Nina always wanted to swear at times like these but something in her upbringing prevented her.
“And before you ask, the gauge isn’t on empty,” Rod said, calmly. “Karl checked it only last week.”
“Oh, good old Karl. He’s like the little toy soldier you get out of the box when there’s something wrong. Can you honestly tell me that the petrol gauge itself isn’t faulty?”
Rod knew Nina had often thought him to be bitter about having two daughters and that the Seventeen-year-old rookie recruit at his IT firm was, in her eyes, a substitute son. Even though Sabrina – their eldest – had pulled tank engines apart in the WRENS she’d always said that the ham-fisted youth was, to him, a more reliable bet. He waited for her to remind him about all this now.
“No – there’s definitely petrol,” she said instead, looking at the map. “You filled it up in Sale so there should be at least fifty miles in there yet.”
“You should get Bree to give it a service anyway,” came the precocious voice in the back.
“You’re right,” Nina contended, half turning round to face her younger daughter. Then, realizing she’d cricked her neck: “Ow! S and F!”
“Mum!”
“And stop calling Sabrina that. You know I don’t like it. Makes her sound like a piece of cheese.”
“I’ll call the AA,” Rod said, in his annoyingly calm voice but Nina’s own patience had not got the better of her. She gave up trying to close her map and opened her address book instead.
The AA man only took twenty minutes to arrive but Nina, ever the pessimist, had already phoned a friend.
“Wimbledon Tube’s only half-a-mile away,” she announced to her husband and daughter, without giving too much away. “If Mister Uniform can’t get us going then we can spend the afternoon in Upton Park and get the train back.”
The AA man checked the petrol gauge. “Needs replacing,” he said, breathing in sharply.
Rod looked at Nina, then at the map and back again.
“So you want to play Give Us a Clue?” she said, sarcastically. “Well let me guess…it’s a film. No, it’s a book. That’s it… Female Map Readers are Crap!”
“Mum!”
The mechanic poured in some petrol from a plastic can and tried the engine again.
“Hmm, it’s not only the gauge. Bit far gone for me to do anything right now. Where would you like me to tow the car?”
“Sabrina’s!” “Karl’s!” Nina and Rod said together.
At Wimbledon station they slipped the AA man a fiver and he put on an act for the frowning taxi drivers waiting for fares outside. “Highly irregular,” he said, as the only female one continued to tut. “But thanks all the same.”
By the time the family arrived at Upton Park the youngest of the threesome had lost count of how many train platforms they’d christened.
“I’m sure we could’ve done it in three,” Rod said cockily to Nina, who was no more at home with Underground maps than she was with an atlas.
She called the Williamses.
“Hi! It’s Nina.”
“Nina?” said the male voice. It was a full ten seconds before the penny dropped. “Oh, yes, from this morning. I’m sorry you missed the tennis!”
“We’re at the station.”
“So they haven’t fixed your car?” Paul Williams said.
“They’ve towed it back to Sabrina’s.”
“Who?”
“You know, my eldest daughter!”
“Oh, yes, sorry. You and Rod have a daughter.”
The Williams’s casualness was becoming too painful for Nina. There was too much traffic for Rod to eavesdrop but he got the impression that his family and theirs were in different stress zones.
“See you soon,” said Nina, switching her mobile off. “And before you ask, Rod, no they weren’t about to offer us a lift.”
“Perhaps they haven’t got a car?” Rod offered, being ever the optimist.
“So pleased to see you. Mwahhh!”
The two women were locked in a phoney embrace while the men shook hands awkwardly.
“And you must be…Selina!”
Sabrina’s sister refused a hug but was too polite to correct Christine.
“I’m the younger one,” she scowled. “Natasha.”
“Oh, Sorrr-reee! Nina and I lost touch after you came along.”
The two families trooped into a front room that looked like it was only ever used for guests.
“Haven’t you got any children, Chris?” said Natasha and Nina gave her younger daughter a look as if to say I’m cross with you because every winter I tell you that the Williams’s can’t have children but then again that doesn’t give them the right to forget you exist.
“Cigarette?”
“Thanks, Chris.”
“Mum!” It was Natasha’s turn to disapprove now. “You don’t smoke!”
“Hah!” Christine Williams scoffed.
“Don’t drag up old times, Christine,” Nina scolded.
“Drag? Hah! Drag is the appropriate word, darling. And ‘old times’, sweetie, is all you and I have!”
“Go on, put him out of his misery!” Paul Williams piped up. “Rod, my old missus is about to give your Natalie a revelation…”
“Nat-ash-AH!” interrupted Natasha.
“Don’t!” came Nina’s one-word desperate plea.
Christine Williams did.
Nina had some difficulty making her explanation fit the train journey back.
Afterwards, as the family jostled its way down the busy platform Natasha tried to assemble the random events that contradicted the rosy version of the past her mother had always given her.
“So let’s get this right,” she began, not looking where she was going and nearly knocking over two toddlers and an old woman with a stick. “You met Mrs. Williams at Crown Carriers when you were a temp and she was in Sales?”
“Yes,” yawned Nina.
“And she would drag you to the smoking room about twenty times a day…”
“I’ve told you before, Natasha. I don’t like you using that word.”
Her daughter recapped for a moment, wondering which swearword she’d been guilty of. “Oh, drag,” she eventually said.
“If you must know, I gave up smoking when your father stopped being an alcoholic and then the new boss at Crown gave me the sack.”
“He fired you? Because you smoked? Or because Daddy drank? You didn’t tell me the full story on that train, did you?”
“No, darling, I didn’t. I lost my job when I stopped taking breaks in the smoking room.”
“Well, not smoking in work time is good, isn’t it?”
“The new boss wanted to ban smoking and Christine Williams didn’t so when I refused to back her in her campaign and then stopped smoking with the others out of loyalty to your dad she stopped…”
“Go on, Mum…” Her daughter’s sympathetic tone made Nina go on.
“She stopped doing all my paperwork for me. There, I’ve said it…”
“Mum, you’re dyslexic. I’ve always known that. And you have nothing to hide.”
“How did you find out?”
“Look, writing out all those tedious Christmas cards – including the one to the rotten old Williams’s – well, it may have been a novelty when I was a five- year-old but now I’m fifteen it doesn’t exactly push my buttons. And the other thing that was a dead giveaway – well, let’s just say that you’ve never told me about those friends who shouldn’t be on the Christmas list any longer and the new ones that should. And now you’ve been going to those classes you’re so much better you can nearly read a map and I’m so proud of you but…”
“You think I’ve collected so many unwanted people over the years that amending the list all of a sudden would be stupid…”
“Not now all that effort at your night school is beginning to pay off. Do it, Mum!”
“Anyway, how did you know about the writing classes?”
“I’ve never seen one of your so-called paintings… ever! It’s a bit of a giveaway.”
Later that night Rod and Natasha were so exhausted in their beds that they didn’t even hear Sabrina call. But having opened up to her younger daughter Nina felt she owed something to the older one.
“I’ll pick up the car tomorrow, Sabrina,” she said half-an-hour later. Then she crept into the spare room and unlocked the draw of the bureau. She pulled out her Christmas card list, along with the solitary cigarette that had nearly withered away in the packet next to it – the one she always kept in case Rod’s drinking ever returned and she couldn’t handle it.
Then Nina got out a huge pair of scissors and a cigarette lighter from the other draw.
She cut the cigarette into several pieces and set light to the list.
“Mum and Dad are talking at me in chorus, now. Two retired lawyers, one accusation. My own parents are unsettling me out of court. I often think divorce is the only thing that still keeps them together.”
For me, at an airport, ‘Duty Free’ means something else.
Wendy is the person I both delegate to and rely on. Mother and child. I don’t know why she brings me; to her, this holiday - any holiday - is an ordeal.
Oh don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate airports. In our student days, Wendy and I would drive half-way round the M25 just to hang out at Heathrow on a Sunday night because the local curry house was expensive/rowdy/closed.
No, the airport as a concept is sound. Even Gatwick, as a city, is a marked improvement on the creepy-Crawley it sits on. You get a better class of insect there.
So you’ve guessed I have a fear of flying, right? Okay, so why do I live near the sea and sometimes holiday in the Lake District when I can’t swim? I even went out in Wendy’s father’s boat, once. I was dressed top-to-toe in a sleek, snug wetsuit. She didn’t take long to convince me that if I capsized then my lifejacket would save me and I’d hardly feel a thing.
But here we are, not even on the runway yet, standing outside W H Smiths and the fear is worse than ever. And now I’m thinking of Wendy’s warm-water, reassuring pre-drowning advice and comparing it to the cold, ‘been-through-this-routine-one-hundred-times-before’ hand-signals ritual that will soon be regurgitated by the stewardess when we eventually board the plane. And it all comes down to… engine failure? Potential hijackers? General paranoia? These and other topics were certainly covered in the self-help book Wendy’s mum gave me last Christmas. Trouble is, I was too afraid to read it in case I couldn’t face confronting my emotions. So here we are again and I haven’t done the homework. I wonder what that other self-help book is all about, the one on the shelf over there?
