Your Father Sends His Love (17 page)

‘You need to sort yourself out, laddie,' the old woman said. ‘Or else you'll be sleeping in your wet all term.'

The boys called him pisspants all through the third day. He did not piss the bed the third night. He broke one
of the boys' noses. His blows were incredible. He heard one of the boys say, ‘He's going to kill him! He's actually going to kill him!'

The dormitory staff wrested Simon from the boy, Simon still trying to land blows, blood on his knuckles, blood all over the boy's face. They locked Simon in a store cupboard for that. The teachers, not the boys. He was dry as a bone the next morning.

This room is bigger than the store cupboard, are there rats here too? The rats in the store cupboard. Yellow fangs, clutching cheese, their tails making Fu Manchu moustaches over his lip. What he told the boys. He preferred the store cupboard. To be told something is a punishment does not make it so.

Anya is next to him in the bed. Slender Anya, the coal of her joint burning red.

‘We'll go,' she says, ‘you and I, we'll go together. The grand tour. Temples. Meditation. Fresh seafood. The best hash in the world. A cabin by the beach.'

She smiles sadly and she has her hand out. Keys he puts there. Keys so briefly his, for the mortise and the latch. A key ring she bought for him that he had not thought to remove before giving them up. Cross my palm with silver. A door slams and the night is cold and he gets a bus home. He cries on the bus and no one offers him a handkerchief.

His father. His father Bob. Bob now in the corner of the room, standing in evening wear, dabbing a pocket square at the top of his brow.

‘It's hot in here, isn't it?' Bob says. ‘Good God it's hot. My wife'd hate it here. My wife can't stand the heat, you see. Can't stand the heat. I have to say though, it's a blessing: it keeps her out of the kitchen.'

Simon watches Bob wait for the laughter. Simon watches Bob wait for the applause. Simon turns over in the bed and closes his eyes.

3

Bob puts
The Flip Side
back unwatched and drags his fingers across the spines of the other tapes. Archivists' handwriting, not his own; the kind you see in libraries, in lawyers' offices. Were he to start now, Bob would not live long enough to watch them all. Tapes are stacked alongside the desk, last week's new recordings.

Behind an oil portrait of Jaq, the safe. He opens its combination lock. The numbers are not significant; there is no need for significance when you recall so much. Only important things. Only recall the significant things. A combination lock presents no challenge. But those things
he considers not important slip through his fingers. Memory as value judgement. Memory as protectorate. He remembers as a child being fat. He remembers the Coronation Day parade, a Romany family passing, their caravan loudly painted, loudly hanging with Union Jack bunting, shouting something as he waved his flag, shouting Fatty Arbuckle at him, laughing and pointing. But he does not remember his mother pushing her fingers into his stomach. He does not recall her saying, ‘You're a disgrace, Robert. Like a pig, always with your snout in the trough.' He does not recall his father laughing at him running in the park. He does not recall their comments to friends when all the kids were together. Mother and Father. Both dead now. No one now to say it ever happened.

The notebooks are the same shape and size: maroon boards, stitched. They have a fair weight, a solid heft. He takes them from the safe and arranges them side by side on the desktop. He sits on the leather-covered chair. He touches their covers, opens one and flicks through the pages, the cartoons and the jokes, the sketches and gags. At random:
People think I'm from Kent, I hear them say it as I walk past.
He looks at the line. Prestatyn, 1971, a motorway service station. Clumsy. He has used it many times, but it isn't quite there. Gets a laugh, yes, but clumsy. The forty-seventh page has five jokes about
funerals. They are wretched. Written at this desk. Written after Gary's death and still in his black suit and tie, a bottle of Scotch and Jaq asleep.

He had not considered it an estrangement. Estrangement is for the upper classes, something they have been perfecting for centuries. The middle classes are made for reconciliation: even he and his mother made their peace in the end. At Jaq's prompting, a letter sent, a letter of admonishment and explanation, a list of questions he wanted answering. A letter came back, laced with cautious conciliation and ignoring the charges levelled at her. The summer of 1967. The summer of love. Three visits to her in Goring-by-Sea. Her in the rocking chair, the large gins and the cigarettes at her well-painted lip. Three visits and any mention of his wife, his marriage, its breakdown, waved away like trails of smoke. They talked a long time, but not of the cancer in her colon. They talked a long time, and he left for the last time. A coma. Reconciled and so now ready to die. Inevitable, the reconciliation. There could never be absolute defiance.

Absolute defiance. Yes. That was the look on his face, on Simon's face, walking up the driveway in his uniform, back from his first term. Bob had thought the boarding school would be the making of Simon. Something that
would loosen his anger, strafe his resentment. A period of time away from Gary, some time for the boy to find his own voice, his own character. At the door, Bob welcomed him as the prodigal. Simon looked at him with the same look Bob had once tried to master towards his mother: hardened and uncaring, nonchalant about her disregard.

The intercom runs between kitchen and annexe, a speaker grille and push button screwed into the walls. Jaq calls him in for supper; she calls him in for sleep. She would rather not make the walk between the two buildings, rather not poke her head around the door. Though he does not say it, she understands she is intruding, even after twenty years. Having the space changed him. Jaq saw it straight away. Noticed it in his performances. Less polish, a slight easing of the worked-at patter. It looked like he cared less, like there was something perhaps more important than making those people laugh.

‘You're more yourself now,' she said after a show in Bournemouth. ‘You are more believable. More real.'

‘Was I not before?' Bob said.

