron and me. It was Patti’s doing, it was Aaron’s, it was mine. I don’t know. Once—we were having Sunday breakfast—I actually said to Patti, ‘I wonder if those women aren’t catching up with him.’ I might have said ‘the years’ instead. It was just a casual, private-joke thing, but it was a bit careless perhaps.

Patti didn’t pick it up one way or the other. She said, ‘Mmm, I wonder too.’ She took a bite of toast. Then she said, ‘If you’re worried about him, give him a call, look him up.’ As if she was daring me.

She was pregnant with Daryl, our first, around this time. She was crazy about marmalade! Maybe she was thinking: Well, if he’s hankering for a last boys’ night out, he better take his chance while he can. Now we have the two boys, Daryl and Warren, two growing boys. Lots of boys’ nights in.

Anyhow, I never made the call. But one day, years later, I get a call, out of the blue, from Aaron. He sounds just like the old Aaron, but he also sounds a bit cagey. It turns out he’s called to tell me he’s going to get married. I wait a bit, in case I’m being wound up. Then I wait anyway, in case he has some joke to make about it. I wait for an ‘Okay, man, don’t laugh’. But the only joke is that he’s speaking in a sort of whisper, as if it’s top-secret information he can trust only with me.

Then he says he’d like me—me and Patti of course—to come to the wedding. To make things clear, he says it’s going to be a ‘low-key’ thing, in a registry office, just the two of them. Except you need a witness. So would Patti and I like to be there, to witness?

All the time, apart from swallowing back my surprise, I’m thinking: He didn’t have to tell me this—a witness could be anyone—but I get the feeling he thinks that by telling me and having me as his witness he won’t have to tell anyone else. I feel honoured and I also feel arm-twisted, but how could I not say yes? Even though, apparently, it means a trip to Birmingham. That’s where he is now. Guess what—teaching PE.

I say, ‘Yes, of course.’ Before I’ve even spoken to Patti. I also feel like saying, ‘Don’t worry, Aaron, I won’t breathe a word.’

I say, ‘So what’s her name then?’

‘It’s Wanda.’

‘Wanda,’ I say, trying to form a picture of a Wanda. I don’t say, ‘So, is she pregnant?’

Fortunately, Patti more or less has the same thought as me: How can we not? Perhaps she’s really thinking: Must we? But she looks all keen and interested, she even makes a joke about it, a pretty good joke too. ‘Well, Wandas will never cease.’

So we go through with it, this low-key, hush-hush event. We manage to park the boys with Patti’s parents. We’re even ready to book a hotel. But Aaron says, ‘Nah, man, stay with us, no problem.’ This needs a bit of thought. I don’t like to spell it out: this might be intruding on Aaron and Wanda’s wedding night. We aren’t at PE college any more.

But I soon get the picture that, apart from the business at the registry office and a few drinks and a meal, nothing much out of the ordinary is going to happen. There’s not going to be a honeymoon. Aaron and Wanda have apparently been shacked up together for quite a while. There’d be a spare room in their flat for Patti and me. It’s just that they’ve both decided it’s time to get married.

‘Okay,’ I say, slightly wishing it would be easier to insist on paying for a hotel anyway. With the two boys, Patti and me have to watch the cash. But of course what I’m mostly thinking, and so’s Patti, is: What’s this Wanda like? And, given all the years that have passed: What’s Aaron like?

Well, it may put me in a bad light, but I have to say Wanda was a disappointment. At least at first. A surprise and a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean she wasn’t perfectly—fine. But if all those years of what Aaron once got up to were supposed to be a selection process, so that in the end he’d pick out a real star—well, Wanda was nothing special.

I even felt, which doesn’t put me in a good light either, I did better with Patti.

I didn’t share this thought with Patti, but I could feel her tuning in to it and relaxing. It put me in a good light with her. I think Patti’s fear was that we were about to meet some woman who’d have me, in spite of myself, spending the whole weekend with my tongue hanging out. That this might have been the real purpose of the exercise. Aaron just wanted to show off his trophy.

To be honest, it was my fear too.

Wanda was built along pretty pared-down lines, which wasn’t, as I recall, how Aaron had liked them. She wasn’t skinny, but she was, well, wiry, with a tough little pair of shoulders. And her face, though it had a cheeky way of making you feel good and want to laugh, wasn’t a face that would stop you in your tracks. It could even sometimes look a bit hard and locked up.