The Life of Lee (37 page)

I was even cross with Heather for being so brave and taking it without herself getting angry. She always does that. If there’s one thing that irritates me about Heather, it’s that whenever anything bad happens, she hardly expresses any anger at all. What’s that? ‘I’m not very happy with you now.’ That’s crap! She never seeks revenge. She’s always of a mind that you are innocent until proven guilty. She just takes it and gets on with it.

In Bristol, the rules were that you went over to see the bloke who had done you wrong, knocked on his door and sorted him out. Dad always said that if someone hits you, hit them back, but harder. Ever since I’d run from that one fight, I swore I would never run from anything ever again. But then you find out that’s all bullshit because it doesn’t work in the real world, not here, not now. There is no one to fight in a situation like this. There’s just you, running along this empty street trying to help your best friend, the person you love most in the world.

Suddenly I lost my footing. I flew forward and, unable to get my hands out in time – crunch! – my face cracked into the tarmac. I lay there for a moment, face down, spread across the wet road, waiting to see what bits would start hurting first. My hands began to sting where they had slapped hard on to the unforgiving surface. Then I could feel one side of my face start to throb. I lifted my head up and examined the road where my face had hit it – no blood, good – but I’d definitely given it a good scraping. Now I was really annoyed with everything: the road, the wet, myself, the whole situation.

I gradually got to my feet, and began talking to God knows who. ‘Well, then, if that’s how it is, then fuck you, because we ain’t beat yet!’ I raised myself up and rolled back my shoulders. ‘If that’s what your little plan is, then you’ve got to do better than that.’

I lowered my head and faced into the wind. I bent over nearly double and was much more aerodynamic now. I thought of Heather lying back there on the bed, waiting. So I picked up my feet and hammered them hard into the wet black tarmac and, bang, I sliced through the sharp freezing air once more. I was flying down the street so fast, the wind couldn’t even keep up. I rallied, shouting at the top of my lungs. Up from the pit of my stomach it came and roared out of my mouth.

‘I’m coming, Heather. You hold on, my friend, cos we ain’t beat yet. Now come on, Lee. Run, you bastard, run!’

34. Opportunity Knocks

‘Sorry, it’s gone. You lost it.’

That’s what the tired, dishevelled-looking bloke in the white coat said, just like that, all casual. He never even batted an eyelid, nothing; it was as if he’d just put the rubbish out. He then turned, flipped the lid of a giant pedal-bin, threw in a paper towel he’d been wiping his hands with and began walking away up the long, grey, empty corridor.

It took me a moment to process what he had just told me. Lost it? What did he mean? I needed more than that. So I shouted, ‘Doctor? Sorry.’ I chased after him, grabbing his arm to stop him. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand. What?’

He looked a little irked that I’d pulled at his coat. ‘She lost the baby,’ he snapped. ‘We’re keeping her in for observation. She’s asleep now. It was an ectopic, so she has lost a lot of blood. It was a good job we caught it when we did – it could have been fatal, you know. So go home now. You can come and see her tomorrow.’

He said it with such disregard that I thought he couldn’t possibly be talking about that beautiful woman, my Heather. My mind was now all topsy-turvy, confused. I needed more information. I know I’m an idiot, I thought, perhaps it’s me. What was he going on about, ectopic? What’s that? I was only eighteen, for crying out loud!

The doctor went to walk away, but I suddenly found I’d grabbed hold of him and stared into his blood-shot eyes. Heather deserved more than that. Why was he so rude? He just stared back at me with hardly any emotion at all. There didn’t seem to be anyone home – did he even care?

Wait a minute, why should he? I understood. We were just a couple of scruffbags from God knows where, brought in and dumped with him in the early hours of the morning after a long night shift. It wasn’t his fault; we were just one of many he’d had to tell the same to, some even worse than us. I must also have looked like some wino with my dirty clothes and half my face swollen up.

I loosened my grip on his white coat. Letting go, I apologized. He raised an eyebrow, looked down at me with real disdain, nodded, straightened his coat and walked away down the corridor, which looked just as cold as he was. I watched him go all the way until he disappeared, flapping through some doors at the end.

