by Jon L. Breen
To the newspapers, I was no longer an ordinary working bloke; I was a “self-employed businessman”. I was no longer a brave lone father, struggling to raise his beautiful daughter; I was now a “divorcee loner,” who had raised a “wild child”. (The fact that my ex-wife had died in a motor accident shortly before our divorce had been finalised, and that I was therefore technically a widower, went unmentioned).
I was, above all, no longer that quiet, unassuming dad who bore his bereavement with solemn dignity. Now, I was that crazy do-gooder who wanted to let a murdering monster out of jail to kill again. (A black monster. The word was always there, even though it rarely appeared in print.)
One journalist—who I later discovered was all of 22 years old, fresh down from Oxford, and a niece by marriage of the proprietor—wrote an op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph, telling the world (and, incidentally, me) precisely what it was that I was doing, and why. The what was putting my “white liberal conscience” and “knee-jerk pro-ethnic bias” before the “natural love a proper father feels for his child”. And the reason I was doing this was, as far as I could make out, because that was what white liberals did.
It was all a case of “political correctness gone mad,” the writer concluded (demonstrating that what she lacked in empathy she made up for in cliché-mongering), and furthermore it was this “false prioritisation, born of middle-class guilt and enforced by the liberal theocracy,” that had led to the breakdown of family-based, Christian society. And so on: I’m sure you’re familiar with the script.
Daft, I know, but it was that word “liberal” that annoyed me most. I have never been remotely liberal; I am a socialist son of socialist parents. My daughter was a socialist. My great-grandfather was arrested seven times during the General Strike. If Lucinda Buckteeth-Jodphurs, or whatever the silly little bitch’s name was, wanted to get into a liberal-despising contest with me, she’d better be prepared for a heavy defeat. My wife, now, she was a liberal. Probably one of the reasons we split up—I don’t mean because we argued about politics, but because, being a liberal, she had no moral impediment to abandoning her husband and child to pursue self-fulfilment.
Smart comedians, bored with their usual diet of bent politicians and ugly TV celebrities, made neat little gags at my expense. They couldn’t be accused of racism, of course, because they were being ironic.
It wasn’t only the mass media that took an interest in me. Someone painted “Wog Lover” in large, ironically black letters on my garage door. Of the two attackers, I found I had more respect for the spray-painter than for the Telegraph girl. They were both saying the same thing, after all—exactly the same thing, make no mistake about that—but at least the painter didn’t try to disguise himself with the false-beard-and-moustache of education, privilege and logorrhoea.
I left the legend on the garage door, didn’t try to clean it off. I decided instead to treat it as a compliment. “Wog Lover”? Sure, why not? I do try to love my neighbour: that’s how I was brought up. It’s how my daughter was brought up.
Besides, if I’d cleaned it off, someone would only have put it back, wouldn’t they? I could have been out there with a bucket and scrubbing brush every day for the rest of my life.
There was much more in a similar vein, but it’s not worth listing. No-one actually hit me or put a bomb through my window. As for the rest—well, if you want the truth, being a national villain was considerably less irritating than being a national hero had been. At least I could get my car out of my garage without first clearing several dozen bouquets of damn lilies away from the door.
“I’m really sorry,” Teddy said one night over a beer, in my living-room. The campaign to secure an appeal hearing went on for two years—a much quicker process than it had been in the recent past, Teddy was always at pains to point out. In America they bury their mistakes, he’d say. At least Horace is still alive.
“You’re sorry for what?” I asked, though I knew what he meant.
“All this. If I’d known it was going to be so hard on you—”
“You’d have done it anyway,” I said, putting an end to the discussion. Because he would have done it anyway, and he’d have been right to do it, so what was the point of pretending otherwise?
The appeal hearing revealed the usual tragic, tawdry story of errors and evasions. It wasn’t so much a case of evidence being deliberately hidden in order to frame the innocent—more a case of facts which didn’t fit being ignored, so as not to ruin a good theory. Evidence, for instance, suggesting that there had been more than two people involved in the scuffle which led to Nadine’s death. Evidence which showed that Nadine’s death might have been caused by one strong man, or by a number of smaller, weaker people acting together.
