Starting Over (14 page)

‘That’s a nasty little scam,’ Keith said, narrowing his eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Playing dead in the middle of the road and then robbing the poor bugger who stops to help you.’

The boy raised his eyebrows, a gesture of defiance so pathetic that I felt sorry for him, and then he stared out of the window as we headed down to King’s Cross. With his hands cuffed behind his back, the kid had to sit forward, almost on the very edge of that cracked vinyl seat.

‘Do I know you?’ I said. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

He looked at me for the first time. ‘I’m not saying anything without my brief,’ he muttered, a voice thick with South London.

‘How do I know you?’ I said, and I knew it was just out of reach, and that he was as ignorant as me.

We got back to my parents’ place. The kids stayed in the car and Keith fished me out. The fresh air immediately did something to my legs. They went from rubber, to jelly, to water, and Keith took me by the scruff of the neck and said, ‘Easy, Tiger,’ as he gently led me up the garden path. I stopped to lean against my dad’s car, a red Ford Capri, and struggled to get it all under control. My stomach, my breathing, my life. I could see the blue glow of the swimming pool in the back garden. It looked beautiful.

Then my parents appeared in the doorway in their dressing gowns, my mum’s eyes going to the black and uncaring windows of the neighbours, my dad staring at me with a total absence of surprise. The way he looked at me made it
hard to concentrate on the medley of Soul II Soul songs I was singing.

‘He can sleep in his own bed tonight,’ Keith said, ‘if you can stop him singing.’

My parents fussed around him, grateful and ashamed, and he shook his great bashed-in head, declining all thanks and offers of tea. Then he kissed my mum and shook my dad’s hand and placed me in the custody of my parents. He patted my back and was gone.

‘I’ll make that tea,’ my mum said, and my dad almost laughed.

‘It’s not tea he wants.’ The old man shook his head and almost tutted. ‘Is this the part where I tell you you’re grounded?’ he asked me.

I was ready to rise to the bait, but then he was up the stairs and gone and I looked up at the ceiling, listening to the soft fall of his carpet slippers on the bedroom floor. And then I realised that, just like all the other nights, my pockets were full of scraps of paper. I rewound the night after leaving Lara, trying to remember the girls and the women I had encountered. But when I began to empty my pockets, it was not the usual collection of names, numbers and electronic addresses. It was all Lara.

I held up a photograph of our wedding day. Then I pulled out a photo-booth strip of the pair of us looning around like a couple of kids about a year after we met, when it was still new but we knew it was going to last. And then there was Lara in an orange bikini on a beach with Rufus and Ruby when they were about four and two, and she was scooping up wet sand and the sun was going down over her shoulder, catching the collarbone and glinting with gold. Then Lara was smiling in our first home, wearing dungarees for decorating,
a bit heavier after the birth of our second. And – folded in four – how could I be so stupid as to fold it in four? – there was an agency photo of Lara taken the year before we met.

I got down on my knees to smooth it and out tumbled more pictures. Lara unsteady on skis, Lara in our back garden, Lara in a hospital bed with a sleeping baby in her arms.

So it just wasn’t true, was it?

We still had plenty of places.

The law had it all under control. I had to admire their crowd management. Even if I was now on the other side.

They had established a perimeter around the demonstrators, and corralled us into a crowded pen of protest, held in place by lines of orange barriers, hundreds of bored young cops and, beyond them, a lot of empty space before you reached the place where the meat wagons were waiting with their reinforcements and charges of resisting arrest.

The mood among the demonstrators was surprisingly upbeat. Perhaps now everyone was getting what they wanted. The law kept the peace. The demonstrators got to demonstrate. And the airport got to build its runway. In the distance I could see the diggers and the men working, but it was so far away it felt like I was watching it on the news.

I narrowed my eyes at the sun. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach earth, so I was looking at what the sun looked like eight minutes ago. Time travel, I thought. It’s real. Here’s the proof. And up in the roaring blue sky, the 747s were masters of the heavens, coming and going as if free of all human direction, taking off and landing, completely oblivious to the sign in my hands. PLANE BONKERS, it said, and I had made it myself.

