The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “But you never see snakes in England, or hardly ever,” he went on. “You have to get exactly the right terrain, and not often even there. So when I say I was interested in snakes, I mean I read about them in books. I borrowed books from the library—there was one I didn’t take back for a year and a half, and then I didn’t take it back, my mum found it and took it back, and I didn’t get any pocket money for a whole year, really, not just a threat, I really didn’t. I used to sit up and learn all their names, their Latin names, the inland Taipan is Oxyripidus something. I found out all about their habitats and what they ate, and how endangered they were, because most snakes are endangered to some degree. But mostly I wanted to have one of my own. Not a venomous one, I wanted a yellow python, and you could get them in this shop in Sheffield I knew about. I knew my mum and dad would never let me have one—well, my dad, maybe, he’s got his hobbies and interests, he’d have understood, but my mum never would have. I saved up for about two years, I reckon.”

  “That was before you had your pocket money confiscated, I suppose,” Sandra said, not greatly interested.

  “Yes, of course,” Timothy said. “That all happened long afterwards. I’d forgotten about the library book by then.”

  “Oh dear,” Sandra said.

  Timothy looked at her; she buried her expression in a glass of beer. “It wasn’t enough, though, I had to make up in other ways. I took a couple of pounds from my dad’s wallet every now and again. And then once, this never happened to me before and never since, I just found a five-pound note on the Manchester Road. You know how children are, how superstitious, and I thought that meant I was supposed to buy the snake. But of course my mum, she’d never have let me have one, so at first I just asked the man in the shop if I could have a snake of my own, there, to visit, which he wouldn’t sell. And he did, and I went down there, but after a bit, you have to have the snake with you all the time, don’t you? So I had to sneak a vivarium into the house, and put it under my bed, and then finally, when I knew no one was going to be at home, I went and collected Geoffrey, he was called Geoffrey, he was a yellow carpet python. I thought I’d be able to keep him there without anyone noticing, feed him on frozen mice, you get frozen mice from pet shops quite easily.”

  “Are they still frozen when the snakes eat them?”

  “No, you defrost them first,” Timothy said. “And some snakes won’t eat dead mice at all, you have to feed them live ones. So I had this snake underneath my bed, and I suppose it was starting to smell a bit in there, quite quickly—my brother, Daniel, he went on about it. And then one day I thought I’d take Geoffrey out to show him the new people moving in opposite—”

  “Oh dear,” Sandra said. “I knew this was all going to be my fault somehow.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Tim said. “It was your mum, she saw Geoffrey and she told my mum, without knowing he was a secret, and then, well, you saw the rest.”

  “Right,” Sandra said. They were silent for a moment. Sandra remembered not so much that, but that Katherine’s husband had run off, that that was the first thing she’d announced, and a week later he was back again. It had taken ages for them to speak to each other, the two families, without embarrassment. For Timothy it was all about his stupid snake. “How is everyone in Sheffield, anyway?”

  “Well,” Timothy said. “You know, I think I will have a drink. A proper one.” Sandra got up, and without asking further, fetched him a beer from the fridge, handed it to him with a fresh glass. “Your mum—well, you know about your mum …”

  “Yes,” Sandra said. This was what she had been expecting, and she sat down heavily, with a set look on her face. “She’s making a good recovery. It was quite serious.”

  “It was quite serious,” Timothy said. “They thought she was going to die, my mum says.”

  “She’s recovering well,” Sandra insisted. “My dad’s been keeping me up to date. I would have come over, but I don’t know what I could have done and, thank God, it worked out for the best.”

  “You know,” Timothy said, “I don’t think anyone understands why you didn’t make more of an effort. It looked to most people as if you didn’t care.”

  “Or it’s working out,” Sandra said. “She’s getting better all the time. She’ll be leaving hospital before too long. I’ll come over soon. So people like you can just—”

  “It didn’t look very good,” Timothy said. “People were surprised.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Sandra said. “Who was surprised?”