Everyone does that, don’t they? Leaves out the bits that don’t fit. Cops do it, politicians do it, school teachers, scientists, sports commentators.
In the dock, this time, Horace told the story that he had told me when I visited him in prison.
“Nadine and me, we were friends, OK? Nothing more. I don’t care if you all believe that or not, that’s the truth. That is the truth. I’m not gay or nothing, but she already had a boyfriend. She was seeing a married man.”
That was the bit he hadn’t wanted me to hear, because of what had happened between me and Nadine’s mother. He was right: I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear evidence, in a court of law, that I had raised a daughter who was merely human, not perfect.
“The night she died, the night they killed her, she and I had a drink, and then she went to meet this fellow, John.”
Don’t call her She, I wanted to say. If you call her Nadine she still exists.
“He was supposed to be at a meeting in Birmingham, but he wasn’t, he was meeting her at a hotel in Hampstead. But when we split up after our drink, and she was going to one Tube and I was going to another, I followed her. I decided to follow her, because . . .”
During a long pause, no-one in the court tried to prompt him.
“. . . I wasn’t her boyfriend, OK? Whatever everybody thinks. I just followed her because I was—because I decided to follow her to see if, you know. Just to see. When she turned into that alley, near the Tube, I saw that I wasn’t the only one following her. There was four girls, four young women, and they were following her too. I saw them. They had this can of spray, I didn’t know what it was then, just a can of something. The main girl, the leader, she was wearing gloves. I saw what they did, and I ran up to them and I was shouting at them to stop and I tried to grab the can, but one of the girls, she raked my face with those long nails. I couldn’t see too good, there was blood all in my eyes, and I . . . I ran off to get help. To get some help, you see? For Nadine.”
That was the bit he hadn’t wanted anyone to hear. That was why he had gone to prison for a crime he hadn’t committed: to avoid telling the world that he had run from four girls.
“I don’t think they meant to kill her. I think they just meant to beat her up. But she . . . Nadine collapsed when they sprayed that stuff in her face.” Another long, uninterrupted pause. “I ran off to get help.”
A young black man—a young black male, as the news-papers always say—running through the streets of the West End, blood running down his face, shouting about murder. He couldn’t find a policeman, and no citizen was brave enough to help him. Are you surprised?
By the time he got back to the scene, Nadine was dead.
“I went home,” Horace concluded. He was asked by the Crown’s barrister and by his own why he had simply gone home, why he hadn’t stayed with the body, called the police, called an ambulance?I don’t know why they asked: surely the answer was obvious. The poor kid was ashamed.
Horace Jones did not receive a proper pardon, but he was released on a technicality. He went to live, Teddy told me, with a distant relative somewhere in the Midlands. He changed his name. He refused to sell his story to the newspapers, which means that if the reporters ever do catch up w
ith him they’ll consider it their solemn duty to rip his life to shreds. I only hope that by then he’s got a life worth ripping.
I never saw him again, except for briefly in Teddy’s office, immediately after his release, when I just had time to ask him one question.
“People saw you and Nadine arguing the evening before she died. What were you arguing about?”
He gave me that dead stare. I didn’t know if he was going to answer, until he spoke. “Football,” he said.
“Football?”
“I don’t like football. I like cricket. In cricket you get fair play.”
I’ve no idea if that was the truth. Could have been, I suppose. Funny thing is, Nadine and I used to have that same argument. I’m a cricket man, myself.
* * *
On the steps of the appeal court, a police spokesman announced that “as far as we are concerned the case remains closed”—police code for, “Of course the bastard was guilty—we wouldn’t have arrested him otherwise, would we?” But they were humiliatingly forced to abandon this position only a few days later, when one of the girls involved in the attack on Nadine broke ranks, and turned herself in at her local police station, accompanied by her family lawyer.
