News Where You Are

by Catherine O'Flynn

  Francis doesn’t hear a word of his father’s presentation. He gazes at the toy town and imagines the lives of the people that live there.

  30

  He laid the dominos out on the table in preparation. Walter arrived after a few minutes, gripping the local newspaper and looking red in the face.

  ‘Have you seen this?’

  Frank looked at the paper where Walter pointed. There was an advert for a local cabaret club. ‘What is it?’

  Walter shook the paper with fury. ‘Third act down! Look at it.’

  Frank read aloud. ‘ “An evening of The Whisperers. Come and enjoy the easy melodies and barbershop harmonies of Tamworth’s answer to The Drifters in this family-friendly tribute night to the late great Whisperers as performed by Blackjack.” ’ He looked up at Walter. ‘Did you not like The Whisperers?’

  ‘Like them? I’m bloody in them! Founder member. Me, Reg Stevens, Vince Capello and Ray Peck. How dare they! How bloody dare they! I’ve just come off the phone to Ray – he’s spitting feathers.’

  ‘The Whisperers? Really? I never knew you were one of them.’

  ‘Not “were”, Frank. Not “were”, if you don’t mind. Am. I am in The Whisperers. We are not “the late Whisperers”. Bloody slander that is. Absolute slander. They think they can just come along and steal our gigs? Is that what they think?’

  Frank wasn’t sure what to say. ‘So you’re still together as a band?’

  ‘Of course we are.’

  ‘That’s amazing, Walter. You still rehearse?’

  ‘We don’t need to rehearse. It’s all up here.’ Walter tapped the side of his head vigorously. ‘Last gig we played was the Northgate Theatre, Hanley, as part of a Christmas cabaret night.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘December third, 1977.’

  Frank looked at Walter. ‘That’s more than thirty years ago.’

  ‘Well? What difference does that make?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just I suppose that people might have assumed you’d retired.’

  ‘Well, they’d assume wrong. We were just biding our time, laying low for a little while.’

  ‘Why?’

  Walter sighed with exasperation. ‘Heard of Johnny Rotten, have you, Frank? A thing called punk rock?’

  The conversation was growing too strange for Frank. He was only able to nod.

  ‘Oh, we’d weathered storms in the past. Always managed to incorporate the latest sounds in our shows. That was down to Vince – genius arranger he is, pure genius. He’d take the old tunes and make them sound fresh. A touch of Merseybeat in the sixties. Even a spot of disco syncopation in the seventies. But that punk-rock noise. It was too much.’

  ‘But surely that wasn’t your audience, Walter. I mean you must have been in your fifties – your fans wouldn’t have wanted you to sound like Johnny Rotten.’

  ‘Well, no one likes to be irrelevant, Frank. We decided the more dignified thing was to sit it out.’

  ‘That was over thirty years ago.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘But, Walter, punk didn’t last very long.’

  Walter stared at Frank, eyes gleaming. ‘Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  They sat in silence for a while. Frank was the first to speak. ‘Where are the other Whisperers now?’

  ‘Vince lives on the Isle of Man. Ray’s down in Farnborough. Reg isn’t too well these days – he’s in a place out Lichfield way but I get a Christmas card each year from his wife.’ He paused. ‘Apparently he doesn’t recognize her any more.’ He turned away from Frank for a moment. He spoke in the direction of the window. ‘I know if we got him on stage it’d all come back to him. It doesn’t go away.’

  Frank nodded. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Oh, Ray’s already onto it. He’s finding the manager of these Blackjack jokers and getting onto the venue. If they want an evening with The Whisperers, they can bloody well book The Whisperers.’

  Frank reached over for his pile of dominos, but Walter stopped him. ‘Do you mind if we leave it today, Frank? I’m not in the mood.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘Course. I’ll shove off and see you next week.’ He picked up his jacket and stood for a moment. Walter was staring at the advert in the paper again. Frank couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  He left the residents’ lounge and headed towards the exit. By the front door was a conservatory extension where a few people dozed in chairs. As he walked past, a frail-looking old woman called out, ‘Excuse me.’

