Birthday

by Alan Sillitoe

  At the foot of the hill a mother, father, and three children on their rainbow coloured bikes went between the greenswards like a shoal of tropical fish. Through the brick archway a young woman in the stable was grooming a horse. She swabbed the snot off its nose with a grey rag that looked as if it had done the same service for a posse of others, a tail of ginger hair shifting to and fro down her back. The placid animal royally accepted her care, but she was accustomed to people noting her activity. ‘You look after the horse well.’

  She turned, but kept a hand on the animal’s mouth, her pale worried face not losing its concern for the horse. ‘I’ve got to, haven’t I?’

  He imagined the shape under her clothes. A funny old chap, she must have thought, though personable young women sometimes fell in love with older men, who would surely be daft if they questioned what sinister undercurrents led them to it. It wasn’t the women he fell in love with ten times a day who would improve his existence but the one he laid siege to on deciding to make her his girlfriend, which had now and again succeeded. When one is dying in a desert of your own making, and finally gets to water, thirst kills whatever microbes are hidden in it.

  His usual quick walk took him by the industrial museum and out to the large area of grass descending from the rear of the Hall. Heading towards the lake, he thought maybe he would call on his first wife when he got back to London, to see if he could persuade her to live with him again. He would surprise her by being suave, humorous, kindly and understanding, a much reformed man in fact, telling so many amusing anecdotes (he would write a list, and rehearse them) about what had happened to him since their divorce, that she would have no opportunity to bring out the big guns of sarcastic disbelief. He would take an armful of flowers, escort her to a good restaurant (with anti-salmonella pills in his pocket) and if he got as far as being invited back to her flat, he would praise her exquisite cooking (it had always been god-awful, when she bothered to cook at all), offer to wash the dishes, and maybe dry them, and even put them away, as well as sweep the kitchen. He would say how much he loved her, that he couldn’t live without her (as indeed, how could any man? he would add) and admit that all the troubles of their previous marriage had been due to him (they hadn’t, by any means) and would never be repeated.

  Which would be absolutely the wrong way to go about it, supposing he cared to try, which he didn’t. She knew him too well to trust him, and if he did win her again the same fiasco would soon enough come around, and for such a smash up to happen twice would wreck her peace forever. So he wouldn’t do it, malice and injustice no part of him, fantasies only grain for the mill of his trade, having long since learned where imagination ended and actual life began.

  Such speculation took him to where a chill wind rippled the water, two swans sliding towards the bushes, more as if thinking to find cover than have a quick fuck. Ruts being filled by yesterday’s rain, he gave way to a passing woman, and took in what he could without seeming to stare, hoping his manoeuvre to leave her the drier part of the path was plain.

  Her head was angled towards the ground, but not so much that he couldn’t see a sign of tightness around the mouth, perhaps due to anxiety as much as age, for she couldn’t have been much more than forty. She might have stepped from an Edwardian album, being handsome though not classically beautiful, mysterious because interesting and independent, coat blown by a renewing breeze to show a high necked pale brown blouse with a broad tie of narrow darker brown bands hanging between the folds of her small bosom, giving the neat aspect of a north American with dark Colette styled hair.

  In the photoflash of a moment, he would have said something was missing in a life which ought to have been exciting but wasn’t, though formerly an event he couldn’t guess at had provided sufficient memories for her to be alone, while beginning to wonder on her solitary walk around the lake if it might be good to mix with anyone interesting again, her lips showing a subtle mark of enquiry and discontent.

  Any intriguing woman passed on the street sent a wave of desire through him, always had, as if he’d only to see their face during an orgasm and discover the greatest love of his life. But the lady by the lake could have no part of him. Her passing merely enlivened the morning, for which he was grateful, and sorry he couldn’t tell her so. Such faces filled his mind with possibilities, yet one of the first women met that way had been Jenny, on coming out of the factory arm in arm with a friend, smiling as if she could only be at ease with other women.

