by Clare Carson
A twang was audible now, a lift at the end of his sentences leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Australian possibly.
‘I thought you were someone I knew. You look like an ex-girlfriend of mine. She’s Dutch. She came to England to train as a nurse. It threw me a bit. The likeness. Are you Dutch?’
‘No,’ she said. Course she wasn’t Dutch; first he nearly runs her over with his mad bike-riding and then he tries to chat her up with some lame bollocks about looking Dutch. She turned and stared down the road pointedly, hoped he would get the message and piss off.
‘Well, I’m sorry if I scared you.’
She folded her arms, glanced back at him out of the corner of her eye, caught sight of a hand disappearing inside his leather jacket, a flash, a compact, metallic object in his palm, raised arm. Shoot position. She blinked. It was just a gold box of Benson and Hedges.
‘Are you sure I didn’t scare you?’ he asked. ‘You look a little jumpy.’ He held the open packet out for her. ‘Want one?’
‘No thanks.’
He pat-patted his jacket with his spare hand, searching his pockets. ‘Do you have a light? I usually have my Zippo on me, but I can’t find it. I must have left it somewhere.’
‘I might have a box of matches.’ She rummaged in her coat pocket, felt the rough edge of a Swan Vesta box, was about to hand it over, remembered she had stashed her hash inside, retracted her offer and instead grasped a single matchstick, pushing its red head against the sandpaper strike. The match flared, licked the thickening dusk air, illuminating the man’s hands cupped to shield the flame, revealing the un-etched skin on his fingers. Not a mechanic, then, or a courier like most of her sister’s chopper-owning biker mates. He held the fag between his index finger and his thumb, took deep drags, cracked his jaw and sent a trail of smoke rings wobbling skyward. Not impressed. She scanned the road, slowly, deliberately.
‘What are you doing out here on your own anyway?’ the rider persisted.
It wasn’t an Australian accent. Kiwi perhaps.
‘I’m waiting for a friend.’
‘Are you going in there for a drink?’ He nodded his head over his shoulder at the mock Tudor façade of the pub set back among the trees. She nodded a tentative response. The corners of his mouth pulled sideways into the start of an easy smile, lighting up his face, and she thought for a second there was something quite attractive about him. He caught her checking him out. She flushed.
‘What’s your name anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?’
She spotted the bus lumbering down the road. ‘Frieda.’
‘Frieda what?’
‘Frieda People. My friend will be on that one.’
His eyes were on her back as she waved at the driver and waved again to make sure that Becky had seen her, make sure the rider got the message. The double-decker pulled up to the stop. Becky was dangling from the pole on the rear platform, snakes of mahogany hair writhing around her face in the backdraught of the bus’s forward movement. Becky Shapiro.
‘Am I late?’ Becky asked.
‘A bit. I thought I’d wait out here for you because I wasn’t sure you knew the right stop.’
‘Thanks. It’s not that easy to tell where you are once you are in the countryside.’
‘This isn’t the countryside. It’s the periphery. It’s all bypasses, golf courses and rubbish tips. And boring bikers.’
She flicked her eyes dismissively to indicate the rider standing behind, but the gesture was met with a blank stare from Becky. She turned. No one was there. She scanned the car park; the black machine was shimmering under the sulphurous cone of the solitary car park light. Its rider had vanished. He must have dived into the bar while she was greeting Becky. Odd.
‘God, I don’t know how you survive this far out,’ Becky said. ‘Where is everybody else?’
‘Inside.’
‘Come on, Sam.’ Becky grabbed her arm. ‘You don’t want to be late for your own party.’
The Coney’s Tavern was aptly named: a sprawling, airless warren of a pub that had taken to serving food in an attempt to turn a profit. Jim had objected to the venue, of course. He had tried to dissuade her from holding the party there with his usual combination of sarcasm and casual threats, declared he wasn’t prepared to eat in a place that catered to the golf-playing classes and specialized in microwaving everything to buggery. It wasn’t what he called a bar. She had dug in; insisted it was her birthday so it was her choice. But now, as she peered through the smoke and was confronted by a fug of florid self-satisfied faces, she wondered whether she had made the right call after all. She felt uneasy; she searched for the rider in the crowd, couldn’t see him.