‘Oh, that’s the famous “Black Book”,’ Wendy says, as if I should know.
‘So it’s for single studs like I was before I met you?’ I say, ‘to fill up with girls’ telephone numbers? Because if so, they’re displaying it in the wrong place. I once went to W H Smiths in Buckingham and they filed Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads” next to the Tears for Fears biography in the rock section’.
I’m telling Wendy this story for the umpteenth time again now. I always use too many words when I’m scared.
‘No, Alan, it’s correctly placed. It’s genuine self-help,’ my wife says loftily, leaving me to protest:
‘Well, it would help me considerably if the author would at least tell us the title of the book. Oh, and if he or she would reveal their name.’
Three hours into the flight and the man sitting on the other side of me from Wendy breathes such a huge sigh of relief that I imagine he’s inflating his parachute. A quick look through the window at the eye-level landing lights and the wheels bumping on to the runway do nothing to quell my paranoia. He’s relieved and I haven’t, well, been able to relieve myself for the whole journey. I can only explain this by saying that when your bladder lets go you’ve got no other hopes to hold on to. I’ve been playing this game called Extreme Bladder Control and I wish I was still in nappies. Perhaps I’m not a baby after all?
Turns out the man in the other seat is going to the same hotel.
Now, what you have to remember is that whatever was left of my usual quiet confidence has long since been crushed during the steward’s opening mime to the standard safety DVD and so when we arrive at the Granada or Ramada or whatever it’s called - the Mail House, Wendy reminds me (though it might just as well be the Post Office for all the attention I’m paying to my surroundings) - the man has already forged ahead of me in the queue.
‘The Buck House Suite - Room Seven,’ he proclaims loudly, to the native Spanish receptionist who looks like she’s about to knock off from her very last twelve-hour shift without a leaving present (or even a reference).
‘Buck House,’ I whisper, to Wendy. And Wendy replies that this is somewhat ambiguous because this room could at once be a mini-Queen Elizabeth palace or a place where a man prepares for his stag night with his drunken, promiscuous mates. Then again, she’s saying, “Buck House” could be a euphemism for an under-the-counter prostitute-on-tap, in which case there is no Buck. Just a house. A disorderly one, like the ones she’s read about in Victorian novels.
Anyway, I drift in and out of my wife’s witty but far-from-concise observation of options and my eyes focus on the hotel ‘mission statement’ that apparently serves to take the place of a menu when the food is ‘off’ - in other words, when the chef can’t be buggered, or is being buggered. Whatever. I read it. Out loud. Then the two English people in the queue that’s rapidly forming behind me laugh at the sheer banality of the Mail House ‘Pre-stay-Statement’, as announced by me. The rest just pick up their phones.
‘I am… a Promise,’ I say, somewhat theatrically. Then I furnish the English couple with the web address but even they have opted out now, looking away, embarrassed. ‘More details at www.promises DOT COM!!’ I shout.
The foreigners furiously tap away at their mobiles again and I wait for the probable arrival of the police.
‘Name, Sir?’
On the basis of crowd reaction to my recent performance I really don’t feel like sharing this information with a Spanish stranger and so I quiz the reception girl about theirs.
‘In England,’ I explain, ‘there used to be this hotel chain called the Post House before it became the Holiday Inn. Now that made a lot of sense. But “Mail House”?’
‘You are the one making no sense now. We tired. We in exciting city and we want early night to enjoy tomorrow and you holding us up.’
I don’t answer them, but I give the Spanish guests’ elected English Language representative a look that says, I thought that foreigners no speak-ee zee English. The foreigners respond by dialling furiously again on their phones and so I continue my monologue about the Mail House’s allegedly inappropriate and deliriously derivative name.
‘Post is where you tie your horse up,’ I try to explain to the reception girl. ‘So, as names go, “Post House” may be old fashioned but at least it makes sense. But “Mail House”? Pah-leeze!’
‘People used to book by post and now they do it by e-mail,’ says the Spanish girl, in matter-of-fact perfect English. The foreigners behind me may not have understood what she said but now they are all giving her a round of applause. This is a clear victory for her. ‘So, name, please, Sir?’
‘Oh, Mister Self-Help,’ I tease, looking at the title-less black book for inspiration. Wendy bought me the stupid book at the airport but I was too frightened to read it on the plane in case it crashed while I was halfway through the advice. How ironic would that be? I’d probably have my biography published posthumously for having suffered that. As I continue to skirt around the issue of my identity the Spanish girl looks right through me in the anonymous way that hotel staff do and we’re back to Square One.
‘Language travels but humour stays at home,’ I observe succinctly to Wendy with a whisper but she’s had enough of me now and is taking over as usual.
‘Forgive my husband but he has had a bad experience. He’s afraid of flying,’ my wife explains to the girl. ‘The room was booked in my name. It’s Wendy Hillier…’
The girl appears relieved at Wendy’s adept, proficient use of clear, universal, un-patronising English (and at not having to deal with me).
‘Ah, Ms Hillier. A double room, paid for by your company I see. And you are entitled to one guest.’
‘I can tell you his name if you like.’
‘No need, Madam.’
‘He’ll probably be sent home before the end of the night,’ I chip in, talking about myself in the third person as if I know I’ve been a naughty child. And I must be, because my ‘mother’ gives me a look of instant disgust. Then I say, ‘Excuse me, Miss Receptionist, but what does “I am… a Promise” actually mean?’
‘It means that if we don’t meet the customer’s expectations then you tell us and we try to improve,’ explains the girl.
‘I’ll remember that,’ I say, happy that I’ve found a potential scapegoat for bad behaviour that isn’t me.
*********************
‘It was just awful!’ I’m telling the woman who is my real mother all about the so-called holiday now I’m safely back in England. ‘Still, what d’you expect? For Wendy, it was just another business trip. And the fact that I had nothing to do but see the same boring old sights made me feel even more useless than usual. Even more of an appendage than ever.’
‘And you hate flying, don’t you, darling?’
‘Sorry Mum, must fly. Another call coming through.’
‘You didn’t tell me whether the Mail House kept their “I am… a promise”, did you?’ she says, not wanting me to hang up.
‘Mum, can I please call you back? My solicitor’s trying to get through.’
‘You’re not divorcing her, are you Son?’
That was Dad, who’s eavesdropping on the other phone. The sudden appearance of his voice confuses me for a moment, making me say, ‘Divorcing who?’
‘WENDY!” he says. “That’s your wife’s name. Or at least it was last time your mother and I looked.’
Then: ‘We think you are losing your mind!’
Mum and Dad are talking at me in chorus, now. Two retired lawyers, one accusation. My own parents are unsettling me out of court. I often think divorce is the only thing that still keeps them together.
‘Mum, Dad - I’m not changing my wife.’ Mum and Dad both realise there’s a “but” coming along in a minute. I can hear them stealing themselves for the revelation - like their thirty-two-year-old son announcing he’s gay or something. ‘What I’m doing is…’
‘Spit it out, boy.’
‘Yes, darling. Spit it out!’
‘Well, if you must know, I’m changing my name.’
‘Oh.’ ‘Oh.’
****************************
Two weeks later and there are still no e-mails from the Spanish Hotel.
Wendy is still in Spain doing the holiday bit at the end of her fated Marbella business trip and I’m lying alone in what used to be our bed in Buckinghamshire.
I wake abruptly to several letters thudding on to the floor.
I run down the stairs and crouch semi-naked by the letterbox, sifting the prize notifications and the loan invitations deftly - like a Fifties TV card-trick performer.
Then it jumps out at me - visually at first, then literally as my hands jerk spontaneously in response to the familiar logo. “Mail House Complaints Division - I am… a Promise”, the envelope says. And when I open it the promise continues:
Dear Wendy’s Guest.
Thank you for completing the e-mail form at www.promises.com.
We at the Mail House take such complaints very seriously indeed.
As our name suggests, Mail House will always deal with your complaint in writing personally.
We are sorry, Wendy’s Guest, for everything that was not to your satisfaction during her stay.
We broke our promise when you asked for the vegetarian option and the meal contained offal.
We broke our promise when you asked for an ironing board and you received a trouser press instead.
We broke our promise when we didn’t listen to your views.
We broke our promise when we interrupted your views…
Oh, that’ll be when I complained about my seaside view being obstructed by an unscheduled construction team, then.
And finally, we broke our promise when we sent our resident masseuse to the wrong room.
That’ll be Wendy’s room.
