‘Thank you.’
‘It’s not foolish you know.’
Luke, caught between mouthfuls and captured in the older man’s stare, had no choice but to ask.
‘What isn’t?’
‘Voting for the good of one’s children. It’s what I’ve always done.’
There is, in any conflict, a clearly signalled point of no return. As a school teacher Luke understood this intimately. But knowledge, as always, was only one half of the equation.
‘And how exactly, do you imagine, are that bunch of twats going to help Alicia? No, Nigel, please …’ Luke held his hand up to cut off Nigel’s defence. ‘I’d like to hear Robyn’s answer.’
‘It’s not a crime to disagree with you, you know,’ Robyn told him, across the bowl of roasted vegetables.
‘We’re not disagreeing. We’re discussing. I don’t know if my vote today was the right one. I find it all very confusing. So please, enlighten me.’
‘You’re being aggressive,’ she complained.
‘I’m not.’ He softened his voice but nobody was convinced. ‘I’m just interested.’
Robyn wasn’t stupid. Even at his most downcast Luke would never have claimed such a thing. She was by all common measures clever. Articulate, good with figures, sharp with abstractions, a keen reader, well-informed. And yet, there was a reason they never discussed politics; that a dust cloth was lowered over the relationship each election.
‘Well, I know you won’t like this, Luke, but I’m worried about crime. That man who was in our house last night for instance. We could have been killed.’
Betrayal. They had decided, promised, that this would not be mentioned to the parents. Not once, but three times. First, in bed, as Robyn lay crying, and turned on him, accusing him of not caring what happened to her. Again this morning, while they waited for the policeman to arrive, whom, it turned out, Robyn had been to school with, and therefore made some effort to hide his disinterest (‘and what colour was this hoodie, Sir?’ Grey, he wrote, on the small page of a notebook that would never again be referred to.) And the third time, in the car: the decision reinforced in code, to avoid Alicia’s sharp ears. Now the promises lay broken, snapped like twigs; and after the snapping, silence. Just long enough for Luke to look at Robyn, and Nigel to look at Ruth, and both of them to look at their daughter.
‘What man? What are you talking about?’
‘It was nothing,’ Luke tried. ‘When we got home last night, after dinner, we found out we’d been broken into, that’s all. Just a burglary.’
‘My God, why didn’t you call us?’
‘It was late.’
‘You knew we were still up,’ Nigel protested. ‘We’d had Alicia.’
‘Are you all right?’ Ruth searched her daughter’s eyes for signs of damage.
‘It’s no big deal…’ Luke tried again, but he was cut off.
‘What did they take?’ Nigel asked. ‘How much have you lost?’
‘Nothing really.’ Robyn shrugged, poised at the edge of the cliff, already committed to the dive. ‘We scared him off.’
‘He was still there?’
‘He ran out through the garden,’ Robyn continued. ‘He fell through the glasshouse and cut his ankle.’
‘So they got him? Good.’
‘No, he ran away, while we were waiting for the ambulance.’
Nigel’s eyes darkened with suspicion.
‘What do you mean he got away? I thought you said he was injured?’
‘I just turned my back for a second,’ Luke lied. ‘And he ran off. It can’t have been as bad as I first thought.’
‘Where was Alicia during all of this?’ Ruth asked. They should never have spoken of this.
‘She was fine. She was with me, and then Robyn took her inside. It was all quite safe.’
Nigel harrumphed: a sound which up until that point Luke had never believed existed.
‘Nigel, finish your dinner,’ Ruth told him, although her own worry was plain to see. ‘Before it gets cold.’
‘I’m still having trouble picturing this,’ Nigel continued, his eyes fixed on the man who had failed in his duties. ‘When you came home, where was he exactly?’
‘Look, Dad, the details aren’t important, it’s just …’ Too late though, to mount a credible defence.
‘They’re important to me. Was he already in the garden? What, did you hear him?’
‘He was in the house. When I approached him …’
‘You approached him?’ The emphasis landing heavily on the ‘you’, the tone incredulous.
