by Adam Thorpe
‘Don’t be a lemon, Eamon,’ says Don.
Howard hears the laughter as he’s closing the front door, its St George’s flag streaked here and there with bird muck from the nest on the porch. Has Don noticed?
Good mates, still. He adjusts his tartan cap and matching scarf – prezz from Diane for his sixty-fifth – and watches his step on the crazy paving. Don’s massive Land Rover, cherry red, means he has to squeeze past. The garage is reserved for Sandra’s new Dodge Challenger.
Just don’t ask. That way trouble lies.
The park is either ten minutes further from the street than it used to be when he was living in this part of town, in the days when he and Donald were next-door neighbours – Sandra and his Diane nattering over the wall – or he walks a lot slower. What’s more, he’d be pushing Andrew’s pushchair or going at the speed of Lily’s four-year-old legs. No excuses. It’s a seventy-four-year-old’s puff, this one. The grey mizzle has cleared with the blustery wind, it is cold but bright, blue-sky stuff, everything sharper. It reminds him of their weekends away in Skeggy and Mablethorpe. A quick motor out to the edge. Hood up, get blown about. Fish and chips. A few snaps with his trusty Ilford Sportsman: the waves, Diane in her swimsuit, kids frolicking, reckoning he’s Lord Snowdon. Best of British, Ilford. All the Fun of the Pier. Now it’s a digital Canon with a zoom. Jap. Fake click.
He pauses at the iron gate. He hasn’t been back here since. Wally, he calls himself. He loved this place once. It was always intimate. He liked its sloping nature, an open sweep all the way down and running with the kids through the rough grass in Hobbler’s Hole. You could cross from here into West Common of course, which is probably still full of horses and more for dog-walkers and such like so you’d have plenty to slip on.
Birdwatching, courting, then the kids. Before they moved to Dunholme. ‘I want to live in a village,’ Diane said. ‘In a quiet close for the kids. I’m a farming girl.’ The piner after London! A twenty-minute commute: he should have used a pedal bike all those years. The extra quiet meant they could hear the training aircraft droning over, mostly from Wickenby. The Red Arrows at Scampton were the closest, but for some reason their racket didn’t nark her so much: sharp and quick it was. All them smoke trails playing noughts and crosses in the sky. Helicopters are the worst, but there weren’t so many back then. Blade slap, you call it. Thump thump thump. Even Lincoln’s got it bad with them these days: police, surveillance, private. London even worse. All them rich A-rabs and Russkies and whatnot. He put in double glazing but she could still hear the droning. It didn’t bother him, his ears were already buggered for that sort of pitch, but he wondered why it bothered her when she’d been brought up on it. Out in the fens, on the farm, right under Coningsby’s flight path they were. The in-laws.
The iron gate needs grease in the hinges, squeals like an alley cat. ‘Know when to stay in Jail,’ he mutters as he enters the park between the same old brick pillars, taking his mind off. The rest of the gang have stayed put, even though most of them are Londoners like him. Bow bells bong bong. Or from the south-east, anyway. He’s lost about fifteen quid, he reckons, totting it all up. Three crisp Godivas less. Monopoly money, as someone always observes.
Like them video games are not real war. Four years older than him, yet she was still a little brat when she’d seen the first-ever lot to bomb Germany heading off – Handley Page Hampdens, cramped as a suitcase, sharp taper to the wings. Long thin tail like a dragonfly’s. That’s how he knew what she’d seen passing overhead. And the noise. ‘What a fearful din they made, Howie.’ Out of Scampton, that must have been. ‘Might have done for me mum and dad,’ he said. ‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘they were trying to save your mum and dad.’
When a crippled Lancaster had come down short on the return trip, the hedgerows were ablaze. Running up to help with slopping milk-pails, she was, her father scorching his hands. And the gippos making a line, handing on the pails. Loads of gippos in them days, helping with the harvest, she said. Always had been at harvest time. Their nice wooden caravans, all painted. Their hard brown hands. And then a Wellington’s crew falling like stones one by one onto the family acreage one winter, their parachutes more flame than silk. Never talked about what she found. It was them Phantoms in peacetime, eventually. By then Diane was living with him in town. Nice change of a Sunday, to tread the muck on the farm, lift a few hundred beetroot or cut some broccoli just to give a hand, tuck into a roast after.
