The Man in the Street

by Martin Howe

  She put down the mug on the bedside table and smiled, then lunged forward and slapped his naked buttocks. David cried out in surprise, his body stiffening momentarily before writhing away and almost rolling off the bed. Susan retreated beneath the blankets and stared wide-eyed as he slowly crept towards her. She screamed when he grabbed her.

  “Leave me alone, it was just too tempting.”

  She struggled as he pinned her to the bed with his arms, then lay still.

  “Do you surrender?”

  “No, never.”

  Kicking out she managed to topple him over on to his side of the mattress. Grinning he tried to grab her wrists again, but she shoved her hands into his armpits and began tickling him. Convulsed by laughter, he thrashed around, his body quivering. Susan climbed on top of him and smiled.

  “Do you surrender?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Grasping her buttocks with both hands, he began gently kneading them. Susan relaxed, closed her eyes and arched her back. Her body moved in rhythm with the circular motion of his hands. Unnoticed he edged one of his fingers between her cheeks and with a sudden cry of triumph thrust it deep inside her.

  “There, see how you like that.”

  With a yelp of pain Susan rolled off him and covered herself with the bedclothes.

  “That hurt David.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “It bloody did. You know I’m sensitive down there. You never know when to stop do you?”

  David sat up and held out his arms.

  “I’m sorry. I just got carried away.”

  “Leave me alone and drink your tea.”

  “Please don’t let it spoil things. Susan?”

  “I could’ve woken the kids. You’re an idiot.”

  “That would have been a pain.”

  “Oh give over will you. You can always bloody win me round. Drink your tea and we’ll see.”

  The two of them sat side by side in silence, the only sounds the dripping of a tap in the bathroom next door and the intermittent snoring of their eldest son, punctuated by the occasional heavy thump as his feet hit the thin party wall as he turned over in his sleep.

  “I knew there was something I had to tell you.”

  “What?”

  Susan sounded irritated. She was already starting to feel drowsy and David’s voice wrenched her harshly back to full awareness.

  “At work there are rumours we’re getting a new managing director. Derek told me. It never bloody stops, does it?”

  “Who is it, do you know?”

  “No idea, although Derek thinks it will be someone from outside. A new broom, as he puts it.”

  “How does he know?”

  “He heard it from one of his sources. The new bloke, he reckons, is being brought in to carry out all the recommendations in that departmental review those management consultants did for a vast sum at the end of last year. So God knows what will happen. They’ve kept the results of that one close to their chests.”

  “You should be all right though, shouldn’t you? You’ve only just signed a new three-year contract.”

  “Yeah, should be. It’ll mean more bloody work though. These things always do.”

  Susan put down her empty mug and slid over to David, placing her head on his chest and looking up at him wide-eyed.

  “David is not afraid of a little bit of hard work is he?”

  “No, David is most definitely not. In fact he wouldn’t mind some hard work at the moment. Are you still on?”

  Susan blinked at him.

  “On for what?”

  “You know … for it.”

  “I may be, if you treat me right.”

  David snuggled down beneath the blankets, hugged his wife and kissed her fleetingly on the lips.

  “How’s that?”

  “Is that it? Is that what you call foreplay?”

  “Yep.”

  He nuzzled her neck with his lips and caressed her breasts and nipples.

  “A lady likes to be wooed. That’s better.”

  “Can we go all the way?”

  “What do you mean? I’m a virgin.”

  David placed his hand between her legs and began to slowly probe the moist matted hair with his finger.

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. I’ll treat you gently.”

  “You won’t go too far will you?”

  “No, not at all. What position do you want to adopt?”

  Susan sighed and began nibbling David’s ear.

  “How many do we have to chose from?”

  “Lots and lots. Let me see there’s missionary… jockey… spoons… rear… and many more. That’s enough to be going on with.”

  “You choose. I’m too tired.”

  “No, it’s your choice.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t make up my mind.”

  “Go on.”

  “Will you go on top?”

  “Alright.”

  “Missionary then.”

  “Roll over…”

  “They’ve taken down the Limes. It really opens things up.”

  Susan looked quizzically in the direction David was pointing. It was raining and they were sheltering beneath the covered porch at the entrance to St Botolph’s church. Their two boys, Richard and Mark, sat gloomily on the gnarled wooden seat leafing their way through a bedraggled copy of the Beano and glancing up occasionally to glare malevolently at their father.

  “David, this looks pretty set in. I’ll stay here with the boys if you want to visit the grave. We don’t mind do we? As long as Daddy doesn’t take too long.”

  Richard nodded his head without looking up, while Mark steadfastly ignored his mother. David was about to say something, when out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Susan shaking her head.

  “OK, I won’t be long.”

  Raising the collar on his jacket David ran up the gravel path towards the northern end of the graveyard, but quickly slowed to a walk. The rain soaked his hair and began running in cold rivulets down his neck. With the trees gone – only gashed stumps were left – he had a clear view across the park to the wooded slopes beyond. He’d often walked over there with his grandfather, looking for bird’s nests and wild flowers, and at the top of the ridge they would stand and look back, trying to pick out the church steeple among the trees. The burgeoning graveyard Limes had made it almost impossible, but there was one spot where you could just make out the golden weathervane glinting above the waving green canopy. He’d always spotted it first and been so pleased. To think of those times now, brought tears to his eyes.