They sent a prostitute when my wife was out doing business. Okay, Kandi had left by the time Wendy returned. But how was I to know she’d left her calling card on the bathroom floor, along with an aura of scent that I must have become accustomed to while digging a huge linguistic trench for myself by searching a useless Spanish phrase book for words that might make the hooker leave? And now Wendy has no use for me. I’m so fed up with being “Mister Wendy” on all these business trips - people asking me my name and then forgetting it again - that I’ve changed my name to… hang on a minute, let me open the only other letter that isn’t junk mail…
Dear Nameless,
Thank you for applying to increase your loan, but Mortgages-On-Line cannot process your application because you have not completed our on-line Form.
Please visit us at www.mortgages_on_line.co.uk and complete the field marked…
Name.
Yours faithfully,
ýû
pp
ÀÀ
As I’m reading this letter from two people who apparently have no name, crouched in my lonely, vulnerable position in front of the letterbox, someone opens my front door without permission. It turns out to be one of the only two people who are allowed to do this.
‘You nearly ploughed into me,’ I say, to the presence that is my ageing but still very formidable father.
‘We were just curious, your mother and I. She wants to know why you were getting in touch with your brief. Can’t bring herself to ask, but can’t sleep, you see. We don’t buy this name-change thing. So if it’s not that, and it’s not divorce, then it must be worse, she thinks. It’s the way of the female mind - a lawyers mind, perhaps. So go on, Son, tell us. You’ve made a Will because you’ve got some terminal disease, is that it? It can’t be worse than that.’
‘I changed my name by deed poll, Dad,’ I confess, rising awkwardly to my feet to face him head-on. ‘That’s why I called the lawyer. I was fed up with people wanting to know my name and every other irrelevant detail when all I am to them is Mister Bloody Wendy. Oh, and Wendy’s divorcing me, if you must know. But you can represent me on that one.’
‘How did this happen, Alan? So suddenly, I mean.’
‘On holiday. Something really clicked. It was when I clicked on www.promises.com, if you must know. They couldn’t deliver on their promises and I couldn’t complain because, well, I was just Mr. Anonymous sharing a room with a customer. I couldn’t even give them my name. So now Mister Wendy is buying Mrs. Wendy out. And I don’t see what difference it makes, this compulsory name thing. You see, I have a new identity. I’m empowered, Dad - that’s the word. I’m no longer going to be just somebody’s bloody hen-pecked husband or even some lawyer’s under-achieving son. No offence.’
‘None taken. So what have you actually changed your name to, Alan? Whatever it is, you must know your mother will be upset!’
‘I’ve changed my name to “I Have No Name”. Brilliant, isn’t it? Whoever you deal with from now on gives you a form that asks your name and you can legally write “I Have No Name”. Sorts the men out from the boys - those companies that can get their heads around the concept and those that can’t. I’m only dealing with real people from now on. People who can see beyond the Alan. Oh, and by the way Dad, can you lend me thirty grand?’
‘Why, Son?’
‘Because I no longer have a wife and I can’t get a mortgage.’
The young owner of the voice from behind didn’t really expect an answer, and settled back into his game boy.
“A few years ago our son would have said, ‘are we there yet?’” Shelley said to her husband instead, from the passenger seat of the huge people carrier that was originally purchased to transport a larger family than they could now afford. “There’s a subtle difference, I suppose. By the way, do you think we’re bad parents?”
Eamonn’s pensive look reassured his wife that he wasn’t dishing out the silent treatment they both reserved for Sean. But then Shelley was a grown up and she wasn’t engrossed in a computer game.
Eventually, after a time delay worthy of one of Eamonn and Sean’s favourite Doctor Who episodes, Shelley announced:
“About three-hundred-and-fifty-miles.”
“Cool,” Sean said. “Can we can stop for a burger?”
Sean’s twelve-year-old sister Siobhan did her obligatory one-woman-three-fingers-down-the-throat vegetarian protest but the pair’s parents sided with neither child by exercising their right to remain silent (again).
Sean sighed.
Then, after another three miles or so, he said, “Go on, Dad. You’re good at inventing games!”
“S’pose I am. But I thought you were already playing one?”
“Yeah – and I’m too old for I-spy, but if you come up with something really good I’ll put this away,” he sneered, holding up his Game Boy in a way that suggested torture instrument, rather than tool for negotiation. “And I won’t take the you-know-what out of Siobhan’s stupid salad.”
“And she can have the first go?” Eamonn bargained.
“Because I’m only twelve,” Siobhan said.
“Yes, Dad. She can have a false start.”
“It’s a fool’s start, son, you foo-“
“Takes one to know one,” said Sean.
The newish-but-dirty people carrier came to an unnatural halt outside a restaurant renowned for offering more than just a token-sized veggie option, then ruining the experience with surly staff, burly chefs – and copious dollops of compulsory mayonnaise.
Eamonn made a ‘sorry’ gesture that was a little too ambiguous when he kicked up some gravel dust with his huge tyres, obscuring the diners’ view to a certain extent. The customers hated his family already, he decided. When the waitress began staring through the window before they’d even got out he was finally convinced.
As the family trooped through, Eamonn’s loud-but-warm Irish brogue added heat to her day. “If it’s non-smoking you want, then there’s just one table in the middle,” she snapped, in a voice that matched her poodle hairdo perfectly.
“Look, love – my daughter might look like a fairy, but when everybody around her is lighting up do you imagine she could magic the smoke away? And it’s going to do to her lungs what my Renault nearly did to your window.”
The waitress tapped her pen impatiently while the children decided, and gave Eamonn a look that said, Why are you blaming the car for that?
“Omlette and Rocket Salad,” Siobhan said, sternly. “And NO mayonnaise.”
“Can’t do it without mayo,” the girl replied mechanically.
“Can’t – or won’t?” said Eamonn, sounding just like the teacher he is.
“We HAVE to bring it to you just like it is in the picture,” the waitress explained, ludicrously. “Otherwise, customers complain.”
Shelley gave her one of her silent stares. The rest of the family didn’t need to add anything as the girl went to phone the manager. Other customers were beginning to murmur, now, and Eamonn wasn’t sure whether they were being supportive or not. He could only make out certain words from the telephone conversation. Words like ‘awkward’, ‘obnoxious’ – and Irish.
Eamonn followed her behind her counter and placed an ironic hand on the girl’s shoulder, taking up the slack on his oversized sweatshirt with the other.
“I’ll give you Irish,” he growled, menacingly. “S’pose I had a gun strapped to me chest,” he went on, mimicking someone from Belfast, adapting his Dublin accent as best he could. “What use would yer manager be then? Noy, just give me leetle girl what it doesn’t say on da tin.”
The waitress tried to let out a non-existent scream but was too scared to move. “Bloody inflexible they are, in here,” he shouted to his would-be fellow diners.
“I’m proud of you for making half their customers walk out, Dad.”
Siobhan’s voice was echoing round the empty foyer. By the time her foot had hit the gravel outside she was still full of admiring daughterly gazes, nearly walking into one of the people carrier’s doors.
“See that sign there?” said Eamonn. “Services, indeed. And what sort of a service did Miss Stroppy Pants in there provide?”
“She’d be good on the front line,” offered Shelley, who’d done a stint in the WRACS.
“I’d hate to have her as a parent,” Siobhan added.
“That’s IT!” Eamonn said. “We’ll look for the nearest veggie place in the next town.” Siobhan reprised her admiring daughter face. “And afterwards we’ll play a game called The Person I’d Most Hate to be My Parent,” he added, the authority in his voice giving every impression that Waddingtons had been manufacturing his game since before Monopoly.
“Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have left my mobile in the car,” Shelley said, after they’d eaten at Restaurant Number Two. She was venting her anger on the buttons. “Must be Mum. Number withheld. She always does this.”
“Mar-see-err,” said Eamonn, demonstrating his dislike for his mother-in-law by enunciating her name coldly. “Marcia would be first on my list. How about you, son?”
“Enid Blyton,” said Shelley, when her son couldn’t immediately come up with one. “She’s just like Mum.”
“Blyton would be cool,” contradicted Siobhan, unexpectedly. “We had those Noddy books at school,” she explained. “Only they had some bits about Big Ears taken out. Something about bullying, the teacher said. If she was my mum she could write a book just for me! ”
Her real mum put her straight. “Legend has it she used to shut herself away from her own children for weeks. Her study window used to look out on her neighbour’s bathroom, apparently. Siobhan, imagine how you’d feel if you didn’t see your mum from one day to the next and then you read one of her books that was based on the life of a little girl she saw every morning brushing her teeth. It’s a bit weird, don’t you think?”
“So, Shelley, was that really your mother trying to phone, d’you think?”
“Hmm, Eamonn - let’s consider the evidence. Withheld number, withheld affection… I’d say it’s a ‘Yes’.”