I took out my phone, started calling Ruby and then hesitated. I was dehydrated and tired, staring at the world through an evil hangover, and just the tone of my voice would make her think that she had won the argument.
Nothing changes,
she had told me.
Don’t bother. Do something useful instead. Something that really makes a difference.
Like a bit of light shoplifting.

I was not ready to concede that she was right. I believed that I would never be ready.

So I put my phone back in my paint-splattered jeans and wearily shook my sign at the heavens.

I felt like just walking into his office without an appointment but I managed to restrain myself. After all, I didn’t want him to think that I was some kind of nut-job.

But when the heart man came out of his Harley Street office at the end of the day, I was waiting for him. I thought that perhaps he would be off to do a spot of surgery before going home for his tea. But he was wearing black tie and looked like David Niven off for cocktails on the Aga Khan’s yacht.

‘Ah, Mr Bailey,’ he said, covering his surprise quite well. ‘How can I help you?’

‘This is not my life,’ I told him, and he nodded. I couldn’t work out if he was humouring me, or if it was a perfectly reasonable statement and a sentiment that he encountered quite frequently in the course of his working day. ‘I mean, this is not the life I am meant to have. There’s been some mistake. I want my old life back.’

‘Do you?’ he said, and the late-evening sunshine made the shiny collar of his tuxedo look like the blackest thing in the world. ‘Do you really want all that back? I wonder.
The constant fear of dying, the daily routine of serious illness, the inescapable knowledge that your body is failing.’

I furiously shook my head. ‘But I don’t know who I am,’ I said. ‘I need to know where it came from. My heart, I mean. I have to know more.’

He touched his bow tie. It was a real one, not the kind that comes on a bit of elastic. You can’t beat a real one. The fake ones just look too perfect. The police are big on functions, and I always wore a real one.

‘I’m not keeping a secret from you, George,’ he said. ‘I don’t know myself.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.

‘It’s true. I don’t need to know. And it doesn’t matter to me. If your donor’s family want anonymity – so what? You’re my patient. Just be grateful for your life.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘But I want to know who it belongs to.’

My hands clawed at my hair. He said my name, and touched my arm, and he did it in such a subtle way that I almost missed it when he glanced at his watch.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m keeping you from your dinner.’

‘
Madama Butterfly
,’ he said. ‘You’re keeping me from Puccini.’

Then I saw why his bony finger kept touching his bow tie. It was coming undone. That was the trouble with the real ones. They were always coming undone. I smiled and nodded.

‘Your tie,’ I said.

He laughed and touched it self-consciously. ‘My wife usually does it,’ he said. ‘She’s not coming tonight.’

‘Let me help you,’ I said. ‘I’m good at this.’

He flinched very slightly as I reached out to him, but then he stood there with an embarrassed, grateful little smile as
I tugged the tie apart, and confidently took the black satin between my thumbs and index fingers.

I pulled it so that the end in my left hand was a couple of inches lower than the end in my right hand. I crossed the longer end over the shorter end, passed it up through the loop, and then formed the front loop of the bow by doubling up the shorter end and placing it across the collar points.

And it looked like a car wreck.

I tried again. And then I tried again. And by now he was looking worried, and staring at his watch more openly, and taking a step away from me. And I felt the sting of failure burn my eyes.

‘I used to know how to do it,’ I said, and the crumpled black material hung forlornly from his neck. ‘Honest I did.’

He looked like he really believed me.

I watched Larry flip the burgers, his big face smiling through the smoke as he waved his hand above the grill.

‘Enjoy every sandwich,’ he told me. ‘The likes of us, we have a ninety per cent chance of living for a year, a fifty per cent chance of living for ten years.’ With his free hand he cracked open two cans of beer and handed one of them to me. ‘We’ve been given a great gift, you and me.’ He took a deep breath and exhaled with a sigh. At the neck of his shirt, the first few inches of his scar were showing. ‘All of us,’ he said waving his spatula to indicate the other guests. And the rest of the group was all here. Paul, tall and shy, with his young family. Geoff, small and rat-like, with his young girlfriend. All the rest. All the guys who should be dead by now. ‘We don’t see you at the meetings any more,’ Larry said.

I felt the stab of guilt. I didn’t want to let Larry down.
He was the one who made us feel as though we were a community. He was the only one.