  The grave was overgrown and the grimy headstone heavily weathered. If you didn’t know who was buried there, it would have taken an effort to find out and David was certain nobody ever bothered these days. It was the final grave in the last row of graves in the churchyard, close to a small wooden gate that he’d often used to get into the parkland. He remembered it had a powerful spring attached to it and always slammed shut with a sharp retort. His grandfather said he could hear him coming, well before he ever arrived. That was when he lived in the rundown Old Vicarage next to the church, in the days before he moved, somewhat shame-faced, David recalled, into his small flat in the village. The benefice was demolished and not rebuilt and now there was a car park on half the site, the rest overgrown and wild. David couldn’t believe enough worshippers came to church to justify a car park that size, but then he’d never been a great believer. He’d stopped going to listen to his grandfather give his sermon on Sundays when he was thirteen or fourteen and had hardly ever been to a church service since. His grandfather had teased him mercilessly.

  “Here I am, a man of God, raising a heathen. You’ll never get to heaven you know.”

  He had gone on and on until finally David snapped.
<
br />   “What makes you think you’ll get to heaven yourself, there’s no monopoly on goodness.”

  His grandmother, Emily, had been buried here, around the time he was born and he wasn’t sure she had ever met him. He guessed probably not as his father and grandfather were barely civil to each other and his family had not visited Dumpton often. That had been part of the attraction for David when he started having problems of his own with his father, a common bond of estrangement, which had rapidly grown into something much stronger, one of mutual respect and then love. It had irritated his father.

  “I don’t know what you see in him, he’s an old charlatan. I’d steer well clear of him if I was you.”

  It was the only parental advice David had ever been given and he didn’t understand it and as a result paid it no heed. Every time he came to Dumpton he thought he must ask his father what he had meant, and every year he never did.

  His grandmother’s name was barely legible in the centre of the headstone: “Emily Coxon-Dyet, loving wife of the Reverend Anthony Coxon-Dyet.” At the bottom engraved in a clearer slightly different script was his grandfather’s inscription: “In memory of Anthony Coxon-Dyet, 1910 – 1975.” They were the only words that the church authorities would allow and none of his family had been prepared to argue with them. The problem had been that his grandfather’s body hadn’t been buried here, they’d held a funeral service in the church, then had him cremated. His youngest son, Freddy, David’s uncle, had finally agreed to dispose of the ashes and had come here with his nephew on a damp winter day and scattered them over the grave. For David this was his grandfather’s last resting place. But even that was not as he remembered it. Everything was changing. He took one last look at the grave, then headed across the soaking grass towards the gap in the hedge that led to the site of the old Vicarage.

  He had loved this place. Some of his happiest memories were of roaming around the ramshackle Victorian house and its overgrown, lush-green gardens with one or more of the boys who were always staying with his grandfather. “Rooming with him” was the phrase and they always seemed to David to have been a “cutthroat” bunch, all outlaws on the run from the authorities. He remembered unlimited supplies of cigarettes, bottles of Strongbow cider, marijuana and pills. Naturally conservative, David initially hesitated, scared of losing control, before finally taking the hedonistic plunge with a boy called Jamie. They spent a gloriously sunny afternoon speeding, while his grandfather was out on his pastoral rounds, smashing every pane of glass in the old conservatory on the side of the house. It had been hilarious and a giggling Jamie owned up and was sent away, David didn’t and had relished this guilty secret ever since. The glass had never been replaced and the cold biting autumnal rain quickly killed the palms and cacti that had flourished there for years, while rats gnawed their decaying trunks, scattering fibrous honey-coloured husks across the tiled floor.

  The boys, his itinerant friends, had come and gone, yet he could still see their wild faces milling around in the drenched vegetation that had reclaimed the derelict site. They had been runaways, thieves, arsonists, petty criminals. St Botolph’s vicarage was the sink into which all the local magistrates poured their problem cases, the boys they had seen just once too often, the boys who they considered beyond redemption. But all had been welcome.

  David had watched as they gradually wrecked the place, taking advantage of his grandfather, abusing his hospitality and generosity of spirit. David joined in, exploiting a freedom he had never known before and would never experience again. He had his first sexual fling with a fat blond-haired boy hidden in the middle of a huge rhododendron bush at the end of the garden. The shrub was still there, twice as large as he remembered it and as lush and forbidding, but now parishioners parked their cars in its shadow before evensong and Holy Communion. David smiled as he gazed at the dark glistening mass and remembered his horror as he undressed later that night and discovered his penis had turned green. The algae were still there, he noticed, as vivid as ever, clinging to the trunks and branches, staining everything that brushed against it a bright powdery emerald. The smell of coal tar soap was for him the aroma of release, as the viridescent lather trickled away down the rusty plughole of the stained white enamel sink in one of the vicarage’s outhouses.