  Perhaps all his clandestine scrutinies were an attempt to retrieve her image from the time they were in love, before she got pregnant by a man who wanted neither her nor the child, and before her marriage to George who later required almost more than anyone had to give.

  Looking along the shore from the sluice gate at the top end of the water recalled scenery from The Woman in White, but the Hall beyond was a monument of civilization resplendent against slowly shifting clouds. You live in order to create memories, an incident from the past swamping in, whether pleasant or not, and you relish the free show with all its resonances, because when you’re dead there’ll be no more. If he had turned into smithereens on the motorway back to London every memory would have been fighting for space in the final second, before the exhibition hall of his mind was blacked out forever, the psychic pile up of all time, a reflection that only increased his feeling for life.

  SIX

  Arthur, driving as carefully as all get-out over Basford Crossing, thought that Brian had never come up for a gasp of real air since leaving home, because working for television cut him off from ordinary life. He spends his time scribbling, sticks to his work but admits it’s an easy life, having enough in his loaf to earn money by writing scripts, which I never thought anybody in our family would do. Derek (who’s probably at the pub already) slid out of hard sweat as well, only me to carry the can, except I jacked work in when the firm went bust and I was supposed to be too old to go on. Grandad shoed ponies down the pit till he was seventy, but I was glad to let others have a turn.

  A lot of factories were closing at the time, the government glad to see them go, everybody chucked on the scrapheap and more like slaves than when they’d got places to work in. Now there’s a Labour government but they’re no better than the Tories because they don’t care about ordinary people either.

  What I can’t understand though is why I’ve got such a bone idle bastard like Harold for a son. If I say anything about him wearing a ponytail and an earring, when he calls to cadge some money, he looks as if there’s a bomb ticking inside him ready to explode, though I’d give him more than a run for his money if he made a move.

  Now and again he spins a yarn that he’s got a job, and likes it because it’s such interesting work, says he’s friendly with everybody and wants to stick it for the rest of his life, it’s just what he’s always wanted, and what a shame he didn’t find it years ago. He sits there like a useless wanker, telling me how he works so hard the firm can’t do without him, that he’s so well in with the gaffer he’s on the way to marrying his daughter and being made a foreman, and when he is he’ll take out a mortgage on a bungalow and they’ll have a few kids, and go for their holidays to Skegness or the New Forest.

  A pack of fucking lies because I know he’s only taking the piss, which makes me want to punch him in the chops and tell him to wrap it up or he’ll get another, but for some reason I can’t, want to see how far he’ll go, and then it’s as I expect because a week later the job, if he had one, is no longer a novelty, or he gets a black look from the foreman and tells him to stuff the job where a monkey shoves its nuts. Then he comes to us and asks to borrow twenty quid, like he did last month.

  ‘I’m stony broke. I ain’t even got the price of a pint.’

  ‘You should have thought of that before you chucked your job.’

  ‘I didn’t chuck it. I was kicked out.’

  ‘Everybody gets kicked out if they tell the foreman to fuck off.’

  ‘How did you
know I said that?’

  How? It was just what he’d wanted to say a hundred times a day when he’d worked in the factory, but hadn’t because he’d got to earn a living, and needed his fourteen pounds for ale and women at the weekend. ‘It’s what everybody wants to say who’s at work, and you were daft enough to say it.’

  ‘He asked for it.’

  ‘They all do. But you don’t say it.’

  ‘The fuckface was picking on me. He had it in for me right from the start, but I stuck it as long as I could. Anyway, it’s too late now. All I want is twenty quid for a packet o’ fags and a pint. It’s Saturday night, and I’m flat broke.’

  ‘Where do you think I’ve got twenty quid? Well, I did print a batch this morning, but I’m waiting for the ink to dry, though I don’t think you’ll be able to pass ’em over the counter because like a prat I put the Queen’s head on upside down.’

  ‘Very funny.’ The smile didn’t do much for his face, as he stretched his legs to their fullest extent. ‘What a fucking country. It must be the deadest place in the world. I wish I’d got a lot more than twenty quid, and if I had do you know what I’d do with it?’

