Sixty Minutes

by Tony Salter

  SIXTY MINUTES

  Tony Salter

  Contents

  Prologue

  11:00

  11:06

  11:12

  11:18

  11:24

  11:30

  11:36

  11:42

  11:48

  11:54

  11:58

  12:00

  No Choice

  Afterwards

  For my father, Michael.

  Prologue

  The minute hand of the big clock pointed to the heavens, finally eclipsing its smaller sister.

  There was a moment of stillness. A lull before the storm. The peace at the centre of a hurricane’s eye.

  In the middle of the huge hall stood a young man, one hand deep in his pocket, his clean-shaven cheeks shadowed by the massive dinosaur skull hanging above his head.

  Less than fifty other souls were scattered about that great space, enjoying the sights of London and innocently unaware of the drama playing out in front of them.

  Most, but not all, were unaware.

  The young man’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two figures who were approaching him from either side. Their mouths were moving, but he was unable to hear any words. The swirling clamour of the battle raging inside him filled his head and swamped all other sounds.

  Time had stopped – a gesture of generosity offering him one last chance to change his mind – and, as the fear and strain took hold of him and squeezed, he started to tremble.

  11:00

  Jim

  As he warmed his fingers on the fifth cuppa of the day, Jim looked up at the big clock. Only eleven. One and a half hours until lunch and then four more hours after that. And it was still Monday.

  How had he ended up here? At his age? Going through the motions of this dull, pathetic, excuse-for-a-job. It wasn’t how the master plan was expected to pan out. He was supposed to be winding down and choosing his own working hours by now. That had always been the idea.

  Jim had always needed structure in his life. That was why he’d joined the army as soon as he was sixteen. Nothing was wishy-washy and uncertain there. You had to swallow a lot of shit, but you knew the rules and there were no surprises. The only downside had been when wife and kids appeared. It wasn’t easy to keep the family on the straight and narrow while you were away on tour for months at a time.

  But there’d been a plan for that too; Jim had known that mixing army and family would be an issue and he’d had his transition organised for years. Julie could manage to take care of the girls for the first ten years and then he would hand in his ticket. He’d have over twenty years under his belt and would be set for a decent pension even though he’d only be thirty-nine.

  The other great part of his plan was that the army transition programme would fund the first year of his taxi driver training. It was a bit of a joke really, but if someone was offering a free handout, Jim had never been backwards about stepping forward.

  He’d always wanted to be a cabbie; his uncle had driven a taxi for forty years and, as kids, Jim and his brother would often sit with an A-Z map book trying to catch out Uncle Don by giving him the names of tiny, obscure streets – little mews or cul-de-sacs which no-one would ever want to go to. They never managed to beat him. Not only did he know every street and where it was but, if they gave him two addresses, he was always ready to talk them through the route from one to the other.

  ‘… go down Formosa Street and take a left on Warrington Crescent, down to the roundabout – great pub there – slight right up Sutherland Avenue, straight over Maida Vale to Hall Road. Follow that for a couple of blocks before taking a left onto Grove End Road. Just a short stretch before you take a left onto Abbey Road and drive over the famous zebra crossing past Abbey Road studios …’

  Don was a genius and Jim could still picture himself as a kid, wide-eyed and overflowing with admiration. That would something to be proud of. Something special.

  It had been a good plan and, on the face of it, every piece had fallen into place like the delicate components of a Swiss watch, tick-tocking away in perfect balance.

  But events had conspired against him – he still didn’t quite understand how – and his perfectly constructed clockwork mechanism had started to lose time. It was only a few seconds a day at the beginning – fights with Julie, one or both kids testing his patience, traffic conspiring against him – but, year after year, it got worse. A gradual decline until that moment, two years earlier, when a sharp piece of grit found its way into the inner workings and the watch suddenly stopped.

  In retrospect, if he’d been more flexible, more aware and less self-centred, he might have found a way to keep his plans together. If he’d left the army a few years earlier, things would probably have turned out differently. Maybe so, but he was sure about one thing. He would have found a way to fix everything if it hadn’t been for that stupid, stuck-up, interfering bitch.

  Even thinking about her made his chest tighten – it was as though he was being squeezed by thick rolls of white bandage like an Egyptian mummy and his saliva was sour with shame as the panic and fear washed over him.

  He dreamt about mummies sometimes; he was still alive but two tall thin men were wrapping him up ready to put his body into one of those massive stone coffins. The bands would tighten around his chest and he would begin to struggle for air, but they didn’t stop or slow down, both bending over and working their way upwards turn by turn, carefully avoiding wrinkling the soft cotton, first smoothing it out and then pulling it tight. By the time they reached his neck and chin, the terror would be squeezing out of him like toothpaste; the next wrap would cover his mouth and nose and that would be it.

