My Little Armalite (3 page)

For a fraction of a second my heart leapt as I saw that one message was from the assistant to the PA of the acting European editor of
The Paper
, in reply to my jolly invitation to come and hear the VIP. But it was only an automatic allegedly out-of-office reply, the stuck-up Islington shits.

I mean, for God's sake, I had appeared, and only back in 1990, for very nearly a whole minute of total screen time, on a BBC
Newsnight
special devoted to the reunification of Germany! What did I have to
do
for
The
bloody
Paper
to look twice at me?

The rest of my mail was largely from my third-year students, who had, it seemed, banded together to swamp my inbox with complaints that the books I had done for my A levels in 1981 were ‘a bit heavy' for today's finalists. The faculty's Teaching Quality Assessment Guidelines obliged me to reply to each of these whingeing messages personally, in some way at least, within seventy-two hours. There were also three messages from the Teaching Enhancement Unit demanding to know why I had still not filed my own New Appointees' Mission Statement, my Annual
Personal Development Plan, my Course Aims for each module and a Personal Student Goals Statement for each of my students on each of these modules. Not now. Nor did I, naturally, bother answering yet another plea to sign an e-petition against (!) my own union's recently declared policy of boycotting all academic visits and exchanges with Israel.

I decided that I would go out into the garden and de-pot the three small plum trees we had bought two weeks before. Good idea, yes. A nice bit of light, future-oriented and family-centred exercise, then a clean start, clear up the pathetic admin and then straight into it at dawn tomorrow. Exactly. I had plenty of time, for God's sake, a whole seven days and nights. No, eight.

Outside, the rain had just stopped, the air was fresh and clean. Some unusual combination of the elements had allowed a real winter night sky to replace, for once, the muggy orange sodium-lamp haze that normally passes for darkness in London. Venus was already riding high and although the moon was still below the horizon, its light put silver tints into the ozone-eating vapour trails. Pretty nice. And what better picture of trust in the future than a man planting young plum trees for his children under this picture-book sky?

Soon I was working away, my spirits high and rising. In the limitless places behind my eyes, as I dug and planted and trod down, I was breasting a rainbow-crowned hill after a stiff climb, knowing that beyond it would lie, spread out beneath and before me, a wide-screen vision of glorious summer uplands. I hoofed the spade in yet again, and heard vast chords lurking at the edge of my mind, like pre-echos on old vinyl, ready to be unleashed in a triumphal soundtrack of spiritual homecoming:

London, at last!

The only place to be in England, the natural capital of Northern Europe!

I had got us here, as I had always promised I would. True, it had taken a decade or so longer than I had expected, and had also required a stroke of luck (the first-choice candidate for my new job had dropped suddenly out). But after all, everyone needs a break and, one way or another, we were here at last.

And well, really, I ask you: what city can compare?

Where else for a career to burgeon, a family to thrive? Our twin boys would not grow up as beer-swilling teenage bumpkins hanging around the desolate malls of some godforsaken regional so-called centre till the last bus left for their muffled home in the arse-end of nowhere. No, no, not that, not for them! Jack and Will would be cool Young Londoners, travelcard-carrying junior-sophisticate citizens of a perfectly hyper-diverse, postmodern world. Our baby daughter would become no daydreaming backwoods hayseed, lined up for seduction by the first drawling, trust-funded bastard who coolly offered to show her the big world from Mummy's Spare Flat in London. No, no, not that, not she! Mariana would blossom into a laughing metropolitan princess of the
puh-lease
put-down, as blithely familiar with great museums and legendary stages as with multicultural street markets and colourful slang, a fine girl swimming free but unavailable in the infinite variety of London life.

And for Sarah and me, ourselves now in the perhaps
slightly tardy flower of our days? Oh, thank God, no more worthy little galleries laughably proud of their few second-division Impressionists! Never again some condescendingly stripped-back and down-casted travelling production of last year‘s alleged West End hit! From now on it would be the real things, the things we had always known were there to be ours. If not here, where? If not now, before we got really and truly middle-aged, when?