  “Well, most people,” Timothy said. “Most people were surprised that you didn’t come over. That’s what I meant.”

  “I can tell you, my dad completely understood,” Sandra said, who knew exactly what Timothy had meant, having expected it for some time. “He said straight away, he’s gone on saying, he didn’t expect me to come over.”

  “That’s exactly what you would say in the circumstances,” Timothy said. “I don’t know whether he would have meant it.”

  “It’s my dad,” Sandra said. “I know whether he’d have meant it or not. I tell you something else. I know very well he wouldn’t in a million years have asked you to come over and try to make me feel guilty. He wouldn’t have asked you, and he wouldn’t want to make me feel guilty. I don’t know why you’re here.”

  “I’m on holiday,” Timothy said. “I happen to be here on holiday. I thought I’d drop in and keep you up to date.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Sandra said. “It’s really none of your business, the whole thing. I’d rather not talk about it.”

  At this point, the telephone rang. “Excuse me,” Sandra said, getting up, but Tim got up too. For a moment she thought he was, in some mistaken gesture of kindness, going to answer the telephone on her behalf, but before she could reach it, he grabbed her shoulder.

  “Don’t get that,” he said.

  “Don’t you tell me—” she said, and twisted in abrupt rage—it was there so quickly, she must have been building up to it—and he gripped more firmly. Her blouse tore.

  “Jesus, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she said. “You’ve torn my fucking blouse.”

  The phone message came to an end—… if you want to leave a message, speak after the beep … and Stewart’s voice started up, in the echoey acoustic of his shop. He just wanted to know what she was up to; she stood, furious, and held herself back from slapping Timothy.

  “I think you’d better go,” she said, as the phone message came to an end. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, or what you want, but I think you’ve said it all. That was my boyfriend.”

  “You’ve got a boyfriend,” Timothy said, smiling.

  “Yes, why shouldn’t I?” she said. “I might even have a husband for all you know.”

  “No,” Timothy said. “I would have known that.”

  “Look, you’ve made your point,” she said. “I sincerely hope you really were coming to Australia on holiday. You’ve come a hell of a long way otherwise to be told something you’re blaming me for is none of your business. It’s none of anyone’s business. All right?”

  But Timothy made no move to go. He picked up a corner of the rent cloth, quite delicately, but as if he knew he could make a more decisive gesture, and let it drop again. He sat down, quite heavily. She remained standing, waiting for him to take the hint. Outside, in the street, it was growing dark; she switched on a light, returned to her cross posture. He smiled again, not looking at her.

  “I expect you’re probably wondering what I’ve been up to for the last few years,” Timothy said. “I was only a little boy when I saw you last. I got interested in radical politics when I was still at school. It’s injustice that makes you burn, the injustice, it’s in schools and you can see it, but it’s everywhere, more hidden. I got eight O levels and four A levels, I did A levels in economics and history and German. And general studies. I thought I’d take German to read Marx in the original, but I never got to that point. I didn’t
do so well in German as I did in the others, I got a C for that, I got As for the others. I could have gone to university.”

  “Nobody’s suggesting you couldn’t,” Sandra murmured, fingering her torn blouse, trying to see if it could be fixed, but it was no good: he’d bring out this triumph, he was going to introduce himself by summing up his life, give her the sense of the right he had to talk to her in this way. He talked over her as if she’d said nothing. She wondered whether he was like this with everyone he met; she thought, frighteningly, that this was probably a special occasion.