“Quit, you two,” said Siobhan, who couldn’t even stand mild aggression. “We’re on our way to see Grandma and all you can do is argue about Nan. Gran’s got some Enid Blyton books, I think. I might try the Secret Seven – or the Famous Five.”
“Gotta be better than S Club 7,” Eamonn offered.
“Or 5ive,” Sean chipped in. “And it’s just S Club now, Dad. Not that I care.”
“Peter Stringfellow,” said Dad, changing the subject.
“Who?” chorused the kids.
“Parents I’d hate. If he was my dad then my mum would be younger than you are,” Eamonn tried to explain and Shelley joined in with:
“And everyone would confuse your old man with Rod Stewart. Oh, yeah: Dolly the Sheep. Wouldn’t like to have her as a mum. I’d look like a carbon-copied younger version. And Clive Sinclair…” His wife was on a roll, now. “Imagine bringing your friends round to listen to your new Limahl single and there was your dad, falling off a C5 over piles of tiny televisions and toy computers.”
“Your mother’s in an Eighties timewarp,” offered Eamonn.
“The adults have hi-jacked our game,” said Sean, precociously.
“It’s Dad’s game anyway,” protested Siobhan (whose dad could do no wrong today).
“Bill Clinton,” said Dad.
“Ugh!”
“Thought you liked him, Shell?”
“I do, love. But it wouldn’t be worth it. Imagine those headlines ruining the rest of your life. ‘The ovaries and the orifice in the Oval Office.’ I saw that one just the other day. Imagine having the looks of Chelsea…”
“The Captain of the Titanic,” Siobhan suggested. “For obvious reasons.”
“Margaret Thatcher,” volunteered her mum. “For the same reason.”
“She sank the Belgrano,” Eamonn explained to the kids. They were all becoming so involved with all this that he nearly collided with another restaurant they didn’t want to eat in.
“It says Truro, 37 miles,” said an excitable Sean. “So how far till Crock’s End?”
“I’ll tell you when I see the signs,” said his mother as Sean buried his head in his miniature computer screen.
When he’d finished a game the boy looked up again and nearly peed himself when he saw a sign indicating the village that had had its ‘r’ surgically removed by humourous vandals.
They parked the car and the family marched almost militarily up the unevenly pebbled steps to the windswept cottage overlooking the unspoilt Cornish bay.
Eamonn was stealing himself for an unorthodox welcome and already planning his retreat in the pub across the water, once the niceties had been performed.
“Granny!” shouted Siobhan, throwing her arms around Margaret Thatcher.
The girl’s father almost didn’t recognise his own mother at the door.
“Welcome to our fancy dress party,” Thatcher bellowed back.
“Surprise, Surprise,” said Cilla Black.
Eamonn dutifully did the social rounds. He kept muttering “Mum’s so embarrassing” like a child, through clenched teeth, whenever he passed his wife. After the third time, Shelley asked him whether he’d come dressed as a bad ventriloquist.
It was an hour before he noticed that he hadn’t collided with his wife for sometime – and then only because he was seeking her permission to disappear to the inn across the bay.
But his instincts led him to a different watering hole in Marion’s pitch-black garden. The duck-pond was only a few feet in diameter but the silhouette of Shelley remained unusually still (and, in adult company, uncharacteristically silent).
Shelley’s silhouette seems suicidal enough, he was thinking, to jump right in.
“All those jokes about parents,” she sobbed eventually, letting it all out after some careful comforting.
This was the unambiguous cry that Eamonn knew could only mean sudden bereavement.
“All my put-downs about Mum ignoring us – being nearly like Enid Blyton. Maybe she was. Well, I wish she were Margaret bloody Thatcher instead of Marcia, enjoying her second adolescence inside the house with all her geriatric friends.”
Eamonn put his other arm around his wife, encapsulating her.
The couple listened for a while to his own mother prancing around to an old show tune with Nancy Reagan and Doris Day, then Shelley yelled:
“And you know what?”
“What?”
“All she is now is a bloody corpse lying somewhere…”
Once the tears had subsided, the couple silently recalled those caller-withheld numbers and they both thought ‘Hospital’.
Shelley drew a cross in the air and kissed it out towards the pond. “But she still withheld those affections, Eamonn. I can’t deny that.”
“How about a game,” he suggested, tentatively. “We could call it: ‘Parents we do want’!”
His wife’s smile of approval came from within her voice. “Eamonn - you go first!”
“The Pope,” he said, firmly. “If I nominated him as your father then life would be so much simpler because you wouldn’t be here!”
“Mother Theresa, then. For almost the same reason.”
I can remember what I asked him – practically word for word, as it happens - although it doesn’t really matter much now, anyway.
But I can quote you what his reply was. Exactly.
“It’s come around to the point when Miranda and I should be getting married. It’s either that, or the parting of the ways. An either or thing,” I’d confessed.
And Ben had thought about it for a moment, and said: “A relationship has to be greater than the sum of its parts.”
That was a good observation: cold, quotable, soundbite-able. Right up there with Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you…”
Ben has always been my best friend.
We’ve both lived through his embarrassing name and come out the other side.
Well, his name isn’t embarrassing for him, perhaps. But it makes me go red-faced when I explain that Ben is my best mate because…well, because people of a certain age reckon that Ben is a dog. My ultimate best friend – man’s best friend. And younger people within earshot believe them, snigger and say I need to get a life.
It has to be said that younger people are always within earshot of older people speaking because:
a) Old people think they know everything and it’s therefore their mission to let everyone know it. And:
b) That’s why they talk in a loud voice, not because they’re deaf (which they may or may not be, of course).
“Your pal should be eating Pal,” one of these old farts even said, once. And just to spite them, Ben did.
Anyway, back to the parts that nearly made up the sum.
Ben’s reasons why I should marry Miranda were:
a) Miranda is good fun;
b) Miranda is younger than I am;
c) Miranda has the correct height-weight ratio;
d) She cooks well;
e) She looks great. Really great. Steady Ben, I’d said to that one. And:
f) She’d never cheat on you;
g) She has a law degree and will one day make us very rich - probably from the proceeds of somebody else’s misfortune but I can’t afford to care: I don’t buy fair trade coffee and free range eggs. Do you? Oh, and by the way Ben had wanted to get to ‘h’ because, he says, H is his lucky letter. Sad git. So he’d thrown in:
h) Isn’t that enough?
Well, no it wasn’t. Because Ben had gone to the bar for the umpteenth time and forced that unlucky seventh pint down my neck – unlucky, not because I share Man’s Best Friend’s superstitions but because every man(‘s best friend) knows his limits. And mine is that elusive seventh pint from Hell, the one that always results in me having slightly more drink inside me than he has; the one that finally forces our pint-to-piss ratio out of synchronicity (and therefore, because he’s a good bodyguard but only when he’s actually there, can get me beaten up in the gents).
Anyway, on that night, and after that particular seventh pint, I’d finally been made to admit that I didn’t really love Miranda.
I’d voluntarily gone through a list of ‘cons’ that came nowhere near outnumbering the ‘pros’ but that, you see (and I think you do already) was Ben’s point.
If you don’t, then let me tell you that with Miranda our love wasn’t greater than the some of our parts.
And one of her parts, as she was continually reminding me, meant that Miranda could not have a child.
“That’s a little harsh,” he’d said, when I’d listed her lack of a certain part as a con.
“I know,” I’d replied. “But it goes back to the time when Miranda and Ron (her previous lover who is actually still technically her husband) had this huge row over his infertility.”
To his credit, Ron had accepted straight away that they couldn’t have a child because he knew they were having plenty of hot sex.
He also knew that he was ugly and fat and that she was ‘fit’, so how could it possibly be her? I mean, God only stops people who are less than aesthetically pleasing from procreating, doesn’t He?
Yeah, that was his logic. Who was she to contradict it?
And she didn’t, until, one day she’d had a few gins – seven, legend has it – and finally fronted him out.
And then she’d chucked him out.
Again, to Ron’s credit he still didn’t believe her so she sent him what he believed to be a certificate from the hospital, although she still refused to let him back in the house. Ron opened the letter in tears at his sad bolthole in bedsit-land – Lord knows how it ever got there unopened. I mean, you know you’re renting down-market when your home doesn’t have a postcode. The postie knows it as ‘third padlock up from the downstairs bog that nobody uses (but nobody’s cleaned since two years ago when the last person used it very much).
So it was then, and only then, that Ron finally conceded that he’d been chucked out for good.
He’d thrown the wallet that contained Miranda’s photo and front door key into a very huge puddle, a puddle that was so huge, in fact, that it had a name.
“Into the Thames with you, my girl,” he’d said. “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”
Anyway, in the pub that night I’d continued to go on, and on, and on – in the way that you now know I do.