‘I had Alicia,’ Luke explained. ‘I told her not to, but you know …’
‘No, I most certainly do not know. You let a woman, a pregnant woman …’
‘I told her not to.’
‘Oh, yes, well done that man. And then what? He came out and you let him get away?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, I’m sorry Luke, but this is my family too, and I have to say, well I just have to say I’m disappointed.’
‘The food Nigel. It will spoil.’
‘Disappointed.’
Had it ended there it would have been bad, but Nigel was in no mood for ending things.
‘This is the problem you see.’ He stabbed at the world as he spoke, making small angry holes in its fabric with his fork. ‘The problem is we’re animals. All of us. Our humanity is a construction, that’s the word they use isn’t it, but beneath that we are animals. You teach biology Luke, you should understand this. Have you read Richard Dawkins?’
He paused only long enough for Luke to nod.
‘Well, you’ll know what I’m talking about then. When I was at school, if we stepped out of line, they belted us. School had a purpose. It was a place of learning. And if we didn’t want to learn, then we kept our mouths shut and didn’t interfere with the learning of others. And if we did, we were belted. That’s what you do, with animals. You train them. And that’s what’s gone wrong today. We’ve forgotten we are animals. We treat the young ones like they don’t need training. We believe they will find their own way. And what way do they find? Drugs, crime, pregnancy. He will have been after money for drugs, your intruder, you mark my words. It starts in the home, of course, I’m not just blaming the schools, but if the homes won’t do it, then somebody else has to. That’s what your wife was trying to explain to you, Luke. That’s why she voted the way she did. It’s for the children. It’s with the understanding that in the end we live in the kind of society we choose to live in. Accepting the responsibility for training. Acknowledging that in the end we are animals. You have to be cruel to be kind, Luke. That’s what we’re forgetting.’
Nigel scanned the room and then, satisfied with a point well made, let his eyes turn to the meal before him. Luke knew that if he looked at Robyn, she would mouth ‘no’. He did not look. What little pride he had brought to the house had long since spilled out onto the carpet. The absence gave him a feeling of lightness.
‘You’re talking bollocks, Nigel.’
‘Am I just?’ The old head rose to the challenge.
‘Luke!’
‘No, I’m sorry, but I don’t see why I should sit here and be lectured at in the name of politeness.’
‘It’s their house,’ Robyn tried, her voice low, strained through her bottom teeth.
‘No, if he has something to say, let him say it,’ Nigel challenged. ‘Why is what I’m saying “bollocks?”’
‘Anyone can say we’re animals.’ Luke tried not to let his voice rise to match Nigel’s. ‘That’s obvious. It’s banal. The interesting question is what sort of animals are we? Do we respond best to encouragement and opportunity, or to being beaten about with a large stick? You’re not arguing we’re animals. You’re arguing we’re dumb animals. And that’s not an argument; it’s an expression of prejudice.’
‘I am most certainly not prejudiced,’ Nigel snorted. ‘That’s a cheap shot and I take offence at it.’
&
nbsp; ‘Nigel, you’re the most prejudiced person I’ve ever met.’
It just came out. Later, looking back, that was the only way Luke was able to describe it. It erupted without warning or apology: the snarl of a cat, the bark of a dog, the screech of a wheeling gull. And Nigel barked back, as Nigels will.
‘You’re a far bigger snob than I will ever be, Luke Krane. From the moment I first set eyes on you, I knew you didn’t like us. The polite thing would have been to at least pretend. It’s what civilised people do.’
Robyn was crying. Alicia reached up and took her mother’s hand. It was too late for sorry.
‘I think we should be going,’ Robyn said. ‘It’s … we’ve just had … we barely slept last night.’ One last little lie. The polite thing to do.
RAIN WAS WORTH a percentage point to National. So claimed the man with the weasel voice, fighting through the static of the car radio.
‘They wish,’ Richard growled.
‘There’s a park!’ Elizabeth called.