  She was a tiny shrunken figure, but her voice was surprisingly clear. Frank smiled and approached her.

  ‘It’s Frank, isn’t it?’

  Frank held out his hand to her. Her hand as he shook it was cold and papery. ‘Hello, yes, I’m Frank.’

  ‘Hello, Frank. I’m Irene.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Irene.’

  ‘I’ve seen you on the telly.’

  Frank mock-grimaced. ‘Oh dear. Sorry about that.’ He sat down on the next chair. He guessed that Irene was older than his mother – possibly in her eighties. ‘I’ve not seen you here before, Irene. Have you been at Evergreen long?’ He realized he was raising his voice for no apparent reason; Irene’s hearing seemed perfectly good.

  ‘Well, the answer to that, dear, is yes and no. I’ve been at Evergreen now for many years, but not this branch. That’s not the right word, is it? Not this centre – what’s it called? Forest of Arden. They have them all over the country, you know. I was out in Northampton – Althorp they called that one. I moved here about nine months ago.’

  ‘What made you move over here?’

  Irene tried to smile. ‘Oh, silly, I suppose. My good friend, Amy, she passed away and I found it difficult there without her – you know, sad. I thought a change might do me good.’ She looked around. ‘Though, to be honest, this place is exactly the same. I hardly know that I’ve moved. I wake up in the morning and I still expect to see her at breakfast.’

  Frank nodded. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. There are some nice people here. Even some of the staff.’

  Irene smiled. ‘I’d heard that your mother was here so I was hoping I might bump into you one day.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad we met. It’s always nice to meet a viewer.’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh, I’m not really … to be honest. Not wishing to give offence, but I don’t really watch your programme. Sometimes it’s on in the background, but I find the news depressing.’

  Frank realized he’d walked straight into that.

  ‘No, I wanted to talk to you because you used to work with Phil, didn’t you?’

  Now he understood. People always wanted to ask him about Phil. ‘Phil. Yes. He was a great man. Sad loss to the industry. Did you watch his show on Saturday nights?’

  Irene shook her head. ‘Good gracious, no.’

  Frank felt the conversation was getting away from him.

  ‘I stopped watching Phil a long time ago.’

  Frank looked at Irene. ‘Did you know Phil, then?’

  Irene smiled and looked straight back at Frank. ‘I should say so. I was married to him for seven years.’

  Frank laughed. ‘Oh my goodness. Sorry, Irene. We’ve been talking at cross-purposes. I’m talking about Phil Smethway. The TV celebrity.’

  Irene carried on looking at Frank. ‘So am I.’

  Frank frowned. ‘But Phil was …’ he trailed off.

  Irene put her hand on Frank’s. ‘It’s all right, dear. I’m not mad. I was Phil’s first wife. We were married when we were young. July first, 1950 – rained cats and dogs all day. I was what they call a cradle snatcher: twenty-five years old to Phil’s twenty.’

  Frank stared at Irene. He heard what she said, he knew Phil had been married before Michelle, and he knew what Irene said made sense, but he couldn’t take it in. He had a vivid image in his mind of Phil’s life and the contrast between that and the woman sitting in front of him now was impossible to
process.

  Irene seemed to read his mind. ‘All a bit Dorian Gray, isn’t it? Him on telly getting younger-looking every year with his surgery, hair transplants and dolly birds, and here’s me, the skeleton in the cupboard, disintegrating quietly in Evergreen.’ She laughed. ‘Oh, I’m exaggerating, dear. Don’t look so shocked. He didn’t have me locked up. We were divorced years ago. I remarried very happily, but when my Geoff passed on I didn’t want to stay in the house on my own.’

  Frank remembered that it was Phil who’d first recommended Evergreen for Maureen. He’d said he knew someone there; Frank had had no idea he’d meant his ex-wife. For no clear reason he felt ashamed of Phil. ‘Did he ever visit you here?’

