скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Only one each,’ said Tony. ‘Woolly jumpers and a small piece of pottery that they find every week because they take it with them. What’s this?’
‘Views of Dudley,’ said Jack, scanning the TV guide. ‘A documentary. Five sites of interest in Dudley.’
‘Five?’ asked Tony.
‘Well, it doesn’t specify who’d be interested,’ I said. ‘If it’s sites of interest to traffic light fans they could do it.’
‘Charity shops,’ suggested Jack. Samantha was still looking at him, entranced. I felt a pang of jealousy. She was my niece. Jack had a nephew of his own, and I didn’t see why my niece had to like him. I wasn’t even sure why I did.
The view on the television changed, passing from the view of the town to what looked like a dull row of houses.
‘And this is of interest, is it?’ asked Tony. Caroline shrugged.
‘Turn it over,’ said Samantha. ‘Tweenies.’
‘Hold on,’ said Jack, paying more attention to the screen than it seemed to merit. ‘Just a minute there, I want to watch this.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s interesting, you know? This is where we live.’ He tuned the rest of us out. Samantha whiled away the time by pulling at his piercings. The documentary spent a while dawdling around the row of dull houses, and then took in some other equally dull views, the old railway tracks down by Dudley Port, a set of new houses on the Russells Hall Estate, a grubby factory on Pear Tree Lane, the collapsed priory that lay in pieces behind the college. One or two other houses featured, but they could have been anywhere. Jack sat entranced.
‘Boring,’ said Samantha. ‘Boring on the telly. Tweenies. Tweenies.’ For the last word she used a register only available to small children and military experiments into sonic weapons, a sharp squeal that punctured your head like a frozen skewer.
‘Sorry, kiddo,’ said Jack, ‘I’ve been hogging the box.’ He turned over and we tuned in to the Tweenies, and very bright they were. Jack didn’t seem to be watching it, though. I was watching him. Tony was watching me, and so was Caroline. They were both watching me but in different ways and I didn’t want to catch their eyes. Jack was looking at the set, and absently fending off Samantha, but he wasn’t really with us. He’d gone into himself, I thought. In fact he’d gone much, much further.
Before long, we’d all be going there with him.
Chapter Three (#ulink_73cd611e-cb9a-5a0a-87b0-ce3064f5a646)
I
I’ve had more girlfriends than you might think likely. But they don’t stick around for long. They’re like summer colds: they turn up, send you light-headed for a couple of days, then two weeks of headaches and it’s all over. There have been quite a few of them and all but one of them have gone their own ways. There have been several, but in terms of time spent together they don’t add up to a single long-term relationship. That’s total time together. I’m not adjusting for moods and tantrums.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful here. It could be worse. Some people are surprised I’ve had a girlfriend at all, let alone one you could take outdoors in daylight. And they’ve been convenient. They haven’t overlapped. I’ve had friends with overlapping girlfriends and it always ends up with shouting. There are reprisals and cars have to be resprayed. It’s all too much trouble. I’ve stuck with girlfriends who don’t overlap, but they haven’t stuck with me.
I was in town getting a new bus pass, thinking about girlfriends. It was summer in Dudley: the time of year when the sky goes a brighter shade of grey. There seemed to be more young people than the year before, but there always seemed to be more young people than the year before. It was me, getting older. It couldn’t be many more years before I’d go out in the middle of summer in thirty cardigans and a flock of coats. I watched pretty girls teetering on the edge of adulthood, poised on the brink of stretchmarks and hoovering.
The travel centre is next to the bus stop, and it’s got a queue in it. The queue has been there since the travel centre opened, and it hasn’t got any shorter. The travel centre was moved to the bus depot five years ago. Before that, people had to queue in the town centre, where the travel centre used to be before it was knocked down so that the council could build some new public toilets by the market before the smell from the old public toilets led to an epidemic.
The queue isn’t there because the people working in the travel centre are slow. They’re not slow, they’re friendly and efficient. I’m biased about this, but take it from me, considering the sort of things they have to deal with they’re bright and lively. There are two young women in very crisp blouses with well-ordered haircuts. Straight fringes. Behind them is a door, and behind that you can see part of an office. An older woman sits in there and sometimes comes out and looks at everyone in the long queue the way you’d look at an unexpected boil on your scrotum. She has hair that’s been forced into a state beyond tidiness. It’s pulled away from her face, not without good reason. For many years I thought that no one knew what she did, but I now have insider information.