I’d mainly gone on about Miranda admitting she was dyslexic, the reason she’d given to not getting round to actually divorcing Ron. She couldn’t fill in the forms correctly, you see. So that would incur more costs - employing someone who could, I mean. And, no, she didn’t trust me to do it – another bone of contention. Another ‘con’.
So the matter of her officially leaving him had just been left.
After I’d reminded Ben of all Miranda’s bad points, and introduced him gently to those two revelations about her dyslexia and the lack of a divorce, Ben had said: “Let’s go on to a club.”
The bouncer delighted in letting me know I was borderline.
I’d only just made it into The Snooty Vixen because, although I’d been reeling around a bit after the seven pints, Ben had sworn on his mother’s life that he’d arranged to meet some horny blondes there later that night and none of them had a penny between them because they were expecting him to pay. The bouncer knew that this was ‘Girls Go Free’ night and Ben knew the bouncer was on a bar takings percentage and so he’d given me the benefit of the doubt because if either of us was refused admission Ben would simply call the Head Blonde up on her mobile and drag the whole party along to Happy Mondays instead.
Once inside the Vixen, Ben had introduced me to a man who ran another club, only not a nightclub this time.
“It’s called ‘Luck School’, its American Principal proudly announced. “And, boy, you sure look like you could use some.”
It must’ve been my lucky night.
The man’s instant recruitment plan for me had consisted of Ben inducing the pissed version of me to run through the good and bad points about Miranda once again, only this time for Mr. Lucky’s benefit. Then, just as Lucky had drawn so much breath that I’d actually accused him of sounding like a car mechanic who was about to impart some expensive news I’d begun to mention something that was a revelation to both Ben and his odd acquaintance.
“Do you know, Mister, er…” I bumbled.
“Call me Ralph.”
“Do you know, Mr Lucky Ralph, that Miranda’s schoolmates were so cruel…”
“About her word-blindness?” said Ben, being mindful of his imagined probability that Americans haven’t yet heard of dyslexia.
“Yeah,” I went on. “Do you know that these kids were so heartless that they accused her parents of christening her ‘Miranda’ because they knew she would be dyslexic – er, word-blind - because they were dyslexic themselves. And they must have believed that she was going to get in trouble with the law…”
“Law breaking isn’t hereditary, you know, even if dyslexia is,” Ralph had wisely said.
“I know,” I snapped. “Anyway, as I was saying, they called her ‘Miranda’ because it’s an anagram of ‘remand her’ – as in custody.”
“No it’s not – not literally,” Ben had joined in.
“It is an anagram if you’re dyslexic,” Ralph contributed patiently. “Ben, it seems you have been very unlucky indeed.”
My mate’s guru had seemed very convincing and so I’d given him my American Express card and he bought me my eighth drink – the one that elevated me dangerously beyond seventh heaven.
Eventually, after I’d signed for fifty dollars, he handed me his business card.
I’ve kept it all crumpled up in my wallet for three years – yes, it still lives just behind the one with a girl’s name in red writing, though it’s not next to my Amex card anymore because I’ve torn that one up.
What do you mean, Why?
Not because of Mr. Lucky Ralph. No. It’s because that night Ben had dared me to actually phone the prostitute on the card but I’d never taken him up on it because I was secretly afraid that she might be dyslexic, too. You see I feared that every woman I was destined to meet would turn out to be dyslexic. Is that a condition in itself?
In this case Ben conceded I was probably right. I mean, how many girls called Nicola do you know who spell the shortened version of their name with three k’s?
Anyway, three hooker-less, girlfriend-less years later I find myself standing outside the place where Ralph holds his Luck Classes.
Knowing my luck, Ralph himself is probably not even here anymore.
I knock on the door – hard. It hurts my knuckle because there is no knocker, which makes me think there are bouncers instead.
I realise I’m right when a burly man in a suit unhooks the castle-like door.
His attire kind of blends in with the oak. It looks like there’s just a head hanging there.
“Yeah?”
“Come to see Ralph,” I say, mimicking his abbreviated style.
“This way.”
At this point, I notice another, slightly shorter version of the doorman standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Up till now this man has blended in completely with the darkness.
His sudden ‘appearance’ makes me flinch.
“Uhh, oh. No you don’t,” implies the second man by restraining me gently, threateningly, professionally.
He’s holding out his hand. It’s almost invisible on account of his dark, leather glove.
“He’s asking you for five quid,” the first man says, helpfully.
I pull a tenner out of my wallet and, who knows, drop another tenner on the stair.
I feel the second man’s glove. For all I know he might have given me a receipt but I don’t stop to check because the first man is already holding me by the collar and pushing me up the stairs.
On the umpteenth floor we eventually reach the second set of oak-beamed doors. The second man lifts the huge latch and the first one bundles me in.
“This is Ralf,” says Man 2, revealing his inadequate, high-timbre voice.
Ralf appears in front of me like the Godfather.
I interpret his body language as a pledge to remain silent on account of my low ranking in the food chain of this particular club and, yes, I am afraid he’s going to eat me (or something rather worse).
I stare at Ralf for what seems like an eternity, swallowing regularly and nervously.
Finally, I muster up the courage to spit it out:
“We’ve never met before.”
“Correct.”
I don’t know it at the time, but this is the only word that this terrifying man will ever say to me.
I stare at the luminous banner across the stage that I only realise exists when my eyes become sufficiently accustomed to tell me.
I read the words out loud: School for 5th Century Warriors, it says.
And underneath, in slightly smaller print, Today’s Guru: Ralf the Terrible, leader of the Oodoo Sect. All of which goes someway towards an explanation. The other Ralph, of course, spells his name with a P and an H.
Like I say, I’ve still got his card.
“Where’s the, er, Luck School?” I manage, throwing out my words in the vague direction of the ‘guru’.
Man A and Man B laugh uncontrollably.
The contrasting pitch of their voices only adds to the cruelty.
As they bundle me out, I console myself with the likely fact that I’m not the first to make this mistake and I won’t be the last.
Then the two bouncers hurl me through yet another set of oak doors and I finally fall to my feet – not because they hurt me, because they don’t. Not because the floor’s slippery, even though it is.
I fall because, well, compared to that last bunch of bastards, I’ve seen the light.
And it’s a very, very bright light indeed that adorns this room.
I’ve made my lucky escape from the other room and I’m completely unaccustomed to it but I’m very happy.
And whadda-ya-know: there, under the spotlight, stands the other Ralph – Mister Lucky.
“You were very fortunate to find this place,” he says, offering me his hand.
I hardly notice the rest of the class as Ralph skilfully extracts my reasons for being here without making it at all clear whether he remembers our meeting at the Snooty Vixen three years ago.
“After the ordeal I’ve just been through,” I say, “I would submit that anything happening to me from now on constitutes some degree of fortune.” I show a satisfied smirk as I await the considered response that my eloquent statement deserves.
I have found my voice at last. The pitch of my voice may lie somewhere between Man A and Man B but its owner is lucky to be free from their clutches.
“You are indeed fortunate to be freed from those monkeys,” Ralph pronounces, finally revealing his worst kept secret. “Everything is relative,” he assures.
It has now dawned on me that all the goings-on in the other room were a staged first stage of Ralph’s game.
This lunchtime May is showcasing her Gemini origins and contradictions. Bright sunlight and a bitter breeze have arrived like twins in our room.
The first voice belongs to a man who speaks with a kind of false confidence that can only be heard when someone is offloading an admission from his guilt wagon:
“My name’s Mike and I’m a pessimist,” he declares to the rest of the class.
He waits for a reply but Ralph holds our suspense with one of his trademark pauses.
It underlines my coldness and I freeze as another delegate beats me to it. “Let’s shut those French doors, Mister Lucky,” the spotty teenager proposes.
“As many of you already know, nothing is everything it seems,” Ralph begins, enigmatically. “Mike here has joined us because…well, you tell the class, Michael dear…”
“No matter where I am, or what time of day it is – which season, even,” Mike says almost proudly, “I have to have the doors open.”
“And that’s because, Michael?”
“Because luck never happens when the door’s shut, Coach. And so I have to let it in. Or escape.”
“Bullshit,” shouts a brave voice from the back.
I look round and see the ‘bouncer’ whom I’d met earlier – the one who’d catapulted me into the ‘wrong’ room. As I observe his bogus contribution, his wooden acting, hismulti-skilling, I decide that his face is more familiar than I’d been allowed to notice during that dark encounter.
Here, in the middle of Mike’s Daylight City, I am recognising his face as belonging to the man who’d only just sanctioned my entry into the Vixen some three years earlier. “BullSHIT!” he announces again: a little more conviction but just as wooden, I evaluate.
“We all know that Michael is hiding behind something, don’t we Class?” Ralph goes on. “Don’t we Peter?”
I crane my neck to see a tall, mid-twenty-something man standing up.
