‘Isn’t it rather complicated?’ I asked him.
‘No!’ he said, beaming. ‘Anyone with a screwdriver, a complete medical history, a grasp of mathematics, a smattering of genetics, a family tree and just a little technical how’s-your-father could get it going in a couple of hours. That’s the beauty of it. You just set it and forget it.’
I thought it must be difficult to forget a biological time bomb ticking your life away, especially when it was strapped to your wrist. But it was a clever idea. You couldn’t fault him. If you wanted to know the hour of your death, this was the wristwatch for you.
‘What happens if there’s an accident?’ I ventured.
‘It’s shockproof and waterproof to fifty metres,’ he said proudly.
‘No, I mean, what happens if I get knocked down by a truck? What happens if I die in a plane crash or an earthquake or something? What happens if I catch some unknown disease?’
‘It can’t read your fortune,’ he admitted. He took the timepiece from my hand as if it were some rare and valuable egg, placed it gently on the workbench in a little nest of rags, and wiped my thumbprints away with a cloth. ‘You can’t account for acts of God.’
‘And what happens if it goes wrong?’ I demanded. ‘What happens if it runs slow, or fast, or suddenly stops?’
‘You get it fixed,’ he said, perplexed by my attitude. He wanted smiles and admiring glances, congratulations and coloured bunting. He hadn’t expected to pick at the bones of an argument.
‘But it’s running backwards,’ I protested. ‘How do you know if it’s running on time? You wouldn’t know the difference. I mean, if it starts gaining or losing thirty seconds every twenty-four hours, that would turn into days over thirty years. You wouldn’t know if you were supposed to be alive or dead!’
He blinked and frowned and clacked his nails against the silver case. He was beginning to have his doubts.
‘And what about flat batteries?’ I said. ‘What happens when the batteries go flat because you forgot to change them?’
‘It’s a solar battery,’ he argued. ‘It’s powered by sunlight. Solar battery. Quartz crystal. It will last forever.’
‘But suppose,’ I insisted. ‘What would happen if you woke up in the middle of the night and fumbled for your watch and you thought it had stopped. You pressed it to your ear and you couldn’t hear it. You would feel like you’d died in your sleep. Your life cut short unexpectedly. It would be like mechanical heart failure. I mean, the shock could kill you!’ I knew I must be hurting him but I didn’t know how to stop myself. I was out of control. I wanted him to throttle me. I wanted to bite out my own tongue. I couldn’t stop talking.
‘And if nothing goes wrong, if it just keeps running, that would be worse because you’d eventually reach the last few weeks of your life and you’d start counting the days and hours and final minutes,’ I continued. ‘It would drive you crazy. Watching your life slip away. I mean, you’d feel like a condemned man waiting for the moment of execution!’
He looked sick. His fingers trembled as they stroked the watch. His face had turned grey and the skin seemed to sag on his bones. He was growing old before my eyes. But I couldn’t stop talking.
‘If we all wore this kind of wristwatch there’d be panic in the streets!’ I jabbered. ‘We’d all be running and screaming, trying to keep ahead of ourselves. It would be terrible. Terrible. Nothing would get done because we wouldn’t have the time to spare.’
He looked exhausted. He shivered and shrank away from me. He didn’t want me there in the cellar. He didn’t want me to be his son.
‘It would drive you mad!’ I shouted in horror. Here was a monstrous device, a diabolical manacle of slow but perpetual torture. ‘Something like that. It would drive you mad. Watching it get a little closer every day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Terrible. You’d always be thinking about it.’
‘No!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No!’
‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘You’d go insane or get so depressed that you’d want to take an overdose just to forget about it. And if you killed yourself before your time, if you committed suicide, it would make life worthless. All that hard work for nothing. It would be a waste of time.’
He didn’t say a word. He looked down at his doomed invention for a long time. He could see now that the concept was fatally flawed. It was damned. It couldn’t be rescued. And then he reached out, took a hammer from his toolbox and with a swift, deliberate blow, smashed the watch into fragments. He didn’t speak to me again for two-and-a-half weeks. I know it was two-and-a-half weeks. I marked off the days on my Wrestlemania calendar.