‘There they are,’ said Becky, pointing to a long table in a side dining room around which her friends and family were gathered. The white plastic tablecloth made the scene look like a bargain basement re-enactment of ‘The Last Supper’. Becky dragged Sam through the pressing bodies filling the bar and she pushed the rider to the back of her mind.
She had drunk way too much, way too quickly. The table was littered with empty plonk bottles and discarded plates of sludge and chips stubbed with fag butts. She gazed blearily across the debris at Liz, her mother, sitting opposite; tight-lipped, hands clasped tensely in front of her on the table, recusing herself from the party. Even when she was annoyed, Liz had a natural elegance – unruffled, straight chestnut hair that always fell in a sharp-edged bob. Sam ran a remonstrative hand over her own frizzy locks and, in the absence of any engagement from her mum, turned to look at the far end of the table where Becky was holding court among their mates. Becky was recounting in gory detail the afternoon she had spent at the local hospital, watching surgery being performed on various bits of male anatomy: preparation for the start of her medical degree in September, Becky was explaining. Becky knew where she was heading. Becky was the rising star in their crowd.
At the nearer table end, Sam’s two sisters sat cawing raucously, snow-white faces and crow-haired heads rocking. The Coyle girls: three of them born at eighteen-month intervals. Sam looked different from her sisters – a smudgy sandy summer to the clarity of their dark and light icy winter – yet you could tell they shared a bond, unable to move as individuals without creating a ripple across the surface of the whole. And now here they were on the verge of going their separate ways. Helen, the eldest, had been desperate to find an excuse to move out of the family home and had been handed it when she landed a job in some shop in Camden selling post-punk, gothic glad-rags to her nightclubbing friends. She had moved out to a bedsit on the north side of the river that April. Jess was working part-time stacking shelves at Iceland, a job that just about paid enough to keep her bike on the road with a bit left over for a pint with her mates. As for Sam, she had surprised herself and everyone else by passing the Oxford entrance exam the previous autumn. Hadn’t really taken it seriously at the time. Jim had laughed when she had told him she had been accepted, and proudly explained to anyone within earshot that she had managed to pull a fast one on those old farts in their ivory tower, a girl from a comp no less, sneaking her way into the country’s top university. You could tell, he had declared, from which side of the family she had harvested her talents. He was right, she had suspected; she was a fraud, not really cut out for the bright lights, the glittering prizes. A bit of a cowboy when it came to academic endeavour.
She sat silently, caught up in her own doubts, trapped in the space between competing conversations, on the edge of everything as always, never at the centre, beginning to think no one would miss her if she weren’t there. She poured herself another glass of vinegary white and turned automatically, sensing eyes on her back again. The rider was watching her from the far end of the bar. He lifted his helmet in the air, a half salute, and then he was off, through the door and out.
‘Who was that bloke then?’ Jess asked – her radar attuned to any man in leather.
Sam shrugged. ‘He came over and started talking to me whe
n I was outside waiting for Becky.’
‘What kind of bike was he riding?’
‘Black.’
Jess rolled her eyes. Sam rolled hers back. Helen laughed, or perhaps it was a sneer.
She drained her glass. Everything was moving in slow motion now, voices raucous, not quite in sync with mouths, conversations increasingly incoherent. Jess was explaining that she wouldn’t fancy being a barmaid in the Coney’s Tavern because everybody knew that ‘coney’ was Anglo-Saxon for ‘cunt’ and she certainly wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea and think there was more on offer than a pint of lager and a packet of crisps.
Liz’s head swivelled round. ‘Cunny.’
‘What?’
‘Seventeenth-century. Pepys. He used the form “cunny” in his diary. “His wife caught him with his main in his mistress’s cunny.”’
Jess frowned at Liz, momentarily perplexed by the reference, then continued to rant about her best mate being a bit of an old slapper. Sam watched Helen half-heartedly chasing a lettuce leaf around the plate with her fork.
Jess reached the end of her diatribe and followed Sam’s gaze. ‘Why did you order a salad?’ she asked. ‘Are you going anorexic on us?’