I assess that he has probably paid his dues with the tedious life-long round of cloud jokes that have almost certainly come his way; you know, What’s-the-weather-like-up-there type efforts. Oh, and even worse: Deeply unattractive women in supermarkets capitalising on his height to overcome forbidden access to top shelf merchandise (and perhaps the man himself).
“Michael’s just being a luvvy,” Peter accuses. “He has to have the French doors open because he’s a failed actor who thinks he’s on a stage. Well, I’ve got news for you…” Peter is addressing Michael directly now, though I catch him glancing briefly sideways, trying to seek Ralph’s approval. “You’re just an old Queen,” he lets out now. “Those doors are your bloody stage curtain – go on, admit it: you won’t be happy until another dwarf dives into a sandpit and accidentally buries his equity card.”
“It’s you that’s the freak, Lampost Legs,” Michael says cattily.
Peter, to his credit, only registers a slight ‘tut’ and sits down again.
“Who’s next?” Our guru is rubbing his hands together as he says this. He looks as if he knows he shouldn’t be enjoying himself but he clearly is and no one seems to care.
Then a middle-aged man in a sharp grey suit stands up. “My name is Robert and…”
“He’s unlucky!” choruses the class.
“Tell us your story, young man,” Ralph instructs enthusiastically.
Robert offers some false charm to our host, muttering something about it being a long time since anyone’s called him young and then proceeds to tell his story.
“Since moving to the countryside from the big smoke,” he confides, “all my opportunities have gone down the drain.”
“Why do you think that is?” says our guru as sincerely as he can.
“Can’t meet the right girl. And now I never will,” Robert sighs.
“And why do you think that is?”
“Why don’t you ask the rest of them?” he says, sweeping his hand across the crowd. “It’s because all the people down here are in-bred,” he submits, “present company accepted,” he adds weakly.
The class members look at each other accusingly, as if to prove him right.
“Should see ‘em on a Monday,” Robert goes on. “You walk into the Post Office and there they are, crawling out of the hills. Or in some cases the sea. Those bloody overcoats cover a multitude of sins – sheep, cross-bred with pond life…”
Ralph temporarily halts the rant - but only, as it disappointingly turns out, to scold the man for his mixed metaphor, not to challenge his outrageous theory.
“Pond life can never survive in the English Channel,” he admonishes.
“Whatever. They’re neither man nor woman round here. Just bloody hermaphrodites, that’s all. Their gender provides the ultimate in cross-breeding, if you think about it. Self-reproduction: perfect, digital copies.”
“They reckon there are mermaids in the Post Office on a Monday,” chirps up a woman who appears older than her likely years. She looks like a librarian from the Nineteen-fifties and offers: “I keep meaning to collect my mother’s pension on a Tuesday from now on.”
I calculate that the class isn’t laughing at her comments so much as her inaccurate geography. Although the woman’s accent suggests she’s never left town, her gloved hand is indicating that the Post Office is situated on an island all by itself, somewhere in the sea.
Finally, a man called Jack in his forties makes an offering: “Addicted to competitions, me. But you know the only thing I’ve ever won is this TOG’s jacket…”
“Terry’s Old Geezers?” Ralph tries to confirm.
“Yes. Won it on Mr. Wogan’s breakfast show. On Radio 2.”
“What lives in the place that should be occupied by a white handkerchief?” the guru asks the rest of the class. When no answer is forthcoming he provides the answer. “Cheese. That’s what it is! Jack is carrying a three-week-old lump of cheddar around in his top pocket. Don’t you think that might just contribute to the likelihood of your perpetual misfortune, Mister Old-before-your-Time?”
The class is collectively cheering now in response to the great skill of Ralph’s cleverly-engineered guru-punch line. They slow hand-clap but the encore never comes. They’re blissfully unaware that Ralph is a leading exponent of the maxim ‘Leave ‘em wanting more’.
On the way out, our guru shakes my right hand while pointing to the in-house collection bowl with the other. I see no evidence of delegates making spontaneous donations, yet I notice no currency smaller than a tenner lurking in the receptacle.
This could well be another trick, I whisper to myself as I head towards the still-darkened hallway with an emptier feeling (and a much lighter wallet) than when I went in.
But the most important question remains unanswered:
Can you create luck, even with the help of a guru? Or are these people just losers?
I’m still pondering on this question as I walk out into the bright but biting Spring afternoon and then it happens:
The familiar-looking woman with dark glasses growls at me in a deep voice.
I notice she’s too young to wear a headscarf, but it’s not her disguise that fails to give her away.
“Is this where they hold that luck school?”
“I think you’ve just missed it,” I say, looking at the notice board, playing for time.
I’m already aware that there are three repeat sessions this afternoon, but I’m waiting for her to say something back.
“What time does it finish?” the woman persists. “Got to pick my little one up from nursery school at half-two.”
I grow suspicious of her identity so I risk accusations of assault by tearing off her scarf.
When I see Miranda, I give her the sort of look that people who aren’t Chess players rarely see.
“Okay,” Miranda says, holding both her glove-clad hands up in the air. “But it’s not what you think. I haven’t come here to try and get fertile – I’m not that much of a disciple of Luck. Anyway, I can have children. Could all along. It was Ron, after all, that was infertile. But I pretended it was me. It was a convenient excuse to leave him.”
“Where were you when you were supposed to be having the op?”
“In Barbados.”
“So you let yourself fail him?”
“Got it in one. And then I let you leave me too because, deep down, every man wants kids, don’t they? But I couldn’t just let us get on with it. It would be like a miracle, don’t you see? And besides, it would hurt Ron even more if…”
I position the scarf over her mouth. It stops her going on about this insane mess for a moment, until some passers-by appear to be phoning the Police and I have no choice but to let her carry on.
I stand there in silence, letting Miranda dig her own trench. Whether or not the hole becomes a grave is up to her, now.
“Go on, admit it – it was easier for you to leave because you believed that I wasn’t able to get pregnant,” she says. I nod. “It made it clearer in your mind, didn’t it? Provided you with the ultimate excuse, though you never said the reason why…”
“You’re damn right, Miranda. I never said why. I never said that the reason I left you was that Ben convinced me that I didn’t love you.”
“And that’s because he did.”
“Eh?”
“Ben has always carried a torch for me. It was your best mate that broke us up!”
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to see whether Ralph can help me bring about the right circumstances for Ron to love me enough…”
“You’re still not divorced, are you?”
“No. Look, this is important. Let me finish. Please! I’ve come to see whether Ron might forgive me for leading him on, for letting him believe that he was impotent when all the time I was on the pill. And if he can, I can exorcise that particular ghost. And move on.”
“And the child?”
“What child?”
“The one you’re picking up from nursery school in an hour’s time.”
“He’s your son.”
Miranda and I have now begun what I can only describe as a ‘forgiving’ relationship.
Our three-and-a-half-year-old son will be starting school pretty soon but it’s sheer coincidence, not luck, that his middle name happens to be Ralph.
Then again, Miranda might have been lying about that…maybe I’ll just check that birth certificate before I put my best diplomatic skills to the test.
I mean, how does an absent father, albeit an accidental one, go about convincing his prodigal son that Ben, as a first name, is only suitable for a dog?
“I think I’ll go for the… yes, that’s right. I’ll definitely have the… “
“Excuse me, Sir, but you don’t sound very definite to me. No. 23, you’re pointing to, isn’t it?”
“And the Egg Foo Young. I can say that bit.”
“Take a seat.”
Marky sat down on the most sumptuous seat he’d ever experienced this side of a restaurant. He felt relaxed, as if he’d eaten the food.
“Can I get you another side dish to take away?” he thought she said (it was a long way from the counter to the seat).
“You?” he tried. There was a long silence, during which Marky thought he must’ve got away with it (but he might’ve got a ‘yes’ if only he hadn’t phrased the ‘you’ as a question, been a bit more assertive sort of thing. Yes, he assessed. Women like Assertive).
He was staring at the girl now, who pulled off the elastic band that kept her shoulder-length dark brown hair at a safe distance from his prawn crackers. “That new Jackie Chan movie’s showing at the Astoria tonight,” he mumbled.
Marky couldn’t remember any of the film because now she was leading him by the wrist up a municipal staircase and practically forcing him through the front door. He wanted to change his mind about her offer of coffee but he couldn’t fight back. It was nearly rape.
“No 23?”
“I’m… not… sure…”
“No 23 is the full body massage with optional chicken grease. And sliced prawn crackers… “
Marky couldn’t remember anything, actually.
