by Alexei Sayle
The implication is that the handsome man has had a better time by staying in and watching the television. But really it’s the ugly one that you should admire, doggedly ploughing on with going Out into the world, despite it relentlessly coughing great gobs of rejection and hawking them into his face. Brave, brave, ugly, nervy little man.
Most weekends before Mercy came I stayed in and watched television.
Bateman went up to London in his van to get her stuff. There was a lot of it. Such as: an exercise bike, a dressmaker’s dummy with the face of Cliff Richard, a hundred pairs of shoes, her Piaggio (which I was looking forward to riding), two inflatable armchairs and, in his travelling basket, Adrian, a furious-looking black tom cat whose continual yowling only stopped when he was let out into the living room and went straight about attacking the moquette of my Hille couch with his claws.
It took so long to get her stuff in that it was ten o’clock by the time we’d finished, which meant that I’d missed a special two-hour episode of The Job when Kurdish terrorists took the whole station hostage and threatened to blow it up. One of the old cast members was certain to die, my money was on kindly old desk sergeant, Ron Task. I had been interested to see how the new prettier cast would work out in their first big two-hourer. I thought they had been slow to bed in: partly it was that their appearance was now so at variance with what real police looked like. They were all young and thin with full heads of hair. There were no fat old men working out their time for their pension and, strangest of all, none of the WPCs were stumpy-calfed lesbians.
Mercy would stand at the living-room window every morning and say, ‘It’s so peaceful, I can’t get over how peaceful it is, it’s so peaceful, I can’t get over it,’ then she would go next door to smoke dope with Bateman and Suki if she hadn’t gone to school, the sound of his electric guitar thumping through the walls as I sat in my office sparring with my poem.
Tuesdays and Thursdays she would go with them into Northampton to help with their stall on the market, but then all her stuff stayed behind to represent her and I could hardly get to my study for training shoes.
When she was home Mercy would often walk around the house naked except for her pants.
I went out for longer and longer walks, issuing from paths round the blind backs of villages that I had only ever seen from the lanes, bursting upon unmarked NATO radar stations and on one occasion emerging through a hawthorn hedge onto the eastbound carriageway of the M40 motorway.
With regard to headgear my strong feeling is that felt hats should solely be worn up until Royal Ascot which is held in the third week of June, after which straw is permissible, so, deep in the fields on the Friday afternoon, I was wearing grey flannel trousers, a cream cotton jacket, white cotton shirt with no tie but instead a silk paisley cravat, stout brown walking shoes from Hogg’s of Aberdeen and a fine straw panama hat when I came upon Sam stretching razor-wire fencing across an ancient drovers’ road. I hadn’t seen much of Sam lately so I was pleased to encounter him, though as a lifelong member of the Ramblers’ Association I should really have reproved him for lethally blocking off the footpath; instead I said, ‘Hello, Sam, I didn’t know this was your land.’
‘Oh aye, all around ‘ere, my land.’
‘I see.
‘Not for much longer though, sellin’ it for an ‘ousing development. Three hundred warehouse-style loft apartments for sophisticated rural singles.’
‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘but I heard on the radio the other day that the population is shrinking. Who are these places for?’
‘The government say, the housebuilders say, they need four million nu omes.
‘But who for?’
‘Ah it’s for all these people who’re living by themselves these days, they need a whole apartment to live by themselves in, to wander from room to room, naked, I expect. I ‘spect they’ve lost the knack of gettin’ on with other folk, seeing as they spend all their days at computers, talkin’ to ghosts across the other side of the world. When I was young we all lived together. Generations all together on top of each other. My old gran in the loft, my mum, my dad, brothers and sisters, cousins, lodgers, aunts fallen on hard times, uncles that took a shock and took to their beds never to get up till they died. It were fuckin’ horrible.’
A look crossed his face. ‘Must be like your house these days with all the comm’ and goin’.’
‘I suppose so.
‘No, we don’t see you so much now. An’ how’s that poem of yours that you was tellin’ us about comm’ on?’
