His other efforts centred around the local facilities, such as they were. The nearest village was three miles away. He was intent on shopping locally and imagined how much better food would taste when sourced from nearby farms. The hub of the local village consisted of a post box, a phone box, a franchise convenience store, a Chinese takeaway and a small pub. The shop sold nothing grown locally. Frank learned that the surrounding farms were producing food on an industrial scale to service the large supermarkets. The local shop had little to distinguish it from the convenience store he used to live by in the city except, Frank noticed, for an alcohol selection twice the size and the presence of serious porn titles alongside the usual lads’ mags. He bought a tin of baked beans and a Yorkie bar on his one visit. After that he drove the ten miles to the nearest twenty-four-hour Sainsbury’s.
Andrea and he had realized too late that this was not a good environment for Mo. Although she was happy enough at school, none of her friends lived nearby and when Frank thought of the future he could think of nowhere worse for her to spend her teenage years. He’d often see two or three forlorn characters in hooded tops sitting on the back of the bench in the village, lighting matches and throwing them in the gutter as they passed a bottle of Thunderbird between them.
He pulled on to the drive now past the faded ‘For Sale’ sign. After two years he’d given up hope that anyone would come and take the place off their hands. Andrea was in the kitchen and greeted him with a raised ladle.
‘How was the away day?’
He kissed her. ‘Utterly inspiring.’
‘I bet. Were there jumbo flip charts?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘A PowerPoint presentation?’
‘Several.’
‘Did you learn anything new?’
‘Only that I’m getting too old for all this.’
‘You knew that already.’
Frank took off his jacket. ‘Have you spoken to Mo? Is she having fun?’
‘Yes, she’s happy. She was very excited about something Laura’s mum had given them for tea. Potato with a face apparently. She was delighted by it. I think that might be the highlight of the whole sleepover for her.’
Frank sat down heavily and stared at the reflection of the room in the black window. After a few minutes he became aware that Andrea had been talking.
‘Sorry. What were you saying?’
Andrea looked at him. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah. I’m fine. It was just a bit weird today.’
‘What? Gritting your teeth through all the corporate piffle?’
‘No. Not that. It was on the way back. I ended up driving down the road where Phil died.’
Andrea sat down next to him. ‘Oh.’
‘The conference venue was a big house in the middle of nowhere and I got lost on the way back. Well, very lost, in fact, driving along endless country lanes – no signs anywhere – and at some point in the midst of all this I saw bunches of flowers and photos stuck to a tree. I thought nothing of it at first, but then I caught a glimpse of Phil’s face on some of the photos. I wouldn’t have thought there’d still be any trace, but there were loads – some of them looked quite new.’
‘I wonder if it’s local people who leave them there or if people travel there especially.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t understand it – this need to leave flowers for people they’ve never met.’ She stopped. ‘I don’t mean you. I mean that’s weird too, but in a different way. At least you’re remembering the forgotten; Phil was hardly that.’
‘Perhaps it’s a way of people feeling close to him. They had no tangible connection with him when he was on television, but maybe by putting flowers at the spot he died they feel some link to him.’
She shrugged. ‘It seems odd to me.’
Frank looked at Andrea and smiled. ‘Oh, people are odd. All of them.’
Andrea grinned. ‘Not like us.’
Frank shook his head vigorously. ‘No, not like us. Everyone else. Not us.’ He poured a glass of wine. ‘I couldn’t understand how it happened, though.’
‘What?’
‘The accident. The hit and run. I always assumed it was on some winding lane, but it’s not. It’s long and straight. If Phil was killed at the spot I saw today, I don’t know how the driver didn’t see him.’
‘Maybe they did see him, but they just lost control of the vehicle. Or maybe they fell asleep at the wheel.’
‘But then they’d have crashed as well. It just seems mad that they could drive down a perfectly straight road, kill a pedestrian who would be completely visible and then drive on.’