I turned around, exhausted. The line of five dog-eared plastic chairs bolted to the tiled floor in front of me suddenly looked a very inviting prospect, even though they seemed to be saying they were more tired and yellow-eyed than I was. But, by then, I didn’t care. I bedded down for a couple of hours, accepting that the grumpy chair in the middle was going to poke me in the back the whole time.

Almost as soon as I closed my eyes, I was gone, but not before the thought had flashed across my mind – or was it the hope? – that perhaps this time when I awoke, all this might turn out to have been just a dream.

Of course, when I didn’t show up for work the next
day, my job with Gary went straight down the toilet – probably one of the ones I was meant to be cleaning – faster than a bag of the white stuff at Scarface’s gaff when there was a knock on the door from the drugs squad.

Later, Gary explained that he’d lost lots of work with Southend Council to a competitor and he hoped to employ me when things picked up again. But Gary was a nice guy and did pay me for the days I’d worked for him – which, considering I only ever did infinitesimally more than an imbecile might have done, was very generous of him.

So there it was. I couldn’t even manage another day cleaning a toilet. I mean, how bad had I become? I imagined Gary having a chat with his dad in some wood-panelled men’s club, both of them sat in leather-backed chairs, puffing cigars and sipping cognac.

‘Do you think he could actually have lasted another day cleaning toilets, Gary?’

‘No, I just think he’s not ready for that kind of pressure.’

I was gradually coming to the conclusion that I was one of life’s losers. But, on the positive side, I was good at it.

After a few days, Heather and I returned to our flat, and I set her up with a hot-water bottle and a blanket on the couch in the lounge. She was next to the knackered old telly which, with its feeble inner illuminated tubes and dodgy wiring, would emit about as much heat as a friction burn from a gnat’s wing flap. But I felt it would be even colder for her in the bedroom. It was the middle of winter now, and that bedroom was so cold, every time you opened the door, a light came on.

Heather was desperate to get well again. She wanted to find work or she knew we would now definitely go under. It was nearing Christmas, and the only good tidings we got through our letter box were a tidal wave of reminders that managed to hide the dirty great hole in the shitty carpet next to the front door.

I got straight back to looking for work again down at the Job Centre and along the London Road, proffering my services. Then, before returning home gloomily without any kind of hopeful news for Heather on the job front, I went into W. H. Smith to buy the
Southend Evening Echo
. That paper always had a decent job section in the back, which would keep me busy the next morning down at the call box ringing some of the vacancies.

I searched the news and magazine stand inside the shop for the
Echo
. Then, as I bent down to pick it up, I spotted a copy of
The Stage and Television Today
. It’s a monthly newspaper aimed at all aspects of the entertainment business, a sort of trade publication. It caught my eye because I remembered when I was a kid Dad used to look in it for gigs singing in the clubs.

I smiled to myself, as I recalled those days in Bristol. Back then, I might have thought things were pretty bad, but I would have much preferred that to my current situation. I wished I was back there, maybe just for a day or two, to be a kid again, to be free, to feel protected in my mother’s arms, which I always felt was the safest place in the universe, the one spot where there were no worries, no fear. I longed for just one moment of that right now.

I don’t know why, I couldn’t really afford it, but I picked up a copy of
The Stage
. I folded it up and slipped it in
between the pages of the
Echo
in my hand. I didn’t want Heather to know I’d spent extra money on buying something that was of no use to us.

Later that evening, I sat with Heather as she lay on the couch, having still not regained her full strength yet. I was attempting to cheer her up by reading aloud in some of my best funny voices and, whenever possible, getting up and physically demonstrating around the room some of the job vacancies on offer in the back pages of the
Echo
.

Then if there was anything where it sounded as if I might be qualified, which would be mostly labouring, fetching and carrying, cleaning or dogsbodying, in fact any job that needed the average brain function of a potato, I’d ring it with a pen and call the number provided in the morning. We both knew that later, when it came to Heather finding a job, it would be a lot easier as she was more than qualified as a secretary and in comparison to me had the brain power of the NASA space centre’s central computer system.

