by Jonathan Coe
“Chicks?” said Bill, contemptuously.
“It’s power, Brother Anderton. That’s what it is. They go wild for it. It drives them crazy.”
Bill forced a glance at him. He didn’t even want to meet his eye, if he could help it. “Can we just drop this subject, Gibbs? I’m not interested in your opinions, to be honest.”
“Fair enough.” He held up his hands, acquiescent. “I just thought it would be good news to a man like you. After all, power oozes out of your every pore. These men”—he gestured at the football players—“they do pretty much everything you want them to, don’t they? What’s going on this afternoon, anyway? Have you called them out again?”
There were several ways Bill could have responded to this goading. He could simply have walked away, or he could have played his trump card and dropped some sort of hint about the Charity Committee theft, which he had still not mentioned to anybody. For the time being, though, he decided to keep his cool.
“Sledgehammer fell on the track a while ago. We’re waiting for someone to come and sort it out.”
“You know, it’s funny,” said Gibbs, “I’ve noticed, every time something like this happens—and it seems to happen a lot, every couple of weeks—it always happens just before lunch, so they can’t get an engineer out before two, and half the day’s gone before the thing’s up and running again. Meanwhile, the company’s lost how many cars? Sixty? Seventy?”
“I don’t know what you’re implying,” said Bill, turning on him as fine droplets of rain began to splatter the tarmac, “but I do know that your knowledge of working practices is exactly nil. Nobody who spends all day sitting on his arse pushing figures around is going to criticize my men for the way they do their job.” He stubbed out his cigarette, screwing it angrily into the ground. “Come and spend a day or two on that track, Gibbs, and then tell me you begrudge these blokes a few minutes kicking a ball around. There’s a mate of mine called Ian, Ian Bateman, was laid off last week aged forty-eight, with a back that’s killing him and six months in hospital to look forward to. That’s what ten years as an undersealer does for you.”
He began to walk off, but Gibbs stopped him with the words: “No chance of your son ending up like that, then, is there?”
“My son?” repeated Bill, turning.
“Not after that fancy school he goes to. That toffs’ academy. Too good for the local comprehensive, was he?”
Advancing towards him, Bill seemed suddenly to grow in stature. The hostility between the two men was immediately charged, physical.
“What is your problem, Gibbs? Eh? What is it?”
“I know about you and Miriam Newman,” he answered, calmly.
At which point, Bill couldn’t help smiling. He was glad, finally, that the thing had been mentioned at last. It made everything very straightforward.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “And you shouldn’t have forged those cheques, either.” He didn’t even wait to watch Gibbs’s expression change. “I’ve a terrible feeling that one of us,” he said over his shoulder, ambling away, “is going to be out of a job on Monday morning.”
And for the rest of the afternoon, whenever he thought about that moment, Bill found himself glowing with pride. The sort of pride that comes before a fall.
That evening, he met Miriam at The Black Horse in Northfield, and they drove out to Stourbridge in his brown Marina. They checked into The Talbot Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Stokes (a little tribute Bill had decided to pay to the current chairman of British Leyland). Irene was under the impression that he was in Northampton, staying overnight for a TGWU dinner. And indeed, that’s where he should have been. But he had phoned the regional office that afternoon, and called off sick. It had all been arranged more than a month ago. It was to be their first whole night together.
They sat in the hotel’s cavernous lounge bar, Bill drinking pints of Brew, Miriam drinking Dubonnet and bitter lemon. He rested his hand on her knee beneath the table. It was proving surprisingly hard to sustain a conversation.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely,” Miriam said, “if we could spend every evening together like this?”
Bill wasn’t sure that it would be lovely at all. It was beginning to dawn on him that he and Miriam didn’t know each other very well. Yes, they knew each other’s bodies—knew every inch of each other’s bodies, knew them inside out—but they had never done much talking; had never had the time. The affair had been going on for eleven months but tonight, quite unexpectedly, Bill felt that he was sitting with a stranger. He thought about Irene and found himself aching for her company: not for anything in particular she might say or do; just for her wordless, kindly presence. He thought about his son, about how he would feel if he could see his father in this ridiculous situation. And then he watched Miriam as she went to the bar for more drinks, and his body was galvanized, yet again, with the knowledge that he had somehow won the affection of this beautiful woman— this beautiful young woman, more to the point—and that tonight she was going to give herself to him, willingly. To him: not to any of the young designers she worked for, or the fitters who were always trying to chat her up in the social club, but to him, Bill Anderton, pushing forty, losing his hair. Other girls had fallen for him in the past, often enough, so clearly there was something about him, something they must have liked: but the thrill never quite went away, the thrill of knowing that he could still inspire those feelings, even with Miriam, even after eleven whole months . . .
If only she would stop looking at him that way.
“Cheers,” he said, raising his glass.
“To us,” she said, raising hers.
They smiled at each other, and drank, and then just a few seconds later she put her glass down and let out a convulsive sob and said: “I can’t go on like this, Bill, I just can’t.”