‘You know, George, your life is not different because you have been given someone else’s heart. Your life is different because you have been given a second chance. Your life is different because your old life was killing you. Your life is different because by rights it should be over by now.’ We were joined by Geoff and his new girlfriend and Larry handed them burgers on paper plates. We watched them walk away, the young woman who had just started living and the older man who had lived twice, his hand around her waist as he tried not to spill his cheeseburger. ‘It’s all good,’ Larry smiled.

I wanted to believe him. I could feel my scar pulsing, as it always did on these hot summer days, and I wanted to believe that things were just the same as they ever were. But a new heart had not restored my life and family and my future, the way it had for Larry, and the way it had for the rest of the group who met above the florist’s shop. My new heart had blown it all apart.

I didn’t want to be the old George. Or – more than that – I couldn’t be. I didn’t know who he was.

I smiled at Larry, and nodded at the dozen patties of prime beef he was grilling, their colours ranging from rare baby-pink to well-done charred to a cinder.

‘What you trying to do?’ I said. ‘Give me a heart attack?’

‘Enjoy every sandwich, George,’ he repeated, dead serious. ‘Who knows how long we have left?’

‘But that’s true of everyone alive, isn’t it?’

He nodded. Then his big moon-like face split with a grin. ‘But the rest of the world just doesn’t know it yet.’

We were surrounded by gardens and all around us I could hear the sounds of an English summer. Lawns being mowed,
music coming from open windows, the laughter of Larry’s children in their square swimming pool. The boy, Jack, and the girl, Susie, were playing this game where one of them stayed under water for as long as they could while the other one counted: ‘One-elephant, two-elephant, three-elephant…’

Larry’s wife, Molly, sat with her feet in the pool, her jeans rolled up around her knees, her legs white and skinny, trying to keep the hot dog in her hand dry.

Larry flipped a couple of burgers one last time, pressed them against the grill, smiled when he saw the juice, and then expertly slid them into a pair of buns. ‘Medium well,’ he said, handing one to me. I smothered it in barbecue sauce, my mouth watering at the illicit treat. We strolled over to the pool with our beers and our burgers.

Larry’s daughter was counting. ‘Twenty-eight-elephant, twenty-nine-elephant…’

The boy burst gasping out of the water.

‘You going to be a policeman again?’ he shouted at me.

I shrugged and took a bite of my burger. I almost swooned. Larry was a great cook. ‘I’m considering my options,’ I said to the kid. ‘Taking some time out.’

When the law has finally finished with him, a discarded copper tends to affect an air of studied nonchalance, if not outright indifference. Or was that just me?

‘But it must have been fascinating,’ said Molly. They were all fans of
The Bill.
They watched it together. That’s the kind of family they were.

I smiled politely and knelt by the pool, staring at the water. The level was a little low.

‘You should always add an inch or two of water every time you have your pool serviced,’ I said. ‘If you leave it too long, and it gets down to more than a few inches short, then
it will take hours to fill, and you’ll have to turn on the water supply and then remember to turn it off later.’

I stood up, and took a pull of my beer. There was more debris than I would have liked on the water surface.

‘And I would check the skimmer basket,’ I said. I thought for a moment, just staring at the blue water rippling in the summer heat. ‘It looks slightly over-chlorinated to me. There’s no need to overdo that stuff.’

Larry and Molly looked at each other and laughed. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Thanks, George.’

‘But it’s a good little pool,’ I said, straightening up. Their garden wasn’t really big enough for a pool. It was more of a plunge pool than anything. They even did the maintenance themselves.

‘It’s big enough for us,’ Molly said, and she grinned up at her husband, and so did the children.

Larry’s family had a way of looking at him, holding their gaze on his big face for one second more than necessary, as if they were checking that he was really there, cooking barbecue on a summer’s day, as if he might disappear if they didn’t watch him for every possible moment. They checked him the way a parent checks on a newborn baby. They observed him as though his presence was too good to believe.

And Larry grinned back at his family, a beer in one hand and a burger in the other, bashful with love, the sun on his big bald head, and his face like a full moon seen in the middle of the day.

‘You’re a good dancer,’ shouted the blonde girl.

‘A very good dancer,’ shouted her blonde mother, and I felt the sweat pouring, and my feet flying, and the night fever, night fever down deep in my bones. I didn’t know the tune.
It felt like it might be new. One or two years old. Or ten or fifteen years old. ‘Do you think you’d be better off alone?’ asked the singer, and there was the death of something in there.