  ‘Phil? You are joking, aren’t you? We stayed in touch. Christmas cards, the occasional phone call, that kind of thing – we were always on good terms – but Phil wouldn’t step foot in somewhere like this. He’d be terrified.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You must have known what he was like. The vainest man I ever met – even when he was a lad he was always very particular about his clothes and hair. He hated the idea of these places. He told me as much when I first moved into one. He said: “How can you stand to be surrounded by old people?” I said to him: “I am old, Phil. So are you.” He thought he could run away from it. Poor Phil. I was terribly upset when I heard what happened to him, but I was ill at the time, you see, and couldn’t make it to the funeral.’

  Frank imagined if Irene had been there how alien she would have seemed amongst all the celebrities and fans. He had a picture in his head of her standing at the graveside in her lilac cardigan and neatly set and curled hair next to Michelle in her Italian sunglasses and crocodile-skin boots.

  ‘My children … well, they’re not children now – I’m a great-grandmother – but anyway they find it hard to believe that I was married to him. They say: “Why did you let him go?” Which I think isn’t very nice to their father, really. I tell them, “Well, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here, would you?” That was the reason, you see. I left him, not the other way round. I did it because he didn’t want children. He couldn’t stand the thought of moving aside for someone else – even his own child. Too much of a child himself, I suppose. Poor Phil.’

  A member of staff approached from the side. ‘Irene?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘The life-drawing class is starting now. You put your name down for it.’

  ‘Oh yes. Sorry, I was blathering on to this man. I’ll come now.’

  The member of staff helped her up and Irene said goodbye to Frank. He stood to watch her being led slowly by the arm down the long corridor.

  31

  Phil

  January 2009

  His jaw aches like hell. He has pins and needles up his right forearm and the handle is slippery with sweat in his palm. He looks at the clock on his office wall. Michelle will be back in another hour. He tries to focus. He’s wasted the last God knows how long thinking what he might have for dinner before remembering there won’t be any dinner. He shifts the barrel in his mouth. He needs to get in the right frame of mind. He tightens his grip on the gun. He assumes it works – he’s had it hidden away since National Service. He wonders if guns have best-before dates.

  The final blow came suddenly: shooting a trail for the show, a quick fifteen-second to camera piece – ‘Join me tonight when our special guests include …’ He keeps mispronouncing the name of the singer. Some slappable-looking kid from a talent show. The truth is Phil isn’t even sure who the kid is. He’s got him mixed up with the one who won the year before, or maybe the year before that. They’ve all got the same faces, the same voices – how’s he supposed to keep up? He fluffs the link maybe seven or eight times, then he sees it. A couple of crew members exchange a look – one of them rolls their eyes and smirks. He is an object of derision. In an instant he knows. There won’t be another reinvention. He’s come to the end of the road. He can’t keep up any more, doesn’t have the will or the energy. He knows he’s finished.

  ‘Past it,’ he says aloud now to the empty room. He squeezes his eyes shut and wills himself to pull the trigger, but still nothing happens.

  People think success is down to luck, but he knows luck has nothing to do with it. It’s sheer graft. Critically assessing himself all the time and making changes – making the right changes. Always making the right decisions. A constant process of reinvention, making sure he’s giving people what they want.

  He started noticing the effects of age around forty. After that they kept coming, like space invaders – never-ending lines of them descending the mirror in front of him. They start off superficial – the changing hair colour, the skin sagging and bagging. Nothing a little work can’t fix: hair dye, hair transplants, nips, tucks, Botox, whatever’s going. He thinks where a lot of women go wrong is that they overdo it. The aim is to look very, very good for your age, not to try to look forty years younger – that way you only end up looking embalmed.

  In the last year or two, though, it’s all moved beyond the surface: a massive falling away of his physical abilities, a general feeling of frailty, little lapses of memory – forgetting people’s names or where he went on holiday four years previously. He’s seen the doctors, he’s had all the tests; they tell him it’s normal.

