Dad thinks that rice pudding is my favourite dessert. I think it looks like fly pupae.
Mum left this morning to go to Powys. My father and I have been spending some quality time together.
‘This used to be my favourite too,’ he says, portioning his spoon through the wrinkled skin. A swollen rice grain has attached itself to his moustache. Dad will eat leftover rice pudding – cold – for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
‘More?’
‘No thanks, I’m stuffed,’ I say.
He nods, swallows.
‘Dad. About Graham?’
‘Yup.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s a decent-enough chap. Why do you ask?’
I feel like saying: I wouldn’t let my girlfriend go away for ten days with a decent-enough chap. Chips is a decent-enough chap.
‘What’s Graham’s surname?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m just thinking about Mum.’
‘Mum’ll be fine.’
‘Will she?’ I say cryptically.
‘Yes, she will.’
‘Right.’
I stare at the painting on the wall behind my dad’s head. My parents actually paid money for it. It is of a shrunken old woman in front of a terraced house.
‘Anyway, how’s Jordana?’
‘Improving,’ I say.
‘Do you think you’ll ever let us meet her properly?’
‘No. Not until you’re terminally ill.’
‘Oh, nice.’
‘I’m meeting Jordana’s parents for dinner.’
He puts another spoonful in his mouth and chews. The sound reminds me of two fingers: a courtesy, according to Chips’s rule of thumb. There is a kind of white tidal foam at the corners of his mouth.
I try and imagine what would actually happen if my father and Jordana had a lengthy conversation. I visualize them sat around a table in a French restaurant with a red and white chequered tablecloth. I visualize my father ordering the snails in garlic. I visualize Jordana’s lips retreating inside her mouth. I visualize her asking for half chips, half rice. I visualize my dad’s ears turning red. The universe might actually end. When two immovable objects collide.
‘I hope you’re using condoms,’ he says.
I clink my spoon around the sides of my glass bowl.
‘I use Trojans, America’s number one,’ I say.
My dad is a historian. Albeit in Welsh history. I expect him to say that I should be wary of trusting a condom brand named after a moment in history when the Greeks snuck their army – or penis – into a Trojan fort – or vagina – by hiding in a giant wooden horse – or condom – that they pretended was a gift. When the Trojans got drunk, the condom split and all the Greek soldiers wriggled out and got down to some serious pillaging.
‘Oh, well, right,’ he says.
I Ask Jeeves to ‘tell me about the meditation retreat in Powys where Graham volunteers’.
Jeeves knows exactly what I am talking about. The first website he comes up with is for the Anicca meditation retreat. There is a person named Graham Whiteland who is one of the volunteers. The website has some information about the style of meditation as well as directions for an address in Powys.
Then I Ask Jeeves: ‘Who the heck is Graham Whiteland?’ Jeeves shows me a Graham Whiteland who is an antique-jewellery dealer from Islington. And a Graham Whiteland who has a gallery of underwater photos from his honeymoon to the Great Barrier Reef; he and his wife look very in love beneath their goggles, surrounded by marlin-like confetti.
‘I’ll need to get on that machine in a minute,’ Dad yells from downstairs. My dad thinks that anything with a plug is a machine.
My father shouts for my mother, even though she is in Powys: ‘Tell Oliver to get off that bloody thing,’ he says.
There is no reply.
‘Oliver!’ He yells although I can hear him perfectly.
I disconnect from the internet.
‘I’ll need to get on that thing soon. You shouldn’t be on the internet at this time of night anyway.’
My dad thinks that the internet gets more filthy after the watershed.
We only have one phone line in our house – we use it for both the modem and the phone – so I have to disconnect from the internet to allow incoming calls. When the phone rings, it is proof that I am not downloading child porn.
Chips once brought in a black and white print-out of a girl, about my age, with her legs spread. He said that he hates his father so much that he downloads child pornography on to his dad’s computer and puts it in folders called things like ‘Private’ and ‘Carl’s stuff ’. He says he likes to wank off to proper porn, that child porn is like being in the bath with your sister. Chips’s sister lives with his mum.