The two girls sit on low stools behind small windows in a Perspex screen with fingermarks all over it. There are fingermarks next to the ceiling. Someone must have stood on the counter to do it. In front of one window is an old woman trying to get a bus to a village that fell into the sea sixty years ago. In about half an hour, she’ll try to pay with a money-off voucher for shampoo. In front of the other window is a woman trying to buy a student pass for her son, who isn’t with her. She’ll be going through all the possible variants.
‘Well, he could go to Birmingham by bus, then get the train to Cardiff, and then get the local line to his digs. How can we do that?’
It turns out that we can do that by filling in eighteen ninety-page documents, while everyone else waits and the old woman by the other window gets older. After filling out the documents and handing them over, it turns out that the woman can’t have any passes or tickets because her son has to sign everything, twice. Besides, he might be better off with a super saver plus for part of his journey but he’ll need to go to Cardiff to see about that.
The old woman remembers the name of the village she wants to go to, and it isn’t the one she’d been talking about after all. That was something she saw on television.
The mother decides to leave it, she’ll pop back later and bring her son along. He’ll need a passport photograph, but he won’t be able to get one at the travel centre because the photo booth is broken. There are two obnoxious children in it, surreptitiously pinching one another under the sign asking parents not to let their children play in the photo booth. No one claims the children. Everyone ignores them, secretly hoping that they’ll do themselves some severe harm.
The mother’s place at the window is taken by another woman with a son who also needs a student pass or a free ticket to somewhere. This time the student is with her, looking bored and mumbling. The old woman gets her return ticket to Barmouth, which hasn’t fallen into the sea and is where she wanted to go all along, and discovers that she has to pay for it. This hadn’t occurred to her. She’s about a hundred and fifty but she hasn’t got the hang of shops. She produces a purse and begins taking very small coins from it, one by one. Her ticket will cost her eighteen pounds something, and she’s prepared to count small change until she gets there.
The son won’t tell the girl behind the counter where he wants to go. He mumbles embarrassedly. He can see the bright white shape of the girl’s bra through her crisp white blouse. He tries to look away, but it’s difficult. He is hunched over the form because he has an erection. He’s seventeen and his mother is with him. He puts together a series of unlikely fantasies involving himself and the two girls and many of the other people in the travel centre, including the old woman with the endless supply of sixpences and, of course, his own mother.
Everyone else has the right money, and they have it ready, and they know what they want. One of the two children in the photo booth swears meaninglessly. No one pays any attention.
I know all about the travel centre, because I get my bus pass from it. Once a month my bus pass needs renewing and the travel centre is where I have to go to renew it. I stand in the queue and, in the fullness of time, I get to the front and get another month’s travel on the randomly driven and unevenly scheduled buses.
For months I noticed one of the girls serving there. She was attractive, I thought. I noticed her eyes. I also noticed that she was at the other window, whichever window I got to. As I only went there once a month the chances of getting to her window were low. At twenty-eight day intervals I would look sideways at her while someone else sorted out my bus pass. She had a name badge on, but I couldn’t read it at that angle. Once, while I was trying to make out her name I caught the girl who was serving me eyeing me the way you’d eye a cockroach in the butter dish. From her point of view, I was glancing sidelong at her colleague’s chest. I looked at her chest instead but it didn’t cheer her up.
I began to consider getting a different type of bus pass, so that I could go in at fortnightly intervals.
I don’t know what it was that I found attractive about her. I find strange things attractive. This has been a bonus, considering some of the things I’ve been through. She had neat hair and tidy features. She had angular cheekbones and a straight nose. It looked as though someone had gone over her face with a geometry set, sorting it all out and getting it symmetrical. She had dark eyes. I couldn’t say what colour they were because I was always off to one side of her and never less than three yards away. I wanted to know. She was thin, and I liked that. She had wrists like a sparrow’s ankles. She didn’t have any rings on her fingers. This was good on two counts. Firstly, it meant that she wasn’t married or engaged. Or that she was, but she was embarrassed about it. Secondly, it might mean that she didn’t like jewellery, which was a good thing. I couldn’t afford to buy jewellery.
I was planning birthday presents for a girl I had never spoken to. Things were getting serious before they’d had a chance to be frivolous. The next month I arrived at the front of the queue and found that I was yet again at the wrong window. I went to the back of the queue again. I had a feeling that I needed to move the relationship forward. Speaking to her, for example. When I got to the front of the queue, I thought, I’d ask her out.
