The Magpie Trap: A Novel (10 page)

           
Groaning, Mark began to pack away
his fishing gear; he’d probably need to follow Danny in the van, to make sure
that he got back into town alright; responsibility took many forms. On the
short walk up to the car park, he passed an abandoned, half-empty bottle of
whisky though, and he suddenly began to feel better about things. Perhaps Danny
would turn the corner; perhaps he would get his life in order. Mark knew all
about order; his life may have lacked excitement, but he always knew how many
tins were in the cupboard, how long it had been since he had last had the
clippers run over his head, exactly how much he could spend on drinks if he went
out.

Mark took comfort in the fact that his life was so
structured, so secure; he knew that nothing could ever harm him if he never
stepped out of his rabbit-hole; if he never put his head above the parapet.
He’d seen what happened to the over-ambitious; people like Danny, whose life
lurched from one disaster to another as though he couldn’t live with the hand
that life had dealt him; Danny, who was constantly trying to change these odds.
It would take something dramatic to shake Mark from his wilful inertia…
 
And that something definitely didn’t involve
getting caught up in any more of Danny stupid schemes as he had at
Edison
’s.

At Home
with the Parkers

Chris
felt that familiar dread feeling creep up on him as he turned into the
cul-de-sac on which his mother and father lived. It had the faintly whimsical
name of The Cherryblossoms which ill suited the artificial forgeries, the
not-quite-right copies of old masters which were the mock Tudor houses.
Although darkness had set in, as Chris drove up the narrow road, the
over-zealous security lighting of every one of the houses was alerted by his
seemingly unwelcome presence and his arrival at the front of his familial house
was floodlit.

Casting an elongated shadow across the driveway,
Chris walked with the halting step of a condemned man on the approach to the
front door. The side door - the door which he had used when he had lived in the
house - was no longer an option. Adjacent to the palatial twin garage, whose
square footage was larger than his City Centre flat, ‘the tradesman’s entrance’
was reserved for the less formal guest. Chris’s visits were now an unwelcome,
but necessary addition to the calendar, like dinner with old, but not
well-liked work colleagues. Chris therefore had to squeeze between the large
haphazardly parked Rolls Royce and the overhanging pussy willow tree and was
rewarded by a shower of spray from the tree’s overhanging branches. Chris could
picture his father returning from the golf course half-cut earlier in the
evening, annoyed at the inconvenient visit of his son scuppering his night out
and parking the car as though it was abandoned.

Chris’s father, Mal, was part of the older
generation which believed that the drink drive laws simply did not apply to them.
He reasoned that: a) he had been driving for so long now that it was second
nature to him; the odd beer would not affect his skills, and b) that the
journey from the nineteenth hole was so short anyway that he probably wouldn’t
pass another car or pedestrian that he could kill even if he’d wanted to. The
golf course was, to be fair, a short but twisting half mile away from the house
in the opulent
North Leeds
suburb of Shadwell.

Chris reflected that the black and white of the
front of the house had been somewhat spoiled since his last visit by the
addition of a large dark blue EyeSpy Security burglar alarm bell box slap-bang
in the centre. It had been installed as a favour, on the cheap by an
engineering mate of Danny’s; Mark Birch. Mark had clearly not been thinking of
the aesthetic qualities that the bell box would lend to the house, but rather
the preventative effect that such high visibility security measures would have
on the would-be intruder. It was an up-market ‘Beware of the Killer Dog’ sign.

Luckily Mal had been dissuaded from placing the
clichéd name plate ‘Dunroamin’ on the door, however his questionable tastes had
clearly been channelled into the door bell’s perky, electronic version of a Rod
Stewart number which brassily responded to Chris’s pushing the buzzer. It was
Do
Ya Think I’m Sexy
, and Chris yet again had to screw up his eyes to try and
get rid of that
unsavoury
image of his dad answering the door in
PVC chaps, holding a whip.