Andrea went back to her cooking. ‘Poor Phil. Of course he would be jogging. Couldn’t just age gracefully. Seventy-eight years old and still trying to look forty-five. Why couldn’t he just let himself go to seed? I can’t wait to start sprouting biscuit crumbs and money-off vouchers cut from My Weekly.’
Frank smiled and turned on the worktop TV. He stared at the screen, but found that all he saw were fluttering images of Phil’s face glimpsed on a tree on a long straight road.
14
He sat in his parked car and looked across at the banner declaring the grand opening. It described it as an exciting new leisure development. What that amounted to was a casino with a gym on top. Black and silver balloons bobbed frantically in the sharp wind. A few women with straightened blonde hair and suntans were dressed as bunny girls to lend glamour to the occasion. They clustered shivering in the shelter of the entrance. Stretched behind them he saw the pink ribbon that he would soon cut. The letter ‘o’ in the neon sign above the casino door was a roulette wheel. Above the glare of the sign, discreetly carved into the stone portico, were the words: Royal Children’s Hospital.
The Regal Casino was the latest and perhaps most audacious in a series of reimaginings of city landmarks. Birmingham was trying to change its reputation for the way it treated its architectural heritage: the famous lack of sentimentality that bordered on self-harm. The city now adopted a more sensitive approach to its Victorian heritage. Those notable examples that had managed to survive the post-war purges were protected and cherished.
One of the consequences of the current doctrine was a drive to find new uses for Victorian buildings. Many had stood empty for years, their original remit expired, obsolete or transferred to newer facilities. Now private development companies with names like Urban Heritage, Regeneris and New Concept were finding new ways to use old spaces.
Frank looked at the small crowd now assembling over the road. He always donated his PA fees to charity and that made him feel guilty for rejecting lucrative offers. He’d agreed to open the casino as a favour to an old colleague of his father’s whose son now owned Regeneris, but he couldn’t suppress his distaste for the development. He’d felt ambivalent in the past about some of the strange reinventions of old buildings. The eye hospital that became a luxury hotel, the imposing hilltop edifice of the Victorian mental hospital turned into apartments. He could never pass the grand driveway to the gated condominiums without remembering walking past as a boy and seeing the patients standing behind the chain-link fence shouting strange words and asking for fags. He wondered who would choose to live in a place of former suffering. What level of hubris was required to feel so utterly undaunted by the past?
Of them all, though, he found something particularly hard to take about the metamorphosis of a children’s hospital into a casino. It seemed to aspire to a new level of inappropriateness. The hospital had moved to larger premises five years earlier, but Frank always thought of it in its former home. He’d been there as a child to have his appendix out, and again as a panic-stricken father when Mo had fallen downstairs as a toddler. He’d also covered many stories there. In particular he remembered Lucy Smallwood, a ten-year-old with leukaemia who had spent her time in hospital engaged in one sponsored event after another, raising funds for other sick children. There was regular coverage of her attempts on the p
rogramme and in the local press and Frank would always remember the silence in the newsroom on the day she died.
He gazed at the images of dice and chips hanging in the windows and wondered who could feel lucky in such a place. Looking at his watch he saw there were still another ten minutes to go. He spent much of his life killing small blocks of time. It was a consequence of his punctuality. He wasn’t sure that punctuality was the right way to describe it: he was always early, which was, he supposed, as unpunctual as always being late, but he inconvenienced only himself and not others.
He’d been brought up to arrive fifteen minutes ahead of any appointment, but people didn’t want personalities to arrive early; they expected to be kept waiting. Now, after twenty years, he was able to recognize the unease that the public experienced when they saw celebrities – even of his minor variety – out of certain clearly defined realms. They understood that celebrities existed primarily in the spotlight – shuffling papers officiously as the intro music faded out, emerging from behind curtains, smiling on a sofa behind a pile of unread magazines. They understood also that celebrities had a ‘real life’. But this was a certain type of real life glimpsed only in photos in magazines with short one-word titles. Celebrities with no make-up on, with strange scars visible and shameful rolls of fat falling over expensive bikini bottoms. It was understood that celebrities existed in these separate and clearly defined realms, but the PA – the charity dinner, the restaurant opening – blurred these lines. The exotic and the mundane came together for a short while and it was essential that the celebrity balanced perfectly on the fine line between the two.