11
Despite the failure of the Wandsworth home-security system, Mr Marvel never again prowled the stairs at midnight in search of phantom intruders. Perhaps he slept secure in his bed because he felt that we cared for his safety. Or perhaps the demons that taunted him fell silent during the hours of darkness. Whatever the reasons, he seemed to grow more confident. He would sleep late, take a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits at ten o’clock sharp, and spend the rest of the day in the parlour, reading any paper or journal that hadn’t fallen victim to Franklin’s scissors. Janet granted him the freedom of her Katie Pphart library and, in return, he taught her to play a nimble game of dominoes. He even began to join us for supper, pecking timidly at his food and chuckling at my mother as she tried to tempt him with tasty morsels of steamed beef pudding or cherry pie. He led a quiet and simple life.
But once a week he would undertake the same mysterious errand, leaving the house in the morning and returning in the late afternoon, bloated and raving, transformed from a timid, mild-mannered man into a flatulent, potbellied boggart. These wild excursions would be followed, late at night, by rapid bursts of activity on his ancient typewriter. It happened with such regularity and seemed to fill him with such a great violence of emotion that even my mother had to admit something was wrong.
‘Drunk!’ father declared, after one particular episode. ‘Drunk as a toad in a brandy barrel!’ He didn’t sound in the least concerned that Marvel should want to drink himself blind. He supposed that crapulence was a mark of universal brotherhood and thoroughly approved of it, although he himself seldom took more than a glass of beer and never touched wine or spirits.
‘Nonsense!’ mother said. ‘The drink has got nothing to do with it.’ We had found Mr Marvel slumped against the front door with his head wrapped up in his overcoat and carried him upstairs like a piano.
‘He still thinks there are people chasing him,’ I said.
‘So why doesn’t he stay in the house?’ father asked.
‘He needs the fresh air,’ mother told him. She rarely ventured from the fog of her own kitchen and thought the smoke of the city streets was a first-rate tonic, a natural restorative.
‘He’s convinced that someone out there wants to kill him,’ I said. I knew it sounded ridiculous but that was the truth of it.
‘Who?’ father demanded. ‘Who? Tell me. Who wants to kill him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I grumbled, sucking air through my teeth. We were hiding in the back parlour, feasting on slabs of sultana cake with glasses of chocolate milk. The cake was still hot from the oven, the sultanas sizzled and popped in my mouth, making me gasp as they burned my tongue.
‘I think he’s lonely,’ father said to himself. ‘The poor old bugger. I think his mind is wandering.’
‘He should be married. A man his age. It isn’t normal,’ mother agreed. She hated to see a man without a wife. She regarded such men as pariahs, free to prey on the innocent, cunning, hungry and dangerous.
For a few moments we were silent, our mouths glued with cake.
‘He seems to have grown rather fond of Janet,’ I said, with a pang of jealousy. Everyone fell in love with Janet. I imagined her beauty counter besieged by crowds of her smiling admirers. Dangerous men in dark suits stirred into heat as she bent to anoint their wrists with perfume.
‘Janet couldn
’t look after him!’ mother said, as she sucked her fingers.
‘It’s a shame that we don’t have Dorothy here,’ father said brightly. ‘She’d soon have him as right as ninepence!’ And to my surprise he blushed with pleasure and laughed at the mere idea of it.
‘Who?’
‘Dorothy. You must remember Dorothy. Dorothy Clark. Big, bright girl with a sense of fun. She used to have Janet’s room when you were small.’
‘He’s forgotten,’ mother said. ‘He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. It must be more than ten years ago.’
It was true. So many people had passed through the house it was hard to remember their names and faces. A few had made an impression. I could still recall Trenchard Cox, the stuttering lepidopterist, who had filled his room with ten thousand tiny velvet corpses. I dimly remembered Boswell Shanks, a man who had shocked me as a child by extricating his upper teeth and placing them in his jacket pocket. And I hadn’t forgotten Jessica Proud, the bullnecked physiotherapist. The memory came rushing back to scorch my face with embarrassment. She had come to the house one dismal winter’s afternoon and stayed until the following summer. I had been twelve years old and interested in growing biceps. Jessica Proud was three times my age and three times my size and possessed not an ounce of modesty. She had marched around the house in vest and underpants with a towel at her neck and a stopwatch in hand; and for a few brief but alarming months, she had turned our little backyard into a makeshift gymnasium.
