Rebuilding Coventry (2 page)

Greta
lit a cigarette and, through an exhalation of dirty smoke, said: ‘That’s Norman
Parker. He’s a compulsive gambler and he’s got the worst-smelling feet of any
man I’ve ever known. Keep clear of him, Coy.’

The
three women looked at Norman Parker’s feet hidden inside industrial boots.
Noticing their glance, Norman shouted: ‘You wouldn’t know me when I’m washed
and done up. Cecil Parkinson’s got nowt on me.’

Mr
Patel, the landlord, looked up from the microwave where mysterious rays were
warming a shepherd’s pie for Norman’s supper. He didn’t like raised voices in
his pub. In his experience raised voices were a prelude to calling the police,
before locking himself in the stock-room with the contents of the till.

Gerald
Fox crashed into the bar from the street and stood looking around importantly,
as though he were about to announce the outbreak of war. ‘Bung us a sausage
roll in the micro, Abdul,’ he shouted. Mr Patel whispered bitter words under
his breath. He hated to be called Abdul. Why couldn’t this man learn to
pronounce his given name properly? Was Parvez too difficult for his clumsy
tongue?

‘Would
you like anything else, Mr Fox?’ enquired Mr Patel.

‘Well,
Abdul, I wouldn’t mind a night with your missus. I’ve heard that she’s some
goer.’ Gerald laughed long and hard, and Norman Parker joined in to be
sociable.

But Mr
Patel was not smiling. After the laughter had died away he said: ‘You have been
misinformed, Mr Fox. You must have been told that my wife was
from
Goa,
as indeed she is. Goa was her place of birth; it is a small territory next to
the Indian Ocean.’

The
ping of the microwave called him away. Coventry laughed and clapped her hands
and exchanged smiles with Mr Patel. Gerald looked over his shoulder and
shouted: ‘Well, if it’s not Coventry Tittie … sorry, I mean City.’ Once
again Norman Parker echoed Gerald’s laughter. His mouth opened and closed,
displaying half-chewed bits of shepherd’s pie. Gerald turned his back and
ordered a pint.

Maureen
said, ‘Shall we move on somewhere else, girls?’

Greta
said, ‘No, why should we? We was here first.’ Then, to Gerald Fox, ‘If I had a
mouth like yours I’d donate it to the Channel Tunnel project.’

Norman
Parker, always obliging, laughed. Gerald turned, took a deep drink of lager and
said threateningly: ‘Now then, Greta.’

Coventry
was still blushing to the roots of her naturally blonde hair at Gerald Fox’s
allusion to her breasts. She folded her arms over them, as she had done
millions of times since the first schoolboy had shouted ‘Coventry Tittie!’ in
the street twenty-seven years ago.

Norman
and Gerald were talking at the bar, swopping lies and bragging about money
earned, personal strength and women conquered.
Gerald told Norman the
terrible lie that Coventry had been his mistress for over a year.
He
elaborated: ‘I see her on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, but the rest of
the time we have to pretend that we don’t get on.’

Norman
said, ‘Well, she had me fooled. To be quite honest, I thought she looked like
she hated you.’

Gerald
lowered his voice. ‘She’s crazy about me, always on at me to leave my missus,
but I said to her only last Wednesday, I said:

“Coventry,
don’t ask me to leave my kids; it would kill me.”‘

Norman
Parker nodded sympathetically. He had left his kids two years ago and now, made
maudlin with drink, he briefly regretted it.

‘I live
opposite her, you know,’ said Gerald. ‘Which is quite handy … saves petrol.’

Norman
understood this convenience; his own marital infidelities had been with girls
who lived out of the district. The back window of his car was constantly full
of give-away gifts from petrol stations.

Greta
got up from the table and went to the bar. She watched as Mr Patel removed the
cellophane from a sausage roll and put the pink and brown object on a cardboard
plate for Gerald to devour. She was going to
say
something, she didn’t
know what, or to whom, but she was going to manufacture a small drama out of
this tense atmosphere between the small groups of men and women. Greta needed
drama in her life, it was oxygen to her. Without it she slumped, pale and lifeless.
She was a big woman who needed big events. She felt she was born to star in
La
Traviata,
but always seemed fated to sing in the chorus of
The
Gondoliers.
She picked on Norman Parker.

