Rebuilding Coventry

To Geoffrey Strachan — he
knows why

1
Yesterday I Killed a Man

There are two things that
you should know about me immediately: the first is that I am beautiful, the
second is that yesterday I killed a man called Gerald Fox. Both things were
accidents. My parents are not good-looking. My father looks like a tennis ball,
bald and round, and my mother closely resembles a bread knife, thin, jagged and
with a cutting tongue. I have never liked them and I suspect they don’t like
me.

And, I
neither loved nor hated Gerald Fox enough to want to kill him.

But I
love my brother Sidney, and I think he loves me. We laugh together about Tennis
Ball and Bread Knife. Sidney is married to a sad woman called Ruth. Ruth sighs
before she speaks, and when she has finished speaking she sighs again. Sighs
are her punctuation marks. Sidney is besotted with her: he finds her
melancholia to be deeply erotic. They have no children, and don’t want any.
Ruth claims to be too afraid of the world, and Sidney wants frightened Ruth all
to himself. They make love seven times a week — more if the weather’s hot — and
when they go abroad they hardly leave their hotel room. Sidney tells me nearly
everything about his marriage, although he is surprisingly squeamish about
money. ‘No, no,’ he says, and shudders away from financial talk.

He is a
sales manager in a store selling electrical goods in the city where we were
both born, a dab hand at selling cameras, compact disc players and portable
colour televisions to people who can’t afford them. Sidney is successful
because, like me, he is beautiful. He has a smile that customers can’t resist.
They are hypnotized by the deep brown of his eyes, and the lush growth of his
eyelashes. As they sign the credit arrangement they admire his hands. They don’t
mind when he tells them that the consumer durable they have just purchased, and
want immediately, will not be delivered for a fortnight. They are too busy
listening to his heartbreaking voice with its charming hesitations and throaty
catches. They leave the shop in a daze. One woman walked backwards out of the
shop still waving to Sidney and backed onto a motorbike which carried her
fifteen yards before throwing her into the gutter. Other people in the shop ran
out to help her but Sidney stayed inside to guard the till.

Sidney
has a very cold heart. He has never suffered himself and is irritated by other
people’s pain. He has refused to watch the television news ‘since they started
clogging it up with films of bloody famine victims’. I once asked Sidney what
he wanted out of life. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ve already got it.’ He was
thirty-two then. I said: ‘But what will you do until you die?’ He laughed and
said: ‘Make more money and buy more things.’ My brother is pragmatic to a
fault. He doesn’t know I killed a man yesterday. He’s on holiday in a villa on
the Algarve and he won’t answer the telephone.

Sidney
is the only person in the world I know who won’t be shocked that I am wanted by
the police. I am almost pleased that he has no principles; unprincipled people
are a great comfort in times of crisis.

I have
an unusual Christian name: Coventry. My father was visiting Coventry on the day
I was born. He was delivering a lorry-load of sand to a bomb-site. ‘Thank God
he wasn’t on an errand to Giggleswick,’ my mother used to say at least three
times a week. It is the nearest she has come to cracking a joke in the whole of
her life.

Sidney
was also named after a city: my father saw a picture of Sydney Harbour Bridge
in
Tit Bits
and fell in love with it. He knew its weight and length and
the frequency with which it was painted.

When I
grew up I was puzzled at these quixotic choices. With the cold eye of
adolescence I saw that my father was stultifyingly dull and possessed no
imagination whatsoever.

Naturally
Sidney and I have always hated our names. I longed to be an anonymous Pat,
Susan or Ann, and Sidney wanted to be called Steve. But then every man I’ve
ever known has wanted to be called Steve.

So
there you are. I have an extraordinary face, body and name, but unfortunately I
am a very ordinary woman with no obvious talents, no influential family
connections, no qualifications in anything at all and no income. Yesterday I
had a husband and two teenage children. Today I am alone, I’m on the run and I’m
in London,
without my handbag.

2
Night Out with the Neighbours

They had been sitting in
the pub, Coventry Dakin and her friends. It was Monday evening. Coventry was
not enjoying herself. Derek, her husband, had raised his voice to her before
she left home. He was going out to the Annual General Meeting of the Tortoise
Society and he thought that Coventry should stay in with the children.

‘But
Derek, they’re sixteen and seventeen, old enough to be left,’ whispered
Coventry.

‘And
what if a gang of violent yobs decide to break in and beat John up and rape
Mary?’ Derek hissed. Neither of them believed in arguing in front of the
children, so they were in the back garden in the tortoise shed. Outside was the
glooming night. Derek had picked up a lettuce during his last speech and was
carefully peeling away leaves and feeding them to his beloved tortoises.
Coventry could hear their shells clacking together as they rushed towards Derek’s
hand.

‘But
there aren’t any violent gangs around here, Derek,’ she said. ‘Those gangs
drive round in
cars,
Coventry. They come out of the inner city and pick
on affluent suburban houses.’

‘But
this is a council estate, Derek.’

‘But we’re
buying
our
house, aren’t we?’

‘How would
a car-load of yobs know that?’

