Meeting the English (23 page)

Even in England, the High Court released the Guildford Four, admitting that all they had ever done to earn imprisonment was play cards and be Irish. In Hampstead, warm mornings ripened into sweaty afternoons, the sunshine was gold all day. A kindly colour, like the bright washes of early technicolour; as if London were playing itself in a movie, and needed flattering lights. But:

‘I'm sick of London, actually,' said Struan Robertson to Giles, as they stood on the Heath, contemplating the yellow grass and haystacks, the amiable, puffy clouds. ‘I mean,' he went on, waving at the hunkered grey horizon, ‘it's just money, isn't it?' They'd just been to the Pond.

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Giles, blinking, thrusting his awkward paws in his linen pockets. ‘There's all sorts here, you know, Struan, all sorts of people.'

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘aye, that's the problem, though, isn't it? Too many folk, and nobody cares?'

‘You know, Struan,' said Giles, ‘when I was your age, and came to London, I worked that one out too. Nobody cares.'

‘Were you not born here?' asked Struan, astonished. He had thought of Giles as essential to Hampstead, just as bings were to Cuik.

‘Amsterdam, actually,' said Giles, ‘my people came to England in 1939. Saw which way the wind was blowing, you see.' He paused, stuck his hands deeper in his pockets, coughed: ‘Jewish family, don't you know.'

‘You havnae an accent,' said Struan, astonished. In Cuik, most folk still said ‘to jew down' for getting a bargain.

‘Well, no,' said Giles, ‘you see, they sent me to school here. Ampleforth. Just the place for a little Jewish Dutch boy. Frightfully nice monks. Books.' And he smiled at Struan, his boyish smile with the eyebrows pushed anxiously together. ‘So you see,' Giles went on, ‘when, after all that, university, and so on, I came to London, and worked out what you worked out, that no one cares here, no one notices, I didn't feel bad about it. Because really, do you know, for a chap like me, that was just what I needed. That was absolutely terrific.' And Giles opened his shirt-sleeved arms in an expansive gesture, as up the path and into the arc of that arm and the warmth of his great dimpling smile, loped long-legged Bill, carrying the towels.

‘Struan is tired of London,' said Giles to Bill.

‘Then he's tired of life,' said Bill.

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘that'd be right.' And they all laughed.

Struan knew Giles and Bill quite well, now, even though they were adults. You could almost call them friends. It was because Struan still pushed along to the Pond most mornings – the one journey to which Phillip would not raise his tiny, telegraphed, moth-on-lamp-shade objections; the one way left to get him to sleep in the day – and Giles and Bill were usually there. All the long push, in fact, Struan would look forward to seeing them, tweedy and silky, waving a greeting, ready to talk to Phillip while Struan did his weights and had his swim. They'd never actually given Phillip a dip since that memorable August morning, though: he had proper, though so far ineffective, hydrotherapy these days, twice a week in a hot chlorinated pool in St John's Wood.

‘Have you told him?' said Bill, grinning beatifically at Giles.

‘Not yet,' said Giles.

And Bill said, ‘Struan, we heard it was your birthday. We heard you're going to turn eighteen?'

‘Oh no,' said Struan, ‘that'd be Juliet.' The new Juliet, that was: still very much in residence in Yewtree Row. Victorious Juliet, who only allowed her mother to speak to her on the phone twice a week. Small and nearly slim and short-skirted Juliet. Juliet with the pretty, jaggedy haircut with crimped bits over her nose and mad wee plaits in the top. Juliet who only took drugs at weekends, now, at events called ‘raves' in the company of Struan's former English teacher, Ron Fox. (Juliet, by her own admission, would still be on speed if it was available, but it turned out that the Lovely Pills, like so much else, had come to Celia via Jake's dealer Frankie, a connection now severed. Juliet had been very bad-tempered, during cold turkey.) Juliet with the nose piercing and small tattoo. Juliet who bossily rang people up—

‘That's right,' said Bill, ‘Juliet. She even phoned up your gran.'

‘She never did,' said Struan, blushing to his hair.

‘Straight up,' said Bill. ‘Your gran can't make it, but she was pleased to be asked. And then Juliet talked to Giles, and Giles talked to me, and well – all sorts of folk here feel that we owe you, so we've organized you a party.'

‘Och,' said Struan, sincerely, ‘no.'

‘Yes,' said Giles, ‘we're going to the zoo.'

‘The zoo?' said Struan.

‘My idea,' said Bill. ‘For tea.'

‘Have you been?' asked Giles.