‘I can’t seem to get on with it ..
‘No well, I expect you’re having too much fun, with your new friends.’
‘Is that what it is?’
‘I would have thought you’d need to get a move on, though, don’t you? I mean how long have you got left?’
‘In what sense?’
‘In your life sense, might only be a year or two after all, what are you?’
‘Seventy-two.’
‘What’s the average, seventy-six, is it? Then there’s all the stuff that happens, strokes, cancer, even if you survive beyond that, your mind goes, a year or two and I imagine your powers will be waning considerable. There’s not a minute to be lost when you think about it, is there? Time must be running through your fingers like sand. There’s not a minute, not a second to be wasted.’
When I got back to my house, out of breath from trying to run some of the way across ploughed fields, my mudsplattered flannels torn from my having unsuccessfully attempted to vault a stile, there was a van parked on my drive, on its side was written ‘Barry Rush, Certified Gas Heating Engineer’.
Mercy was in the kitchen looking tense, trying to grill some toast. She said, ‘Hillary, my dad’s here.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘so I see.’
I went into the living room. Sitting on my couch was a youthful-looking man: it was hard to believe he was Mercy’s father. The young image was compounded by his clothes, he wore a coat from Dexter Wong, black leather Prada trousers and the new Nike cross trainers, his hair was shaved to mask his baldness and his arms were muscled and buffed from gym training. Sitting next to him was a girl of perhaps twenty-five, her clothes were more ordinary, torn Gap jeans and a pale blue T-shirt, her small breasts clearly defined, dark blonde hair in dreadlocks and a ring through the centre of her bottom lip.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m Hillary Wheat.’ They stood and shook my hand.
‘Barry Rush.’
‘Melon Gabriel.’
‘Please do sit down, is Mercy looking after you?’
‘Yeah, she’s getting us coffee and stuff,’ said her father.
‘Lovely little house you have here,’ said Melon. While Barry spoke in working-class Scottish, her accent had been forged in a barrio bounded by Knightsbridge to the north and Sloane Street to the west, Eaton Square to the south and Grosvenor Place to the east. ‘My brother Rollo has a place over towards Daventry. Fawkley Hall — do you know it?’
‘I’ve been round it.’
‘The Van Dykes are particularly fine, aren’t they?’
‘Indeed. So are you here to stay for the weekend?’
‘Naww. Me and Melon are attending a weekend pony club that’s being held at a stately home over Byfield way. Starts tomorrow morning, so I thought we’d get here early and spend the night with my darling daughter.’
‘Well, yes, of course. You can sleep in the erm .
‘The spare room,’ said Mercy coming in with a tray piled with coffee and burnt toast.
‘Yes, the spare room … You know it’s shaming but I don’t know as much as I should about these country pursuits. Is a pony club some type of point to point?’
Barry and Melon sniggered. Melon took it upon herself to explain in a voice vibrating with a kind of self-regarding excitement. ‘No, Hillary, what happens at a pony club is that all the women there dress up in special leather costumes, bustiers, high-heeled boots and so on, plumed headdresses like you
see on horses at funerals, we all have nice swishy tails, the other end of which, of course, are butt plugs, big rubber dicks, which are stuck up our arses. Then we’re leashed to little pony carts and we pull the men around in them. And the men whip us when we don’t go fast enough, somebody might get branded and such and such.’
‘I see.’
Barry chipped in, ‘It’s fantastic and we’ve made so many friends of like-minded individuals at these weekends. As soon as it’s over we can’t wait to get home so we can all get on the e-mail, chatting to each other.’
‘Toast?’ said Mercy, setting the tray down with a crash.
After coffee we showed them up to the spare room. At some point Mercy seemed to have moved all of her substantial amounts of possessions into my bedroom, her underwear and her stuffed toys and her punchbag and her weights. She followed me in there after we’d shown Barry and Melon the bathroom and they’d gone in there together, carrying a coiled length of rubber tubing and locking the door behind them.
