Heartbreak Hotel (26 page)

Dai Jones’s Outfitter’s stood between the chippy and the magic crystals shop. Its window display was celebrated for its continuity. Headless mannequins, dressed in an assortment of sports jackets, corduroys and cavalry-twill trousers, leaned at a drunken angle season in and season out. It had clothed generations of farmers and their sons; indeed, generations of Joneses had come and gone. Apparently Connie from Costcutter’s had worked there as a young man before changing sex and crossing the street to work at the supermarket.

Buffy told Harold this as they sat in the flat above the shop, drinking a celebratory bottle of Prosecco. It was Saturday morning; sunlight blazed through the window. Harold’s luggage – a laptop and a suitcase – sat on the floor.

‘I shall live like a gypsy until my work is done,’ said Harold. ‘As Virginia Woolf so rightly pointed out, all one needs is a room of one’s own.’

‘But you’ve got a whole house back in Hackney.’

‘Don’t nit-pick.’ He told Buffy about a novelist he knew who lived in a mansion in Dorset. ‘Every day he solemnly walks across the garden to a freezing little shed, littered with dead wasps. It’s the only place he can write.’ Harold got up and flung open the window. ‘And look! All human life is here! I love these people, they’re stopping to chat to each other, it’s like Brigadoon!’

Buffy joined him at the window. ‘I felt that, when I first came here. The dogs are friendlier too.’

‘Look down there.’ Harold pointed. ‘Even the postman’s whistling.’

Buffy stared. ‘Good God, it’s Andy.’

It was, indeed, Andy. Red postman’s jacket, parcel in his hand. Despite the street noises his whistling could faintly be heard as he delivered the parcel to Jill’s Things and emerged a few moments later. He climbed into a Royal Mail van and drove off.

What on earth was Andy doing in Knockton? He had left for London the week before. Was he filling in for the regular postie who had broken his leg?

‘Who’s Andy?’ asked Harold.

Buffy started to tell him. As he got to the bit about the fishing he noticed a commotion down in the high street. Somebody was walking along the middle of the road. He was naked, except for a pair of grubby underpants. As he walked, he raised his arms and twirled round to display himself.

People stopped and stared. Behind the cavorting figure was a procession of cars. Somebody honked their horn.

It was Conor. Now he was nearer, Buffy recognised him. Even from this distance, he could see that Conor’s puny chest and back were covered in tattoos. A scruffy chap, who looked like one of his mates, skipped along beside him, holding up his mobile to take his photo.

‘Blimey,’ said Harold. ‘Is this normal, for Knockton?’

People came out of the shops to watch. Kids cheered. Conor, who looked unsteady on his feet, was shouting something incomprehensible. ‘Get off the road, you twat!’ a motorist yelled. A dog broke through the crowd and bounded up to Conor, barking.

Buffy and Harold hurried down the stairs and through the shop. The assistant was gazing out of the window. ‘He’s been at the wacky baccy again,’ he said.

By the time they were out in the road Conor had given up. Shaking with cold, he sat slumped on the kerb outside the newsagent’s. His friend tried to haul him to his feet but he shook his head. Burying his face in his hands, he burst into tears.

‘Poor thing, he really is the runt of the litter, isn’t he?’ The woman who ran the charity shop stood beside Buffy, shaking her head. ‘Should have been drowned at birth.’

‘What’s he up to?’

‘Did you see he’s had
phone
tattooed on his back?’ she asked. ‘Next to
Voda
?’

‘Why on earth would he do that?’

‘Apparently he fancies himself as a walking advertisement for Vodafone. He thinks they’ll pay him when they see the photos and he can do it around the country.’

Even Buffy, for a moment, was lost for words.

Harold pulled a notebook out of his pocket. ‘Talk about material. And I only arrived last night.’

‘I wonder if he’s run that past the people at Vodafone,’ said Buffy. ‘I’m not entirely sure that a deranged skunk dealer is the best endorsement of their product.’

On Monday morning, alerted by the frenzied yapping of his dog, Buffy hurried down the hallway. Fig tore at the letters as they spewed onto the floor. Buffy, kicking him aside, opened the front door. Andy stood there with his red plastic cart.

‘I got you to thank for this,’ he said, grinning.

It turned out that the relief postman, called in when the regular postie broke his leg, had himself fallen ill. Andy had heard about this in the pub and the next day had offered himself as a stopgap.

‘But you don’t live here,’ said Buffy. ‘You don’t know the route, or whatever it’s called. How did you swing it?’