Frank used to arrive whilst the photographers were still setting up, quite happy to wait a few moments and exchange pleasantries with the staff of the shop or restaurant he was opening. He’d be there in his role as celebrity, but not quite ‘on’ yet. Eventually it was a restaurant manager who spelled it out to him. Frank had arrived ten minutes early and the manager whisked him off to the staff changing area to wait. ‘They don’t want to see you like that,’ he’d said, and for a moment Frank thought he’d spilled something down his suit, but then he realized what he meant. He had to emerge, fully formed and glistening, at the appointed hour, not hover awkwardly for ten minutes beforehand.
And so Frank had become practised at a form of invisibility. He had no control over his early arrival – it wasn’t something, at his time of life, that he had any power to change – but he did seem able to manage his visibility, to choose to be seen or unseen. He’d kill time in nearby shops, or read a newspaper in his car, and no one would notice him until he switched on his beam and stepped up to the ribbon. He remembered when he was a boy that he had written a list of superpowers on a piece of paper ranked in order of how much he craved them. He could only think of a few now, the obvious things: the ability to fly and to travel through time. He recalled clearly, though, that top of the list had been the gift of invisibility. Sometimes at night he’d pretend that he was wearing magic invisible pyjamas. He’d lie alone in his bed and be sure that no one could see him. He’d will his mother or father to come in the room and panic at his apparent absence, just so he could have proof of his invisibility. He’d lie and wait and the longer he waited the more he wondered if he really was invisible. He would start to worry about how he could know he was visible, that he even existed, if there was no one to see him. He’d fall asleep in a state of confusion unsure about himself, his imagination and his pyjamas.
He got out of the car now and walked purposefully towards the man he had identified as the owner. He was a fleshy figure, pigeon-chested with no neck, attempting some kind of Miami Vice look that Frank didn’t think suited him or the bitter weather. Frank reached out to shake his hand and as the man turned and recognized him Frank noticed the brief look that crossed his face. A momentary flash of amusement as if Frank had just been the subject of some humorous conversation. It was a look he was used to. After a few introductions, Frank stood up at the ribbon and gave the speech he’d been asked to give – combining an upbeat economic forecast for the area with corny jokes. He gave his best cheese-eating grin as he cut the ribbon and the cameras flashed.
Afterwards he drank tasteless cava and chatted to an investor in the development called Eddy and the generically glamorous woman at his side who was not introduced by name.
‘There seem to be casinos cropping up all over the city now,’ Frank ventured.
‘Yeah, well, there’s only so many tits a city can take,’ said Eddy. ‘Did you know Birmingham has more gentlemen’s clubs per capita than anywhere else in Europe?’
‘Really?’ said Frank.
‘Thing is that women’s bodies are being devalued.’ Frank was momentarily wrong-footed, before Eddy made his meaning clear. ‘Some of the skanks these clubs employ, they cheapen the experience, put the punters off. I run five lap-dancing establishments, but they’re classy. The girls keep themselves nice and spruce-looking. But it’s all too available now. A man should feel special that he has the currency to pay a beautiful woman to dance for him, but there’s nothing special about it now. It’s lost the glamour and the magic. The punters feel sordid.’
Frank had always assumed that was the point.
‘But casinos, Frank, that’s a different game. They have that glamour and magic and they have it in spades. People think of casinos and they think of James Bond, they think of George Clooney and Sharon Stone. They think of all these things and, while they think, they are pouring money on those tables faster than we can bank it. Course, I could’ve done without the recession, but you never know; desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures – like putting it all on red.’