  Jim reached into his pocket and took out an orange plastic pill bottle. Julie was right. He had to find a way to let this go. Shaking two capsules into his palm, he swallowed them with a gulp of lukewarm tea. He was still panting like an overexcited puppy and he wrapped his head in one hand, thumb and little finger squeezing his temples as he hunched forward, trying to focus on keeping calm. Easy to say, but so hard to do.

  Slowly, steadily, he felt the bandages around his chest loosen, allowing him to breathe again. He took out a white cotton handkerchief to wipe the beads of clammy sweat from his forehead and imagined the strain he was putting on his body. This had to stop or it would kill him. He had to move on and draw a line in the sand.

  Hassan

  ‘Excuse me. This is my stop.’

  ‘Oi! All right, mate. No need to shove. Where’s the bloody fire, then?’ The man reached out to grab Hassan’s arm, snarling. He was tall and wearing a smart suit like a businessman or a banker, but the shine of his shaven head and his glass-blue eyes told another story.

  Hassan twisted and pulled free of the grasping fingers. ‘I’m sorry. I’m … I’m … late,’ he mumbled over his shoulder as he stepped past and down onto the platform.

  ‘They’ve got no bloody manners, have they?’ The alpha male laugh followed him down the crowded platform, stuffed with triumphant disdain. ‘Wanker! Why don’t you piss off back home? … Tosser!’

  Hassan didn’t turn around. He gripped his bag with both hands, hunched low and weaved carefully through the heaving mass of tourists and office workers until he was safely away. Guys like that were everywhere back home, and he’d learned how to survive early on. Always avoid eye contact, keep your head down and, nine times out of ten, nothing would happen. If that failed, you were stuffed – there would always be more than one of them and the only hope was that they weren’t either too drunk or too angry.

  None of the other passengers looked up; they didn’t want anything to do with trouble and he sensed a Red Sea parting around him as if to emphasise his toxicity. If Mr Natio
nal Front decided Hassan was worth getting off the train for, there wouldn’t be any help from bystanders. They probably didn’t actually wish him harm, but he was definitely to blame for their discomfort and fear – just by being there.

  He kept moving until he heard the hiss of the train doors closing accompanied by a now-distant shout of ‘Fucking Paki’. His sigh of relief merged with those of his fellow passengers in an echo of the closing doors and the parted waters flowed back together as though nothing had happened.

  It was only getting worse after the Brexit vote. Whatever eventually happened, he couldn’t believe that people had been so stupid. Everyone liked to talk the talk about Britain being an inclusive society but it hadn’t taken long for a whole raft of closet racists to show their true colours. The most depressing part of it all – from a very long list of depressing things – was that apparently his father and most of his friends had voted to leave the EU. Did they really think their lives would improve? That they would have a real voice in British democracy?

  Hassan couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he’d realised that his father was a stupid man. As a child, your father just “is”. A Godlike figure embodying size, strength and infallibility, the idea of questioning your dad was as unimaginable as believing you could fly.

  The cracks had probably first appeared during the second year of his GCSEs. His youngest brother, Omar, who’d been twelve at the time, had asked their dad to help him with his maths homework while Hassan was sitting quietly in the corner revising for his mock exams. He couldn’t help listening in and it was as though he was hearing a familiar song for the umpteenth time but, by some magical wave of a wand, he suddenly understood the meaning of the lyrics.

  The excuses, explanations and eventual grumbling exit were the same ones that he’d heard so many times, but it was only at that moment that he realised that his father didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer the questions, but was too proud to admit it.

  Once Hassan learnt to translate the language of bluster and self-deception which had played understudy to true wisdom for all of those years, he discovered example after example, both in daily life and in the secret pockets of his memory. His eyes were opened for the first time and he became alive to once-forbidden possibilities.

  Cold drops of sweat were stinging his eyes as he came out of the tube station into the bright sunlight. It was always the same after an incident like that; the fear would rush in like hand-pumped Real Ale into a pint glass - two, maybe three, great swooshes – until he was full and frothing over. Adrenaline-fuelled impulses would then scream at him to defend himself or to run … run … run …

  Experience had taught him that neither was the smart option. He’d tried fighting, but it made it worse every time; running seemed to evoke the hunting spirit of the wolf pack and was no better. The right choice – almost always – was to make yourself small, humble and weak. They got their victory, the ritual humiliation, and most of the time he could slink away unharmed.

  In his secret heart of hearts, he hoped that he left them confused, their primal urges only partially sated, and with a lingering sourness in the roofs of their mouths which wouldn’t go away. He didn’t really believe that was true, but it was all he had.

  His body would be in one piece but there was always a price to pay. He could feel it again – the effort of fighting his animal instincts had left him exhausted and as weak as he’d been pretending to be. And the shame burned him, a lifetime of insults and apologies building layer upon layer and towering over him in a constant reminder of his weakness.

  He thought about whisky.

  It had been almost two years now. He was proud of himself and grateful to God for helping him to crawl out of the abyss, but he still thought about whisky constantly. It had always been whisky for him. Most of his friends drank lager, but he’d never liked the gas and the bitter aftertaste. Ironically it was his father who’d given him his first illicit sip of peaty malt when he was seventeen, and that was it. He was enslaved.

