The Right Man (20 page)

Leisure.
Funny word. Leh-czha. Lejah. I rolled it around my mind for a while. When was
the last time it had been there? Leisure. When? I thought about this. 1984.
Yes, 1984, before Mullin and Ketts, before bloody Liz even. I was working for
Anthony Sampson, the famous old-school agent. The type with a pocket
handkerchief. I had a three-week holiday in Greece with my brother Tony and his
girlfriend of the time. What was her name — Stacey, Tracy, Spacey? I had
leisure and a job to go back to, as a commissioned trainee. Eleven thousand I
made that year, and it seemed enough. Cor! Listen to me: ‘In them days you
could go clubbing, shag a few birds, pay off your mortgage, smart clothes,
smart car, and still have change for the school fees and the wife’s cocaine
habit.’

I
wandered along the towpath in the Putney direction. In the warm, girls were
wearing cotton again and the river looked luxuriant: glinting silver diagonals
emanating from the wake of a rowing eight. Spring had been grown out of, and
the air was optimistic. It all made me feel, well, guilty. I could not come up
to the mood of the day. I was aimless. There was no need to walk to the park,
but like a headless chicken, I tottered down well-trodden paths. With Grace
gone, the park would undoubtedly make me feel worse. The climbing frame train
where she cut her knee, the now dried-out boating lake which we never did get
to have a go on. The sandpit where some older kids had teased her and stolen
her shoe. And of course, down towards Fulham, the spot where the bearded man
had sunk so gracefully last month. I must have been mad coming here. A bicycle
went past with an empty plastic baby-seat on the back. School pickup. It was
twenty past three.

Liz was
right, I am an indulgent and self-pitying wanker. Stupid to come down here and
look at all these things, sit on this bench. I bring things on myself. I set
myself up to fail. How did I think Bishop’s Park would make me feel, even on a
day like this? What did I expect?

Some
lads broke into a fight over a disputed goal in the football field beyond the
playground. A dog barked and the irritating whine of a chainsaw suddenly
stopped. Strange how, in its absence, one notices a noise which before had been
there but blocked out by the mind. It started again. Damn, once you’ve noticed
it, it really gets under your skin and makes it hard to think. I got up and
walked towards the exit gate.

In the
miracle of this day, which I spoiled with my presence, a flirtatious breeze
invited the sawdust from the chainsaw to dance. Some of it stuck in my throat.
The noise stopped again momentarily and then resumed. I was wading through
brash now, large branches and sawdust strewn across the path which an old boy
in a dark-blue donkey jacket was shunting into a heap.

Up in
the branches, a pair of brown male legs in oily denim shorts braced themselves
against the Y—shaped break of the tree, whilst among the leaves above, their
owner wielded the whining saw like a TV magician showing you each side of a
silk handkerchief And that’s TV as in television, by the way. The legs, though
muscular and tanned, were scarred and lived-in. Not the legs of one of those
model boys in the new jeans ads, or on the Z-cards. Older legs, a man’s legs,
tough, sinewy, bloody British legs. Not pumped up with steroids, vitamins or
gym machinery. Men’s legs must have been like this at Agincourt.

The old
boy down below, clearing the brash, shouted, ‘Cheer up!’ at me. ‘It might never
happen!’

The saw
noise stopped and the air thumped into a silence in my head. Broken only by the
man above shouting, ‘Timbaaaaaah!’ like a corny Tarzan. Well, at least someone
was enjoying himself. It was my brother Tony. They’d let him loose with a
chainsaw, the mad fools. After the remedial home in Kent, we were all pleased
he’d managed to hold down a job sweeping leaves and picking up litter. Now he
was limbering down towards me like a monkey on speed.

He
flashed a pirate’s grin at me, his earring glinting in the sunlight. Grace was
not there to have this stuff explained to her. No one was asking me, ‘Why,
Daddy? Why is Uncle Tony cutting the tree off? What does timbaa mean? What did
the other man say would never happen?’