‘Where?’ Richard braked and the car behind him tooted. Richard wound down his window and displayed a single digit. Another toot, longer and more aggressive.
‘Richard!’
Richard looked in his rear vision mirror and saw the angry face, slurred through two watery windows. It was wrong, to take such pleasure in such things, and therein most of the pleasure lay.
‘Where’s this park?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just drive on.’
‘Then we’ll have to walk back.’
More tooting.
‘ACT voter. You get out here, I’ll find a park and meet you inside.’
Richard still remembered his first election. His father accompanied him to the polls. In his memory the day was stiff with formality, but then, so were most things. Hats were worn, families travelled together, walking slowly through the town, giving the whole day over to this Important Task. Now people allotted four minutes, and tooted at any stranger who threatened to make it five.
Richard’s mother always voted separately because, she claimed, she needed to get her own mother to the polls, and they wouldn’t want to be bothered with all that waiting around. But the real reason was that she found it easier to vote against her husband if he wasn’t in the same building, if she couldn’t feel him watching over. But God is watching, he would have told her, and in Richard’s father’s house, God was most certainly not a Tory.
Richard’s father was a tall man, a slow-moving farmer whose heart was in the town. He had fallen into the country life after the war; received the land by ballot, and felt obliged to stick at it. He was quite likely the only farmer in the district who voted Labour, and that was all the reason he needed.
His father accompanied Richard all the way to the election official that first time, and instructed him through the process, as if he were a child.
‘I’m all right,’ Richard remembered telling him (had he?) ‘I can do this by myself.’
‘Just remember, what you decide here will affect all of us,’ his father replied, before backing off, but only a little; staying close enough, Richard knew, to peer over his shoulder. And Richard still remembered the sense of moment, of occasion, as he amplified his father’s vote.
His father didn’t live long enough to learn the truth of modern democracy. That was Richard’s one great consolation; his father was four years buried by the time of his son’s greatest failure. It was only out of deference to the past that Richard even bothered showing at the polling booth. It made him sick to the stomach now. That’s why he always insisted on driving to a place like this, out of the way, where nobody would recognise him. The rain was good. The rain would mask his sweating.
They came from all directions, hunched against the weather, pulled towards the doorway of the small school hall by prejudice and a sense of obligation, to make their secret mark, to ‘teach the bitch a lesson’.
There was a queue. Eight, nine people ahead of him. Richard tried to guess how they would vote. National for the gentleman at the front, heavy on his walking stick as he shuffled forward, his tweed hat dipped above shaggy eyebrows. His last vote? His daughter (perhaps) behind him, wide and solid, ready to catch him when finally he fell. Labour for her, a secret she did not share. A small act of rebellion. In front of them a family speaking a language Richard could not place. Two brothers, one wife, her dark skin stretched tight over strong bones, her eyes brown and bottomless. She saw him staring. He looked away, embarrassed. How would she vote? He had no idea. He did not know her. The country was growing strange to him. Fair enough he supposed. Where was it ever written he should not be the stranger? The queue wasn’t moving. Up ahead something was happening. Richard stepped to his left, for a better view. A young girl, too young surely to be voting, stared sulkily at the scrutineer through careless strands of long black hair.
‘You are aware it is a serious crime under the Elections Act to impersonate …’
‘I’m not impersonating anyone. That’s me.’
She pointed again. Stubborn. The scrutineer did not believe her, but the queue was growing longer. The seated woman sighed and took her pen, ruling a neat line through the name before handing the girl her papers.
‘To the cubicle behind you. Read the instructions carefully, although I assume you …’
‘It’s my first fucking time isn’t it?’ the girl fumed. Green?
