The
concentric rings of a sexquake ran through the lads as Mercy came through the
door into the pub, then a following after-shock of perplexity when it was clear
that she was with me. The other three sat down at a table and I went up to the
bar to order drinks.
Miles
Godmanchester said, ‘Hello, Hillary, who’s this? Your granddaughter, is it?’
I just
smiled a silly smile and ordered drinks.
‘A
friend from London…’ I eventually said.
‘You’re
a quiet one, it’s gotta be said.’
‘Fucking
gorgeous,’ said Marty Spen.
‘Blinder,’
from Paul Crouch.
‘Spectacular
tits,’ said Ronny Raul.
On my
way back to the table I sensed the men looking at me and felt ridiculous pride.
After the pub Bateman and
Suki came back to my house and finished off the bottle of vodka so that Mercy
and I didn’t go up to bed till 3 a.m. In the doorway of my room she said, ‘I
think I’m falling in love with you a little bit.’
I could
do nothing except emit a foolish little giggle. She put her arms round me and
bent down to kiss me, her tongue in my mouth; I could feel the down on her
upper lip. Then she pulled her mouth away and put her head on my shoulder. This
gave me a good view of a Bridget Riley etching that I had stopped noticing was
there years ago and which deserved a better spot than the upstairs landing. Its
migraine swirls seemed appropriate to the moment. She went on, ‘You’ll
understand if we don’t … you know, sleep together right now, though, won’t
you? I’ve got to get my head straight about a few things.’
‘Of
course I understand,’ I said.
Then
she went to bed.
The next day I felt quite
ill: I had had no reason to stay up late in a long while and even when I went
to bed I hadn’t slept very well. By the time I got down to the kitchen it was
nearly eleven o’clock. Mercy had the Roberts radio atop the window sill
switched on, tuned to MidCounty Melody FM, soft rock trickling like treacle out
of its speaker.
We went
for a walk together along the bridleways. I showed her where the railways used
to run, where the old fishponds and rabbit warrens were, named the few kinds of
trees and the one wayside flower the chemicals had left behind.
She
thought it was all wonderful. She said, ‘Hillary?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s
quite a big thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘Can I
come and stay here with you for a bit? I’ve really got to get out of London, it’s
doing my head in.
My
heart leapt though I was not sure with what emotion exactly. However I said
quickly enough, ‘Of course you can.
When we
got back to my house Bateman was standing by my front door. He waved a ziplock
bag at us. ‘I got dis good scag in Banbury dis mornin, you wanna try some?’
‘Sure,’
said Mercy hurrying inside with an eager smile on her face. Turning to me she
said, ‘Fuck, the country really is brilliant, isn’t it?’
We went
into the living room, Mercy and Bateman sitting side by side on the couch while
I took the armchair; we were like two kids and their dad. Bateman took a roll of
tinfoil from his pocket, he tore off a piece and sprinkled some of the heroin
onto it, then he rolled some more tinfoil into a tight little tube. Heating the
drug from beneath with a little plastic lighter, he sucked up the snow-white
smoke. ‘You want, Hillary?’ he asked. I said no, so he put some more heroin
onto the foil and passed it, the lighter and the tube to Mercy. She put the
tube between her lips and drew hungrily on the narcotic fumes.
I
wanted to stay as alert as I could, although I was feeling drowsy myself from
the effects of my late night: it was nearly four o’clock and time for this week’s
omnibus edition of
The Job
on UK Gold, which I was eager to see as I’d
missed a lot of episodes during the week. The reason I admired shows like
The
Job
or the hospital drama
Casualty
was because although they were
hack work, scripts turned out week after week for an audience who didn’t want
their intelligence stimulated too much after they’d had their chemical-packed,
ready meal dinners, they were good hack work providing the cleansing catharsis
of Greek drama.
Once, a
few years ago, I tried my hand at writing an episode of
Casualty.