Stop now? Give up? Down tools? Not I!

In I struck with the spade again, panting lightly but positively basking in my manly aches. Beside me by now stood, stoutly pruned, straight and true, soundly trodden down, two new-planted plum trees, each some seven feet tall. The third young
Prunus nigra
was waiting, ready to complete the careful line across the lawn. A tree for each of my children. Soon, very soon, I would be quaffing that bottle of Olde English organic ale. And smoking a single cigarette from the new pack, which was meant to, and which certainly would, last me for the whole week. Around my canines my gums itched and watered, primed for the good old twentieth-century bite of bitter beer and smoke. I rammed my spade decisively, one-handed, down into the earth beside the hole. And that, said Jack, was that, surely?

I moved over to the last treelet, firmly placed my wellington-booted feet on either side of the black plastic tub, gripped it hard between my ankles, bent to grasp the slim trunk low down and heaved carefully upwards. My back gave polite though firm notice that it could no longer be taken for granted, but the mass of soil and roots, somewhat dried out and shrunken by neglect over the past few busy weeks, slid easily from its pot. I lowered the root ball carefully but confidently into the hole.

Shit.

Not quite deep enough. Another three or four inches. Fine. Christ, I was going to murder that beer. Then, for once, a really long bath and a great, early, baby-free night. Excellent. Up early tomorrow and straight down to work, work, uninterrupted, wonderful, career-cracking work at last!

Lay down the tree, then, gently does it. Boot the spade in again. Never mind the blisters. The cold, the wet, so what? Enough of my back, already. Next summer we would all have plums, from our own garden. Our
London
garden. Mariana would be almost three next summer; she would be charging around the lawn in little red shoes, talking gorgeous half-nonsense.

Jack and Will would lift her up to pick her very first, very own plums with her little hands. Sarah would smile. I would have delivered happiness, at last.

Dig, dig, dig.

If the VIP went well, who knew? In a couple of years, I might be earning enough to service the mortgage by myself. Sarah would not have to work just to keep her career going and bring in the, to be honest, ridiculously small (yet, to be even more honest, very necessary) net difference between her taxed wage and the child-minding bills. She would not have to be exhausted or feel guilty about not seeing enough of Mariana. The plums would be sweet. We might even have enough money to move to
north
London …

— Ow, shit! I cried, for in the midst of this heady thought, my spade butted squarely on to something under the ground and jarred to a sudden, total halt.

I was caught flat, mid-rhythm. My ankle shot painfully outwards, twisting my knee and thigh after it. I pitched helplessly forward, let go of the spade with both hands and with a desperate lurch managed to get
my digging foot freed up just in time to make earthfall on the far side of the hole. My trailing left foot, though, caught the lip of the pit. This sneaky little trip-tackle took out my whole leg, and my momentum flung me bodily earthwards. I felt a whack and a burn as my right shin smacked into the iron blade, but before any actual pain could register my nervous system was swamped by a depth charge of agony as the stout spade handle flew upwards and walloped me full in the balls.

I had not been seriously thumped anywhere by anything for several decades, let alone by a solid lump of wood right in the testicles. Volts of icy heat flashed down the insides of my thighs, leaving me lying there, retching, fighting for breath and with a deeply unpleasant hallucination that I was back in the playground of my vicious seventies Devon comprehensive, rolling on the pitiless tarmac, clutching yet again my bruised
taters
.

—Christ, you fucking little bastard! I gasped, once the power of speech returned. Disentangling my legs, I scrambled growling to my feet, stuck my glasses back on my nose, swung the spade up high with my right hand alone, snatched the steel shaft neatly with my left hand, mid-air, as it fell back
(ha!)
and glared back down into the pit, ready to decapitate whatever had dared to cross me.

Empty, dark and dumb, the hole simply waited.

— Oh for God's sake, I sighed.

Digging and filling and treading down the previous two holes had warmed me up, even before that smack in the balls sent blood flying around my system. Now the sweat was cooling my skin in the wintry night. My brow had the slabby sheen of cold wax. My specs slid on my nose. My chest seemed to have been rubbed with fridgy lard. My damp shirt back clung clammily on the hated pads of flab astride my kidneys.