‘I see
your ex-wife has done all right for herself,’ she said. ‘Undermanager at Tesco’s
now, isn’t she?’

Norman’s
face set hard, his toes curled inside his industrial boots. ‘Must be hard up if
they have to promote
her,’
he growled. He spun out drinking the last of
his beer to give him time to think but nothing came to him. Gerald helped him
out.

‘Everybody
knows how your wife got promotion,’ he said.

‘How
did she?’ asked Norman, who genuinely didn’t know.

‘On her
back, of course,’ said Gerald encouragingly, trying to catch Norman’s eye, but
Norman was looking away.

Greta
ordered two vodkas and orange for herself and Maureen, and a port and lemon for
Coventry. Mr Patel busied himself at the optics and tried to look
inconspicuous. He thought, ‘I would kill a man who insulted my wife, even my
ex-wife, in such a fashion. I would chop him into small pieces and feed him to
the large goldfish who swim in the ornamental pond in the foyer of the
restaurant owned by my brother-in-law.’

Norman
turned, grim-faced, and said, ‘How do
you
know?’

Gerald
laughed cynically and said, ‘Norman, it’s common knowledge. She’s not known as
“The Grand Canyon” for nothing.’

Norman’s
knowledge of geography was not extensive but he sensed a terrible insult and
hit Gerald Fox on his upper arm.

Mr
Patel’s finger was already dialling the first of three nines. Coventry rose to
go but Greta pulled her down, saying, ‘Finish your drink. Port doesn’t grow on
trees, you know.’

Coventry
sat back and thought, ‘Port
does
grow on trees … initially.’

Maureen,
who was a wrestling fan, was shouting encouragement to Norman, who was
pummelling Gerald around the shoulders. Gerald was trying to soothe Norman’s
pride (and save wear and tear on his suit) by saying: ‘Only a joke Norman, only
a joke.’ But Norman’s fist caught him a cruel blow, on the side of his neck and
made reasoning difficult. So Gerald was obliged to start fighting back. The men
were well matched in build and weight and were still fighting when two spotty
policemen came into the bar, carrying their peaked hats under their arms like
rugby footballs.

Greta
sat back in her seat, satisfied and happy. There was no blood, but the strong
possibility of an arrest and a subsequent court case, with herself as star
witness. She would wear her black and white hound’s-tooth checked suit. It
would contrast nicely with the dark panelling of the magistrates’ court.

The
spottier of the two policemen imposed himself between Gerald and Norman, who
were both pleased that a higher authority had intervened and relieved them of
the responsibility of ending the fight themselves. Coventry again got up to
leave, but the less spotty policeman said: ‘Sit down, madam, until this is
sorted out.’

Coventry
protested, ‘But I’m not involved with either of them.’

Norman
shouted, ‘Oh yes you are, you lying cow …
you’re Gerald Fox’s mistress,
and have been for the past year.’

They
haven’t been mentioned earlier, being unimportant until now, but there were
other people sitting in the Astaire’s bar that night and all of them heard
Norman’s allegation clearly. Thirty per cent of them had problems and didn’t
retain the information. However, seventy per cent not only retained it but
relished it and told other people. And so it became widely known on the Grey
Paths Council Estate that Coventry Dakin and Gerald Fox were lovers and had
been brawling in Astaire’s and wasn’t it awful and her with two children and a
respectable husband and him with four lovely little girls and a wife who had a
nervous disposition and couldn’t watch horror films on the television.

Greta
left the pub a disappointed woman. Mr Patel would not prefer charges, as he
preferred no publicity. The young policemen lectured Norman and Gerald
dispassionately. They used many obscenities to prove that they were men of the
world, then left, after refusing Mr Patel’s offer of free sausage rolls. They
discussed Coventry Dakin in the police car and decided that Gerald Fox was a
lucky man. Because of excessive overtime duties neither was experienced with
women. They couldn’t wait to be transferred to Vice.