He was going to ask the girl out, just to see what her smile was like. Well, that would’ve been his line. He’d planned it (always a bad thing) then bottled it when she’d said “Egg Foo Young” so sternly that her dark brown hair had appeared to take on a forbidden ginger hue. Or was that the lighting? Perhaps she was older than his original early-twenties estimate. Not quite so Egg Foo Young after all. Anyway, in the space of two seconds she’d gone from pretty take-away owner’s daughter to Anne Robinson’s love child. And once the adrenalin, the anticipation and his perceived rejection had kicked in he’d actually fallen asleep – in public. That’s it; he could remember the real story, now. An easy task, sorting the reality from the dream, but only once you’re awake. But at that moment – the Egg Foo Young moment –His workaday tiredness that had inspired the take-away in the first place had conspired with The Seat to make him drift off into a sleep-fantasy about the girl having a younger self who was single and had her own flat - albeit a municipal one with a rickety staircase.
He’d been with married women before, thank you very much. And although a semi-detached house was much easier to make a sharp exit from he’d go for the single girl and the staircase every time.
She came over to wake him up with his bag. “One number Twenty Three and an Egg Foo Young.”
“Velly comfowtable seat,” he said embarrassingly, mimicking her oriental-ness, failing miserably to capture the essence of it. (Marky couldn’t help that; once he’d been to Fort William for a week and come back talking Scottish).
“We like our customers to relax here,” said the girl. “We’re the total opposite of Southern Fried McBurger Queen,” she smiled. “We prepare our food slow-lee. We won’t - make - you - sit - on - a - spike.”
Marky swore her voice had dropped an octave once she’s slowed down. Maybe she’d drop her pants?
“And how do you like to relax?” he asked, cheesily.
“I know it’s a cliché. But I like film. And martial arts. That new Jackie Chan movie opens tomorrow at the UCI.”
Marky swallowed hard, trying to digest his déjà vu.
In the dream, the film had been the same but the venue was the now-demolished Astoria – older era, younger girl.
Dreams, he knew, know no sense of time. Ah, the Astoria – those were the days. Seats even bigger than The Seat. And surround sound - a novelty back then. Oh, and yes: the last girlfriend he’d taken to a movie had been, well, when movies weren’t called movies. She was a married girl. Married to him.
The credits rolled in the real, present-day, workaday UCI.
Marky tried to jump up.
As a middle-aged man, his bones had stiffened during the movie. All of them. Ah, at least something was still working. He assured Kanoosha that the reason he’d sat down again was that he’d been forced to by the huge, awkward teenager who was leading his tiny girlfriend through the aisle and knocking him back down again. Nonsense, Kanoosha had said. She was tiny-ish too and even though she was yelling at the hulk in Chinese he had turned around and now he was leading his pale, sculptured trophy back to his seat and out the other side.
“Gotta call the shots in life,” Kannosha was telling him now in her very best American film-speak. “I usually get what I want. Anyway, those kids aren’t the most annoying thing about tonight.”
“You mean that interference? Dialogue from the neighbouring screen?”
“Yeah, Marky. During the quiet bits.”
This was good; they’d found something in common to complain about. Kannosha may be half his age but she was halfway to hankering back to his Astoria days.
“And those crisp packets,” she said. Even better, thought Marky; this is Marky and Kanoosha against the rest of the world.
He tried to hide his breathlessness as she led him up the clinical, municipal staircase towards her flat. “What did you think of the leading lady?” Kanoosha quizzed. “Very promising,” he said simply, conserving some energy for the rest of the climb (and for what he hoped would follow).
“Anyway, it wasn’t a real Jackie Chan picture,” he puffed.
“No, Marky. Not as such. It was more like a Steve Coogan film with Jackie Chan doing all the choreography in return for a huge cameo appearance and a token bit of fighting. Even the Great Master’s not so Kung-Fu young as he used to be.”
“Don’t look at me when you say that!”
“So the leading lady? You haven’t told me what you think.”
The actress was unknown to him, but very beautiful; a kind of tall, fair, fathomable negative to Kanoosha’s small, colourful, inscrutable positive.
“Yes, she was very promising,” he said again, without vocalising his comparison.
He’d been polite about paying, too. But Kanoosha had refused at the first hurdle – at the box office – and later, too, when she’d insisted on paying for the ice cream. And when he’d quizzed her on this she had come over all defensive and let slip that she’d recently inherited the take-away after the sudden death of her father. “He’s as big in Beijing as Branson is in a Balloon,” her weird sense of humour had informed.
The flat gave Marky an impression of enforced cleanliness and awkward uniformity. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on it but the décor simply wasn’t up to the job of reflecting Kanoosha’s complex, multi-layered persona.
“It’s minimalist,” she tried to explain.
“I’m not falling for that one,” Marky said flatly. Then, aware that he’d sounded abrupt, he decided to come straight out with it. “Are all the rooms in this building like this?”
“They’re practically clones. But I try to have as little to do with the other guinea pi… I mean, students, as I can.”
Marky noticed for the first time that Kanoosha seemed vulnerable.
She went to get them some Lapsang and his eyes settled on a rather odd photograph in which Kanoosha was sitting upright in a metal bed - like a corpse that had been ‘posed’ by a pathologist’s assistant, he imagined, though he’d never go near one.
Marky got up from his sumptuous seat - the only friendly piece of furniture in the whole place. Yeah, that was it; the seat was like The Seat. It had been ‘borrowed’ from the take-away, surely?
He wandered around the flat, his curiosity failing to halt his snooping, even when he could hear the kettle with its whistle that was saying ‘time’s up’. Kanoosha appeared from the kitchenette and caught him emerging from the other side of an alcove.
“Stay out of there!”
“What’s this, Kanoosha?”
“You’re scaring me, Marky.”
Kanoosha knew he’d found several more photographs in which she’d assumed a similar pose to the original one, only in different tops. She saw Marky’s eyes alternating between the photos and the large metal bed in the room. She knew he’d made the connection.
“Okay, we’re all students here. Only we’re not the ones doing the studying.
Round the corner - that’s his ‘office’. Every flat has one – its own little nerve-centre for individual human experiments. And that’s him.”
Kanoosha was waggling her finger at the distant figure in a white coat whose appearance in the main photo - the one she kept in the ‘private’ area of her flat - seemed like a momentary security lapse, if not a huge military mistake.
“There’s nothing sinister in this,” Kanoosha reassured, unconvincingly. “So far, it’s paid for my English lessons. But now I can speak. And now Papa has died I can afford to get out!”
His eyes were focussing now on a 1950’s course book on the bedside table.
He hoped her bedroom sensibilities weren’t as quaint.
She saw he’d noticed the book and grabbed it quickly, snatching it from his eyes. When it nearly knocked over the lamp on her bedside table she threw herself backwards onto the duvet in a ‘what the heck’ fashion, curling her bare legs seductively around her.
“Your first lesson,” she teased, pretending to quote from Chapter One. “Never visit the female flesh until you’ve visited her mind.”
“And what’s on your mind?”
“Flesh! Number Twenty-three is definitely not vegetarian.”
Marky remembered his dream in the take-away when the unpronounceable dish had morphed into a massage. Well, he was about to enjoy the experience for real now, only (he hoped) without the chicken grease.
Marky allowed himself to become indulged in all of Kanoosha’s comprehensive courses and before long the bed had become a mixture of unorthodox food, strange colonial-not-colloquial Fifties literature and oddly incompatible underwear. “Present from my last boyfriend,” she muttered defensively when Marky cringed at the personalised message on the crotch.
The next thing he said to her was “Christ, what time is it?”
He was staring at her digital clock but had become no wiser once he’d managed to find his glasses.
Another twenty minutes passed and it was becoming clear that Kanoosha wasn’t about to wake up and translate those Chinese characters anytime soon.
Fumbling neurotically with his mobile he called the speaking clock.
“Not too late for work, then,” he whispered to himself. It was only half-seven, but Marky still couldn’t relax. His anxiety needed another outlet.
“What about those experiments?” he snapped. “Am I an experiment, too?”
“You want breakfast?” she said calmly, her satisfied look at odds with his aggression. “Number twenty-three?”
“You know I can’t pronounce that one. What does it mean anyway?”
“Oh, that dish. It’s ‘Empire Steak’. That’s a very lucky dish. Lucky old Marky, I’d say. You see I’ve just given up half my bed. And now I’m giving you half my… ”
“Empire?”
“That’s right. You’ve just become the co-owner of my newly-inherited take-away. Congratulations, Marky. You’ve passed the experiment with flying colours.”
This blog is actually a nifty way to copyright my short stories.
Of course, writers are kidding themselves if they believe that people are queueing up to get rich by stealing their creations.
But this way, at least if someone unconsciously uses an idea that was originally mine then this proves that my effort pre-dates it. Makes sense? Go on, humour me - you know you want to!
So here, on this ‘blog’, I’m releasing 24 of my short stories - one a month, every month, from the start of 2010 to the end of 2011. Drip-fed, until you get fed up with reading them.
I seem to remember it was the postman that started it all off.
Yes, that’s right. Sometime around 1996, I think.