  The vicarage was known locally as “Fagin’s Den”. The police were regular visitors, bad publicity led church congregations to tail off, letters were written, and finally the Bishop intervened. But it had been a fun-filled rite of passage for David and his grandfather appeared unperturbed by the criticism. His sermons berated the “uncaring” for their lack of charity and his weekly newsletter in the parish magazine hit out at a country whose moral backbone had been weakened by years of Socialism, which had destroyed any concept of self-help and left the care of the sick, the poor and the outcast to an inefficient, unfeeling state. His strident views on politics and every other topic imaginable, together with his willingness to court controversy by putting them down on paper, meant that the magazine was popular. It always sold out and over the years they printed more and more copies to meet the demand. As his grandfather used to say, “people prefer to take their medicine in private, rather than be spoon-fed in public.” David remembered him chuckling to himself in his study on Saturday evening as he tapped out the following day’s sermon or the next week’s editorial on his old Olivetti typewriter. Clouds of cigarette smoke hung in the air and the light from his desk lamp outlined his hunched body in a yellow smudged haze. David would sneak into the room, sit quietly in the narrow gap between the wall and the bookcase and imagine he was watching the word of God being made real. He was sure when he thought back, that he would wake up, tucked safely in bed, the light streaming through the partially closed curtains of his bedroom. The one he always slept in during his stays at the Vicarage, high in the roof, with a glorious outlook over the chimney pots of Dumpton Gap. He knew the view so well, that it floated before him: it was always sunny, a brisk breeze blowing, the silvery undersides of the leaves twisting and glinting, the clouds scudding across an azure-blue sky. There were days he had scoured the countryside with his grandfather’s old telescope probing the woodland edges, the stacked hay bales, the long grass in the meadow by the river, the windows of the houses in the village, but only once found what he was looking for. It was as vivid to him now as the day it had happened. A young woman stood framed in an upper casement window, slowly unbuttoning her white blouse. She had a distant look in her eyes. The white cotton slid from her shoulders revealing a white brassiere, David could clearly see a red weal on her shoulder where the strap had cut into her skin. He held his breath. She stepped back, shut the curtains and disappeared from view.

  David shivered, he felt chilled to the core, the damp air intruding, his body sodden. The Vicarage was gone and so was his grandfather. There was so much he didn’t understand. He didn’t know why he had died. He still couldn’t remember when he had last talked to him, could not resurrect that final image. After his death he had discovered there were very few photographs of his grandfather. The local paper had a number of him opening fetes, holding babies awkwardly in his arms or judging a vegetable or cake competition, but they were all in black and white and he didn’t want to remember his dearest relative that way. David’s memories were vivid and alive – silver-grey receding hair, cut short; brown limpid eyes that unnervingly held your gaze; yellow nicotine-stained fingers, nails manicured – a plethora of detail even if the whole man escaped him. The odd thing had been the indifferent reaction of his father, who had shown little interest in David’s pleas for help in fixing this shifting figure, referring him brusquely to an old cardboard box stored in the attic. It had been damp and cold up there and many of the jumbled photographs were curling and fading, the chemicals eating away the images they had originally preserved. The photographs were all of his grandfather when he was young, recognizable, but not the man he had known. He looked more serious in his youth with an a
ngular, less attractive face and more hair. His grandfather had been one of those people whose appearance had improved with age, his face filling out and softening his harsh features. A distinctive youth had matured into a handsome old man.

  In only one of the photographs was his grandfather looking at the camera, and he seemed slightly bemused. David didn’t recognize him. There was something about the eyes that made him appear distant, evasive and unfriendly, a stranger.

  David had been depressed after his grandfather’s death – the news had deeply shocked him, it had been sudden and unexpected – and then to find out there was little of the man that was tangible seemed particularly unfair. Even more galling was that nobody seemed to care. It was as if there was a conspiracy to erase his grandfather from history. His name had never been added to the ancient wooden panel with its ornate frame hanging in the nave of St Botolph’s that listed the vicars of the church and their dates in the parish in a more or less unbroken line from the eleventh century to the present day.

  He took one last look at the site of the old vicarage and walked slowly back towards the church. The rain was easing off and the sky was brightening, he thought he could hear voices calling out to him. He shouted, “I’m just coming, give me a couple of minutes.”

  David had complained at first, saying that the list of clergymen was an historical record and shouldn’t be tampered with, for the sake of future generations. He had thought at the time that he had made his case and the parish clerk had not argued with him.

  “The matter will be taken up by the Parochial Church Council and the due procedures will be followed,” was all he said. That was years ago and as of last July nothing had happened, he knew that for sure.

  The church frightened him and he rarely went inside. He approached the large black wooden door now with trepidation. The covered entrance was cool and totally silent. He stamped his feet several times, hesitated, then grasped the iron door handle – it was cold to the touch – and turned. The heavy latch lifted noisily on the other side of the door and David pushed. Nothing. The door was locked.