‘We can push Phil along,' said Bill.

‘Or not,' said Giles.

‘Celia is coming,' said Bill.

‘Jeese,' said Struan.

‘Now,' said Bill, ‘she's such a pretty thing, Struan.'

‘She's mad as a bat,' said Struan. ‘Kind of girl who likes getting her ribs broken.'

‘Struan,' said Bill, ‘you rescued her from the pond. You have to let me keep my romantic dreams alive. I love being match-maker.'

‘Who else have you invited?' asked Struan. ‘Myfanwy?'

‘We have not,' said Giles.

‘OK then,' said Struan, ‘thank Christ for small mercies.'

Struan had not laid eyes on Myfanwy since Gnome Morning. Myfanwy had gone to Cricklewood, where the Goodies weren't, and Mr Riley was, and Struan did not plan to visit. She'd moved into her own railway cottage, where, said Giles, she could appreciate her own wisteria and carriage lamps, and wipe her own stains off the famous oatmeal carpet, and service her own debt by renting out the flat in the Finchley Road to an obliging family from Saudi Arabia.

In the other cottage, presumably appreciating the mirror-image carriage lamps and carpet, was Jake Prys. Myfanwy had fetched him home, battered and dishevelled and on the run from Frankie, from the Notting Hill Police Station in the middle of the Carnival. They hadn't charged him with anything, though, to Struan's chagrin: not cheque fraud, which Celia attested he'd frequently committed, not Damage to the Cricklewood cottages, not Taking Without Permission for all the times he'd whizzed the MG round town, not even Possession, though, said Juliet who went to visit, he was still bug-eyed and stoned as a rabbit if you asked her. Nothing: Myfanwy had just sent him to a clinic.

‘What's the matter, Struan?' asked Bill.

‘Just thinking,' said Struan. Thinking about Jake, riffling through the dog-eared hand that went: Jake the car thief; Jake the fraud; Jake with cheques in the Royal Bank; Jake in the night; Jake with coke; Jake in the kitchen; Jake throwing shapes; Jake's hand in Shirin's hair at the bottom of the kitchen stair. And with that last image, always, Shirin's elegant profile, talking to the police that night, the Celia Night, when they all got home from the Royal Free. Shirin's voice, calm as the radio, saying, ‘He asked for the car key, as he had before, and I gave it to him. He said he wanted to take his girlfriend out for a spin. The car wasn't stolen.' Sticking up for him. Sticking up for him. Jake in the kitchen, saying, ‘fancy her much?'; saying, ‘I've got a lady,' and moving his hips. But maybe Jake Prys got the car key off Shirin, and then just kissed her, in the way he had, the way he thrust his fists down on the pub table, the way he crawled through windows, the way he reached out his hand at the pub, and hit Struan Robertson, bang across the face …

‘Struan,' said Bill. ‘whatever it is, stop thinking about it. You'll give yourself wrinkles. Are you worried about the party?'

‘I'm not great at parties,' said Struan. ‘To be honest.'

‘The zoo,' said Giles, ‘is one of my very favourite places. The black-handed gibbons. The marmosets. The Twilight World of the Small Mammal. Super. Especially on a dampish day.'

‘It'll be beautiful,' said Bill. ‘A beautiful thing. You wait and see.' Struan nodded, and looked at Giles' kind hairy mammalian face, and Bill's smiling piscine one, and nodded again and kicked the dry earth at his feet.

‘Cheers anyway,' he said. ‘Thanks. It's good of you.'

*   *   *

Sometimes Phillip thought he was dead, and sometimes he thought he was alive. Being dead was all right, being dead was quite comfortable: they had arranged for him in purgatory a simulacrum of his study, and they let him get on with his play. It was a terrific play, not the usual sort, it was about a Welsh boy, do you see, a working boy, in the Pits, and his Da, and his struggle to get free. When he wrote it, the typewriter sang, and the words came back to him in a Scottish accent, which was an effect, he thought, of being dead, but a grand effect, part of the solidarity of the working classes. The play was green and shone on the telly, for now, it was a
Play for Today
maybe, but that was just a start, Phil would get it on the stage where it belonged, it would be at the Old Vic, it would get a crit to make old Osborne green.