‘I’m just not hungry,’ Helen snapped.
‘We’ve always used food as a weapon in this family,’ said Liz and sighed.
‘Food does make good ammunition. It’s surprising how painful a roast potato can be if it hits you at speed.’
‘I didn’t mean it quite so literally.’
Sam chipped in. ‘Helen’s not anorexic. She’s not hungry because she’s just shoved a line of speed up her nose.’ Helen kicked her under the table and caught her shin with the pointed toe of her buckled stiletto boot. Sam yelped loudly and was about to kick her back when something made her pause – an almost imperceptible disturbance pulsing through the golfing crowd by the bar. A Mexican wave of hackles rising. Jim was standing at the pub’s entrance. He pushed through the crowd, his plaid shirt unbuttoned to the point of disreputability – perhaps a deliberate distraction from his burgeoning paunch below – his mouth pulled sideways in that lopsided smirk of his, hinting he had something on everybody sitting in the room. He could have them all if he wanted – one way or another. She cringed. Then felt a stab of anger: it was all his fucking fault she was so jumpy, saw death threats in every passing vehicle. He navigated a winding course between the dining tables, seemingly oblivious to the churning he left in his wake; swivelling faces caught between attraction and disapproval, gritted teeth and pink cheeks as he skimmed sports jackets and pretty waitresses. He pulled up a chair, swung his stocky form into the vacant berth next to hers; didn’t even bother to apologize for being late.
‘Where have you been?’ Liz asked.
‘Drink with Harry,’ he said. He didn’t work with Harry anymore; he just turned to him when he needed back-up. He ordered Sam to pass him the menu, grinned at her conspiratorially, peered theatrically at the plastic-laminated card.
‘Tell me what’s for dinner,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses.’
‘You don’t wear glasses,’ Sam replied. Jim had twenty-twenty vision. ‘It might help if you held the menu the right way up.’
He ignored her, rotated his head to gawp at the table behind, pulled a face, hailed a nearby waitress and said he wanted tomato soup. He certainly didn’t want what they were having, he added, gesturing his hand in the direction of the surrounding diners.
Jim’s soup arrived as everyone else was dispatching slices of sickly sweet cheesecake. He fished around in the bowl for a few minutes with no obvious intention of actually eating anything and then, with an unexpected urgency of movement, he lifted his spoon, waved it in the air and swiped it down on the side of a wine bottle. The resonant chime had the desired effect: all eyes round the table lifted and fixed on Jim. He searched the gathered faces, checked everyone was paying attention. Oh God, what next.
‘It is Sam’s eighteenth birthday,’ Jim said. She frowned at him, willed him to shut up; she could do without the benefit of his maudlin proclamations of the totally bloody obvious.
‘Thanks for pointing that out, Dad.’
Liz was trying to catch the eye of the waitress, writing an invisible signature in the air. Good move. Wrap it up. Time to go before Jim had a chance to embarrass her further. Too late.
Jim continued, slurring his words now. ‘I didn’t think I would make it this far. Still, here I am.’ He paused and his eyes swept the corners of the Coney’s Tavern as if he were, indeed, genuinely surprised to find himself there. Or perhaps he was searching for someone, she thought with slight alarm.
‘But I very much doubt whether I’ll live to see Sam’s next birthday.’
Helen tutted. Jess yawned ostentatiously. It wasn’t the first time their father had announced his impending death, although he’d never done it quite so publicly before. Jim dropped the spoon he had been waving like a sorcerer’s wand and let it clatter on the table. Jesus wept. What would her friends make of that performance? She caught them exchanging meaningful glances before Becky carried on talking as if nothing had happened. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. And then she seethed.
‘Dad,’ she said.
He didn’t respond.
‘Dad.’
She said it more forcefully this time. He turned towards her with blank eyes, carelessly knocked a bowl with his hand and sent a tsunami of viscous red soup rolling across the table towards Liz. Jess muttered in Sam’s ear.
‘Well, he might not live to see your next birthday, but I hope he lives to see the bill, because he’s the only person here with a credit card.’