It was Mummy Dearest that finally deigned to answer
the door, perhaps they were hurriedly clearing away the paraphernalia of their
new ‘swinging sixties’ life, or perhaps they were simply waiting for the
lift-version of Rod Stewart to finish. Margaret answered with a
ta-daaah
flourish,
as if the front door was the stage curtain lifting. She was wearing a sea green
cocktail dress and a huge gold necklace which made her look a little like B.A.
Baracus. Clearly her dress sense was being impaired by the usual vast quantity
of gin in which she swam on a daily basis.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she slurred, promptly dropping her
theatrical act and reverting to normal
behaviour
. ‘Hello Chris. You’re
early,’ she snarled, turning her back on him and flouncing down the entrance
hallway without so much as her traditional airy peck on both cheeks.

As she sashayed away from him, Chris was
unexpectedly moved by the fact that her mermaid costume was not properly zipped
up at the back. Her off-white bra was showing through. He imagined her
carefully changing for dinner and asking Mal how she looked, or to zip her up,
but Mal had probably not even glanced at her; she was the invisible woman.

Chris could not summon up the energy to hate her
for her pursed lipped disapproval; he could only pity her for the
Stepford
Wives
existence she led. Thinking about it, even the bondage parties would
have been
something
different, but now he was in the house he could see
that they were no more feasible than their holding a circus in their front
room.

The front room of the house was reserved for entertaining
guests and had a cold, unlived-in atmosphere. Chris was directed to a chair by
his mother as though he had never been in the house before, and again he had to
fight his urge to simply get back in his car, turn around and drive home, or
rush out and dive into the pub on the corner for a quick sense-dulling shot
before going back. Margaret offered him a drink and then left him alone in that
oppressively silent, chilly room. He looked around him, seeing the familiar
room through new eyes, noting that of all of the framed pictures of the
mantelpiece, none featured him.

Margaret finally returned with a staple gin and
tonic each, and sat, awkwardly cross-legged in the chair opposite.

‘Cheers,’ said Chris, warily tasting the drink
which, from his shudder, tasted as though there was no tonic in it at all. ‘So,
how are you? Any news from leafy Shadwell?’ he chanced.

‘Your father will be down in a minute,’ was his
mother’s only reply. He shuffled on his chair, sipped more of the
toilet-cleaner strength drink, and at all costs avoided eye contact.

Chris was almost relieved by his father’s
boisterous entrance; a reek of strong aftershave preceding his arrival in the
room. He always wore vats of the stuff to compensate for the smell of dead
animals which in his paranoid mind always clung to him. He was a butcher by
trade, but had long since given up actually touching the carcasses themselves.
He had built up his business so much that he rarely even went near his
premises, but the old habits of dousing himself with scent died hard.

Chris’s initial relief was however, not to last
long; the usual interrogation soon began. This huge beast of a man had refused
to sit down, and instead loomed over Chris, bristling with annoyance and
grievance. He barked a series of angry questions, without waiting for a
response; Chris thinking;
this place does not need a guard dog. Daddy dear
is its very own rottweiler
.

Like Chris, he had a full head of sandy hair which
showed no signs of receding. He was also almost threateningly tall, and
radiated an intensity that had not been passed on to Chris. Signals warning ‘do
not cross me’
pulsed from the protruding veins of his forehead.
 
   

What
are you doing with your life? Why don’t you come and work for me? Why don’t you
buy a house, not rent a flat? Are you not getting married yet?

It was like wave after wave of fists beating at
him. Chris silently fantasized about spraying the room with machine-gun fire
like in the film version of
Billy Liar
which he and Danny had constantly
watched during smoking sessions when they were at university. He could almost
imagine the look of shock and awe on his father’s face when he finally realised
that his son was a man who could do things for himself; a man of action. But in
the real world, his father remained the action man, a man who had seen and done
it all.

The happy family eventually retired to the equally
formal dining room, where a cold buffet of meats and cheese had been laid out
under fly-covers by his mother. She darted about, like a fly herself, from
plate to plate, removing these fly covers, cling-film, and tin foil. She had
almost triple glazed this food against the unwelcome attentions of any germs or
insects.

The dining room had a staid and charmless
old-fashioned feel to it; features such as the paintings on the wall simply
added to its show-room qualities. Frilled doilies, covers on the seats, a
plastic table-cloth all clubbed together as if to shout out their warnings:
Do
not put anything on the surfaces. Do not spill anything. Do not sit too long.
You are not welcome.