The phone rings.
My dad answers halfway through the second ring.
‘Helloo?’
He is never depressed when he answers the phone.
I switch on the monitor button. It’s my dad’s oldest friend, Geraint. They grew up together. Geraint’s accent is melodic, mellifluous and deep.
‘I’m good, Butt, battling on,’ Geraint says. The bass from his voice is too much for the crappy in-built speaker. He distorts. ‘ ’Ow-er you, boy bach?’
‘Very well, ta. Just pootling along, as per. You sound well.’
‘Pootling? Yew getting old, mush. ’Ow-zoo lady-wife?’
‘She’s away at the moment, not far from you actually.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Up in darkest Powys. She’s on a meditation retreat.’ Dad says the words ‘meditation retreat’ as if he were saying the words ‘coloured person’.
‘Oh, a meditation retreat, is ’at what she told you?’
Geraint does his big Valleys laugh; the speaker fizzes.
Dad laughs too, after a pause.
‘You want to be careful, Butt. She might run off with a monk.’
‘Hahahaha,’ Dad says.
Dad stops laughing.
‘So, how long she there for?’
‘Ten days.’
‘Ten days?’ Geraint says.
Ten days is too long. Ten days is basically a honeymoon. According to Chips’s seduction time scale, Graham will have brokered the deal by Thursday next week.
‘I know. But apparently that’s the minimum time it takes for someone to feel the benefits.’
‘Well, I’m sure she’ll be in touch with something by the end of that.’ Geraint does his big laugh.
‘Oh, yes, I should think so.’
‘Well, Butty, since you lady-wife is off enjoying herself, this brings me to the important matter of a certain rugby tournament disguised as five weekends of binge-drinking.’
Part of the deal with being friends with Geraint is that my dad has to pretend he loves rugby. Every year, they go with an old schoolfriend, Bill, stay in a hotel in Cardiff, and watch Wales play in the Five Nations tournament.
‘I’ve got us three tickets for Wales – England; Bill’s booked the hotel. All we need now is you and your liver.’
‘Well, let’s ’ope we do better than last year. We owe those bastards a beating.’
After a weekend spent with Geraint, my dad’s ‘h’s disappear. Like me, he knows how important it is to sound the same as everybody else. Dad’s parents are Welsh, and he was born in Mount Pleasant Hospital, but he spent the first ten years of his life in London where my Gramps – who is dead – worked in insurance. My grandad is commonly known as the man who invented the no-claims bonus. Growing up in England, the schoolkids used to call Dad ‘Taff’, even though, by age ten, he had an English accent. Then his parents settled in Newport, Pembrokeshire, which is where Dad went to secondary school, and they called him ‘Toff ’. It was at this point that he met Geraint and learnt to play rugby.
Dad only sounds properly Welsh when he’s been drinking with Geraint and Bill. I only sound properly Welsh when I am trying to impress someone.
‘Oh God, now don�
�t get me started,’ Geraint says. ‘Those cheap bastards.’
‘We should ’ave let France win.’
I can’t stand to hear my dad pretend to know about rugby. I switch off the monitor button. I think about Chips. I wonder whether we will get together when we are forty and go through his porn magazines, just like old times, and I’ll have to keep saying: ‘Oh my fuck!’ and ‘Look at her minge!’ and so on, just like I do at the moment. It’s a show of affection, I suppose.
I hear my dad say: ‘Byeee,’ and put the phone down.
I think that if Dad can pretend to like rugby he can pretend to be happily married.
I reconnect to the internet and go back to the Anicca website.
The nearest train station is Hereford. I start to print out the map and directions. The Epson 610 mumbles, struggling with the various colours.
I search train times from Swansea. The screen shows a clock while it checks availability.
‘Oliver! You can put these dishes in the machine too,’ Dad shouts.
There’s a train that leaves at eleven tomorrow morning. I can hear him noisily putting the dishes away.