Jess turned away and picked up her conversation with Helen again: the perennial debate about why the best-looking blokes in the room always turned out to be gay.
Jim was still staring without seeing. His mouth moved. He mumbled; indistinguishable sounds swallowed up in the clamour of the tavern. She leaned forward to catch his words.
‘Asgard.’
‘What?’
‘Operation Asgard.’
Sam repeated the words in her head. Operation Asgard; it sounded like one of Jim’s jokes.
‘I’m not sure,’ he continued, ‘I’m not sure… which side I’m on… I don’t even know who I am anymore…’
He really was going for it tonight. Hamming it up. She was about to tell him to stop messing around when she noticed his eyes were damp. She’d never seen the glint of tears before, not in Jim’s eyes. She didn’t want to see him cry, it didn’t seem quite right. Not Jim. She looked away. Looked back. And now all she could see was a half-cut, middle-aged, sweaty face glistening in the heat of the crowd.
‘So what’s Operation Asgard all about then?’ she asked, cheerfully.
He snapped out of his daze, scowled, reached for a napkin, dabbed at his soup-splashed shirt. ‘None of your bloody business.’ He jabbed his finger towards her face. ‘Don’t mention it again.’
She was about to protest, point out that he was the one who had mentioned it in the first place, but he didn’t give her the chance.
‘Where’s Liz gone?’ he demanded. She glanced across the table, clocked that her mother had disappeared, searched the room and shrugged – the toilet perhaps, or outside for some fresh air.
The waitress appeared with the bill, hovered nervously behind Jim. Helen reached over, snatched the paper and shoved it under Jim’s nose.
‘Time to cough up, face the damage.’
He examined the bill belligerently. ‘Do I really have to pay for this crap as well as eat it?’
The waitress flushed. Jess whispered loudly, ‘Cunny’s Tavern’, and started tittering uncontrollably.
‘It’s my birthday treat,’ Sam said. ‘Please just pay the bill so we can go.’
She could hear a wheedling hint of desperation in her voice and caught the beginnings of a sadistic smile playing at the edges of Jim’s mouth.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, hand your
card over,’ Helen snapped.
Jim teetered precariously on the verge of explosion, then subsided just before the point of no return. He must have thought better of it, decided to back down. For once.
‘Where do you get it from?’ he asked. He addressed his progeny with a look of injured innocence plastered to his face. ‘Where did you lot learn to behave like this? Uncouth. That’s what you lot are, bloody uncouth.’
Jess leaned over, deftly dipped her hand into his pocket, fished out his wallet, extracted his credit card and handed it to the waitress. The woman walked off and returned a few minutes later with the imprint of his card on a paper slip. Sam shoved the pen into Jim’s hand and guided it toward the signature box.
‘There,’ he said as he handed the paper back to the waitress. ‘Tell your boss he can buy a new microwave and a couple more can-openers with that.’
‘You’re such a berk,’ said Helen. ‘I’d be surprised if you make it to next week, let alone Sam’s next birthday.’ She pushed herself up from the table, stalked away, stabbing the floor with her boot heels as she left.
Sam grabbed one of Jim’s elbows, Jess grabbed the other, hoisted him out of his chair, giving the golfers something to talk about as they dragged him through the bar and outside into the mugginess, her mates bringing up the rear.
‘What was your dad on about? He’s so…’ Becky muttered as she headed towards the bus stop. Sam strained to hear the end of Becky’s sentence but there wasn’t one. It wasn’t like Becky to be stuck for words.
Liz was waiting in the car, gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands. They bundled the comatose heap of Jim into the passenger seat, strapped him in. Liz turned the ignition in silence, reversed and was about to leave the car park when the black bike appeared out of nowhere, burned up the road, cutting across their exit. Heading north. Back to the city.
‘What kind of bike is it then?’ Sam asked Jess.
‘Yamaha XT500. The noise of the engine is the giveaway; single cylinder. You can hear it firing. Pretty powerful bike; built to handle anything – mud, sand. It’s won the Paris–Dakar rally across the Sahara a couple of times.’ Jess narrowed her eyes, icy splinters. ‘I always think you can tell a lot about a bloke from the type of bike he rides.’