The cardboard cubicle was an absurdity. Orange and white, as lurid and insubstantial as a promotional display for chocolate. Dignity the price of privacy, just as it was the cost of democracy. Richard paused, as he always did, running his eyes down the local candidates. He had attended the meetings, sat at the back and watched their faces. He was proud of this, stubbornly so. Yes, he understood it no longer mattered. There was the business of the other tick, the party vote whereby the government would receive its mandate. He had even heard, and readily believed, that the party organisation supported weak local candidates, backing them to lose. All the better to get more of their listed cronies into the game. But it had to matter somehow, surely. Wasn’t his knowledge that Sandra Doak – real estate agent and aspiring politician – was unable to outline the details of the tax regime upon which her party was contesting this election, somehow important? To Richard that betrayed a certain laziness, a lack of commitment. Or take Nigel Lattimer, third on the list by dint of the alphabet, good solid citizen, but a man who had never had the courage to stand up to his wife (who left him eventually, because she could), or to his teenage daughter, who stayed loyal for the money, at least until her university days were done with. What chance of him standing up to represent the local interests when Labour Incorporated instructed him to sit on his hands and breathe quietly through his nose?
‘So, who are you voting for then?’ She was a pretty girl, he saw, now that she turned his way, her cheeky face an echo of someone he had once wanted, back when the things he wanted were simpler. It was their eyes that always got you. Women. Them and us. Just the way he’d been brought up, Elizabeth insisted, but Richard doubted that now. The girl wore a small top that clung to her; flattened, subdued her, but the struggle would not end here. The tops of her breasts were plainly visible, smooth with youth, wet from rain. It was impossible not to imagine a finger running across them. Age hadn’t changed that. Them and us. Her eyes. Dark and almost crossing, as she attempted to peer into his cubicle, to see where his votes were going.
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to discuss it,’ Richard told her.
‘Oh.’ She pulled back, not admonished, just disappointed. He looked again at the ballot paper, aware that he was acting, attempting to model the gravitas that this tawdry ritual no longer inspired. She was still watching him, waiting for him to speak again.
‘Your first time?’ he asked.
‘Go on, give us a clue.’
‘Labour,’ Richard muttered. ‘And Vercoe.’
‘Right, thanks.’
Her smile was made beautiful by nostalgia, like t
he photos he had kept from his first time in Europe, summer by the Rhône. Had it ever been that good? He remembered it that way, and it made moving away bearable. They placed their ticks together. Labour, Vercoe. Two for the price of one.
THE MEETING WAS held in a café/bar cum conference centre. Nothing was anything in the city any more. Libraries hosted technology hubs, schools boasted academies, movie theatres dressed up as wine bars, gyms morphed into health centres. One big postmodern multimedia fusion of self-consciousness and ambition. And it bored Simon to tears.
He was the only person waiting. Behind the bar a women busied herself polishing glasses; she was heavily made-up, her hair dyed jet-black, her eyes a loaded smile. A man called Jonathon had emerged down a wooden stairway five minutes ago, to shake Simon’s hand, and tell him they were running a little behind, but he was ‘next cab off the rank’, quotation marks supplied. Simon ordered a beer, and tried to swallow down his nervousness.
Amanda had done all she could to allay his fears that morning. She’d sat him down and asked him all the questions she imagined the people in charge of the Film Commission’s development fund were likely to ask. And she’d assured him his answers were perfect, compelling, irresistible. Lying was not her strong point. She had no idea what a good answer was supposed to sound like. Nor did he. It was like being back at school, wondering how it was everybody else seemed to know exactly what to expect in the upcoming exam. Conversations had occurred out of his earshot, hints had been dropped, crucial spells had been slept through.
Simon wasn’t connected, that was the problem, had always been his problem. He had seen other people do it. He understood the process. Fundamentally it involved dishonesty. The active listener feigning interest, the self-important bullshit artist, making a ladder of impossible promises. Simon was a poor deceiver. He had the unfortunate habit of drifting free from his lie, losing interest in it: the same characteristic that made him such an excellent dreamer. In film, deception was everything. They, other would-be-writers, lived to deceive. The only story they were interested in telling was the one about the up and comer who had a story to tell. To make it, to be seen, that was all. Attention must be paid. Simon had memorised that line, for an English exam, but the question had never come up. He was doing this for Amanda. She had such faith in him. He owed it to her, to let her down gently.
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