The printer heaves and groans – halfway done; I can see that the retreat is next to a river, couched in contours. Cutlery clatters. I close all the windows and clear the cookies, just in case. The dining-room door slams shut. Dad stomps down the hallway. He clops loudly upstairs, two steps at a time.
‘I’ll put a brick through that fucking machine!’
I remember when my dad said that we could not afford a new computer. But then he went to Hertec Computing in town and came back with a top-of-the-range Pentium 90. The man had told him it was an investment.
The door swings back. I yank the A4 tongue from the printer’s mouth, crumple it awkwardly at my side.
‘Now what are you doing?’
His hands are red and wet; the top of his forehead is reflective. He smells of fake lemons.
‘Hey?’ he says. I can see the cartilage at the bridge of his nose, straining at the skin.
I think about a story Chips once told me about his dad finding him with a porn magazine. I remember what Chips said.
‘It’s porn, Dad. Sorry.’ It helps that I look guilty.
In Chips’s story, his dad asks to have a look.
‘Oh, well, right,’ he says.
28.6.97
Dear Diary,
• I have decided to stage an intervention. I’ve promised Jordana I’ll go for dinner with her parents tomorrow, so I’ll have to leave on Monday morning. I only hope it’s not too late.
• Anicca meditation is mostly about the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation.
The site claims Mum will undergo ‘a process of self-purification by self-observation’. For ten days, she will not be talking, writing, reading, listening to Radio 4, drinking alcohol, killing any living creature or making eye contact. The site seems designed to throw a worried spouse off the scent; it claims there will be ‘no physical contact whatsoever between persons of the same or opposite sex’.
• The website says: ‘No charges are made, not even to cover the cost of food and accommodation. Neither the teacher nor the assistant teachers receive remuneration; they and others who serve on the course volunteer their time and efforts.’ The word ‘volunteer’ arouses my suspicion. Graham ‘volunteered’ to spend ten days in a room with my mother, eyes closed, breathing deeply – there are many different kinds of foreplay.
• Volunteering also gives Graham a chance to cook meals, make beds, bleach the showers, pull slugs of hair from the plugholes; he knows my mum is modern and likes a man who can perform domestic tasks.
• Earlier, I found Dad not playing a thing at the upright piano, not even D minor, which is easy and sad. I also caught him at his desk: flossing. He ignored two phone calls and, ever since Mum went away, he has regressed to drinking hot water and lemon – using the same mug over and over, never washing it. The mug is decorated with a variety of cartoon penguins: Emperor, Little Blue, Rockhopper, Adelie and King.
• I told Dad that while Mum was away I was going to spend a few days with my friend Dave. He said: ‘That’s fine.’ I don’t know anybody called Dave.
A feeling of unease,
Oli
Decollation
‘Now here’s a riddle for you, Oliver.’
Jordana’s dad’s name is Bryn.
We are seated at a dark varnished wood table. There are six seats but dinner was only set for four. Jordana is opposite me, next to her dad. I’m sat next to Jude. We ate roast beef that, although tasty, did not respond to chewing. I was forced to swallow large gristly fur balls. The carrots had been boiled until they looked out of focus. The broccoli was delish and the roast potatoes were crispy balls of molten salty goo. There are cork mats laid out at each place and two in the centre.
Jordana groans and lets her head drop: ‘Dad!’
‘Now I know Jor has heard this before but it’s a good one, right.’
I nod.
Bryn has exactly the nose I’d expected. Sturdy and thick. Nostrils I could fit my thumb into.
He leans on to the table with his meaty forearm, turning to me.
‘Right. The king wants to find a suitable man to marry his daughter, the beautiful princess.’
‘Okay,’ I say. Basically, this is it. This is the moment when I am going to be found out.
I can smell perfume, remnants of dog hair and onions.
‘Now, as you can imagine, every man across the land wants to marry the beautiful princess, so the king devises a test for any potential suitors. If they pass the test then they can have his daughter’s hand in marriage; if they fail then they will be beheaded.’
Bryn’s smile is enormous. Jude is smiling too.