Eddy continued to speak, but Frank drifted off. He looked around distractedly at the faces around him. He wondered how many of them had been in the hospital as children, or had maybe brought their own children there, running every red light in the empty night-time streets. His attention was caught by a figure with a shopping trolley making his way along the pavement towards them. The man was tall, perhaps in his fifties, wearing an anorak covered in badges and a Boyzone baseball cap. He stopped to look at the spectacle before him. After a moment he dragged his trolley up to one of the bunny girls and Frank heard him ask: ‘Is the kiddies coming back, love?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The kiddies. The hospital. Is them opening it again?’
‘The hospital?’ She was speaking loudly as if the man was deaf. ‘Is that what you’re asking? The hospital’s moved now … This isn’t the hospital any more,’ she added slowly.
The man looked at her as if she was simple. ‘I know that, love. I remember it closing. I thought they wuz reopening it like. What’s happening, then? What’s all this in aid of?’
‘It’s a new casino opening today.’
The man frowned at her. ‘A casino? Here? You joking, bab?’ And then he started to laugh. He laughed so much that one by one the conversations began to trail off until eventually everyone had stopped speaking and all eyes were turned on the laughing man with the trolley in their midst.
15
Andrea, Frank and Mo had driven out to the canal for a walk one afternoon the previous summer. They followed the canal out through the suburbs where Mo enjoyed giving a running commentary on every back garden they passed. She loved the ones with stone ornaments in the shapes of hedgehogs and badgers and waistcoat-wearing frogs carrying wheelbarrows. She also loved the gardens that had small wooden jetties at the end and row boats tied up. The idea of just getting up in the morning and going out in a dinghy seemed entirely magical to her. She disapproved fiercely, however, of those gardens with trampolines, believing their proximity to the canal was a terrible accident waiting to happen.
Frank had said: ‘What? Boing, boing, splosh?’ and Mo had nodded solemnly.
At some point the houses petered out and the canal continued its course through countryside, alongside empty fields and tangled hedgerows. They had walked for some miles through the fi
ltered green light of overhanging leaves when the landscape on the opposite towpath abruptly changed. Modern apartment buildings in the style of old warehouses and wharves rose up from the towpath. An opening in the block revealed a colonnaded plaza built around a grand stepped waterfall, which led down to the canal. Enormity appeared to be the key design feature.
The three of them stood and stared for some time before crossing the bridge to explore. Mo ran up and down the steps at the side of the waterfall while Frank and Andrea looked around the shopfronts of the plaza. All were empty except for the office and estate agents of the development company itself, and a shop selling leather furniture. They laughed at a lime-green sofa that cost £6,000. They wandered on through the estate, which stretched far back from the canal. Signposts told them they were in a village and directed them to the centre. They passed through an empty zone called Waterside, through another called Gardenside and reached the apparent centre, which branded itself as Marketside. Here they found more empty shopfronts, two designer clothes shops, a Sainsbury’s Local and a bar yet to be opened. They saw no one apart from the shop workers that stared as they passed. Andrea said it was as if a neutron bomb had fallen. Mo liked it. She liked the neatness of the houses and shops and she liked the clock tower in the middle. She said she felt like a Playmobil figure and started speaking in a strange, presumably Playmobil, accent. Frank walked into a shop like someone fallen from the sky to ask where they were. The answer was Byron’s Common.
Now Frank was back again. The bar was open for business, serving food all day, and he sat waiting to meet Phil’s widow Michelle. Byron’s Common was a little busier now, though still had the feel of a stage set. Most of the shop units were still empty, but Frank could see a chemist and a Chinese takeaway had opened on the parade. There was a slow trickle of people passing by and a few other tables were occupied in the bar. For no reason that Frank could discern, the upholstery in the bar was covered with what appeared to be cow hide, and bleached cattle skulls hung on the bare brick walls. Their hollow sockets gazed out at the Sainsbury’s Local across the street. Frank wondered if it was a reference to the Old West, with Byron’s Common cast as a frontier town. Had he missed out on the gold rush? He couldn’t help but notice that the women in the bar all looked similar. Blonde hair, deep tans, jumbo handbags, tight dark jeans and heels. A few of them recognized him. They caught his eye, looked away then looked back. He pretended to read the menu.
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