The trouble was, there was no sure route to being dead. Most of the time, they made him be alive. Alive was worse. Alive was bumpety-bump in the wheelchair, light in the eyes and a close-up of Struan's spots. Being alive was Giles or some other bugger talking on the radio high above his head. Salman Rushdie, still in the sodding news, and no one to move the radio down to a decent level, where you could hear it, where you could get hold of the dial and bloody adjust it. Being alive was being hungry, or being cold, or itching in some specific part of your body, for instance, between the toes, and no help for it. Being alive was hours in the study with that chill or that itch, and no one there, having a nap the fuck he was. Alive was no way to tell anyone except twitch and typing boring typing onto a fire screen, a film, a telly, a computer for fucksake and all your words were scattered as spillikins and so, God damn it, was your spelling. Being alive was them all going away and your own voice in your own head bashing on like a wasp in a jam jar.

When you were alive, you knew your latest wife's name, and that she visited you maybe twice a day, and that you were never never going to have her again because none of the bits of you worked, none of the bits you needed. When you were alive you could not read for yourself, and when they read to you they read the wrong parts. When you were alive your son did not come to visit you, not ever, not in the night, not in the day because probably he hated you for being alive. Probably, he was in league with his mother now. Going to come with her with the thing, the square, the cushion, the hillock the billow, the bloody pillow for fucksake, he was going to hold it on your head, because she'd filled his mind with poison, she'd told him his dad was standing in his way, so he was coming with the pillow and the day they came, you, Phillip Prys, would be able to do nothing about it.

When you were alive you did try to tell them. Tell them about the pillow the billow the murder coming. You sent a lot of messages to the Scottish boy using the plectrum, the telegram, the thumb, about Jake and Myfanwy and their intentions to do you, to have you and to bury you under the hillock, smother you in a barrow, Othello you with a hanky, a headscarf, a pillow a pillow, and you hadn't been at Bletchley Park, is it? Not a gentleman, is it. A man, a man, a bloody Welshman. No Latin at his school, no Cambridge for him. And so all the messages were in the wrong code.

Being alive was the bastard. Being alive was the pits. When you were alive you just had to close your eyes and hope you'd wake up dead.

*   *   *

One of the reasons Giles and Bill were so blithe about Phillip, thought Struan, as he strapped him into the chair and settled the rug round him, that they were so pleased with his restored ability to communicate, was that you couldn't bring the Amstrad to the Heath. At home, this ponderous machine with its bright green script dominated Phillip's waking hours and reduced Struan's life to an endless series of tiny adjustments – of Phillip's head in front of the screen, the pillow under his neck – and hundreds of intricate crossword puzzles with surreal, baffling, luminous green answers:
My fan concusion. Jak get late. Di I stop. She wil.

Phillip, Struan agreed with the glass-eyed consultant and a series of therapists, could no longer spell. They all smiled encouragingly about this, as if Phillip were a slightly backward child, and said it was marvellous, the progress he had made already. But they only spent an hour with him, max. They left Struan to find out how frustrating the whole game could be: this chasing of words with a broken butterfly net; this dipping in alphabet soup with a long-handled spoon. Struan, and Phillip, to be fair.

No one but these two had to go through the leaving-the-Heath rituals: the endless finding of a yes/no question – ‘Ready to go home now?'; the squatting down and the checking of eyes and fingers; the waiting for an answer like a radio signal coming in from very far away. Phillip's finger-taps had a voice for Struan now: a little, tremulous high-pitched voice; like one of the old ladies in the Home; a voice like a fish hook in his softest organ, the conscience.

Giles and Bill didn't hear that. They just sat by Phillip, holding his hand, and talked away, rubbish mostly. And there was nothing, Struan thought as he bumped Phillip over the stones, shoved him along the earthy ruts, nothing he missed as much as talking rubbish. Just walking along with Juliet, chatting, the wheelchair between them blank as a pram. These days, you couldn't do that. These days, you had to watch your tongue, because he could hear you.

And these days, anyway, Juliet was hardly ever there. Juliet, extraordinary to think of, had a job. Just two days after the rescuing of Celia, one day after the jaggedy haircut, and on the very last of Frankie's Pills, Juliet had walked into the small boutique on the corner of the High Street, the one that belonged to an eccentric friend of Myfanwy's and sold odd, elaborate Japanese clothes and super-expensive scarves, and asked if they had any hours going. Their pretty assistant had gone down with the
Marchioness,
and in the general disarray, and on the grounds of being the daughter of a local celebrity, Juliet landed three days a week, with clothes allowance. Then, inspired by the time her CV had taken to type on Phillip's typewriter – actually, she'd got completely fed up with it after three versions, and had made Struan do it, clack and clack, Struan, and stop whingeing about the fibs – she had enrolled herself on a Secretarial Skills course in the college at Swiss Cottage, using the remnants of her educational trust to pay for it.