I waited for what felt a ridiculously long time, moving forward in slow shuffles, hoping she wouldn’t go to lunch or die of old age before I reached her. Over the dandruff-strewn shoulders of grubby Midlanders I watched her dark eyes. She called the main office to ask about timetables. She advised people where to get off. She gave bank cards to the third woman, who came out of her small office blinking and sullen to check them. A person away from her, one transaction away, I lost my nerve and went home.
I had to find change for a month’s worth of bus travel. I got most of it from down the back of my sofa.
A month later I went through the same procedure, but this time I kept my nerve and asked her out.
Her name was Judy, which wasn’t surprising. She said she’d go out with me, which was. Her eyes were a very dark blue. If they’d been a shade of paint, they’d have been called something like Midnight Shades. Her fringe was so straight it looked like it’d cut you if you touched it. She either had a local accent or a cold. I was so stunned when she said that she’d go out with me that I forgot to get my bus pass.
I had to find change for a month’s worth of bus travel. There was nothing left down the back of the sofa. I had to buy things that only cost four pence so that I’d have the ninety-six pence fare in change. Even in Dudley there isn’t much that only costs four pence. Some of the buildings, perhaps, or the freedom of the city.
Even without a bus pass I had to travel to meet Judy. We met at pubs and at the cinema, where I tried to find out what she wanted to see while looking as though I was deciding. There’s a ten-screen cinema close to Dudley; nine of the screens show the latest blockbusters, and the other one is closed for cleaning. We saw the latest blockbusters, and I bought us four pence worth of assorted sweets from the pick’n’mix booth.
If you’re ever in the position of having to spend very little money on confectionery that’s paid for by weight, go with marshmallows. They don’t weigh much at all and they’re bulky.
With our bag of two marshmallows we’d sit and watch Arnie save the day, listening to stray parts of the soundtracks of other films. As the lights went down Judy’s eyes would get darker. I had trouble not looking at them. I had trouble not looking at Judy.
We passed the two-week mark, moving into what was, for me, new territory.
She kept on going out with me. What was wrong with her? I kept buying her small quantities of cheap marshmallows and meeting her when the travel was cheapest. She seemed to like it.
One thing led to another, and that led to itself, repeatedly.
The time came to introduce her to my friends. I didn’t know where Darren and Spin had got to, and I didn’t have friends at the office. It’d have to be Jack. If she wasn’t put off by Dudley pubs, and sweets with the consistency of sandy snot, then she might just be able to take Jack.
I asked her if she’d like to meet him, and she said yes. He said he’d like to meet anyone who’d go out with me for more than a month, as it would constitute a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I arranged a date and we got together.
II
Jack got on with Judy. Sometimes I didn’t like how well they got on together. I was jealous in two directions. I didn’t want to be jealous at all. I wanted happiness and joy. I wanted enough money to pay back the building society all of their correspondence-producing costs before they went bankrupt. I wanted more money than that, really. I wanted enough money to buy an island, hollow it out, and live under an imitation volcano with a swivel chair and a cat and a stack of underlings in boiler suits. I had to keep things in perspective, however. On my wages I wouldn’t be able to buy an island for several hundred years, and that wasn’t allowing for island inflation.
I could always lower my sights and sponsor a traffic island. That can’t cost much. Companies do it, at least in the West Midlands. You’re in the traffic, beside the latest traffic island, and there next to the discarded shoe and the McWrapper is a sign saying:
This traffic island is sponsored by Keegan’s Home for the Bewildered.
That can’t cost much. The only time people see the things is when they’re stuck in traffic, wondering whether there’s a reason for the traffic jam and hoping it’s a juicy accident. So the name of the company becomes subconsciously linked with stress and waiting and death and no one uses the company ever again, and the managing director in his Portakabin somewhere outside Tipton waits by the dormant telephone until the receivers come and shut him down. Still, at least it’s something to look at while you wait for an accident you can get to before the emergency services arrive and hide all the body parts.
This could just be me.
I told Judy about my days at the office and she told me about her days at the travel centre. I had always known it was a bad queue to be in. Many strange people stood in it. Dandruff was rife, coughing was likely, gaudy skin diseases drew the attention and there was the smell of people who misunderstood the use of soap. There would be strange men in combat gear and huge women with foul tattoos and hairstyles copied from ’70s footballers. There would be someone in a faded Queen concert T-shirt. There would be a young woman with the sort of eyes you normally saw on a dead fish.