  “I could have gone to university but I decided not to, not at first. I thought the radical moment had come, this was in 1984, there was no point in entering an institution to destroy it from within, it was going to be destroyed from outside within months, that’s what we all thought in 1984. But the timing was wrong—that was all, it was the timing—we’d misread the signs. The popular movement fizzled out. So I went to university a couple of years late, and I—I went to the polytechnic in Sheffield, I wanted to stay, I had ties there. I did all right.” This came out belligerently, and, like weather figures in a box on a wall, Sandra now sat down as Timothy stood up, paced around hectoring. “I got a first, I did social sciences. And then I got a master’s and a PhD, and I got that in three years, writing about Goffman, Erving Goffman. You probably don’t even know who that is, do you? Even though I started late I was still only twenty-seven when I finished and got the doctorate. I’m Doctor Timothy Glover, it says it on my passport. And they gave me a job teaching at the polytechnic—it’s a university now, it’s called Sheffield Hallam University. I’ve been doing that for two years, teaching there. I’m still involved with radical politics, only not so much with direct action. I’m getting so I can’t run from the pigs like I used to. It’s your blinking knees what go first, isn’t it, it’s always the knees first. Ooh, me knees—”

  “You’ve still got some passionate interest on the go, then,” Sandra said, pale with anger. But he ignored her, and she fell silent, not laughing as he faked a moment of hopping round her living room. She watched the performance; watched, too, the little china figurine on the glass occasional table. She hoped the idiot wasn’t going to kick it over.

  He subsided at length, straightened up, and gave her a look that went through all the stages; embarrassment, assessment, contempt. “That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said. “It’s been quite a long time, you see.”

  “What happened in 1984?” Sandra said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said something important happened in 1984,” Sandra said. She could, with concentration, have worked out the events of that year, so famous, so anticipated, in advance, and so unlike its previous billing. For her, it could only have been one in a succession of years during which she relaxed, inch by inch, her body, her way of speaking, the tension of her former smile, all giving way under the blazing sun on a beach, on white and gleaming city streets full of well-dressed healthy people, under many nights of fresh and unrecognized stars. No: 1984, surely, was the year she gave up working at Belinda’s and started work at the place she now worked at. It had been ten years ago. “What happened to you in 1984?”

  Timothy wheeled round, as if at a dumb student request for something that had been covered earlier in the degree module. “It wasn’t to me it happened,” he said. “I’m talking about the miners’ strike. The miners. You know. They went on strike.”

  “I heard about that,” Sandra said. “I think I did. I was living such a long way away, though.”

  “Let me explain it to you,” Timothy said heavily—he might have been talking with laborious irony, she just couldn’t detect it any more. But this was certainly a step too far, and she interrupted him.

  “Look,” she said. “I really have no idea why you’ve come to see me. I really don’t have any idea why you’re still here. I don’t remember you, not really. If you’re on holiday here, it’s nice of you to look me up. It’s nice to see people from England, if they come. But that’s all. My mother’s got nothing to do with you. I’ve managed for ten years without knowing the ins and outs of some strike or other, so I guess I’ll go on managing. You’ve burst in, you’ve assaulted me and torn my clothes. That seems like quite a lot in order to tell me about the miners’ strike. Just tell me now what the result was, and I’ll be happy enough with that.”

  The phone rang again. She made no move to answer it; he held her steady gaze. The message started up, then abruptly stopped; Stewart again.

  “The result?” Timothy said, into the silence in the flat. “The result of what?”

  “The miners’ strike,” Sandra said. “Who won?”

  “It’s not really a matter of—”

  “Did the miners get what they wanted? What they were striking over?”

  “No.”

  “So I guess the managers won, the coal company.”

  “It wasn’t a company. It was the Government.”

  “I told you, I’m not interested.”

  “The thing is, it was really your father—do you know what he did? He was in charge of what they called strategy. He piled up coal—he made sure the miners wouldn’t be needed, that they could be laid off for a year and save all that money there without any effects, and afterwards—”

  There was a violence now in Timothy’s accelerating certainties, his hands clenching into fists, unclenching, fist hitting palm as he made his point to a seated audience of one. As he strode and hit his fist into palm, his fist into palm, she concentrated hard on not blinking at each blow. She brought her knees together, and her ankles, tilted her legs to one side in self-protective lady-like posture. She placed her hands together in a praying position, or like a child about to applaud. She held her eyes wide open, and as he smacked his fist into his palm, she did not flinch, she did not blink.