‘Thanks,’ I shouted. ‘My wife taught me.’

‘What?’ said the mother, cupping her ear, and I shouted it again.

‘My wife taught me.’

They looked at each other, and I saw something happen to their smiles, a sort of freezing, or souring, just as I turned to catch the eye of the DJ. He was only a kid, not much older than Rufus, but he knew his Stax and his Motown and his Atlantic, he could tell his classic disco from his old school R&B. He watched me draw an S in the air, and then an O, and then another S. He nodded and held up some 12-inch vinyl.

‘Married?’ mouthed the mother, as they looked at each other. A cascade of synthesised strings poured out of the speakers. The crowd let out a cheer. A woman with the greatest voice I had ever heard, apart from Aretha Franklin, started to sing.

The floor began to move as one heaving mass of dancing old people.

I tapped my wedding ring. ‘Nearly twenty years,’ I shouted proudly. ‘Do you know the SOS Band?’

The mother and daughter looked around, distracted, as if they had only just noticed that there was music in the air.

‘The SOS Band are the biggest secret in the history of music,’ I shouted, moving more slowly now, doing this thing with my shoulders, this sort of rolling movement. You had to see it. It actually looked a lot better when you saw it. ‘Why doesn’t everyone know the SOS Band?’ I shouted.

The daughter shrugged, and made this
beats me
gesture with her hands and mouth.

‘Never heard of them,’ mouthed the mother, with a conspiratorial smirk at her daughter, and that made me realise that she didn’t really care about dancing to the SOS Band. And I remembered dancing with Lara.

Dancing with a dancer, a professional dancer, is funny. Exhilarating but strange. Inhibiting. Yet ultimately liberating. At first I couldn’t do it. And then I realised that, if I was going to keep up with this fabulous woman, I had no choice. I had to dance. And then, some night at the Africa Centre when Soul II Soul were really cooking, I started to love it. And her. And I could not tell them apart, the dancer and the dance.

There was a fluidity about the way Lara moved. It went beyond dance being something that she did for a living, or something she was good at. There was something about the way her body responded to what she told it to do – it was more than grace, more than ease. It was as if, when she danced, she was doing what she was born to do.

And it was that dazzling fluidity that I always noticed. For every move I made, Lara made seven or eight, and they were all sort of joined together. It was seven or eight movements, but it was all one. It flowed. And she made it easy for me. That’s what a real dancer does. Lara wasn’t remotely snobbish about dancing, she didn’t look down on civilians. She loved it, and she thought that everyone should do it, because dancing was as natural to human beings as breathing. But I don’t really know if that’s what it’s like dancing with a dancer, or if that’s just what it was like dancing with Lara.

‘So – Fred Astaire,’ shouted the mother, and she grinned at her daughter, who had a good chuckle at that. ‘Where’s the wife tonight?’

The SOS Band segued into Cameo, ‘The Single Life’. I would have preferred ‘Word Up’ but it was clear that the DJ had hit a theme with all these tunes about being unattached, and how it was the best way to be. The mother and daughter were looking at their watches.

‘She was in
Les Misérables
,’ I said, looking at the lights. ‘And
The King and I.
And
Miss Saigon.
And
Sherlock!
You ever see that show? It closed after ten days.’

But they were gone. And that was fine. I wasn’t looking for someone to take home. I already had a girl.

The child came into the supermarket as I was reading tomorrow’s papers. A chunky little fellow, about five, with cropped red hair and ketchup down the front of his replica football shirt. Up way past his bedtime.

He came over to where I was standing and began rifling through the bottom rack of magazines. I felt somebody standing by my side and looked up at the security guard. A tall, lugubrious, very thin boy. You wouldn’t want to mess with him. But so many people did.

‘Hello, Asif.’

‘’Lo, George.’

Together we watched the small boy pull out a
Doctor Who
magazine, flick through it and then toss it to one side when he came to a picture of the Cybermen.

‘Scary monsters,’ he muttered, and sauntered over to the fruit and vegetables. His filthy little hands lunged for some black grapes on a middle shelf but he was too short to reach them. He selected an apple from the lowest shelf, took a bite and then kicked the rest of it down the aisle.