I thought the queue was bad and I only saw it from the back for one hour each month. Imagine, Judy said, seeing them face-on for eight hours a day, six days a week, shuffling towards you to ask you for tickets on the space shuttle. She’d spotted me months ago, among the living dead. I was always going to the other window, and she thought I fancied Lynn, her partner. I did fancy Lynn but I didn’t mention it. You can only push your luck so far before it falls to the floor and shatters. I asked what happened in the office at the back.
Maureen happened there. Maureen was a supervisor and was in an age range starting at sixty. There was no upper limit. She spent the day in the back office. She had a chair and a desk and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. She had a calendar with pictures of pigs on it. She had a few framed photographs of children. Judy thought they were her grandchildren. Lynn thought they were her victims. No one thought they were pretty. Maureen had a kettle and a sink and she could check bank cards. She liked checking them. She enjoyed it more if they turned out to be invalid. She had twenty/twenty vision and all her own teeth. She had a medical complaint which was never specified but which meant that she was unable to take incoming calls. Lynn had to take them.
Lynn was a blonde midget, full of energy from the tips of her toes all the short way up to her uncontrollable frizzy hair. She fidgeted in her chair all day. I was careful not to call her perky while Judy was in earshot. Since I didn’t know how far Judy’s hearing range extended, I never called her perky at all. Not out loud. She was, though. She had a perky bosom. I had often tried not to notice it. Of course, I had once stared blatantly at it, so as to divert attention away from the amount of attention I had been paying to Judy. Lynn remembered me looking at her chest. She thought I was a pervert, but gradually mellowed. One night, Judy and Lynn came out with me and Jack. The idea was that Jack and Lynn would hit it off, so that we could go out as two couples instead of one couple and a straggler.
Jack refused to hit it off.
‘She’s a midget,’ he said. ‘What am I, Billy fucking Smart?’
‘Billy fucking Stupid,’ I told him. We were in the men’s toilet in the Curdled Milk, a Dudley theme pub. The theme seemed to be bad taste and watery beer, but I might have been missing something. Jack was missing something. He was missing the urinal, completely. I wasn’t looking at his dick – well, you don’t, do you? – but there was a glint of metal from its vicinity. Perhaps that accounted for the spray he was producing. I moved to stand some distance behind him but I still didn’t feel safe.
‘She’s not a midget,’ I said. ‘She’s compact.’
‘Compact? She needs to sit on a cushion to reach the table. That’s a fucking dwarf, chief. If I showed her this she’d run a mile.’
‘If you showed anyone that they’d run a mile.’
‘Shows how much you know. I showed it to your girlfriend and now I can’t get her off the phone. On all day and night she is. Out-fucking-rageous. Can’t get enough of it.’
‘I didn’t know she was into scrap metal.’
‘Ha ha. At least she isn’t a fucking midget.’
‘She might be. Film stars are all midgets. It’s well known.’
‘What about Robert De Niro?’
‘Midget. All done with camera angles. He can’t reach the top shelf in the newsagent.’
‘Robert De Niro doesn’t go to newsagents, he has people to do it for him. He’s seven feet tall in his socks. He’s a wiseguy.’
‘He’s an actor. And he only ever plays the same role, so it’s hardly difficult.’
‘Oh?’ Jack looked round, doing up his zip. ‘And what role’s that?’
‘He always plays Robert De Niro. Every film he’s in, he’s himself.’
Jack was affronted. He was a fan of Robert De Niro. I had been, but it was something I was trying to grow out of. You can’t be impressed with New York gangsters when you leave puberty. It has to go the way of Clark’s Commandos and Action Man.
‘You talking to me?’ asked Jack. ‘There’s nobody else here.’
‘Too true,’ I said, leaving him to it.
Chapter Four (#ulink_a412e582-a4e2-5450-9372-5672e6323e99)
I
Eddie Finch met Judy at a party thrown by a friend of someone Jack knew. The party looked as though it had been thrown with some force, if not much accuracy. It was held in all of the open areas of a three-storey town house on the more expensive side of Stourbridge. There was a spiky record playing somewhere, and someone said that someone who’d once been one of Pop Will Eat Itself was being the DJ for the night. Judy talked to me but I couldn’t hear her. I could only hear the record. I was trying to identify it.