‘Because
of the Georgian doors and windows I’ve put in, of course. But if you want to
leave John and Mary alone and defenceless, then go ahead. Go out drinking with
your common friends.’

Coventry
didn’t defend her friends against this charge because they were, undeniably,
common.

‘Anyway,
I don’t like to think of you sitting in a pub.’ He was sulking now; Coventry
could just make out his pushed-up bottom lip in the dark.

‘Don’t
think about it, then. Concentrate on your slimy
tortoises. She was almost shouting.

‘Tortoises
are not slimy, as you would know if you could ever bring yourself to touch one.’

There
was a long silence between man and wife which was broken only by the
surprisingly loud crunching noises made by the feasting tortoises. For
something to do Coventry read the beasts’ names, which Derek had written
immaculately in fluorescent paint on each shell: ‘Ruth’, ‘Naomi’, ‘Jacob’ and ‘Job’.

‘Shouldn’t
they be hibernating?’ she asked her husband.

This
was a sore point. There had already been several frosts but Derek kept putting
off the evil day. The truth was that he always missed them during the long
winter months.

‘Allow
me
to decide on a suitable date for their hibernation, will you?’ said Derek.
But he thought to himself, ‘Must get some straw on my way home from work
tomorrow.’

Derek
was worried. A series of disastrous summers had put his pets off their food,
thus leaving them short of body fats and jeopardizing their chances of
surviving their winter sojourn in dreamland. He’d tried force-feeding them but
had stopped when they’d shown obvious signs of distress. He now weighed them
daily, noting their respective weights in an exercise book. He blamed himself
for not noticing their anorexic condition earlier, though how he was supposed
to see through their thick shells he didn’t know. He didn’t have X-ray vision,
did he?

‘Now,
if you don’t mind?’ Derek had held the shed door open for Coventry. She had
squeezed past him through the narrow opening, not wanting to touch or be
touched by him, and walked across the dark, damp grass where the tortoises
sported during the summer months, and went into the house.

The pub Coventry and her
friends were sitting in was called Astaire’s. It was a theme pub. The theme
being the cinematic persona of Fred Astaire. The brewery’s designer had razed
the old name, the Black Pig, from the exterior and the sturdy wooden tables and
comfortable bench seating from the interior. Drinkers were now forced to crouch
over pink and chromium coffee-tables. Their large bums lapped over the edges of
tiny, pink Dralon stools. The refurbishment was meant to represent a nineteen-thirties
Hollywood night-club, but the clientele remained stubbornly unsophisticated;
spurning all inducements to buy cocktails, preferring to swig beer from
straight glasses.

Fred Astaire
costumes had been provided for the bar staff, who had worn them for the first
week until, irritated beyond endurance by the inconvenience of wearing top
hats, starched collars and tailcoats, they had rebelled and reverted to wearing
their own clothes.

Greta,
sixteen stone and a barmaid at the Black Pig since leaving school, had resigned
as soon as last orders were called on the night of the reopening.

‘I
looked a right bleddy prat in a top ‘at,’ she said outside on the pavement.

‘You
did an’ all, Greta,’ said one regular, who had missed looking at her
comfortable cleavage.

It took Derek a full five
minutes to settle Ruth, Naomi, Jacob and Job down for the night and then
another few minutes to bolt and padlock the windows and door of the shed.
Tortoises are now rare and valuable animals and tortoise-rustling is all too
common in Britain. So Derek took no chances. He didn’t know what he would do if
his quartet of animals were stolen from him. Apart from loving them, he could
never afford to restock. When he went back into the house he found that
Coventry had disobeyed him and gone to the pub.

‘I’ve
got
to go out, sorry, but it’s the Annual General Meeting,’ he explained to his
indifferent children. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘Course,’
they said.

When
the Georgian door had slammed behind Derek, the children opened a bottle of
their father’s elderflower wine and settled down, drink in hand, to watch a
semi-pornographic video called
Vile Bodies.

Because of the row with
Derek, Coventry was ill at ease. To make things worse one of those
conversational voids had occurred. To fill it she gabbled the first thing that
came into her head. ‘How old was Jesus when he died?’ she asked.

‘For
Christ’s sake!’ Greta rasped in her sixty-a-day voice. ‘I’ve come here to enjoy
myself, not to have a bleedin’ religious discussion!’ Coventry blushed, then
tried very hard to stop blushing. She had read that day that with positive
thinking your body could be made to do anything.

‘He
didn’t
die,
he was murdered,’ said Maureen, who was thin and careful
about detail.

‘He was
thirty-three,’ said Greta in a hostile, warning tone. She clicked her handbag
shut with an air of finality.

Coventry
looked at Greta and thought that she was a bully. She imagined Greta’s big,
squashy body wearing skinhead clothes instead of her usual polyester afternoon
frocks and the picture inside her head made her smirk. A hairy man with
sideburns who was lounging with his back against the bar smirked back at her,
so Coventry quickly looked away and pretended to search through her handbag for
something.

Maureen
laughed quietly and said, ‘Eh, it looks like Coy’s clicked. That bloke in the
overalls just smiled at her.’