She hadn’t been directly involved in the violence, she said. Leading the attack had been her best friend, the wife of the man Nadine was seeing, along with the wife’s two sisters. They’d set out to teach Nadine to “keep her filthy hands off other women’s blokes” but “it had all gone horribly wrong” and she could “no longer live with the guilt.”
She was charged with a lesser offence; the other three were charged with murder. Their case is due to be heard early next year. And I, naturally, am a public hero once again. I am the courageous, loving father who fought for an innocent boy’s freedom against the forces of bigotry and ignorance. My drive is full of bouquets again. I hate it. I’m thinking of moving, changing my name, going abroad. But I’m afraid that to do so would be to surrender to cynicism, and I am determined not to do that. Cynicism is the triumph of death and futility, and I won’t willingly become its ally.
Of course, to some I am still a “Wog Lover,” and poor Horace is still a murdering savage who got away with it. A Conservative MP, hiding behind the parliamentary privilege of immunity to the laws of slander, told the House of Commons that in his opinion the police had acted correctly throughout, only to have their actions “second-guessed by subversives,” and that Horace Jones was “a guilty, guilty man with a soul as black as tar.”
To my astonished delight, the MP’s party leadership disowned him, his local activists turned against him, and his career fell into a terminal decline. So, then: there are still good people in the world. Perhaps I’m even one of them, since the campaign to free Horace began, for me, as a means of keeping Nadine’s name alive—but somewhere along the way it became something else: a desire to prove that in a world full of shrugged shoulders, it is still possible to give witness to the simple, concrete difference between right and wrong.
I try to remember that, I mine that thought for whatever comfort it contains, now that the whole business is over and done with, now that my daughter Nadine finally does not exist, and can never exist again.
James Powell
“Honeydew Wine”
Like Edward D. Hoch, Canadian-born James Powell is a rare example of a writer who has based a long career almost entirely on short fiction. Humor is his trademark, as in this story of an unusual small-business enterprise
Toward evening a van pulled into the driveway of a substantial house of tawny brick on a fringe of Toronto’s Rosedale district. On the vehicle’s side panels the words “Cozy Disposal” arched above an old-world scene of a country gate decorated with hollyhocks and delphiniums.
The driver, an elderly man with a brush-cut and sun-burned face got out pulling soft leather briefcase after him. He wore a crisp white short-sleeved shirt and a modest tie. Coming around to the passenger side he opened the door for a stoutish woman perhaps a few years younger than he was. She had henna-colored hair, a good-natured face and a flowered dress. As he stood for inspection she brushed his shoulders for dandruff making the bangles on her arm jingle. Then they turned as one and came up the walk.
The door opened before they reached it. A small woman armed with a cigarette stood there, a graying blonde in a painter’s smock. “Mr. and Mrs. Cozy?” she asked.
The man grinned. “Boy, do we get that a lot. I’m Lorne Mullins and this is Muriel my wife. ‘Cozy’ is more our business philosophy.” Then he nodded at the car in the driveway. “If you’re having visitors, Mrs. Wilmot, we can call at another time.”
The woman waved her cigarette like a magic wand and the car vanished into unimportance. “That’s ours. Leland, my husband, is painting the inside of the garage. Please come in. You people are very prompt.”
“Oh, we try,” said Muriel Mullins as they followed the woman inside. “But business keeps us hopping. Sometimes we don’t know if we’re coming or going.” Then she exclaimed. “What a wonderful house! I admire the colors!”
Mrs. Wilmot thanked her and ushered them down the hallway. “I thought we’d talk in the garden. If you’ve something to say in private never get between a man and the liquor cabinet.”
As they passed the archway into the living room, Muriel asked, “Is that a Rookwood vase? How beautiful.”
“I’m a bit of a collector,” admitted Mrs. Wilmot.
“Before Cozy Disposal Muriel here decorated show windows for Eatons,” said Mullins.
French doors led outside into the flower garden. Grouped over by a tall hedge were three wicker armchairs with corduroy pillows and a small iron table. Mrs. Wilmot offered them the chairs tucked in behind a hydrangea bush and took the seat by the ashtray.