For a week or more I had watched her pumping and grinding from the safety of my bedroom window, my nose squashed against the glass and a poltergeist in my pyjamas until, one morning, she had seen me there and coaxed me down for a programme of vigorous exercise. I’d stood in the frosty yard, trembling in my jockey shorts, but the sight of her bending and touching her toes had filled my sprouting twelve-year-old limbs with such a confusing rush of excitement that I was required to throw myself into the exercise just to cover my embarrassment. By the time she left I was feeling as fit as a butcher’s dog.
Oh, I remember Jessica Proud, with her close-cropped hair and her perky pecs and astonishing abdominals! I still remember her glucose tablets and pain sprays and vitamin drinks and the pleasure I felt in mixing those Hi-jump milk shakes for breakfast, and my first sight of her white sports bras and her health education magazines and the smell in the towels of her medicated lubricants. And after Jessica Proud came Percy Smart the ventriloquist with his constant companion Cheerful Cyril; and Violet Bush the telephonist and whispering Shirley Fudger the hospital radiographer. I could recapture a dozen or more of the faces that had passed me on the stairs. But Dorothy Clark was not among them. Dorothy Clark was missing.
‘She went to live on the coast,’ father said. ‘I think I might still have the address somewhere…’ He took a swig of chocolate milk, which gave him a foaming sugar moustache to be wiped away with his thumb.
‘No!’ mother snapped.
‘What?’ father said, looking startled.
‘Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is No!’
‘There’s no harm in thinking.’
‘One thing leads to another.’
‘You’ll like Dorothy,’ father whispered, turning to me for support. ‘She was a dancer!’
‘She said she was a dancer,’ mother said darkly, licking the tip of one finger to dab at the crumbs on her plate.
‘She was a dancer,’ father insisted. He sounded very confident. ‘She came here to rest. She was resting.’
‘Well, let her rest in peace,’ mother told him, sternly. ‘And we’ll have no more nonsense.’
Father didn’t care to argue. He wanted more sultana cake. But the next day, when I followed him down to North Street Market, he felt free enough to mention Dorothy Clark again.
12
We had no business in North Street Market — we’d been sent out for soap and potatoes and there were plenty of shops within a short walk of the house. But we knew from bitter experience that the local shops could not be trusted. An Asian grocery might open for business and the second time you went there for cabbage or lavatory paper, it would have turned into Strictly Donuts or the Porno Mag Mart, and a month later would sink into a deep depression only to rise again as Paradise Pancake or an Irish pork butcher or a charity shop selling plaster-of-Paris novelties. In our local neighbourhood only fried chicken counters seemed able to flourish and three of them survived within spitting distance of one another, haunted by unhappy drunks, picking scraps from waxed paper boxes.
The market, by contrast, was constant. A sprawling maze of lanes and alleys carved from the oldest part of the city. You’d find everything in that shanty town. Beneath the faded canvas awnings there were Turkish florists, Indian doctors, Chinese grocers, Nigerian barbers and strange, brooding Babylonians who seemed to sell nothing but needles and buttons. If you picked a path through the brooms and buckets, bales of silk and brightly coloured plastic sandals, you’d find millet cakes from Togo, biltong from Zimbabwe, freshwater fish from Bengal and bottles of almond oil from Kashmir. There were baskets of cardamoms, red and green chillies, cloves, peppers and nutrnegs. The air was charged with the smells of incense, fried apple fritters, cheap cigars, roasting peanuts, ripe fruit and the sour, smoky smell of tamarind paste.
‘Guess what I’ve found!’ father demanded, as he paused beneath a tarpaulin tent to poke through a pile of bananas guarded by a silent, staring Arab in a pair of winkle-picker shoes.
‘What?’ I said, half-expecting him to pull out a spider or scorpion. The Arab scowled and looked nervous, trying to brush father away with his sleeve.