‘I wouldn’t mind them nuclear rockets,’ her mother remarked one day, looking up at the sky as a jet ripped over, loosening their fillings. ‘They don’t make so much as a whisper.’
It was the first sign, of Diane’s sensitivity to noise. Half of it in the mind. And her sight going. Still, he couldn’t see why, with all that water to the east, they couldn’t use that to fly over, like them Typhoons do now from Coningsby. Quick Reaction Alert. Saving the nation from intruders.
Look, sweetheart, we are under the trees. There are red apples on bare branches, unbitten by frost. Crocuses and snowdrops. In January! All that global warming nonsense. They’ll always be dreaming up something to scare you out of your wits. Floods of immigrants. The demise of the indigenous. Bye bye, England.
Well, he quite likes smoked sausage and pickled herring out of the Baltic.
Mild for the time of year, but still a chill in the old bones. Damp and misty. His cap catches on a low thorn, unpicking the tartan. Look on the positive but remember to duck. He’s got about an hour before it gets dark. There are days in January when it never gets light.
He strolls around the pond, remembering. This is going all right. Coming back, walking through them gates, no big deal. Therapy, even. You can avoid too much in life, makes a man weak. Andrew in the pushchair still and Lily scampering about. It hasn’t changed, not much, in four decades. The swans look like the same ones. How long do swans live? Should have brought the Canon, a few artistic black-and-whites.
He enjoyed living in town, he thinks. This end of Lincoln. First job, first love, first kid. First proper job, anyway. British Steel from bloody zero hour. Crankshafts for heavy goods vehicles.
‘How romantic,’ Diane said humorously, first time he met her on that bench in ’58. ‘Jet engines,’ he added. ‘We do them too. I’ve applied for a transfer.’
That was probably what bagged her in the end, him getting an in-house transfer to the jets. ‘He forges stuff for Rolls-Royce,’ she’d say to her many relatives in their muddy gumboots. Adding, ‘Avro Vulcan bombers,’ in case they’d got the wrong idea. Farmyard stink. Lincolnshire innocent, she was. Still is, mate! Eyes wider than the Wolds.
Truth is, it was all in decline. Loss-making by the time Andrew was born. Thatcher sorted them out. Spirit of bloody Grantham.
Not Lincoln, though. It was the aerospace angle. Up-to-the-minute. Thermonuclear capabilities. They still cattle-prodded him out on early retirement: too expensive, mate. As was the oil-fired boiler in Dunholme. So it was a solid brick bungalow from the 1950s, all to gas, in pretty Swinderby. A pond in the garden. Decent neighbours: snuffling old Tom Parks on one side, out in the garden rain or shine; Maureen Henderson on the other, quiet widow doting on her even quieter boy, Gavin. Would hardly have known he existed, except for the occasional blast of teenager’s music. Dreadful acne, poor sod. The occasional row audible over the fence. But who doesn’t shout at his mother now and again at that age?
And when the kitten was adopted off the farm, scrambling over her knees or swinging off the curtains by its miniature claws, Diane would say, ‘You know what, Howard? My life’s complete. Could you turn the heating down? It’s like a sauna in here. Look at what she’s up to now. Smudge! Little rascal! You, c’mere, now!’
‘You’ve never been in a sauna, poppet.’
‘No, there’s a lot I en’t done, Howie.’
Lincoln, Dunholme, Swinderby.
Bloody yo-yos, Don called them.
The ducks flap and quack and the swans glide abo
ut but there’s no one with him to squeal and point. He’d bring them here every Sunday while Diane did her bit for the Baptists. Life went so quick, and now the kids are into their second marriages and he’s one of them oldies he never thought he’d become, all woolly coats and tender skin, and Diane is in the rest home for good, over in Bassingham, nice spot by the river. Doesn’t matter where she is now – Timbuctoo, for all she knows. He tries to go over every day. Dress rehearsal, he jokes to the staff. His clothes smell of the place, that’s the trouble. Pretty nurse or two, gladdening his heart. The raven-haired Romanian one is the best, in terms of efficacy and general all-round charm and the type of bristols you can’t help privately admiring. His mates don’t want to know. There are always exceptions, they say. Stolen someone’s job, she has. Someone native. Yeah, he always thinks, with warpaint and bloody feathers, whooping. Better to keep your head down, though.