‘Used your address as my residence, sorry about that. Boned up on the walk and Bob’s your uncle.’ He said he had fallen in love with Knockton and taken unpaid leave from his job in London. There was no time to talk as he had to get a move on. Which he did, whistling.

As he pottered around that morning Buffy ruminated on the unintended consequences of his courses. Who could have predicted, for instance, that his gardening course would have germinated a novel? Then there were the love affairs, never the ones he had expected. Later that morning he was at the chemist’s, buying cream for his haemorrhoids, when Amy walked in. She told him she had just come from the doctor’s surgery.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered. ‘You’re the first to know – after Nolan, of course. I haven’t even told his mum yet.’

So now a baby was added to the list!

‘His mum’s a right royal pain in the bum, to be honest,’ Amy said. ‘But I’ve given her a makeover. Amazing what you can do with a bit of shading and highlighting, takes pounds off a face. She’s going to go on the internet and find love. Then she can move out and we can have the house.’

Business was quiet that week – in fact, they had no bookings at all. It was early November, the most miserable month of the year, and the weather had turned freezing. Talk of babies prompted Buffy to remember his own grandchild, whose photos had been emailed to him on a regular basis but who he had never actually seen. What better time than the present?

That afternoon he looked up the train times to London. Already his heart was beating faster. Not only would he meet his grandchild, he could also talk to Nyange about her tutoring a course on personal finance and, even more enticingly, revisit the bright lights which in these dark days beckoned so seductively from all those miles away, from a world away.

A storm raged on the Wednesday night but Andy was unaware of it. He was staying at a Travelodge outside Leominster and his room was sealed from the elements. When he emerged in the dark, early the next morning, he found branches littering the puddled tarmac of the car park. Driving to the sorting office he had to swerve round a fallen tree.

Why wasn’t he staying at Myrtle House? It was a lot friendlier than a Travelodge. But basically it was a B&B; Buffy had been generous during that holiday week but Andy didn’t want to presume on the man’s hospitality. As his headlights probed the darkness he knew, however, that the answer lay somewhere deeper. He needed the sanitised silence, the total absence of any human contact, to clear his head. He was in limbo, suspended between one life and another, and what better place could a chap float weightlessly than in a Travelodge? As he drove through the darkness he suddenly realised:
I’m going through a midlife crisis
.

It was a relief to have the sentence deliver itself up to him, fully formed. It had been lurking at the back of his mind but until now he had only applied it to other people.
I’m having a midlife crisis, I’ve joined the club
. The symptoms were there: he had bailed out dramatically; he had bailed out so alarmingly it turned his bowels to water; he had bailed out, and he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. That pretty well summed up a midlife crisis, didn’t it?

The sun rose in a clear blue sky and now he was making his deliveries around Knockton, walking up garden paths littered with twigs, edging his way around spilled litter bins. The air was as sharp as a knife; he felt a surge of mad optimism. Later he felt it was some sort of portent. A cat streaked across the road; schoolkids jostled each other as they made their way towards St Jude’s, a school with which he was becoming familiar. He felt, weirdly, that he was living intensely in the present, and yet far memories – memories he thought he had forgotten – drifted into his head … A song they sang in his teenage band, when he played the drums:
Take me down, baby, take me where you go
. He was still a virgin then, he hadn’t a clue about anything. And yet the words whispered urgently in his ear, they whispered across the years as if they had some significance, and his life between those days and now, the great mass of his adulthood, disappeared as if it had never been. It was odd, this sense of dislocation, and yet it was strangely invigorating.

And now he was walking up the drive of the Powys Camper Van Centre, his last delivery. It was on the edge of town – a fenced car park filled with vehicles, bunting fluttering in the wind, and a bungalow-cum-office. Among the mail was a recorded-delivery letter for
Mr J. Walmer
.

Andy rang the bell. The door was opened by a young woman, her face streaming with tears.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She looked at the letter. ‘That’s for Dad. Have you got a pen?’

‘Sure you’re all right?’

She looked at him and shook her head. ‘No.’ She was thin, with sallow skin and lank brown hair. ‘A tree’s smashed into his greenhouse. He’s going to go ballistic.’

She said her father had gone away for the night and would be back later that day, that she was holding the fort. ‘Not that we’ll have any customers. Nobody buys camper vans in November, do they? I mean, would you?’

‘Want me to have a look?’

She led him through the bungalow and out the back door. He saw a lawn, littered with glass, and half a greenhouse. A tree had buckled the other half.