At forty-five, I was by no means terminally unfit as such. I could still swim a twenty-five-metre length underwater, though these days I burst gasping to the surface, ripe with carbon dioxide, scrabbling for a hold on the slippery tiles, the blood thudding hard behind my eyes. But I had a sort of superstitious awe of cold, hard, dirty labour. I would never remotely have considered driving my kids on a motorway with wheels I had
bolted in place myself
. Married and a multiple father, at forty-five I watched young tattooed men blithely flipping cast-iron manhole covers to check my drains, or insouciantly manoeuvring washing-machines single-handedly for me, and felt as though I were paying not to have work done, but for the right to watch these circus feats of unthinking grace and strength.

I peered down, then made several vengeful prods into the soil at the bottom of the hole. Whatever the thing down there was, it was large, solid and curiously semi-hard. Not so much flexible as almost bouncy. Something man-made, for certain. A door off an old
fridge, for example? An ancient tyre? Whatever, it was bloody certain to be large and heavy and hard and awkward and sharp and dirty and wet and cold and scrabbly. It would be very unpleasant, if not actually impossible, for me, alone and without even gloves, to lever and haul from the earth.

Asbestos sprung nastily to mind.

Well, hold on, just one minute, I was not wrestling in the dark with a bloody great lump of old and friable asbestos, not without proper gloves and a facemask at the very least, no thank you very much. True, I could recall my father happily blowing blue dust out of car brake drums
(—Want a go, John?)
, but now even the toughest of migrant workmen knew better. If there was any chance it was asbestos there was absolutely no shame at all, none whatever, in going straight to the Yellow Pages and hiring men with tattoos.

But what if I did get men with tattoos and they found it was indeed asbestos? Well? What exactly happens if a large piece of old asbestos is found buried in your garden? Don't the men with tattoos have to call the council? Do they seal off the road? Strip the whole garden? What a disturbance to start my precious week of work!

Or a wartime bomb?

By no means impossible. Just twenty years before my birth, one set of Northern Europeans had been trying as hard as they could to kill as many as possible of another set of Northern Europeans, right here. A doodlebug. An unstoppable V-2 even, hull oxidising slowly, warhead sweating but still ticking away a foot from my foot …

Nonsense, all nonsense.

Was I a mere four-eyed pen-pusher to be scared off by the thought of a little hard lifting? By ridiculous
imaginings? Was I now going to scuttle back to my laptop, leaving the job unfinished and still hanging over me? This week of all weeks, my make-or-break time?

No, no. I would be done with it this very night.

I stalked over to my garden shed and kicked about in the dark, looking for a certain small metal crate. This was my father's folding blue toolbox, which had been formally presented to me on my last visit, my father having decided that his days of using it were over. I knew roughly where it was, even without a light, because I had that very day taken from it his old Stanley knife, to help the boys with a plastic model. After no more than three or four trips and bouts of cursing, I found the box.

I knelt down and pulled on the cold metal handles. The halves of the lid, greased annually by my father for fifty years, slid smoothly apart. For the second time that day, smells from my childhood filled the shed. Oil and sawdust: Daddy's toolbox. I scrabbled around in it until I located his trowel. It had been drop-forged in Birmingham, a seamless hunk of metal, back when all that China made was tea: I had often watched my father use it to chop bricks in two with a single blow. I walked out of the shed again and tossed the old trowel on a whim high in the air. It rose, tumbling upwards, above the height of the garden wall. For an instant it caught the light from the still-unseen moon. I held my right hand out and to my amazement felt the whirling handle slap flat back down into my grasp, as though drawn home by unseen wires. If only our boys had been there to see that! Daddy cool. Then I looked down into the hole, knelt, took my weight on my left hand and scraped.

My knees grew damp, the soil piled up around the
edges of the hole, the hidden outlines down inside it hardened, and in two minutes I found myself crouching about a foot above the flat top of a medium-sized suitcase.