For the big summer match he came in shorts – a whopping mistake: gnarled calves, varicose veins, sandpapered knees. They should be put away, he remarked at one point, looking down at his legs which ended in red socks and sandals. Don had asked, ‘Why the socks, Howard?’ Because without them he felt vulnerable. No, because it has always been like that, sandals or no sandals. Auntie Eva’s orders all those years back. Sturdy, thick-strapped sandals for the bomb sites.
‘You’re not a street urchin,’ she’d snap. ‘Or an African.’
Didn’t tell them that, though. He can’t remember what he told them. Some bloody self-effacing jest. Another season, another life.
Terrible, being this age. You look ahead and see your life in slices. Wafer-thin slices. Work it out. Can’t be much left. Almost the whole of 2012 still to go and sounding brand new, like science fiction, but come December he’ll wonder where the year bloody well went to.
And then what?
He takes a circuit up to the bowling green on the edge of the park, walking briskly, pushing the ticker a little. Doctor’s orders. He remembers telling weeny Lily, when she asked what lay beyond the first row of houses, ‘More houses, sweetheart.’ Now there are even more: Lincoln has spread like margarine. Big smart new houses too, but probably cowboy-built just the same. Not necessarily by Polacks or Lithuanians. Good old British lazy arses. Badly finished joints, fungus on the skirting boards. Leaks. Wiring all over the place. His children are thousands of miles away now. Miami. Bloody Auckland! It might’ve been nice to have had their company more often. But they weren’t interested. No grandkids, unless they’d had them and hadn’t let on. The odd Skype, when he gets it to work. No little kiddies secreted in the background, no poster-paint masterpieces, no toys. No continuation of the blood line, so far. To think what Auntie Eva would say. ‘Oy-oy-oy, I hope your mummy and daddy aren’t looking down on us.’ Something like that.
Diane is dead to the world mentally, so she won’t be hurt if they turn out not to have let on. The newbuild in Swinderby found the cracks in her mind after a year or two. Freezing cold air under the floors, she said. Ice burns on her ankles. True, there were draughts, place thrown up in a fortnight probably, wonky handles, Persimmon just pocketing the money, but only she could feel the freezing cold nature of it. Bitter, it was. He’d started with masking tape over the draughts, then tacked bubble wrap, carpets, foam rubber up the walls. Electric blanket at night. Heating on full. Furry boots. It was coming from inside her, that was the trouble. The power of the mind, feebleness of the body.
‘You’d not feel the chill at Skeggy,’ he’d joke. ‘Blimey, we could hardly stand upright.’
Like living in a sauna, it was.
‘I’m in thermal shock, Howard. Look at my feet. Blue!’
Mind you, it was all good at first. She liked Swinderby: the bungalow, the church, the shop, an occasional Sunday roast in the Angel. Driving out between them soggy fields. He can still see her sitting by the pub’s log fire when he goes over for a pint or three.
It was the shock of finding Smudge dumped on the doorstep, that’s what did it. Claws pulled out (a pair of pliers, must have been). Eyes gone. Blood in its nose. That would’ve been enough to have turned anyone’s mind for the worse. She loved that cat. Whoever was capable of doing that to a helpless little creature deserved the same treatment, was Howard’s own view. It wasn’t the first time, they said in the pub. Oh no. Don’t think it’s aimed at you two personally. There’s a torturer of pets in the vicinity somewhere. Maybe a gang. Louts from Lincoln. One of them Polacks or Lithuanians. It was in the Echo, and the vicar touched on it in the parish magazine. All creatures great and small. At least Smudge was buried proper. The lad next door, quiet Gavin, volunteered, probably encouraged by his mum. ‘You’ve got a bad back, Mr Bucksbaum,’ he said, ‘and you’re in deep mourning.’ The most Howard had ever heard him say in one go. Dug the hole with great alacrity. Probably the first physical effort the youth had made in months. Not short, but thin as your little finger. Spots, greasy black hair like a helmet. Diane in the house, still shaking like a leaf. At least some young lads have morals.
That’s what turned her. Pure evil. Never mind what the vicar said about forgiveness in the parish rag. Show us ways to turn darkness into light.
Switch the bloomin light on, Rev.