The yarrow was tall and yellow. The daisies shone in the fading light. The lilies glowed like blood. “What a lovely garden,” said Muriel. “June is certainly our month for lightning-bugs, isn’t it just?”
Mrs. Wilmot looked vaguely at the drift of blinking creatures and spoke as if her mind was elsewhere. “We always called them fire-flies.”
“Same difference, right?” said Mullins, taking his order book and a small pocket-mirror framed in plastic attached to a key chain from his briefcase which he then propped by the chair.
His wife disagreed. “Only the males fly. The females just flash around in the grass. So the ‘fly’ part is sexist.”
Mrs. Wilmot liked that. “Lightning-bugs, it is then.”
Mullins leaned over, placed the key chain beside the ashtray and started to speak. But Mrs. Wilmot stopped him with a raised finger. Then she uttered a theatrical little sneeze.
“God bless you,” said a man’s voice from the other side of the hedge.
“Thank you, Mr. Lockridge,” Mrs. Wilmot replied, keeping her finger in the air. Then they heard the sound of her neighbor pulling himself out of a lawn chair. After several moments a screen door slammed and Mrs. Wilmot lowered her finger.
“That key chain’s our free gift to you for requesting a Cozy Disposal estimate,” said Mullins.
Mrs. Wilmot picked up the pocket-mirror and read the message on the back out loud. “Time to Call Cozy Disposal.”
“And there’s our phone number,” said Muriel. “Night or day.”
“Let me make it clear from the start, I really haven’t decided if your services will be required,” said Mrs. Wilmot. “Or what I’m going to do. That is if I do anything.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “I just decided why not look into it, the cost and everything.” She waved her hand as if clearing a path through the smoke for her words. “I’m really not comfortable talking to strangers about personal matters. But, well, the fact is my husband Leland and I haven’t been getting on too well since we sold the business and retired.”
“No need to explain,” Mullins assured her.
“Though sometimes it helps,” suggested Muriel. “After all, we’ve been there, too, Mrs.
Wilmot.”
“That’s how we got into our line of work,” added her husband. “Retirement ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Twice the spouse and half the money.”
“The stress and strain of husbands underfoot all the time,” said Muriel. “Talk about couch potatoes.”
“Talk about honeydews,” countered Mullins. “Honey, do this. Honey, do that. And both parties knowing it’s all busy work to get the other party out of the way. The boys at Henderson Motors. . . .”
“. . . . where Lorne worked as second-best mechanic for thirty years,” added Muriel proudly.
“The boys at Henderson Motors warned me about retirement,” continued Mullins, “when the voice of the honeydew is heard through the land.”
“But, bravo, Mrs. Wilmot, getting your husband to paint the inside of the garage,” said Muriel with admiration. “Where’d you ever come up with that one?”
“Actually it was his idea,” admitted Mrs. Wilmot. “Out of the blue. Strange, I guess, because I’d given up on—uh—the honeydews about six months ago when Leland turned moody and thoughtful on me. I’d catch him sitting with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand and a brow so furrowed it made your head ache. And when he saw me he’d jump like I’d fired off a gun beside his ear and pretend he wasn’t thinking at all. Or I’d come around the lilac bush and there he’d be like garden statuary. The Thinker.”
“I know that one,” beamed Mullins.
“Next thing I knew watching TV I’d catch him staring at me with these big sad puppy-dog eyes. Or I’d be reading and he’d give this wet and windy sigh and when I looked over there’d be that stare again. Or out of nowhere he’d reach over and pat my arm, ‘Thirty-one years, Eunice, old girl. Thirty-one wonderful years,’ he’d say. And I’d say, ‘What the hell’s gotten into you, Leland? Quite frankly a lot of those years weren’t all that wonderful. Besides, it’s been thirty-three, not thirty-one.’ And he’d say, ‘Whatever’ and look like he was going to cry.” She shook her head. “There’s only so much stuff like that a person can stand.”