We
were all writers after all. Sitting at my desk day after day I thought I might
become a different sort of writer. My idea was that as usual in that show the
chemical tanker would leave the depot, its driver complaining of chest pains,
the Sea Scouts would set out in their kayaks despite warnings on the radio of
bad weather, the bickering couple would begin working on their house not having
seen what we had seen, that the power saw with the whirling silver shark-finned
blades was faulty and unsafe. We would keep cutting back to these scenes, the
tanker on the motorway, the Scouts on the increasingly choppy sea, the couple
arguing and slicing. However at the very end of the episode, after fifty-five
minutes, the tanker would arrive safely at its destination with no undue
incident, the driver suffering from nothing more serious than wind, the leader
of the Sea Scouts would decide it might be prudent to seek shelter from the bad
weather so they would paddle to a safe bay where they would sit under a tree
eating their sandwiches, and the bickering couple would notice that the saw was
faulty and would immediately take it to a registered dealer for repair under
its warranty. All this time Charlie and the rest of the cast at Holby A & E
would sit around drinking tea and saying what a quiet day it was and how they’d
like a bit of action and something would happen any second now. Then they’d all
go home for an early night.
I got a
very nice letter back from the producer’s assistant saying that they didn’t
accept unsolicited scripts but she had included a signed photo of the cast.
Bateman
and Mercy slowly slid sideways on the couch, their arms lying twisted under
them on the cushions, drifting steeply into narcotic dreaming. It felt like a
traditional English Sunday afternoon. Everybody in a coma and the TV on.
One of the cable TV
companies was currently running an advertising campaign: it featured two office
workers standing by the water cooler on a Monday morning. One is handsome, tall
and confident, the other is shorter, uglier and more nervy. The Nervy one says
to the other, ‘I had a fantastic weekend. Went to a club …’ — we then see the
club which is crowded and noisy — ‘met a great woman…’ — we see the woman
slapping his face — ‘didn’t get home till 3 a.m.’ — we see him walking home
alone in the rain. Then he says to the handsome man, ‘What did you do?’ We cut
to all the great cable TV programmes this man has watched over the weekend. ‘Oh,
just stayed in and watched TV,’ he says and smiles smugly. The tag line of the
advert is: ‘A Life Worth Watching.’
The
implication is that the handsome man has had a better time by staying in and
watching the television. But really it’s the ugly one that you should admire,
doggedly ploughing on with going Out into the world, despite it relentlessly
coughing great gobs of rejection and hawking them into his face. Brave, brave,
ugly, nervy little man.
Most
weekends before Mercy came I stayed in and watched television.
Bateman went up to London
in his van to get her stuff. There was a lot of it. Such as: an exercise bike,
a dressmaker’s dummy with the face of Cliff Richard, a hundred pairs of shoes,
her Piaggio (which I was looking forward to riding), two inflatable armchairs
and, in his travelling basket, Adrian, a furious-looking black tom cat whose
continual yowling only stopped when he was let out into the living room and
went straight about attacking the moquette of my Hille couch with his claws.
It took
so long to get her stuff in that it was ten o’clock by the time we’d finished,
which meant that I’d missed a special two-hour episode of
The Job
when
Kurdish terrorists took the whole station hostage and threatened to blow it up.
One of the old cast members was certain to die, my money was on kindly old desk
sergeant, Ron Task. I had been interested to see how the new prettier cast
would work out in their first big two-hourer. I thought they had been slow to
bed in: partly it was that their appearance was now so at variance with what
real police looked like. They were all young and thin with full heads of hair.
There were no fat old men working out their time for their pension and,
strangest of all, none of the WPCs were stumpy-calfed lesbians.
Mercy would stand at the living-room
window every morning and say, ‘It’s so peaceful, I can’t get over how peaceful
it is, it’s so peaceful, I can’t get over it,’ then she would go next door to
smoke dope with Bateman and Suki if she hadn’t gone to school, the sound of his
electric guitar thumping through the walls as I sat in my office sparring with
my poem.
Tuesdays
and Thursdays she would go with them into Northampton to help with their stall
on the market, but then all her stuff stayed behind to represent her and I
could hardly get to my study for training shoes.
