Occasionally, over the years, Paul has thought of this non-child, just as occasionally he remembers the girl. It is a long time ago, he was quite young. He is a good bit older now, and possibly not much wiser but well able to look back clear-eyed. Mostly, he does not like what he sees, and that of course is the problem. If only he had . . . If only he hadn’t . . . And the summer of that girl seems to him a point at which things might have swerved in a new direction, if only she . . .
But she didn’t. And she has vanished now, into that morass of people once known, who from time to time are still heard, mostly telling him things he would rather not hear. Authoritarian figures accuse him of lacking motivation, employers wonder if he is really cut out for this job, girls tell him they just don’t feel they can count on him, people at the rehab place echo again and again about perseverance and application and giving himself a chance.
He hasn’t done drugs for years, in fact. Just once in a while. Booze—well, booze fairly frequently but not to excess, not compared with some people, for heaven’s sake.
Each time he fetches up back here at Allersmead, in his old room, his old bed—whether it is for days, or weeks, or months—he gets this eerie feeling that he has never really left. It is as though his life beyond was just some kind of imaginary excursion, and really he has always been here. His present persona seems an anachronism—this hulking man; an alter ego lurks—the child, the boy.
“You must think of Allersmead as the safety net,” she said. Once. Years ago. “It’s always here for you. We’re always here.”
Dad has not said that, or anything like it. He has said other things, from time to time.
Stocktaking. Assessment exercise. Fancy terms for this involuntary process, this thing that happens each time he is back at Allersmead, this arrival of figures who stand around the bed, requiring that he remember them, that he reconsider what happened.
Tonight, it is the turn of that guy who ran the couriers—Speedbikes. He sits behind the disheveled desk in that greasy cubbyhole of an office in the mews from which he operates, and tells Paul that he is letting him go. They no longer require his services. He is fired, in short. And Paul, who has been expecting this, sees the man’s florid face, always in need of a shave, which has hung in his head ever since, though his name has evaporated. He sees this now so familiar face, and the sandy eyebrows, the reddened broken veins, the thick ridged neck, and is glad that he won’t be seeing it anymore (except that he will, he will), and never mind about the job, he’ll find something else and he was fed up with it anyway. The man is holding out his hand for the bike keys and saying something more, which seems to be that there will be no pay due for this week on account of the compensation demanded by the confectionary shop. This will make things a bit tricky—Paul will have to borrow off someone, or see if the bank will oblige, but it is clear that arguing will get him nowhere, and all he wants now is out. Enough of this guy, enough of hurtling through the traffic, enough of sitting in a jam drinking exhaust fumes.
Something genteel next time; indoors. Newspaper editor; brain surgeon; member of Parliament.
Courier had been good, at first. Black leather from top to toe, slipping like a seal between a bus and a lorry, revving away at the lights, winding through the city streets, the back ways, the rat runs. Heady stuff—oh, this was the life. Handing in the goods with a smile, to pretty receptionists behind glass desks in marble halls amid jungle greenery; waiting for a consignment and sometimes there’s a coffee and a chat. Mostly he is transporting paper—large envelopes and small envelopes and Jiffy bags and packets. He whisks a cargo of paper around the city; goodness knows what it is all about, that is not his business, he is merely the conduit for all this paper, the means whereby it flies from one address to another. Occasionally there is different freight—reels of film, mysterious packages. It is all one to Paul: get the stuff from A to B, and wait for the next set of crackling instructions from that guy in the office. Mostly, it is pretty plain sailing, just the odd hitch when you can’t find the place you’re looking for, or the traffic holds you up and you get an earful for not getting the job done on time.
Occasionally, there’s worse. The first time he came off the bike—taking a corner too fast—the taxi driver who pulled up to help him out of the gutter said, “A short life and a merry one, eh?” Having checked that Paul was unhurt, he added, “I’ve yet to see one of you lot aged over twenty-five.” Paul grinned.
There were other falls, subsequently. The leather gear saves you from road rash—that’s half the point of it—and you learn to roll away from the bike, hoping there’s not a car behind you. Main thing—have you still got the consignment? He always had, until that last day.