He
climbed down out of the tree with ease. Apart from his height, he was the
nearest thing to a pirate you could ever see. He’s concuss-yourself-on-a-door-lintel
tall. Bang-your-knees-on-steering-wheels tall. Stoop-around-in-boats tall. Answer-lonely-hearts-advertisements
tall. He could never have been a real pirate, not even a captain pirate, with
the privileges and higher ceiling of the captain’s cabin. Lofty was his
nickname at school.

‘Have
the Tories reformed themselves into an electable party, number two?’ said in an
accent out of a 1950s submarine movie.

‘What?’
I said, gormlessly.

‘Well,
smile then,’ he chirped at me.

‘Oh,’ I
said lamely, getting his joke.

It was
a fall from a tree that first put Tony into hospital. I must have been nine or
so. I remember waiting with my mum in casualty for the doctor’s results, and
feeling that although it had been his decision to climb so high, it was my
fault that he fell. As if my envy of him had been tangible enough to eject him
from the branch. I still live with that ampoule of guilt. Mind you, the amount
of LSD he took in the late seventies probably had more to do with his current
mental state, and that had nothing to do with me.

The old
geezer in the donkey jacket hustled me out of the way. I was standing on his
brash. I apologized.

‘You’ll
get over it, mate,’ he said.

‘What?’
I said again.

‘They’re
not worth it, you know, them women.

Tony
was unstrapping his harness. ‘Fancy a cup of tea or an ice lolly or something,
number two?’ he said.

‘Oi,’
said the old bloke. ‘You’re not leaving me here with all this.’

‘What
do you want, Ted? Ice lolly? Cake?’

‘Naaaaah,’
said the old bloke. ‘I’ve got me thermos.’

‘Come
on then, bollock-chops,’ said Tony to me. ‘I fancy a Mivvi.’

Even having a
four-year-old child, I didn’t know that you could still get a Mivvi. A slab of
dairy ice-cream covered in raspberry sorbet on a stick. Grace always wanted
Space Rocket Twirls, or Flintstone Icicles. I hadn’t had a Mivvi, hadn’t even
heard the word, since about 1972. Childhood images of holidays in Newquay
accelerated to the forefront of my mind. I wanted a Mivvi too. I wanted a Mivvi
badly. I followed my big little brother across the park.

Despite
his greasy denim shorts, he had on heavy boots and ski socks. He walked with
the crooked gait of someone long at sea, or was this just my wishful thinking,
my tendency to think of everyone’s castability?

‘So
what the fuck’s the problem, smiler?’ he asked, as we climbed through a hole in
the fence into the allotments. I couldn’t think of a reply, so I just coughed
and asked him how often the plane trees needed cutting back.

‘Haven’t
the faintest fucking idea, pal,’ he said, and we arrived at a small pavilion
with a glass-covered noticeboard by the door. He went in. If this was the place
dispensing Mivvis, we had entered a time warp.

An old
woman in a pink nylon overall stood behind a tea counter. There was a small
queue of people in cardigans, jolly fat women, people talking of plants in
undertones. This was where the allotment—owners had their tea break. There were
no advertising posters on the wall, though there was a signed ten-by-eight
photograph of a famous television personality; Jeremy Planter.

‘Seen Mum?’
Tony asked.

‘Yeah,
I’ve been looking for a flat for her.’

‘Oh?’
Tony could never understand the logic of normal things.

‘Well,
it’s a bit lonely for her, you know. In the house now he’s gone.’

‘Nineteen
eighty—seven, that was a good year,’ he said, as he delicately slithered the
raspberry coating off his Mivvi with his tongue. I had bitten into mine from
the top, not daring to attempt the denuding of the dairy ice-cream centre as I
would have done as a child.

‘Remember
that, Guy? October the sixteenth, fucking hurricane, fucked up all the trees.’
And he laughed with a shag tobacco smoker’s wheeze.

‘Terrible,
though, the devastation. You know, we lost forty per cent of the trees in
London. Forty per cent. So, how’s the world of Thespeeenism, then?’ he asked.

‘Oh,
you know, we survive.’

‘What
about the women, though, eh? You get to meet all the decent women, don’t you,
in your line of work. You can pick and choose, you can.’ He laughed again and
his face creased up like an old glove. I still couldn’t manage a smile. I was
off duty after all.