Soon afterwards she composed herself and they went in to dinner.
The dining room was vast, and empty. A waitress led them through the gloom to a far corner, lighting their way with a candle which she carried before her as if it were a torch, and which was then set down to flicker bravely on their table, partly no doubt as a romantic gesture but also, perhaps, in a futile attempt to ward off the swathes of funereal darkness that surrounded them. Buried somewhere in the walls was a speaker system through which John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” dribbled out like primeval musical ooze. The base of the candlestick was encrusted with lumps of molten wax which Bill initially mistook for ice, so Arctic was the room temperature. They took it in turns to warm their hands at the flame of the candle, thereby finding a third use for it. Neither spoke much as they perused their menus, which were printed on enormous sheets of card, some two feet by eighteen inches, but seemed to offer only three choices, one of which was off.
Bill went for the mixed grill. Miriam chose the chicken-in-a-basket.
“Do you want chips with that?” the waitress asked.
“What’s the alternative?” asked Miriam.
“Just chips,” said the waitress.
“Chips is fine,” said Miriam, fighting back tears.
“I’m sorry about that,” said the waitress, concerned. “Do you not like chips?”
“It’s all right,” said Miriam, reaching for a tissue. “Really.”
“She loves chips,” said Bill. “Adores them, in fact. We both do. This is a purely personal matter. Please go away.” Just as she was about to disappear into the encroaching shadows, he added: “And bring us a bottle of Blue Nun while you’re at it.”
He took out his own handkerchief and dabbed tenderly beneath Miriam’s eyes. She pushed him away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.”
“Don’t worry. It’s this place. I know how you feel. It’s so depressing.”
“It’s not that,” said Miriam, sniffing. “It’s Irene. I want you to leave her. I want you to leave her and move in with me.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Bill. “I don’t believe
this is happening.”
This was not a response to Miriam’s declaration—which he had been anticipating anyway, with growing dread—but to the arrival of a party of twelve men and a ferocious, tweedy woman at a nearby table. The men were a sullen-looking bunch: middle-aged for the most part, too poorly dressed to be businessmen, too weedy and unathletic to be rugby players. They were noisy but there was no boisterousness, no high spirits about them; and they all seemed to be terrified of the woman, who, after sitting down at the table, took out a monocle and clamped it over her right eye. It would have been an unprepossessing assembly, at the best of times. But this was the worst of times: for among their number, quite unmissably, was someone Bill recognized only too well. Someone he saw every day of the working week, and usually went out of his way to avoid. His brother-in-arms in the labour relations war, and personal bête noire: Roy Slater.
“Don’t move,” said Bill. “Don’t look around, and don’t say anything. We’re going to have to leave.”
“What are you talking about?” said Miriam. “Did you hear what I just said to you?”
“Of course I heard,” said Bill. “And we’ll discuss it. I promise we’ll discuss it. But right now”—he glanced over his shoulder, taking note, with some relief, of a velvet-wallpapered door in the wall behind them—“it’s time for a quick getaway. You know who Roy Slater is, don’t you?”
Miriam nodded, confused.
“Well, he’s right behind you. And if we don’t get out of here in the next ten seconds, he’s going to see us.”
The dimness of the lighting was on their side, this time, and it was easy enough to leave their table and slip out through the door. They found themselves walking down a deserted corridor, past a number of dark, unused public rooms, until a fire exit gave them access to the hotel car park. The cold night air assaulted them brutally, without warning. Miriam actually cried out: a brief, uncontainable wail of distress. It was the shock, mainly, but also a hint of her despair at the way this longed-for evening was turning out.
They hurried round to the front of the hotel, ducked inside, then paused uncertainly in reception.
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Bill. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Bed? It’s only eight-thirty.”
“We can’t stay down here. It’s too risky.”
“What about my chicken and chips?”
Bill didn’t seem to have heard her. “What’s he doing here, anyway?” he was saying to himself. “Who are those people?”
He went to the reception desk and asked for details of the large party which had just arrived for dinner. Were they guests at the hotel? The receptionist checked her register and told him that they were members of something called the Association of British People, and they were holding a training conference and would be there for the whole weekend. Bill listened to this information impassively. He was silent for a few moments, then remembered to say thank you to the woman behind the desk. When he returned to Miriam, his face was transformed, marked by some grim new knowledge.
“What is it?” Miriam asked. “What’s the matter?”
Bill took her arm and led her towards the stairs. “The bastard’s a fascist,” he said.
Post-coitally, they lay side by side in the centre of the bed, their bodies pressed tightly together, Bill’s hairy, white, thirty-nine-year-old legs bristling against the smoothness of Miriam’s newly waxed calf and thigh. They lay like this not for the sake of intimacy, but because their double mattress sagged heavily in the middle, and gave them no choice in the matter. For preference, they would have been lying with a foot or two of space between them. They had made love effortfully, mechanically, neither of them feeling like it, but both knowing that this whole disastrous excursion would seem even more of a fiasco if they didn’t at least go through the motions. And now, while they remained physically conjoined, their thoughts had already begun to run along separate paths.