Well, not quite always. Once, he nearly lost a big flat folder—architectural drawings, it turned out. Strapped to the pillion, it was, but the strap broke when the bike tipped over—hit the curb, that time—and the folder split open and shed stuff all over the road and some was damaged. There was a hell of a row about that. Fat face in the office threw a proper tantrum.
Fat face had one eye on the clock, always. He knew how long it should take between any two points A to Z; much longer, and you had to account for it. And if there was one thing that really got him going, it was the suspicion you’d stopped off at a pub. Paul kept the Amplex in his jacket pocket.
That day, that last day, he’d stopped off a couple of times for a beer. It was hot, and the traffic was diabolical, and twice he found the best route for a particular job took him past one of his favorite pubs—surprise, surprise. He hadn’t been long, each time—just long enough to put away a pint, and feel all the more efficient for it. And then after the second stop the phone was crackling with the next job, which was a bit of an odd one; pick up a birthday cake from this confectioner’s to take up to Hampstead, one of those mansions by the Heath—and get a move on, they want it for a kid’s party now.
The woman at the confectioner’s was a bit put out: “Why haven’t they sent the van? It’s normally the van for a cake.” Paul explained that the van was off the road at the moment: “It’ll be fine.” The cake was in a box. “Look, the box’ll go in my carrier.” As it would, just, though he couldn’t quite close the lid. “Be fine—not to worry.”
The lorry slammed its brakes on as they were going up Haverstock Hill—a dog ran out. Paul went into the back of the lorry, came off the bike, the bike skidded across the road, the carrier burst open, so did the cake box, and that was that. You could see it had been a class act, that cake, even when broken up all over the asphalt: white icing and pink icing and rosettes and piped writing. Shame.
So that was it, at Speedbikes. “Just once too often, mate,” said fat face. And now here he is beside the bed at Allersmead, saying it again. But you can get rid of such people, with an effort. You concentrate on something else, someone else, and tell them to shove off.
They never surface in the right order, these people in the head. Charlie from the rehab place comes way before fat face at Speedbikes, but here he is now, staking a claim.
Paul and Charlie shared a room. The first time they met Paul said, “You’ve got the same name as my dad.” He said it for something to say, but also because he was struck by the incongruity. Charlie was a chirpy south London wide boy, about as far from Dad as you could get. And Charlie replied—assuming the tone of a concerned shrink—“Tell me about your relationship with your father, Paul?” After which they both rolled on their beds laughing, and knew that they could get by here, with a bit of mutual support. Charlie was thin and jumpy and seldom stopped talking; he had been helping out at his father’s market stall since he was six and he’d truanted from school as a matter of policy and of course he’d done drugs. He had three sisters and his mum had died when he was nine and he’d been nicked for shoplifting when he was ten and he’d been knocked off his bike when he was twelve and was on life support for a week. Or had he? Charlie had many life stories, customized for different occasions. He was the most
willing and fruitful contributor to those group therapy sessions when a bunch of them sat around with one of the rehab people and confessional utterances of some kind were required of everyone. “The breast-beating binges,” Charlie called them, and he could always outdo everyone in submitting some hitherto unmentioned instance of personal deficiency, abuse, or suppressed distress. Fired by his example, Paul presented Allersmead as a Sartrean hell, in which the six of them vied for a crumb of parental attention. He tried to strip it of middle-class attributes, giving his father a chronic disability in place of a tendency to write books, airbrushing Ingrid and replacing his mother with a self-obsessed termagant. The guilt that he felt about this was quite opportune, since it made him deliver in a hangdog, hesitant way, which went down well. He earned much sympathy and understanding advice from other members of the group.
Even Charlie was impressed. He took it for granted that Paul wasn’t telling the truth, and displayed little interest in the reality of Paul’s circumstances. The only point was to manipulate the system here, give them what they wanted, and ingratiate yourself in so doing. He would sit on the edge of his bed, hugging his knees, a small, febrile figure, and instruct Paul on how to take control of any situation in which you found yourself: “You take a good look, right? And then you play it your way but so they don’t realize.” He was popular with both the staff and other inmates, and would no doubt leave the center an apparently reformed character. There were hints that he was already familiar with such places. But he was coming off drugs this time, he told Paul earnestly, that was for definite, no question. Drugging was a mug’s game.