  Arthur was too fed up to guess, unless to suggest a one way ticket to a less boring country on the other side of the world, where he could stay for good. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I’d buy as much dynamite as I could get my hands on and blow up the Houses of Parliament. Blow all them government fuckpigs to bits. They just fuck everything up, the bone idle lot.’

  Arthur wondered what he had done to deserve such a son, whom he’d taken fishing up the canal as a child on the crossbar of his bike, nothing Harold liked better when he had his own little rod and line. He would drive him to all the choice spots in the county, from Cresswell Crags to Hickling Pastures, proud that by eight he could read a map and navigate. At the first mention of hunger he stopped at the nearest café for cakes and a bottle of pop. He bought him an air rifle, books about cars and aeroplanes, even an electric guitar, but on splitting up with Doreen he had lost sight of him for ten years.

  ‘Anyway, why the fuck should I work? What’s in it for me? You slog your bollocks off day after boring day, and get a miserable few quid at the end of the week. So what? It ain’t worth it. In any case there’s plenty of other mugs to do the work, so I can’t feel guilty.’

  Something had gone wrong with Harold in his twenties, but Arthur didn’t blame himself: it would have happened whether he’d stayed with Doreen or not. True, he had spoiled him rotten, but it was heartbreaking to recall how they used to be so friendly. He had given him more than he’d ever had, which should have made him willing to work and settle down. So what had gone wrong?

  Harold’s tea was getting cold, and Arthur knew that as a young man he would have sent it down scalding and been waiting for another. He watched him break up the biscuits without eating, so he wasn’t hungry, didn’t deserve one never mind twenty pounds. He’s idle like a lot of blokes these days, who rely on giros not to go looking for work, and aren’t interested unless they’re offered a job for five hundred pounds a week, or there’s a vacancy for a pop star.

  It wasn’t easy to get work, he knew. When he left school you picked a job from scores of others, and if you didn’t like it after a week could tell the gaffer where to stick it, then get another. Not that he had. He’d stayed at the bike factory more than ten years, though often enough thought of packing it in. ‘And if you blew everybody up in Parliament things would be just the same when the dust settled.’

  Harold laughed. ‘I know, but I’d feel a lot better, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘For five minutes you would. You think it hasn’t been hard for all of us?’

  ‘On no!’ He lay full length along the sofa. ‘Please don’t start telling me how much you suffered as a kid, when you only had a donkey’s foreskin between the seven of you for Sunday dinner, and one pair of shoes in the family so’s you could only go out one at a time when it was snowing. I don’t want to get tears all over your nice new sofa. I just couldn’t bear hearing about when your dad was on the dole and knocked you about. I’ve had to listen to such fucking rubbish all my life, and I’m fed up to here with it.’

  He stabbed two fingers viciously at his throat, and Arthur regretted they hadn’t got steel points at the ends. He knew that if he didn’t give him any money he would get it from somebody, being good looking and charming when he wanted. He also had a swaggering self-confidence, as if spoiling him as a kid had actually done him some good, but at the worst of times he looked like Grandfather Merton down on his luck, though Merton would have kicked him from arsehole to breakfast time as soon as look at him.

  You didn’t know what to think. Last year he and Avril had gone down town for her birthday, thinking to have a drink in the Royal Children. From the doorway they saw Harold with two attractive women, the three of them as close as if he was planning to have one one night and the other the next, or maybe both at the same time. Harold was startled at seeing his father, in no way wanting to be disturbed, so they left him to his love talk, and had their drink in the Trip to Jerusalem.

  Harold usually had some woman to sponge off, who might be married or not, though Arthur couldn’t fault him for that. He probably didn’t need twenty quid anyway, and had only called to play his favourite game of winding the old man up. When Avril came in from the kitchen he sat up and smiled. ‘Hello, duck, I wondered when you were going to come in again and sit by my side.’