He looks up at her portrait, a good job. Captures her warmth and care, her smile. Lines had been smoothed, ridges of chin subtly excised. The woman the girl had promised. The girl in the office, one of the secretarial
pool, typing and filing, making tea, booking tours. The office catered for well-to-do ex-servicemen, now turned comedy writers for hire. Young men, men in suits with cigarettes and constant back-and-forth, prising lines from one another, riffing, writing scraps down on fag-packets and bus tickets, the backs of menus, beer-mats. Their scrawl passed to Jaq and the girls for typing, the typed lines worked at with a pencil, then passed back to Jaq and the girls for retyping. A radio always on, the blast of the road beneath. The boys heading for the pubs, the boys heading for the restaurants, the girls never joining them, the girls preferring the singers and musicians from the offices downstairs. The songwriters and drummers, the singers and the promoters. Those men were distinct, aloof; hailing taxis, heading for cocktails, for all-night coffee bars. There were Negroes and Hispanics, Frenchmen and Americans. Next to them, the office boys were like the boys from school: sniggering, ill-informed, interchangeable. Jaq and the girls found their humour wearying; their bravado boring.

Jaq and the girls were young and slim; they breezed through rooms unaware these were the moments that would haunt them long into their lives: taking a glass of champagne from a silver salver, allowing their cigarettes to be kissed by offered lighters, spending their own hard-earned, heading home to their house-share in the Angel.
Unmarried and with lovers, unmarried yet not untouched. Later, looking back at photographs, their ghost selves alongside famous men who no one today would recognize, alongside nobodies who later were somebodies. Those dresses and hairstyles now back in fashion. Wondering what happened to the others, wondering what became of them all. All save Jaq.

Bob's memory elides the romantic and the documentary. He can recall the name and face of every woman he has ever slept with – Diane, Elizabeth, Suzanne, Angela, Kathryn, Emily, Susan, Mary, Liz, Linda, Pat, Deborah, Barbara, Karen, Suzy, Nancy, Anita, Donna, Cynthia, Sandra, Pamela, Sharon, Kathleen, Carol, Jenny, Cheryl, Janet, Kathy, Anna, Janice, Louisa, Yvonne, Victoria, Carolyn, Kathy, Jackie, Molly, Denise, Gill, Judy, Helen, Jean, Brenda, Linda, Tina, Margaret, Lorraine, Ann, Patsy, Tina, Rebecca, Bethany, Joyce, Helen, Tracy, Teresa, Wendy, Lizzie, Debra, Christine, Catherine, Amy, Sue, Linda, Leann, Shirley, Judith, Louise, Trudy, Holly, Mary, Lisa, Jeanne, Laura, Dawn, Gillian, Dorothy, Michelle, Sally, Victoria, Anne, Jayne, Phyllis, Elaine, Lois, Connie, Vicky, Sheila, Beth, Ann, Pat, Julie, Amelia, Gloria, Gail, Joan, Paula, Beth, Angie, Peggy, Cindy, Jennifer, Becky, Hope, Mary, Tina, Lisa, Pru, Kimberly, Martha, Jane, Cathy, Jo, Joanne, Debbie, Diana, Frances, Alice, Valerie, Marilyn, Ellen, Kim, Lori, Jean, Vicki,
Rhonda, Rita, Virginia, Katherine, Rose, Mary, Lynn, Jo, Ruth, Maria, Jacqueline – yet they are static memories. He can recall the couplings but not the feelings, not the reasons why some became affairs and others remained casual flings. An interviewer – no, more than one interviewer – observed that Bob wanted to please everyone. From street-sweeper to crown prince. He does not know what to make of that. A psychologist said it was all about his mother. There's a line in the sixth notebook, not his own:
That's the problem with shrinks, if it's not one thing, it's your mother.

For years, Jaq worked beside him, day by day, night by night, until Bob was thunderstruck by her. Until his eyes were suddenly opened to her. He could not, could never, have thought this was possible, but yes, under his nose, all this time, all the time he had been embarking on futile affairs and diversions, been a bad boy, his angel was there all along. When he tells the story of their courtship, Jaq is struck by the grandness of his imagination. She does not recall it in any other way than his marriage ending and him casting around for a new wife. He bought her dinner. She was not the only one so treated. He does not recall this.

He remembers the cat-and-mouse game of her refusing to marry him. He does not remember her reticence at taking on the children, at becoming the new wife. It is a
gloriously male, gloriously self-important narrative: the winning of her love, the finding of true happiness. Even between the two of them, when there is no one else to hear the story, he tells it the same way. Jaq does not correct him. There can be no correcting Bob's recall.

In the annexe, in the lamplight, Bob shuffles to the bathroom. He kneels beside the toilet bowl, its chemical stink, and tastes the whisky in his mouth. He is not going to vomit. He does not vomit. But he remains on the bathroom floor, his thin trouser seat on the carpet, his back against the wall. Simon is standing in the annexe. Simon, tumbler in hand, those stupid Lennon-glasses on, Bob sitting at the desk, listening. Simon has just come from the bathroom, a sherbet dab of powder on his unshaven top lip. Simon in the leather jacket and black denims, running a finger along the tapes on the wall unit.

This should have been a bust-up over money. This should have been a long rally of anger and resentment, the two men right up against each other, shouting. This should have been the words just under the surface, close up like veins, until a final, shuddering slam of the door. But instead it was a short, stilted conversation, barely remarkable. Barely something to recall.

‘So how are you?' Bob watches himself ask his son the question.

‘Fine. You?'

‘Never better.' Bob watches himself shift. Weight from one leg to another.

‘Anya?' he hears himself say. ‘Is that her name?—'

Simon scratches his chin, wide smile that starts clenched in his jaw.

‘Long story. For the best.'

‘For the best, of course, yes. But, a shame, though. I know you were—'