I was relying more and more on mail order and Bobby (that’s my son) sending me things in little parcels.
I used to collect them. Not Bobby’s presents, you understand. ‘Sorry you were out’ notices, or whatever they’re called. From the Post Office. So they’d knock on Sheila’s door instead. Silly thing is, my next-door neighbour was eighty-five herself. She couldn’t get to the front door any quicker than I could. But she could manage to hobble up to the Post Office half a mile away to pick up my undelivered mail more easily than me. Women. They have more stamina, don’t they?
But anyway, then it stopped. Sheila had a bit of a problem with her leg – though at least she still had two of them. But when it all got a bit too much for her, Karen – Sheila’s daughter – suggested she went down and lived with her family in Cornwall.
Then Bobby found out I wasn’t getting his parcels. I tried to disguise it at first; thanks for the lovely present, I’d say. He got a bit suspicious after he sent me a box full of aspirins and some incontinence pants. Just what I needed, I told him, for that one. What, the tablets or the other things? he said. I don’t take tablets, never have done. So I said the other, not knowing what it was of course, and Bobby came round quick as a flash, announcing that he was going to arrange for me to see a specialist at the local county hospital. By the time I’d told him I didn’t suffer from incontinence at all the appointment was already ‘in the can’, as Bobby would say. Oh, dear – that expression is hardly appropriate under the circumstances, is it? So why did you send them, I said. And he went on about a little joke we apparently had when he was a teenager. Something about when I’m forty he was going to send me some rubber pants. I’d said make that eighty – I remember it now. But since then I’d forgotten. Till it happened. And when he came round the other week and saw the pile of ‘Sorry you were out’ cards he’d said, ‘I’m going to make you a big notice, on the word processor, saying Please be patient – elderly person needs time to come to the door’. And I’d expressed my fear of muggers and burglars taking advantage if they knew about my lack of speed in the old leg department. And that’s when he said, ‘You should live with me.’
Unlike Sheila, I didn’t go to his place – Bobby was going through a divorce. Still living with his wife. It would be too unsettling, he said. So I’d suggested he comes here. Kills two birds with one stone. ‘I’d like to kill her,’ he said. I’m not sure whether or not he went through with that threat because now I’m up here with the angels. But I haven’t seen his ex-wife knocking on Heaven’s door so he probably hasn’t got round to killing her yet. Oh, yes - and I’m dying for a cup of tea.
When the receptionist called out the name of the late Leopold Turner it was Turner junior who walked swiftly toward the desk.
‘So you’re Mr. Turner, are you?’ she said, looking him up and down. ‘Well, you must let us in on your health secrets sometime. And then we can all retire from the Health Service.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I meant, Mr. Turner, that you don’t look anywhere near eighty-plus.’
‘I’m not. Eighty-two, I mean. I’m actually Leo’s son!’
Bobby returned to his seat and picked up a huge, wide carrier bag. The heads of the other patients in the waiting room followed it in unison as he placed it on the counter – expecting it, perhaps, to be a bomb.
The only person ignoring the package was the girl.
‘You can’t just swap appointments. It doesn’t work like that,’ she told him, the sneer in her voice making up for the lack of eye contact as she shared her disdain towards Bobby with her even younger and more sour-faced assistant.
‘I’m not,’ he said, putting his hand inside the bag. Then he pulled out a crude wooden leg. ‘There’s been a misunderstanding. I was under the impression that my father was suffering from… ‘ Bobby reduced his voice now to a rather intimate whisper. It was a hard thing to do when he knew the girl didn’t like him. ‘In-con-tin-ence,’ he mouthed, nearly showering her with saliva. ‘But he wasn’t. Suffering, that is. But he does need a new wooden leg. So I thought I’d keep the appointment and bring it in.’
‘We don’t do legs,’ said the girl, sounding like a waitress.
So much so that Bobby was moved to say, ‘Leg’s off, today, is it?’
Before he could pretend to ask for the Head Waiter she’d already replied.
‘It would certainly appear that way!’
Poor old Bobby. He always did his best for me, right up till the end. Beyond the end, actually. Wanted me to be buried with dignity in all my finery. Wanted me to have a replacement wooden leg. Kids have new ones all the time – they grow, see. But mine dates back to – well, Marilyn Monroe at least.
‘Look, Dad’, he’d said at the final minute, ‘If there’s anything I’ve neglected to do for you in all these years of being your son – well, you just name it, and I’ll do it’.
I think he meant fixing my car before I’d become too old to drive, taking me to Angora with his silly mistress and her dreadful kids (although that would’ve involved me in his divorce, so I’d said ‘no’ to that one). Bobby was even talking about trying to re-unite me with my old army friends on that web thingy. Good idea that one, I’d said when he’d originally offered it. He’d tried, and then found that they only go back to 1961.
So anyway, my last wish: I said, ‘Son, you know you’re always too busy to make your old man a cup of tea?’ And he just ran into the kitchen like a little boy and put the kettle on. Last thing I remember is the doctor rushing in and the tea on the mantelpiece, stone cold.
So I never did drink it. And now here I am, in this peaceful place they call Heaven. No impatient postmen, here. No bad drivers, nobody in a hurry.
And no tea.
The moment I arrived here, the angel on the cloud next to me asked if there was anything I wanted – that’s funny, really. You see, my last request on earth had become my first in Heaven. But when I told him I’d like a lovely Lapsang - or even just a Tetley - Gabriel just laughed. ‘Caffeine is very much frowned on here,’ he said, smiling.
And before you ask, no he couldn’t frown because he’s an angel.
‘Look, I’m not being funny,’ said the girl. She was. ‘But if your father wanted to change the nature of his appointment then he should have told us. On the phone, or turn up in person.’
Bobby pulled the leg out of the bag again and shook it in front of the girl’s face.
‘What, the whole of him?’ he asked, ludicrously.
‘The rest of him,’ said the girl, frowning so unattractively that Bobby thought she’d arrived straight from Hell.
I’m so lucky not to have gone to that other place. You can’t mention its name here, of course. Because if you do, legend has it that you bring this place into disrepute and then they send you there. Just so you can see what it’s like.
But I like this place too much. All my friends are here. Back on Earth, they were all dying – dropping, one-by-one like dominoes. But now I’ve got more friends here than I had at home. If ever there was a place that really deserves the title – what’s it called again? - Friends Reunited? If anywhere deserves that name then it’s Heaven. I’m missing Bobby, though…
Bobby Turner had given up arguing with the girl. Eventually he admitted, ‘My father is dead. That’s why he can’t be here in person. But the leg kept the appointment, didn’t it? So you’re not going to fine me, are you now?’
The receptionist had got her sullen assistant to tap something into her computer. Having cross-referenced, their records confirmed that Leopold was indeed dead. Then the two girls had acted speedily (well, as quickly as the Health Service is capable of, anyway).
When the two paramedics, or whatever they were, arrived at the house, Bobby’s mood matched the blackness of his mourning suit.
‘Doesn’t look right you two mooching around like undertakers. Not in those white coats.’
‘You mean you’re used to us rushing around, don’t you Sir?’ said the experienced looking one.
‘You’ve got it. White is busy-busy-quick-quick, as my mother used to say. Black is slow and reflective. So just do what you have to do and get out.’
‘Your mother’s dead, too, Sir?’
‘She died in a home. I’ve no idea what the ambulance men were wearing on that particular day because I was in my twenties then. Twenty-something is too young to deal with death. But I think Matron just scooped her straight out to the in-house cemetery and buried her next to the dog. Do you have to remove Pops today?’
‘Beginning to smell a bit,’ said the younger of the two ambulance men.
The older one gave his assistant a look that indicated he knew the young man hadn’t been listening to what the grieving son had been saying.
‘He means the cup,’ the older man explained. Then he turned to Bobby. ‘Hope you don’t mind me asking. You seem to have a little rose garden on your mantelpiece with exotic little bonsai trees and cards and things… it’s really quite elegant – a shrine, is it Sir? And then at the centrepiece of it all is a cup that has ‘Pops’ engraved on it and inside the cup is, well, it may have been tea once but now it’s a load of fungus and some horrible fluff.
I had Victor round the other night. We shared some memories of Shanghai and drank some cabbage water. ‘Is there any way I can make up for all that ribbing when you were alive?’ Vic said. ‘You know, when you were a raw recruit in 1940?’ And I replied that I was still missing Bobby but that I didn’t want the boss to end his life just yet, although it would be nice if you could have a word with Him. I got a black mark for that last bit; nearly went to that other place. What would be even nicer, I said, would be for Vic to go and get me a cup of tea but he just looked at me as if to say Have pigs got wings? And then I saw one - a winged pig, that is - flying over a neighbouring cloud.
Anyway, I still think about cups of tea. Every day.
I wonder what happened to the last one?