  “And afterwards—”

  “Afterwards, what?”

  “The thing is,” Timothy said, lowering his voice a little, “the ironic and awful thing is that your father, he worked so hard to dismantle and sell off what belonged to everyone, because, you know, everything’s so much better if they can make money out of it. Everybody buying and selling and boasting about what Sid told them and ending up with two hundred and sixty pounds worth of what used to be a public utility, you see, and then in the end, your father, his wife’s brain turns on her and he doesn’t think twice, he goes to the National Health Service, of course he does. Because most important things, they’re run by the state for the people. You know something? What’s the safest airline in the world?”

  “I know the answer to this one,” Sandra said. “I just don’t have a buzzer in front of me, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s Qantas,” Timothy said. “It’s the only major airline which has never had a crash. And who owns that? It’s the state, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not,” Sandra said. “Even I know that. It got privatized last year. I bought some shares in it.”

  “Bully for you,” Timothy said. “Let’s see if it goes on being so safe now it’s been denationalized. I hope you’re on the first fucking plane that goes down because they’ve forgotten to tighten the bolts, and I hope you’re on the way to visit your mother, finally, when it goes down.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Sandra said. “And you can leave my mother out of it.”

  “Don’t you see, though?” Timothy said, working himself up again. “It’s all the same thing. Your mother, and you not caring and sitting here buying your little shares to enrich yourself by a few extra Australian dollars and not thinking about anyone else, and everything that was once for the common good, all that being thrown away to make a quick buck, it’s all the same thing. My God, though, I might have known about you. You just don’t care about anyone else. Let me tell you about me. I fell in love with someone, and I’ve been with her for nearly ten years, she’s called Trudy, and we’re together because we can care about each other, and we’ve got that abilit
y, we care about each other and we care about people we know and we care about people we don’t even know. It’s all about love, in the end.”

  Timothy continued hitting his fist into his palm, almost in Sandra’s face. She shrank back in her chair; he was standing halfway between the chair and the telephone, which now started ringing again.

  “Better get that,” he said, but she shook her head. He waited, as if politely, at this interruption, until the message started again and the caller hung up.

  “Let’s talk about you, on the other hand,” he said. “Who do you care about? Not your parents or your family. You don’t care about Daniel, who’s supposed to be such a good friend of yours. I don’t believe you care about anyone except yourself and the dividends you’re going to get from some airline sell-off.”

  “That was my boyfriend on the phone,” Sandra said. “You know nothing about me, nothing at all.”

  “You don’t care about him, either,” Timothy said. “I bet you don’t. If you cared about him, you’d have answered the phone by now.”

  “I’m not answering the phone because you’re here,” Sandra said.

  “I tell you, there’s something missing in your life,” Timothy said, “and it’s love. Do you ever think about love? In the whole of your life, have you ever thought about love?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sandra said. “Go and fuck yourself.”

  There was a long silence; they glared at each other.

  “We’d get on a hell of a lot better,” Sandra said, “if you’d sit down.”

  Timothy looked at his hands, clenched into fists and then, quite at once, without seeming to know what he was doing, he dropped on his knees, and started to cry in an entirely helpless way. She watched, uncaring, knowing that her disinterest in the spectacle would inevitably look like proof of what he had said. She waited for the storm to subside. Outside, the world, incredibly, was going about its business: teenagers with borrowed cars were driving up and down the dark front, hooting in greeting; dinners were being eaten by families and couples to a rumba soundtrack in the street below; Stewart was wondering, not very hard, where his girlfriend could have got to; perhaps her boss, now, was talking in his English voice to his Korean wife, Cindy, perhaps even saying that there was some kind of flu going round the office and that Alex had gone down with it. All that was happening outside, and inside her flat she was looking at a man crying and crumpling.