The park’s air is fresh rather than cold, full of all those pancake-flat fields between here and the sea. Half of them put to rapeseed eventually, the horrible hi-vis crop that Diane’s brother Kevin got into before his breakdown. Diane hated it. Kevin said rape was a good break crop between the wheat and the barley, and the CAP subsidies were ‘summat to take home’. And he was the farmer now, he said, ‘and not you, nat’raly’. Truculent type. Or fratchy, as Diane called him. You’d need a bloody dictionary, sometimes. And now it’s Kevin’s cousin Nathan managing it for whatever insurance company bought the place for its shareholders, screwing the life out of it. Typical Dobson too, all cast from the same mould – except for Diane.
He burps, feeling gassy. Too many Nelsons in his belly. Give me bitter any day, but Don’s a lager man. Not a bad schmuck, when it comes to it.
You get a good view of it all from the park’s slope, he remembers, and no rapeseed in January. He walks slowly over to the right spot, but the trees have grown higher. Still, there are gaps between the bare branches. Makes him think of Diane back in their courting days. He’s glad he’s come. Why be prudent? Being prudent didn’t get him very far, did it? Fifteen quid down. It’s Don who takes the gambles, buying up everything he lands on, going for broke, piling up the properties, while Howard sticks to stations and utility companies. I’m backing Britain, as he jokes. It means he never loses much, makes modest gains. Prudent! It applies to life too. Don and his conservatory, his top-of-the-range Land Rover, his South American holidays. Just don’t ask. There are rumours. Play the wise monkey. Women too, probably. Sandra was always a looker. Knew it. Smuggling a pair of peanuts under her blouse, warm days. Good days. You could see her Alans on the clothes line from their bedroom, all lacy and black. Diane laughing.
There used to be a bench here, for the view. Or was it over there? That was how he met Diane. On a bench in Bexhill-on-Sea, end of the pier. Both far away from their respective domiciles in Lincolnshire. What were the chances of that occurring? One in a million. Could have been anyone. They might not even have got talking, but that her ice-lolly wrapper blew from out of her fingers onto his lap. The winds of fate. What was it? A Cornish Mivvi.
‘Oh, my favourite,’ he quipped, although it’d landed sticky side down on his new trousers. ‘Can I keep this to lick?’
‘I thought you were ever so saucy,’ Diane was to tell him years later.
But he hadn’t intended sauce.
Here’s the bench, a new one with a brass plaque on it. IN MEMORY OF BOB SPRINGFIELD, WHO LOVED THIS SPOT. WE MISS YOU. THE KIDS. He parks himself on it. Someone has to. Like sitting in Bob’s lap. Ghosts. Springfield as in Dusty. Diane’s favourite. Now there was a voice.
A few trees lopped for the view. Sacrificed. Which
came first, the bench or the view? The mist’s not on his lenses either, though it feels like it.
Howard sighs, feeling very much on his tod, aware that no one would dedicate a bench to him. His offspring are too far away to be bothered, and Auntie Eva long gone. Slipped on a cabbage leaf in Borough Market. Nearly thirty years back! There’s no one else, is there? He’s never looked into it. Unless the British Steel Old Codgers Club, Jet Engine Division, Lincoln, would cough up for one. Alias the Miserable Gits Society. Always at Don’s. A good all-gent schmooze, the one time in the year that Don’s trouble has to make herself scarce. Fewer of us these days. Like war veterans. Natural attrition. Before they split tonight (although he still plans to bed down in Don’s spare, once the git’s too bladdered to care what Sandra thinks), they are going to watch Liverpool versus Man City – supping on their Vera Lynns, digging into their takeaway curries, playing the experts. He is looking forward to that, and a warm glow of anticipation floods his chest.
The damp’s made it parkier, and the mist’s gathering thicker. Well, it is nearly February. Already! Time marching on, takes no hostages, faster and faster. Always too hot, the home. But not for her. Never for her. She misses him if he doesn’t go for a day or two. Those bleary blue eyes. Pulled the short straw, she did. It was all hidden. Eating away for years. They’ve not a notion what causes it. Like his glaucoma: makes him drive too near the middle of the road, apparently. One day he’ll be entirely reliant on cabs to get there. Or anywhere. Buses being hopeless. Splash out. Lean back and be driven. British Steel pension, ho ho.
He’s gone inert. What he needs is a good massage. Under the mitts of some beauty called Ludmila, he thinks, smiling to himself. No smoke without fire, but he can’t raise a spark these days. Don’s had his prostate out but still ruts like a ruddy rabbit, or so he claims. Doctor’s orders! Private too, with that robot thingie. All on Bupa. That was never part of the British Steel pension plan.