I do that with music. I can’t help it. Instead of listening to whoever I’m with, I try to work out what the song is. It isn’t deliberate. It’s my ears. They prioritize. Music over conversation. That may be something to do with the conversations I usually get caught in at parties.
Judy sidestepped a slug of red wine that fell to the carpet with a thud. She looked at me and said something. I laughed, hopefully appropriately. A thin white man with thick dreadlocks gave me a stare that might have cleared the student union bar. It didn’t work in Stourbridge, even on the more expensive side. I gave him a look of my own.
Judy tugged me between people who felt as though they were made of elbows and broomsticks, my can of Supa Brew Ice Special brimming over with high-alcohol, low-taste lager. I saw what she’d seen; Jack, reeling down the stairs, carrying a glass that might have been full before he’d tipped it over a quantity of guests.
Although he’d invited us, Jack wasn’t sure whose party it was. He was fairly sure, he’d said in the Frog’s Sister earlier that evening, that his friend Craig knew someone at the party. It would all be okay. They’d be happy to see us. We could get some drinks from the off-licence on Nail Street and drop in. I wanted to stay in the Frog’s Sister. It was quiz night, and they had easy quizzes if you knew your Black Sabbath albums. When Jack went to the bar to get another round in for himself – ‘You’ve got loads there mate, you don’t need another one’ – I asked Judy whether she’d like to go to the party. I tried to make it sound unappealing.
‘It’ll just be like a student party,’ I said. ‘Lots of people in a house, someone crying on the stairs, someone being sick in the bedroom, lots of people we don’t know. You know.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Judy. ‘I haven’t been a student. I don’t go around with students. I don’t know enough about student parties to know whether I want to go to one or not. It’s just as well you’re here to help me with it, otherwise I might go out and have some fun or something.’
I don’t pretend to know everything about women. I know they like to go in clothes shops for hours picking up things they don’t like and saying how horrible they are. I once asked Spin about it and he shrugged.
‘That’s a shrug, chief,’ Darren said. ‘Easy one. No one understands women, not even women.’
I didn’t understand them. I understood Historic Peculiarities well enough to pass exams. If there had been an exam for understanding women my paper would have been returned with a cutting comment on it and I’d have been forced to retake it the following September. I knew that Judy was in a mood without needing to know anything else. There were clues. She kept putting things down forcefully. She answered questions with sharper questions. She’d mentioned not being a student. That helped. She thought that I was patronizing her by telling her what the party would be like. Add that to her bad mood – and I was usually careful not to add anything to her bad moods, they seemed to get along well enough by themselves – and that was enough.
‘We could go,’ I said. ‘If Jack’s going. I mean, it’s Friday night. It’s not as if we have to get up tomorrow.’
‘Yeah well, if it’s no trouble for you. I’d hate to put you out.’
Just then I wanted to put her out of the window of a moving train, but these tender moments are what makes a relationship special.
‘I’d love to go with you. When I was a student I didn’t go out with anyone like you.’
‘What, female?’
No, beset by inexplicable mood swings. I mean, come on. If I was stuck with a twenty-eight day cycle that sent me insane one week in four – I’m not a biologist, so I might have got some of the details wrong on this – and it started in early adolescence, then by the time I was twenty I think I might just have got the hang of it. I might think, hold on, he hasn’t stopped loving me after all. I might think, I know, I’ll just tell him what the problem is and that’ll be that. I might think, hold on, it’s three weeks since last time this happened, it’ll be menstruation, just like it was last month and the month before that and every other bloody month, and there’s nothing wrong.
Jack returned from the bar with drinks for himself. He’d got a pint and a short. I wanted a pint and a short, and I had half a pint. Judy was drinking gin and tonic.
That’s another thing. If I was female and heading towards the ovary-popping time of the month, I’d steer clear of gin.
Then again, I’ve had plenty of bad times on whisky, and I’ll still drink that if there’s any going.
‘You coming?’ Jack asked, downing his pint. ‘You’ll get in with me. You stick with me,’ he said, arranging himself around Judy and talking into her face from close range, ‘and we’ll be fine. I don’t know about this miserable git though. We might have to dump him somewhere.’
‘Yeah,’ said Judy. ‘What’s wrong with you tonight?’
She drained her gin and tonic and stood up. I followed her to the party, via the off-licence.