When
she was home Mercy would often walk around the house naked except for her
pants.
I went
out for longer and longer walks, issuing from paths round the blind backs of
villages that I had only ever seen from the lanes, bursting upon unmarked NATO
radar stations and on one occasion emerging through a hawthorn hedge onto the
eastbound carriageway of the M40 motorway.
With
regard to headgear my strong feeling is that felt hats should solely be worn up
until Royal Ascot which is held in the third week of June, after which straw is
permissible, so, deep in the fields on the Friday afternoon, I was wearing grey
flannel trousers, a cream cotton jacket, white cotton shirt with no tie but
instead a silk paisley cravat, stout brown walking shoes from Hogg’s of
Aberdeen and a fine straw panama hat when I came upon Sam stretching razor-wire
fencing across an ancient drovers’ road. I hadn’t seen much of Sam lately so I
was pleased to encounter him, though as a lifelong member of the Ramblers’
Association I should really have reproved him for lethally blocking off the footpath;
instead I said, ‘Hello, Sam, I didn’t know this was your land.’
‘Oh
aye, all around ‘ere, my land.’
‘I see.
‘Not
for much longer though, sellin’ it for an ‘ousing development. Three hundred
warehouse-style loft apartments for sophisticated rural singles.’
‘Goodness,’
I said, ‘but I heard on the radio the other day that the population is
shrinking. Who are these places for?’
‘The
government say, the housebuilders say, they need four million nu omes.
‘But
who for?’
‘Ah it’s
for all these people who’re living by themselves these days, they need a whole
apartment to live by themselves in, to wander from room to room, naked, I
expect. I ‘spect they’ve lost the knack of gettin’ on with other folk, seeing
as they spend all their days at computers, talkin’ to ghosts across the other
side of the world. When I was young we all lived together. Generations all
together on top of each other. My old gran in the loft, my mum, my dad,
brothers and sisters, cousins, lodgers, aunts fallen on hard times, uncles that
took a shock and took to their beds never to get up till they died. It were
fuckin’ horrible.’
A look
crossed his face. ‘Must be like your house these days with all the comm’ and
goin’.’
‘I
suppose so.
‘No, we
don’t see you so much now. An’ how’s that poem of yours that you was tellin’ us
about comm’ on?’
‘I can’t
seem to get on with it ..
‘No
well, I expect you’re having too much fun, with your new friends.’
‘Is
that what it is?’
‘I
would have thought you’d need to get a move on, though, don’t you? I mean how
long have you got left?’
‘In
what sense?’
‘In
your life sense, might only be a year or two after all, what are you?’
‘Seventy-two.’
‘What’s
the average, seventy-six, is it? Then there’s all the stuff that happens,
strokes, cancer, even if you survive beyond that, your mind goes, a year or two
and I imagine your powers will be waning considerable. There’s not a minute to
be lost when you think about it, is there? Time must be running through your
fingers like sand. There’s not a minute, not a second to be wasted.’
When I got back to my
house, out of breath from trying to run some of the way across ploughed fields,
my mudsplattered flannels torn from my having unsuccessfully attempted to
vault a stile, there was a van parked on my drive, on its side was written ‘Barry
Rush, Certified Gas Heating Engineer’.
Mercy
was in the kitchen looking tense, trying to grill some toast. She said, ‘Hillary,
my dad’s here.’
‘Yes,’
I said, ‘so I see.’
I went
into the living room. Sitting on my couch was a youthful-looking man: it was
hard to believe he was Mercy’s father. The young image was compounded by his
clothes, he wore a coat from Dexter Wong, black leather Prada trousers and the
new Nike cross trainers, his hair was shaved to mask his baldness and his arms
were muscled and buffed from gym training. Sitting next to him was a girl of
perhaps twenty-five, her clothes were more ordinary, torn Gap jeans and a pale
blue T-shirt, her small breasts clearly defined, dark blonde hair in dreadlocks
and a ring through the centre of her bottom lip.