“You don’t understand what these people are about,” Bill was saying. “At least with Enoch Powell you’ve got some thought behind it, something you can argue with. Christ, even the National Front’s got an ideology. Of sorts. But these people . . . It’s just an instinct with them. It’s just hatred. Hatred and violence.”
“D’you think he saw us?” Miriam raised herself on one elbow, her thick brown hair falling across one shoulder. Bill couldn’t help but run his finger along her skin, the immaculate softness of it. “D’you think Mr. Slater saw us?”
“I don’t know, love. I just don’t know.” He laughed, contemptuously. “Did you ever see such a bunch of wimps, eh? Such a bunch of bloody runts. No wonder they have to get other people to do their dirty work for them. And as for that . . . harridan! Did you ever see anything like her?”
“What would you do, though?” Miriam persisted. “I mean, if he saw us, if he spread it all over the factory, if Irene found out about it—what would you do?”
“He didn’t see us,” said Bill. “I saw him—that’s more to the point. So now I know. Now I know who’s been spreading that stuff around. Those stupid bloody leaflets.”
“It probably doesn’t matter, anyway,” said Miriam, her voice far-off, dreamlike: until it suddenly acquired a sharper tone. “I think there’s someone who knows already.”
Bill looked up. “Eh?”
“In fact I know there is. Mr. Gibbs, from the Charity Committee.” She watched him, hoping, apparently, to see some sign of panic, or surprise. When there was none, she said: “Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Oh, I know all about Gibbs. In fact, we had words about it this afternoon.”
“Words? What sort of words?”
Bill shook his head, skirting the question. “He’s a little sod, that one. An interfering little bastard. What’s it to him, anyway? Why can’t a bloke like that mind his own business?”
“Because he’s got it in for me,” said Miriam. She lay back against the pillow, her arms folded behind her head. The pose was languid, provocative. It was somehow as if she relished the subject, took an almost sensual pleasure in it. “He hates me, you know. He hates me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.”
“What?” said Bill, shaken this time. “When was this?”
“Oh, months and months ago. He came up to me in the committee room one evening, after you’d all gone home, and he asked me out for a drink. I said, No thank you—politely, you know, in a pleasant sort of way—and he said why didn’t we skip the drink then and just go for a nice screw back at his place.” She glanced at Bill, checking to see that he was suitably agitated. “So naturally I was . . . horrified, and I told him so in no uncertain terms, and he said that I needn’t act all innocent, he knew just the kind of girl I was, he knew all about me and you, he could see it in the way we looked at each other, and then he started calling me all kinds of names like slut and whore and dirty piece of stuff, and then I told him that even if I was a whore I’d have to be paid more than a million pounds to do it with a creep like him, and then he just stared at me, stared at me for ages and ages, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so angry, I was sure he was going to belt me in the face or something—”
“I would have belted him back, if he had, I can tell you that.”
“—but instead he just walked out of the room, without saying another word, and in a way that was the most scary thing of all, that silence, that not saying anything, and ever since then, every time he sees me, I can see it in his face, the same thing, this . . . hatred. This total hatred he has for me.”
Bill raised himself, leaned over her, brought his face close to hers. He willed himself to smile, wanting to reassure her, but even as he did so, some cloud was gathering at the corner of his memory. How strange it was, how very strange, that he should have encountered both Gibbs and Slater on the same day. And going back all those months to the day before Valentine’s Day, the time Miriam had phoned him at home . . . Yes, that was the afternoon he read Gibbs’s letter, and saw Slater on the television, and
read the foul leaflet that Slater, it now seemed, must have been putting around the factory. They always seemed to crop up together, those two; as if there was some sort of connection between them. And there was something else, something else weird, something that Gibbs had said to him this afternoon. He hadn’t really taken it in at the time. “Toffs’ academy” . . . that’s right. That was how he had described King William’s. But that was the phrase Slater had used, as well, exactly a year ago, when they shared that minicab home from the restaurant. Why should they have used the same expression? And come to think of it, how did Gibbs know which school Doug went to in the first place? They must have been talking about him: that was the only explanation. And so they must know each other. They must be friends.
“Don’t worry about it, Bill,” Miriam was saying, running a hand across his stubbly cheek. “I don’t care if he’s got it in for me.”
But no, he thought, there was more to it than that. Something worse, some kind of dread came over him, when he thought about those two: something in relation to Miriam. Like a premonition . . .
He did his best to shake this feeling off, to think of his responsibilities. He’d got Miriam into this mess in the first place. It was his job to protect her.
“I’m not worried,” he said, almost managing a smile. “Not about Gibbs, at any rate. He’s history.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to have him sacked.”
Miriam’s eyes widened, and then she was smiling too; not just with pleasure but also with some amusement, it seemed, at this unexpected display of macho resolve.
“You can’t sack someone just like that,” she said. “Can you?”
“He’s a crook. He’s been filtering money from the charity account.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Yes. I’ve got the cheques back from the bank. All with forged signatures.”