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Andy. ‘It’s an act of God.’

She stood beside him, pulling her jumper over her hands, rocking to and fro in her misery. ‘You don’t know my dad.’ She looked so small, so freezing and defenceless. He thought: What the hell!

‘You got a saw?’

Andy pulled off his jacket and set to work. In an hour he had chopped up the tree – more of a sapling, to be honest – and stacked the branches against a coal bunker. She sat huddled in a blanket, watching him. How manly he felt! His arms ached but he wasn’t letting on.

‘When your dad comes home he won’t have such a shock,’ he said, his chest heaving. ‘It’s just to show willing.’

‘You’re a champ.’ She suddenly smiled – a radiant smile that lit up her pinched little face. His heart shifted.

Her name was Ginnie.
My name is Virginia
. Andy remembered the snuffle of laughter, from his schooldays.
Virgin for short, but not for long
. He felt his face reddening. He and Ginnie cleared up the glass together and then she made some coffee. They sat in the chaotic office, warming their hands on the mugs.

‘Funny thing is, I’ve never been in one of them,’ she said.

‘A camper van?’

‘There’s a big wide world out there and I’m stuck here. I want to go to Tabriz.’

‘Where’s Tabriz?’

‘Search me.’

They laughed. Ginnie scratched her arms. She said she had eczema, and that it flared up when she was anxious. Andy caught her looking at the clock. Her father was a bully, he could sense it. In a weird way, he felt he knew her life. And yet they had only just met!

And now he was telling her about his mother, who also had eczema, and about his sister who had run away to Hull with a travelling salesman. And Ginnie was telling him how she was good at drawing and wanted to be a fashion designer but then her mother had died in a car crash and her dad had needed her in the office and to tell the truth she didn’t know one end of a camper van from the other. And he told her how he nicked his mother’s nail varnish to paint his toy soldiers and what a bollocking he got. For some reason this led on to the neurotic women he had met on the internet, how they all seemed to be in mourning for their cats. And he knew he should be returning to the depot but now it was one o’clock and still thank God her father hadn’t arrived, nor had a single customer.

Outside the front door stood his mail cart, forgotten. As Ginnie refilled the kettle he told her about his father, how he had found love in a caravan park, and as he spoke he felt a tingling sensation in his scalp – Christ, was history repeating itself? But now he was telling her how he made up limericks while he tramped the streets and she told him a rude one about the Bishop of South Mimms, and as she made them yet more coffee he realised: my throat is dry; my voice is hoarse. I’ve been talking for two hours non-stop.

The ‘Basic Cookery’ course was planned for the last week in November. They had a full house again; hopefully this time people would actually turn up. Voda, who was doing the bookings, said that all the students appeared to be women. This had surprised Buffy, who presumed that the vast majority of useless cooks would be male. He had pictured abandoned husbands fumbling around with tin-openers. Voda told him that this was old-fashioned; nowadays most women were so busy working that they hadn’t a clue about cooking, it was neither taught in school nor did girls learn it at their mother’s knee. Boiling up some penne and slathering it with a jar of pasta sauce was about their limit. Besides, as had become apparent, it was mainly women who came on the courses in the first place.

Harold, however, was going to join them for dinner each evening. This was partly for male solidarity and partly because the writer’s life was a lonely one and by six o’clock he was desperate for company, let alone a drink.

He told Buffy that the novel was forging ahead. Andy the postie had now joined his cast of fictional characters. This had been prompted by the sight of Andy’s mail cart parked outside the Camper Van Centre, spotted by Harold on his lunchtime stroll. This, in turn, had resulted in a whole new plot line where the local postie, Alec (new name!), had fallen for the manager’s wife while delivering a parcel; stealing one of the camper vans they had driven off together to start a new life in the Scottish Highlands. A telling detail, the sort of detail that only a novelist could conjure up, was the sight of the abandoned mail cart as the months passed … blanketed with snow during the winter and – inspired touch! – nested in by a robin when spring arrived. Prompted by this, Harold wondered if he should develop the robin theme: the youngsters leaving the nest as a symbol of hope and renewal? Maybe flitting in and out of scenes as a feathered accompaniment to the action? For a while he played with the idea of some metatextual deconstruction – an unreliable avian narrator? This, however, reeked too strongly of Derrida, the French semiologist with whom Harold had baffled generations of students at Holloway College. Somewhere within him, within the warm-blooded body of the novelist, there still lurked the dry bones of the academic.