‘What
you doing down here, then? Shouldn’t you be clinching deals, or relaxing by a
pool with a pina colada or something?’

‘Well,
yes, I suppose I should, but I felt like a walk…’ I said, feeling like
rubbish in a bin bag.

When
the Mivvis were finished, he got out an old rolling tin from a pouch at his
waist, which had been painted with a yin-yang symbol, and rolled himself a fat ciggie.

I sat
and watched as he lit it, and my look must have spoken to him as he inhaled the
first curl of smoke. He pushed the tin across to me.

‘I
haven’t had a roll-up for years,’ I said. ‘Or a Mivvi, come to that.’

‘No
wonder you look like a dead sheep,’ he said, and laughed again.

I
followed him back through the hole in the fence and we walked along the towpath
together for a bit.

‘How’s
your sexy wife?’ he asked. I told him about sexy Bob Henderson. I don’t know
whether it’s because he has a bit of his brain missing, but Tony comes across
as a good listener. He lets you finish, anyway. I told him about the incident
with the drowning man.

‘Green
Man, that’s what that was,’ he said when I’d finished. ‘Fucking symbol of death
and rebirth. The harvest. Oldest fucking symbol in fucking pagan folklore, that
is. You should’ve done a Morris dance right there and then, Guido.’

‘Well,
I suppose I sort of did,’ I said, remembering the silly run I’d done along the
shore.

‘And
that wasn’t bits of twig going into his mouth, that was a fucking new tree
growing out of it. Symbol of fucking rebirth, that is, don’t you know anything?
Look under any church roof look at the gargoyles. You lucky bastard, yuppying
about in television, all mobile phones and fancy women, and one little walk
down by the river and the fucking Green Man himself floats by, easy
as
you
like.’

‘Is he
giving you all that hippy rubbish?’ said the old codger, ambling up after his
lunch. ‘He’s been smoking that wacky baccy again, haven’t you, Tony? Turns the brain,
that stuff does. I tried it once. Nothing.’

‘I’m
Tony’s brother, Guy,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you.

‘And
you know what Guy means? It means wood man, man of the woods, in old language.
You must be descended from a tree or something.’ I never thought of it before,
but Tony and Barbara Stenner would have had a lot to talk about. He buzzed on
his chainsaw and wobbled it dangerously at me. ‘And I think you need pollarding
down to size, man.’ He laughed like a maniac. I leapt out of the way of the
whizzing teeth. He let the engine die, and hoisted himself up to the Y of the
tree. ‘Ever hugged a tree, Guy?’

‘Erm,
no, I can’t say that I have.’

‘You
should try it,’ and he wrapped his pirate’s arms around the bole of the plane
as if he’d just come back from a sea voyage and it was the first woman he’d
seen for eight months. ‘Aaargh. Lovely!’ he said, and gave it a smacking kiss.

I
looked at my watch, it was twenty to five and I’d said I’d only be gone for a
long lunch. Must check in. What am I, some kind of basking snake? It had been a
pretty dull day in Meard Street by the sound of it. But Liz had rung in to tell
me the time of our appointment to see a counsellor. Yes, OK, we’d decided to go
to a counsellor, it seemed like the only thing left. I wish she hadn’t told
Joan in the office, though. Joan would undoubtedly have told Naomi and Tilda and
even Tania by now, who would probably start bringing me in special healing teas
and books on relationships and treating me like one of her lost animals, and
the others, well, who knows? Humiliating for me. I’m meant to sort out people’s
lives, for Jimmy’s sake, to make people happy. It is my job, after all.

After
this little excursion into Tony’s
Lord of the Rings
world, I felt a bit
better. Like I was on holiday. We’ve had holidays, Liz and I. I’ve made sure of
that. But the trouble with holidays is that however much you relax while away,
however many Stephen King books you read, the mail and the bills are still
waiting for you when you get back. The well-being wears off much quicker than
the tan. Usually before you’ve even got off the Gatwick Express at Victoria. Certainly
before you get the key in the door.

The
best holiday would be to tell everyone you’re going away, pack, get in the
taxi, and then turn it round, come back and secretly have a week on your own at
home. A holiday in your dressing gown with order-in pizzas.