Mercy sat on my bed. She said, ‘I’m sorry about putting my things in your bedroom, I don’t know… I didn’t want my dad to think I was sleeping in the spare room.
‘Why not? You are sleeping in the spare room.
‘I know but I didn’t want him to think I was.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t give me a hard time please, Hillary. Just don’t, alright?’
‘I’m sorry, Mercy.’
‘That’s OK.’
That evening we all went for a meal in the village pub, the pub which had been called the Royal Oak for three hundred years, which had been called The People’s Princess for three years, and which the landlady had now changed to The Stephen Lawrence. Barry, Melon, Suki, Bateman, Mercy and me. Last orders weren’t called until sometime close to 2 a.m. Afterwards we all filed through the pesticide-scented night air back to the house and squeezed into the little front room to carry on drinking with an assortment of portable stuff brought from the pub.
Because I was drunk I tried to tell them the truth about the countryside, how it wasn’t what it appeared to be, but somehow the conversation wriggled like an eel and swerved onto appearances in general. Bateman said that despite overwhelming appearances to the contrary he was in reality a really anxious person. He said, ‘Oh yeah, I suffer real bad from my nerves. Like I’ve got this terrible nervous alopecia, except its only on parts of my body where I don’t have any hair, like my knees.’
Mercy said, ‘Yeah, nature’s cruel, isn’t it? I mean you’re all upset about something and then on top of that all your hair falls out! So then you feel even worse. I mean wouldn’t it be nice if, say, you were a baldy bloke and you were feeling really fed up and instead of all the rest of your hair falling out, it grew instead? So like even though you were feeling depressed at least you’d have a nice new head of hair?’
Bateman said, ‘Yeah or if you were a woman and you were feeling anxious about your life, about not having a boyfriend or something but instead of getting agoraphobia or becoming an alcoholic, you grew a really nice big pair of tits. I mean that would be more fair, wouldn’t it?’
‘And you’d probably get a boyfriend because of your tits,’ said Melon.
‘Maybe there’s some sort of reason for alopecia and agoraphobia and that, maybe some sort of balance in nature.’
‘But that’s what I was trying to say before: nature’s a mess up, isn’t it? Look outside — that’s not nature, it’s a factory, a green factory. It’s not meant to be like this…’
Barry Rush who had been quiet for some time said to me, ‘You got kids, Hillary?’
‘Noo I’m afraid not, I never .
‘You never stop worrying about them, know what I mean?’
‘I think I…’
‘Yes, I was really worried about my daughter, my Mercy. I mean she hadn’t had a good seeing to for God knows how long, then a quiet old fellow like Hillary moves in on her. Not the conventional boyfriend I imagined for her but I’m not one to talk.’
I didn’t know what to say to this so I simply simpered and uttered a noise something like ‘nnggnmam’.
Barry went on, ‘So what’s she like? You know, as a fuck? I’ve always wondered. What dad doesn’t? Is she passionate, like her dad? Is she good at sucking you off? She’s got that big wide mouth, I’d think she would be. Do her tits feel as good as they look?’
I stood up. I said, ‘Sir, I count myself as a good host but I will not have anyone, especially her father, talking about Mercy like that. I’ll thank you to leave now.
Barry stared up at me, looking confused.
‘If you don’t leave I’m sure Bateman would be happy to assist you.
‘Will I fuck, Hillary,’ said Bateman.
‘Don’t be a twat, Hillary,’ said Suki.
I looked in appeal from them to Mercy. Surely she would support me. She stared me straight in the eyes and said, ‘Take a chill pill, man. What’s the matter with you?’
As I left the room I heard Barry say to the others, ‘I never fucked her, did I? Even though God knows plenty of fathers do.’
There was a general murmur of approval at his restraint.
I lay on the bed. ‘I suppose I’m a stupid old man,’ I said to Mercy who was standing in the doorway. Downstairs I could hear the party still going on. She came in and sat down next to me.