  The rest of his family weren’t particularly devout but Hassan had still been brought up properly and had always known that alcohol was forbidden. In spite of that, and the many, many punishments, he’d never been able to help himself. His father’s hypocrisy only made it worse.

  Even now, the thought of that first mouthful made his knees shake. The smoky tang on the roof of his mouth, the awareness of money in his pocket and the anticipation of the warm comfort that he knew would fill him as he moved through the third double shot, and the fourth …

  It would be the comfort and companionship of a false friend and would never last but, for those few short hours, Hassan had always believed that it would be forever, and he missed it with empty, acid spasms.

  South Kensington was as crowded as he’d been told it would be. There was money everywhere and dozens of gorgeous women dripping with jewellery and designer clothes. Clothes which left nothing to the imagination. And the cars; any one of them would probably be worth more than his parents’ house. Insane. All links with the real world seemed broken.

  After the darkness of the tube station, the late morning sunshine reflected off the white paving stones and floated blurred black inkblots across his vision. It took him a while to focus – paving stones were never white in Bradford – as he looked at his map and tried to recover his sense of direction.

  He felt calmer. Stronger. The incident in the tube had shaken him badly, but he was safe out on the street. An alien planet, but the air was breathable. Apart from the rich people everywhere, there were hundreds of tourists from all over the world. He was just another visitor – blue jeans, bomber jacket, clean-shaven, short hair – he could have been Spanish or Italian. Just one of the crowd.

  It was a big day for him. He was finally going to the Natural History Museum. He’d wanted to come here since he was a boy and now he was only five minutes walk away.

  In his parents’ house there had only been one book apart from the Koran – a battered old picture book about dinosaurs. Hassan had worn it out with overuse, the grubby cardboard pages splitting and peeling so much that the ancient sauruses were losing limbs and heads one by one.

  One day, he’d been admiring the close-up, actual-size drawing of a Tyrannosaurus tooth, when his father had snatched the book from his hands.

  ‘It’s not right,’ he’d said to Hassan’s mother. ‘Enough. The boy’s obsessed and it’s not normal. He should get out and play cricket with the other kids.’

  And with that, his father had thrown the book into the fire. Hassan hadn’t spoken a word for three days and never forgave or forgot that casual act of cruelty.

  Shuna

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘MUM?’

  ‘WHAT?’

  Zoe flounced into the kitchen wearing some sort of spangly tank top and the shortest shorts Shuna had ever seen.

  ‘Mum, can I wear this today?’ she said, tilting her head to one side like a cartoon owl and half-closing her eyes.

  That attempt at coquettish charm might work on Zoe’s father, but Shuna wasn’t even slightly impressed.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘We’re going to the Natural History Museum, not a party. And, by the way, young lady, I doubt very much you’ll be wearing those shorts to a party either. Where did you get them? They’re outrageous.’

  The diva exit had started before Shuna finished her sentence – Zoe hadn’t been under any delusions about the response she would get. ‘I got them from Jenny,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s wearing them. I think you actually want me to look like a freak.’

  Shuna smiled at the disappearing back of her oldest and called after her. ‘If you want to have time to go to Muriel’s we have to be out of here in the next couple of minutes. Tell your sister to get a move on.’

  Her smile sagged and she let out a soft sigh. The next few years were going to be tough, and she’d been foolishly hoping for another year’s grace. There was nothing more annoy
ing than the way people always said how things today were worse than they used to be, but surely she hadn’t been that developed and precocious when she was thirteen?

  It wasn’t only the media and technology onslaught which stuck its grubby fingers into every corner of their lives. Living in a big city made a huge difference – Shuna had grown up in the country and her teenage passions and energies had been poured into looking after her horses.

  But, if her memory wasn’t playing tricks with her, everything really had been so much simpler back then. Coming from a rich family which owned a vineyard had helped, but they weren’t exactly living a pauper’s life in London, so that wasn’t it.

  While Shuna was growing up, boys had mostly remained in the background, even through high school – it was only after she’d gone to university that things changed. It was as though someone suddenly pulled back a big red velvet curtain and exposed a whole secret world which had been hidden from view. Wonderful, exciting and a little frightening, but she’d been nineteen by then and ready to deal with all the new experiences – good and bad.

  And still nothing to compare with London – Stellenbosch was only a small town, and the culture had still been very conservative in the eighties. It must be different now but, from everything she’d heard, the Afrikaans puritan streak still ran though every element of life and things hadn’t yet changed as much as most people had been expecting.

  She sipped her tea and wondered absent-mindedly if she’d ever go home again.

  Zoe’s mood was transformed as she bounced back into the kitchen, little Anna traipsing behind her like a miniature replica – same hair, same eyes, same nose, no-one could ever question that they were sisters.

  ‘Here we are, Mum,’ she said, all smiles and youthful exuberance.