After a while, Heather again became fatigued and drifted off to sleep. As I’ve mentioned, she was still pretty weak from her ordeal. I also put her constant tiredness down to being quite understandably depressed about losing the baby. Then she’d had to cope with the psychological strain after the hospital had had to take out one of her fallopian tubes. Obviously, after such a loss, some will feel as if they’re somehow less of a woman. However, always wanting to sound positive, I constantly reminded Heather how much I loved her and let her know that we still had a chance.

As she slept next to me, I took the opportunity quietly to flick through the pages of
The Stage
. It was all very amusing. There were articles about TV shows, adverts for forthcoming tours, write-ups of touring shows, interviews with singers, comedians, stage managers and directors. I read them all and I began to smile. It brought back memories of some of the things I experienced as a kid, going around the clubs with Mum and Dad, staying in stage digs, travelling in the car, the clubs, the shows.

Then, at the back of the paper, there was the jobs section, advertisements for lighting and sound crews, promotional types, dancers and so on. The catchlines were great: ‘actors needed’, ‘blue coats wanted for summer season, bubbly personality required’. Then another section caught my eye. It was headed ‘Talent Shows’. I couldn’t believe it – there were hundreds of them. ‘If you have talent,’ it read, shouting out of the page at me, ‘then you could win £100.’

Another one announced: ‘Take part in gala talent show. Are you a comedian, singer, dancer, magician even? Then call the number below to enter, and you could win £250.’ I looked around me at the drab bare walls that surrounded us, then back at the advert.

Two hundred and fifty pounds!

To us right then, that would have been like winning five million now. I looked over at Heather to make sure she was still asleep. For some reason, I felt I was doing something wrong. I flicked back to the paper and allowed myself to get a little excited by the prospect. Something ignited a slow-burning fire inside me. The more I thought about it, the bigger the fire got. Thoughts began rushing
into my head. I mean, I knew I could play a few instruments. There was no doubt I could definitely throw something together – a few tunes perhaps, or maybe even a song. Yeah! I could bang out a tune on the piano, then a guitar maybe: ‘You hum it, mate, and I’ll play it.’ That sort of thing I could do blindfold.

My finger wandered, more quickly now, down the list of talent contests. Bingo! There it was, right there. Can you believe it, I thought, this is a sign. A talent show just up the road from where we lived, to be held at a pub in a place called South Woodham. You could see it was a way for a brewery to promote its pub: put some acts on and people will turn up and buy lots of beer, the winner gets in the local paper shaking hands with the head of the brewery, free publicity for the pub – everybody wins! Who cares? ‘£250 could be yours,’ it said in big bold writing. ‘If you think you’ve got talent, then come on down.’

Well, I’d never felt so sure about anything as I did right then. As it sunk in, a series of huge cogs seemed to click and clunk into place inside my head. I stared back down at the advert, grabbed a pen and, tearing off a corner of the newspaper, wrote down the number, walked out into the hall and stood next to my coat, which hung over the banister.

There I am, being cheered to the rafters. I have my arm around Heather, and confetti is falling all about us like thick snowflakes. There are flashbulbs exploding, and I can just about hear Heather shouting to me above the noisy crowd. ‘We’re not going to lose the flat now, Lee!’ We both look at each other and begin laughing, something we haven’t done for a long time. ‘It’ll get us out of
debt, pay some of those bills,’ she cries out, then kisses me on the cheek. I shake my head with delight and look up to the sky. ‘Thank you.’

The crowd, now feverish, have climbed on to the stage, and are all around congratulating me. ‘I knew I could do it, H,’ I beam. ‘This is what I know.’ The audience parts in front of us to reveal the chairman of the brewery. He’s holding a giant cheque for £250. Heather and I stare down at it with glee. Then suddenly the mood begins to change. The chairman’s face becomes angry and – rip! – he tears the huge cheque in two. RIP! ‘You’re not worthy of this!’ he shouts.

I sneaked a terrified glance at Heather. She stirred a little, but didn’t wake. I looked back down at the scrap of paper I was holding and came to my senses. I began tapping my forehead with the palm of my hand to get through to my brain. ‘No, stop it, Lee, you fool. You’re dreaming again.’ I scrunched it up in my fist, then stuffed it into my coat pocket.