Decollation is another word for beheading.
I’m glad that I thought about my outfit. I am wearing my darkest jeans and a navy-blue shirt made by L. L. Bean that my mum brought me back from New Orleans.
‘It’s a very simple test to make sure that the man who wants to marry his daughter is really committed to her. The king has a bag with two grapes in it. One white, one black. Okay?’
‘Right,’ I say, thinking about my half-Welsh, half-Bangladeshi friend, Rayhan.
‘All you have to do to marry the princess is pick the white grape out of the bag, not the black.’
‘Okay,’ I say, starting to get into it, ‘fifty-fifty chance of survival.’
They are both smiling. Bryn is nodding slightly. I don’t look at Jordana.
‘Right, yeah, exactly.’ He looks down at the table for a moment, at his dirty plate, a rainbow-swoosh of clean plate where he had mopped through gravy with a roast potato.
‘So the first suitor comes to take the test. He reaches inside the bag and pulls out a black grape.’
‘Oh no,’ I say.
‘Oh yes. So he’s for the chop.’
I raise my eyebrows as if to say: phew, life can be tough.
‘But what he didn’t know was that the king, who loved his daughter just a little too much,’ he laughs at this and glances at Jordana, who looks exasperated, ‘had put two black grapes in the bag.’
I open my mouth a little. Bryn takes a sip of his wine. Jude’s fingertips rub the stem of her glass; it is still full.
‘So, many suitors came to try their luck but, unsurprisingly, they all failed and were beheaded.
‘So the question is: how do you pass the king’s test?’
I look at Jordana and then at Jude. Jude’s hair is her best feature. She has the hair of an air hostess.
‘No clues,’ Bryn says. ‘His life is on the line.’
I try not to think that the impression I make now is the one that Jude will take to her grave.
At first I think of peeling the grape so that it would be a kind of greeny-red colour; perhaps that would be enough to get away with my life – how much can one girl really be worth?
&
nbsp; Then I think of having Tipp-Ex all over the palm of my hand so that, whichever one I grab, the grape will turn white. But I don’t think Bryn is a Tipp-Ex sort of guy.
I think of fighting the king, rugby-tackling him and legging it with the princess under my arm.
I could pull out both the grapes and expose the king for the fraud that he is.
I look around me for clues. I look at the video on top of the TV: Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti – The Three Tenors: The Greatest Concert of the Century.
I look at Jude. Her tumour is the size of a grape. She is lightly made-up, her thin lips painted pink. She has light-blue eyes and, I am surprised to see, a conspicuous zit near her temple.
‘Don’t look at me, you’re on your own,’ she laughs.
‘Um, I don’t know – he could pull out both grapes and then everyone would see that the king is a cheat.’
‘No, good try though. And you can’t peel the grape either. That was Jordana’s idea.’
He is still looking at me, waiting for a better answer. I want to say: chemotherapy?
‘Uuuuuh,’ I say.
He lets me flounder.
‘No? Well, here’s what the future prince did. He pulled a grape from the bag and immediately popped it into his mouth and swallowed.’
Bryn mimes the gulping back of a grape like a pill.
‘Then he says: “You can see which colour I’ve chosen by the grape that remains,” which was, of course, black.’
‘Ahh, I see. Brilliant,’ I say.
‘So now you know,’ he says, ‘next time you’re looking to marry a princess.’
We’ve been sitting for a while. I’ve drunk a glass of wine. Jordana is very relaxed with her parents.
‘God, do you remember how Jordana was conceived?’
‘Come on now, Bryn, you’re embarrassing the poor boy. Oh, go on then.’
They gaze into each other’s eyes as they talk.
‘Jordana was conceived in the cleavage of the Three Cliffs.’
Jordana looks very young; her mouth is agape, she itches her forehead. Her eyes are searching for something to distract them.
‘She’s heard this a hundred times but it was a beautiful night. We found a spot out of the wind, made a fire and put a couple of jacket potatoes in. It was a big moon –’
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