Birthday

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You can’t say no to a request which might give some meaning to your life. Why otherwise had he said yes? His existence couldn’t have been more different from Jenny’s, and that of the man she went on to meet. At nineteen she’d got pregnant, and the baby was now the woman of fifty who had organized the surprise party for her mother. After having the daughter Jenny got married and bore six more kids from a man who was to wish many times he had never been born.

‘She used to come up to the house now and again, and have a cup of tea with mam,’ Arthur called out. ‘I suppose she had to talk about her troubles, or she would have gone off her head. She used to reminisce about when she’d gone out with you, which cheered her up a bit. Mam liked her a lot.’ He aimed for a black cat, knowing it would get out of the way, which it did, just, so that they all laughed. ‘You brought Jenny home for tea once, do you remember? But mam knew her parents already, because everybody knew everybody in those days.’

Brian nodded. ‘Jenny’s old man was a cheerful bloke, though I expect he knew what I was getting up to with his daughter. Luckily, he was fond of his ale, and went out with his wife to the pub every Friday and Saturday night.’

‘You had it made,’ Arthur laughed. ‘And you fucked her blind on the sofa.’

‘Well, who wouldn’t?’

‘Men!’ Avril gave her usual dry laugh. ‘That’s all you can talk about.’

‘It was the same,’ Arthur retorted, ‘when Sarah called on you a couple of years ago. You thought I’d gone out, but I was in the living room with my ear stuck to the wall. I looked in the mirror, and my face had gone like a beetroot.’

‘I’d have known if you had been there,’ she said. ‘Even when I’m in bed and you go out into the garden I can tell you’re not in the house.’

‘Anyway,’ he said to Brian, ‘I’d have fucked Jenny blind as well. You should have stayed with her.’

‘I ought to have done a lot of things, but they’d have been just as wrong as what I did do.’ His many mistakes in life had only been useful for counting over and over when he couldn’t get to sleep.

‘She’d have had a better life,’ Arthur said, ‘though I don’t suppose somebody like you would have stayed with her for long.’ He nodded towards the mass of clean slate roofs going down the hill. ‘Do you remember all them blocks of flats they built there twenty years ago? They had to demolish ’em after ten years because the partition walls turned into wet cardboard when it rained. A fortune was lost over that, which must have gone into somebody’s pocket. Nobody got sent down for it, and I expect a lot of people are still living in Spain on the proceeds. I’d have stood ’em against a wall and shot the lot. Some made even more money when they built new houses in their place.’

‘It provided work,’ Avril reasonably suggested, ‘and saved a lot of dole money.’

A pool of sunlight flowed into the car, and Arthur put the visor down. ‘In them days there was always work. It was just a shame Jenny’s husband took a job at that iron foundry. The best luck he ever had was when he married Jenny, even though she already had another bloke’s kid.’

‘A lot of men wouldn’t have taken it on,’ Avril said.

Arthur flicked the visor back when cloud hit the sun. ‘Yeh, but she made up for it a million times.’