‘Hillary, don’t talk about yourself like that. You’re a lovely man. It’s my dad, I can’t stand up to him. I know I should but I can’t. I know you were only trying to be honourable and I love you for it. How come, though it’s my dad who’s the awful shit, it’s me who somehow feels guilty?’
‘Well I’m not sure, but I think it’s a parent thing, Mercy. I think that he’s holding the child that you were hostage, and you’ll be paying her ransom for the rest of your life.’
‘I see. Thank you.
‘Don’t mention it. You wanted to know.’
And yes, like her dad said, her wide mouth was good for that thing and her breasts were as he imagined them to be. I know a poet should do better than this but it was like riding a horse again after many years, the movements, the postures unaccustomed, yet familiar, mounting her, sliding into her, the sweating twisting body, except now there was a consciousness, a part of me that wasn’t subsumed in the act, a part that worried about falling off. Like riding a horse again after years and the traffic had got faster and more frightening.
The next day Mercy’s father and his girlfriend had gone by the time we got up and she went back to sleeping in her own room. She said to me, ‘I don’t want us to be a couple, not yet. I want us to be friends who sometimes do stuff. Do you know what I mean? That’s much more original, isn’t it?’ It was certainly much more frustrating as far as I was concerned since I never knew when she would choose to activate her franchise and I didn’t seem to have much of a voice in the matter. Needless to say, this not knowing did not help my poem to progress. Plus my days seemed to be full of housework and cooking. My evenings were no longer as empty as they had been either, since I’d been recruited into the pub table-skittles team. This strange game, peculiar to Northamptonshire, was exclusively the province of the village proletariat:
Cedric Gull the owner of the local garage, Len Babb who worked on one of Sam’s farms, that sort of person. Twice a week I would be taken to skittle games in Cedric’s 1969 Rover Coupe, enveloped in the smell of cracked leather and lead replacement petrol. Mostly we would talk about Mercy or rather I would answer questions about Mercy for this fifty-year-old father of five as we rocked along the country lanes, Cedric working the big bakelite steering wheel like a ship’s tiller.
There were several pub-skittles leagues: Byfield, Gayton and Town which was Northampton itself, there were fourteen teams in the Byfield League including Lyttleton Strachey. Each team has nine players. As to the game itself, there are nine pins arranged in a square on a table in three rows of three. Each player has three cheeses and has three throws of the che
ese at the skittles. A cheese is a piece of wood shaped like a small cheese and painted cheese colour. Each player has five legs for his turn to knock down as many pins as possible. There were various strange terms for the success you could achieve: a flora is when all the pins are demolished with one cheese, a stack is when all the pins are demolished with two cheeses and so on and so forth. Though my recruitment onto the team denoted some raising of my status in the village I had not risen too high as there had always been a problem getting new members: a lot of the newer inhabitants of the Northamptonshire villages had difficulty in seeing the point of throwing cheese-shaped bits of wood at skittles in the evening after a hard day spent designing new forms of poison gas or new methods of torturing animals.
It was summer by the time he came again.
One morning I was sitting in my study, the poem inert on my desk. Bateman had just shouted up the stairs that we were out of milk and I needed to ride to the nearest garage to get some, he said; I should also buy Suki some Tampax while I was there. Then the phone rang, and before I spoke a man said, ‘Hello, Hillary.’
‘Yes?’ I replied in a ‘who the fuck are you?’ tone.
‘I was thinking of coming over to pick up my hat.’
‘Is that Emmanuel Porlock, the Million Pound Poet?’
‘Yes indeedy.’
‘I’ve been hanging on to that hat for three months.’
‘Well, I better come and get it then, hadn’t I? Saturday morning alright for you, round about brunchtime?’
‘I suppose so.
‘Excellent, see you then.’
It was only after I put the phone down that I thought to myself, ‘How did he know I’d bought him a new hat?’ I had never spoken to him since the day he had phoned me, badgering me into going up to London and causing me to flirt with Mercy.