The Parkers wordlessly filled their plates from the
buffet which had been laid out on the ‘good plates’ on a folding table adjacent
to the hatch which was the connecting thread to the kitchen. They reverentially
allowed Mal to cut the cold meats as per his traditional role.

Plates full and condiments applied, the three then
took their seats around the titanic mahogany dining table. Both Mal and Chris
were forced to slouch in their chairs by the intrusive chandelier hanging from
a ceiling which was too low to support such a feature without appearing
over-the-top. A sunken position seemed to redress the balance between the two:
height advantage was no longer a feature in the argument.

‘This pork is great; have you got a new supplier?’
asked Chris, making a concentrated effort to alter the mood.

‘Yes, it’s farm near Wetherby. Really looks after
his animals that farmer. Thing is though, he’s got no business sense
whatsoever.’

Mal tore his teeth aggressively into a hunk of
bread before continuing, mouth half-full: ‘He’s more concerned with the grants
he gets from the European Union to be bothered about how much he gets for his
meat.’

‘He must really look after the pigs well though…
So, anyway, how’s business?’ asked Chris. He was still erring on the side of
over-politeness to his father.

‘Picking up again; picking up. We got a major new
contract through one of my mates at the golf club; a police chief. We’re
supplying to all the police canteens in
Yorkshire
now. And most of the
schools.’

‘Through the golf club,’ sneered Chris. ‘Who needs
good marketing when you can just do a bit of horse-trading down the golf club?’

‘Your father doesn’t sell horse meat,’ said
Margaret, rather ridiculously. Chris stifled a guffaw.

‘As I was saying; we’re doing pretty well these
days. We have this sponsorship deal with one of the schools now; a
PFI
thing. It gets our
name in the papers all the time; now that’s what I call marketing,’ said Mal.

‘But the schools get the cut-price stuff though eh?
Can’t afford anything better. No concern about the health of the kids?’

Chris, despite his efforts to take part in a
civilized conversation, was riled by his father’s blasé attitude to the
responsibility he held.

‘Listen to me; don’t come preaching to me with your
egalitarian principles. What do you think paid your way through your three year
doss at university?’

‘Why does it always come down to this? I went to
university to further my education, and to make my own way in the world. I did
not come to work for you because I have a talent for something else.’

Chris’s instinct for going on the defensive in
conversations with his father was now increasing the tension in the room. A
heavy, oppressive atmosphere had set in.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. A talent… what are you
talking about boy? Your only talent is for pissing money up the wall. Mark my
words; one day soon, you’ll be begging me for a job at my place.’

‘Not if this new scheme that I’ve got going starts
to work,’ said Chris. He didn’t really know why he’d started talking about his
involvement with Danny’s plan, but now he had, he somehow felt that his father
should know. He’d probably have a kind of nagging respect for his son if…

‘What scheme? What are you going on about?’

‘We’ve got a great idea for a start-up business.
Security…’

‘What do you know about security? You probably
leave your bleedin’ flat door wide open when you go to work in the afternoon or
whenever you get out of bed, you lazy get.’

Mal shook his head to emphasise his disbelief at
his son’s attitude.

Margaret finally spoke up: ‘Can we not enjoy a meal
in peace without you two fighting? Can we please change the subject?’

Chris cowered like a wounded dog on his side of the
table, but suddenly like the dog that had been kicked that one time too many,
he turned: ‘I can never win with you two. We are not fighting. I am trying to
defend myself from his attacks. We can’t communicate properly because there’s a
spectre
at the feast. Ever since Todd, we all skirt around the real issues.’

Mal’s cheeks ripened into a full purple hue;
furrowed brows and gritted teeth signaled intent as he wildly beat his fist
down upon the table, sending cutlery flying to the floor.

‘We do not mention that name in this house boy!’

‘Why? Why can we not? That’s what’s wrong with this
so-called family.’

Mal’s chair careered backwards through the air as
thrust it backwards from under himself in wild disgust. Without so much as
another word he stormed out of the dining room, the front door, and the next
sound they heard was the revving of the engine of his Rolls Royce in the
driveway.