3
I Leave the City of My Birth

I was halfway through
cleaning my chimney on Wednesday afternoon when I ran across the road to my
neighbour’s house, opened the door, picked up the nearest object to hand, an
Action Man doll, and brought its heavy little head hard down on the back of
Gerald Fox’s bulging neck.

Fox
immediately stopped strangling his wife and fell down dead. Action Man’s hinged
torso swung for a few seconds and then was still. I let go of his feet and the
little soldier fell onto the carpet and lay there in a theatrical attitude with
both plastic hands raised in the air. A trickle of blood escaped from Gerald
Fox’s left ear.

My
neighbour’s children crept from behind a ragged sofa and attached themselves to
their mother, and I let myself out of the house and started running. I was dressed
in my chimney-sweeping clothes. I was covered in soot and I didn’t have my
handbag.

The
first part of my escape route consisted of pedestrian pathways. I ran up and
down ramps. I disappeared into the ground via subways. I grew bigger or smaller
according to the size of the buildings. I was dwarfed by tower blocks and made
gigantic by pensioners’ bungalows. I hurried along past the boarded-up windows
in the Bluebell Wood Shopping Mall. I went by St Osmond’s, the concrete church
with the stainless-steel spire, where I’d attended five ill-fated weddings. On
towards Barn Owl Road, the main thoroughfare, which leads from the estate
towards the city.

Halfway
along this road I stopped to catch my breath. In an adjacent house a family
were eating. Their living-room was lit up like Madison Square Gardens. There
were five of them, dispersed around a three-piece suite. Each of them had a
plate of steaming food on their laps. The pepper and salt and a ketchup bottle
were balanced on the arms of the sofa. The television had their full attention.
Nobody was speaking. They were chewing the cud. I wondered at their willingness
to display such an intimate activity to casual passers-by.

Behind
me, in my deserted kitchen, was a table laid with Wednesday’s table-cloth. Four
places were set. A cruet stood exactly in the middle of the table. Four tubular
chairs waited by each place setting. Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, two teenage Bears.
But Mummy Bear would not be at home tonight.

There
is something heartbreaking about families. Such fragile blood ties. So easily
snapped.

As I
ran along the pavement beside the dual carriageway I thought I saw my husband
looking down at me from the top deck of a rush-hour bus. But it may have been
another middle-aged man with a gloomy expression wearing a hat too big for his
head. I was now going against the tide of people who were returning from the
city to the suburbs. Few people were going in my direction. For who needs to
travel from the suburbs into the city at six o’clock in the evening? Apart from
office cleaners and murderers escaping from outlying districts.

I ran
because I am very frightened of policemen. As other people recoil from snakes
or spiders and yet others refuse to travel in lifts or aeroplanes, so I avoid
policemen. When I was a child I had black-and-white nightmares about Dixon of
Dock Green. The sight of a lone officer of the law strolling along a sunlit
street induces terror in me. I blame my parents for this irrational fear.
(Though now, in my present circumstances, of course, my fear was entirely
rational.)

I was
now on the outskirts of the city. In the distance, coming nearer with each
step, was the redbrick hospital where once I’d screamed and burst a blood
vessel in my eye whilst giving birth to my son. Behind the tall chimney of the
hospital incinerator was the converted hosiery factory, now a sixth-form
college where the same son was studying for a better future.

I ran
across the recreation ground where, years ago, I’d played on the swings while
my own mother was enjoying herself in one of the many outpatients’ clinics she
frequented. ‘It gets me out of the house,’ she’d say, as she replaced her best
underwear in the drawer until the next visit.

The
smooth, wooden swing seats had been replaced by pastel plastic replicas. I sat
down on a swing and tried to control my ragged breathing. Automatically I
pushed my feet off the ground and began to work myself higher and higher. The
night air streamed through my hair. I stood up on the seat and from my new
vantage point I saw the railway station clock. I decided to catch a train, any
train. The first that came in. I would go anywhere so long as it was
away.
Far
away from the policemen investigating Gerald Fox’s violent death.