‘Dorothy’s address. I knew that I hadn’t thrown it away. It came to light in a box of spanners.’
‘And you’re going to write?’ I asked, as I led him away.
He turned and winked at me. ‘You wait, Skipper! You’ll love it. When Dorothy was in the house we never stopped laughing. That girl was a panic. She’ll soon have old Marvel sitting up and balancing biscuits on his nose.’
We pushed forward into the crowded lanes of the market, past the ancient Rangoon doctor with his remedies for the married man, and the sad Greek herbalist with the curious skin disease, and the fat man in the black cotton gloves who sold cracked plates and bundles of unwanted knives and forks.
‘What are you going to say in the letter?’ I asked, as he paused to pick through a box of tarnished silver spoons.
‘I don’t know. I’ll think of something.’
‘Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ I said. It was obvious that he’d given his scheme a lot of thought but sometimes the obvious seemed to escape him.
‘Don’t worry about your mother,’ he grinned. ‘That’s no problem. I know how to handle women.’
‘But if they don’t like each other…’
‘Everyone likes Dorothy!’
‘You want them spoons?’ the fat man asked impatiently, watching father with a small and deeply suspicious eye.
‘They’re filthy!’ said father, dropping them in disgust and sniffing his tainted fingers.
‘They’re old,’ the fat man replied. ‘That’s why they’re smelly. Genuine antiques. You’ll be smelly when you reach their age.’
Father wasn’t impressed. He took me by the elbow and led me deeper into the market, past the Russians selling bottled mushrooms and the Cubans hawking combs, until we had reached the darkest corner where an old man in a knitted hat was selling small birds and animals. There were parrots, huddled like priests, on his shoulders and kittens that squirmed in his overcoat pockets. He was leaning on a long metal pole, tied with plastic bags of water. The bags were draped like dozens of teardrops and each teardrop contained a fish. They hung suspended like living baubles of red and black sequins. Their eyes were gold and their tails were trailing paper fans.
‘You have to give them little surprises,’ father explained, buying one of the prisoners and weighing the wobbling sphere in his hands. ‘A woman needs to be coaxe
d and flattered. It’s something you’ll learn as you get older.’
He never managed to sound convincing, teaching his son these masculine secrets. Despite his bravado, it was obvious that he didn’t believe the myths and fancies that men invent to explain the world. He lived entirely at a woman’s mercy and he knew that he could no more influence her mood with a magic fish than control the planets with tossed chicken bones.
‘It sounds like bribery and corruption,’ I said, to encourage our sense of happy conspiracy.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ he grinned.
‘Do you think a goldfish will do the trick?’ I said, gazing at our glittering captive.
‘Your mother loves goldfish!’ he said.
‘And why doesn’t she want Dorothy back in the house?’
He shrugged and said nothing. I couldn’t guess what had happened but it must have left him in deep disgrace. I sensed scandal. I began to imagine Dorothy as a wild and dangerous woman. He wasn’t an affectionate man. I never saw him flirting or making a fool of himself. But that merely added to his new role as man of mystery.
It was late when we arrived home and, despite father’s predictions, mother wasn’t impressed by the gift.
‘What do you want me to do with this?’ she grumbled, as if she thought we expected her to be ready and waiting to bone and fry it.
‘Nothing,’ father said, rather too loudly. He was rattled by such a poor reception. He’d been hoping for instant success. ‘I bought it for you as a gift. It’s purely for decoration.’
‘That’s something you have in common,’ she said.
She poured the novelty into an earthenware mixing bowl, scolded father and sent me out to buy soap and potatoes. The suffocated goldfish swam in circles and died the following morning.
Father was discouraged but he tried again. ‘Women need time to get the idea,’ he told me. Another of his lessons for life.
He offered sun-faded boxes of chocolates and jars of ginger steeped in syrup. He bought bunches of flowers and glass-bead bangles and miniature bottles of real French perfume. It took him another week of wheedling before mother gave him permission to write a letter to Dorothy Clark. And by that time she was proudly squelching around the house in a new pair of fancy Reeboks with aircushioned soles and racing stripes.
Mr Romance Page 7