  ‘You’ve let your tea get cold,’ she said. ‘And look what you’ve done with those biscuits. You’ve crumpled them all up. That wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. I was so busy listening to dear old dad. He nearly had me sobbing my socks off again about the bad old days. I was hoping you’d come back in and save me. He’s not very glad to see me. All I want though is to say how marvellous you look today. But then, you always do.’

  ‘Listen to him! I never know how to take all those things he says.’

  ‘I’ll put my boot in your big mouth if you don’t shut your rattle.’ Arthur’s fist was twitching to be given flight. ‘Just see if I don’t.’

  The silence frightened Harold. ‘I was only trying to be sociable.’

  ‘Try somewhere else.’

  Avril, as usual, diverted them from their antipathy. ‘If you don’t stop annoying Arthur I won’t make you another cup of tea. But drink it while it’s hot. And eat those biscuits, or you’ll have me to answer to.’

  Harold went to the window. ‘I’ve been thinking things over.’

  Arthur grunted. ‘Not again.’

  ‘I have, though. I’m going to get a haircut, and take this earring off. I’ll even buy myself a proper shirt, and a suit.’

  ‘You’ll look even more handsome,’ Avril said.

  ‘I want to change my life.’ He waved off her compliment. ‘I’m fed up with being the way I am.’ When biscuits were finished, and swilled down with tea, he stood tall in stretching himself, the same way as Arthur a few minutes earlier, showing them as so physically alike that Avril added: ‘I’m sure you can change yourself if you want to.’

  ‘I will. You’ll see. It’s the boredom that’s killing me. And I’m tired of being like this. I’m just not myself, so things have got to alter. I want to stop relying on other people, as well. That’s why I want twenty quid, just to start me off.’

  She was too soft on him, and however much Arthur argued against it, it made little difference. Harold went whistling down the street. ‘Poor chap,’ she said. ‘He told me on his way back from the bathroom that he didn’t have a penny to his name, so I couldn’t see him without the price of a glass of beer.’

  Ten years ago she had been left a few thousand pounds by an aunt, and Arthur never asked how much. She kept it in a building society, and used the interest for a holiday now and again. What she gave Harold would come out of that. ‘You give in to him every time.’

  ‘Yes, but he is your son, you know.’

 
; ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘I am. I’ve never seen two people so alike, allowing for the difference of age. It amazes me every time I see the two of you together. He looks just like you when I first met you.’

  Which seemed, if anything, to please him. ‘It’s the way he carries on, but he’s a lot different to me on the inside. And the trouble with giving him money is he might spend it on drugs. That’s what frightens me.’

  ‘He won’t get much on twenty pounds. Anyway, he doesn’t need drugs to keep his spirits up. And you heard what he said about changing the way he looks. I think he means it.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ He stood, bereft for a moment, as if missing hard work at the factory. ‘I’ve always loved him, and he knows it. I just hope he don’t get on drugs.’

  ‘I can’t think he’s ever taken more than a puff or two of marijuana, if that.’

  ‘I’ve never even swallowed an aspro,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because you’re hopped up all the time.’

  He drew her close for a kiss. ‘I must have been stoned out of my mind when I first made a grab at you.’

  ‘You mean just after you backed into my front bumper at the supermarket?’

  ‘It was the only thing I could do. I saw this smashing young woman in my mirror, and got a hard on, so it made me clumsy. You didn’t half tell me off.’

  ‘You dented my lovely new car, that’s why.’

  ‘I’d never heard such language. I thought you were going to rip my eyes out.’

  ‘There was no other way to get through to you. You just stood there.’

  ‘Then I bought you a cup of coffee.’

  ‘And you kept trying to hold my hand.’

  ‘It was only to steady my nerves.’

  ‘I was glad you did. My hands were freezing, and yours were burning hot.’

  He looked at the framed photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in its frame on the wall, the famous engineer crowned by a stovepipe hat and standing against a heap of enormous chainlinks. ‘I got your bumper off next day, and took it to the factory. Hammered it as good as new. Good job I’d done some panel beating in my time. But I still like nudging into your front bumpers.’