  ‘Nothing sinister, Mr Smethway, just old age.’

  What, he wonders, could be more bloody sinister.

  Ahead of him he sees only decline. Maybe he could bear to watch it, but it’s the other eyes he can’t take, that gaze that never ends. Even when he retires, people will always know the way he once was and the way he has deteriorated. Worst of all for him is the thought of Michelle witnessing this transformation. If he thought she might leave him for another man, it would make it less hard, but he knows she won’t. She will stay by his side. She will look after him. She will forget him as her best friend and lover, and know only the dependent patient, wiping his face whilst wiping away more of the man he once was.

  He looks again at the clock. He’s been here for two hours.

  ‘Do it,’ he says. Nothing happens. He lets out a howl of despair and slams the gun down on the table.

  Whether it’s the thought of the pain he will cause Michelle, or simply his own cowardice, he doesn’t know, but he realizes he can’t do it. He moves his jaw up and down, trying to work some life back into it and turns his desk lamp on. He looks at his distorted reflection in the base of the lamp – his mouth twisted into a grin. He shuts his eyes. He needs help and in that moment he knows exactly the person who will help him: the most capable person he knows, the person who always helped him out of a jam. He thinks of Mikey.

  32

  It wasn’t the kind of modern, purpose-built industrial estate that Frank had expected, but rather a ramshackle affair, clustered around a courtyard in the shadow of a large paper factory. Frank looked at the board listing the companies based there. Amongst them were a tattoo artist, a manufacturer of ball bearings, a car valeting service, a sandwich bar, a precision tool maker, a supplier of party inflatables, a company called SK enterprises and in unit eighteen something describing itself as the Ministry of the Risen Christ. He wondered if the tenants found much to say to each other when they met in the sandwich shop.

  If the woman in the bakery had been right, then Burkett Precision Tool Makers in unit six seemed the obvious choice for Michael’s place of work. Frank walked across the courtyard, past the car valeting boys with their radio blaring and up an exterior staircase to the door of unit six on the upper level. Burkett’s appeared to be closed for business, the lights off and the door locked. Frank knocked at the door anyway and then squinted through the wire-grilled windows. Inside he saw a neat workshop lined with machines and a brown warehouse coat hanging on the back of a chair. He could just see a pile of post inside the door but failed to make out the name on the top envelope.

  He went back down the steps to Azad’s Kleen ’n’ Kustom Kars. A young
man with an intricately razored haircut was heat shrinking some black-plastic tint onto the rear window of a Seat Ibiza and talking loudly to a man who was reading the paper and giving no indication of listening.

  ‘She wanted the full valet, right, but you shoulda seen it inside. She had like four hundred Snickers wrappers all over the floors and the seats. Nothing else – no Kit Kat, no Monster Munch, no road atlas – just Snickers everywhere. And she’s like skinny, man. Like a size zero. So I thought to myself, Fine. Whatever. Bulimia. But the thing is I thought they were supposed to hide it. Where was the shame and all that self-hate stuff? She seemed pretty happy with herself to me. She looked at me as if I was something she’d trod on, you know, like: “Yeah? I eat twenty-six Snickers bars a day and I still look hot.” So I just took the keys and said nothing, you know, cos we’re professionals.’

  The other man raised his eyebrows and then saw Frank hovering nearby.

  Frank approached. ‘Are you Azad?’

  The man regarded Frank with some suspicion. ‘Yeah, that’s me. Who wants to know?’

  ‘My name’s Frank.’

  Azad nodded. ‘All right, Frank, can I help you?’

  ‘I was just wondering if you knew if a man called Michael Church worked in the unit above.’

  Azad walked over towards him. ‘Mike? Yeah, there’s a Mike works up there. He ain’t in today, but you can leave a message if you like. I’ll make sure he gets it next time he shows up.’