At such moments, you believed Charlie. Paul found himself envying this kind of innate self-confidence that allowed him to pursue this course of guile and persuasion. It took both energy and imaginative drive. Paul was well aware that he himself lacked this quality of motivation—figures in authority had been telling him that for years—and he studied Charlie hopefully, wondering if some of his method might rub off. There was a consistency to Charlie; he might offer conflicting versions of himself but it was done with unswerving intent. He had a plan, and he stuck to it. And the plan, roughly, was to live as he chose to live and not as other people might choose for him.
Paul envied the plan. He had no plan, and he knew that he did not. He had not intended to flunk his exams at college, to drift from one dead-end job to another, to get into drugs—these were simply things that happened and the more they happened the more they seemed to become a self-perpetuating process. This was not the way that other people saw it, of course; he had lost count of the number of times he had been told to get a grip on himself or (a general favorite, this) that he was his own worst enemy.
The enemy theory rather appealed to him. It suggested an insuperable internal conflict, one’s own two warring personalities: good, achieving Paul forever scuppered by bad, obstructive Paul. And if that was the way you were made, then there wasn’t much you could do about it, was there?
Paul now no longer knew how long he had been at the rehab place; that period was reduced to a collection of images that would flash up from time to time, featuring shrinks and fellow inmates and, above all, Charlie. “You take it from me,” Charlie would say, “once you let them see you’re giving in, they’ve got you where they want you.” Paul was not clear what was implied by giving in, but Charlie’s conviction was charismatic, and it seemed a good idea to line up behind him in subverting authority. Accordingly, Paul told the rehab people whatever he thought they would like to hear, and tried to absorb from Charlie some kind of personal direction. A plan.
Charlie finished his rehab shortly before Paul did, swearing eternal friendship. He wrote down a phone number; “Give us a bell, right? We’ll get together—go out on the town.”
Paul never saw him again. When he called that number the person at the other end had never heard of Charlie. Only now does he occasionally visit, grinning away beside the bed at Allersmead. “Remember me?”
Sometimes it is Dad who appears beside the bed. Dad of course is asleep in the bedroom along the corridor; this is another Dad, the Dad who refused to cough up for you to go to Amsterdam with your mates, once upon a time, the Dad who appeared grim-faced at Bude police station, with Mum bleating behind him. That Dad is terse, sardonic, the tone is infinitely familiar and indeed it is still to be heard from Dad of today, but it carries less weight now, it is bleached with repetition, it has become a kind of white noise—irritating but without the power it once had. Paul looks at Dad these days and sees a man who is getting old, and that seems somehow pathetic. Even him, even Dad.
But that Dad carried weight, way back. Oh dear me, yes. His tongue could scorch; he could make you feel more inadequate than you already knew that you were. The way he always won an argument, produced the definitive put-down. His scrutiny of a school report, handed back in meaningful silence.
When we played the cellar game, thinks Paul, and I was always the father, the idea was to be as absolutely un-Dad as possible. Shooting buffalo. Captain of the ship. Turning into James Bond if I felt so inclined. But a kind of shadow Dad crept in, I seem to remember—I’d make everyone else toe the line, boss them around. My turn now, down here.
From time to time a sibling pops up. Sandra opens her clenched fist and puts a spider in her mouth—or does she? Roger takes a clinical interest in Paul’s gashed finger: “I need to see how much it’s bleeding.” Clare wants him to watch her doing handstands. Katie looks worriedly at him—he is ill with the flu or something and Mum has sent her up with a glass of lemonade. “Are you going to die?” she says.
Gina tells him to sort himself out. She is fierce. “You can’t go on like this,” she says. “One dud job after another.” It is years ago—the hospital porter period. They meet for a drink; she is hot from some TV studio, he is off duty from trundling fodder to the operating theaters. She talks about training schemes, about City & Guilds. She is trying to send him back to college, it sounds like, and he veers away. This is just to fill in for a bit, he assures her; he’s going to look around for something serious when he’s ready, a real job. She frowns at him. “You cannot go on like this, Paul.”
It is only Gina to whom he talks now, in the world of today. Odd, the way all the others are so far flung. Roger in Canada, Katie in the States, Sandra—where? Italy, is it? Clare hither and thither with that dance company. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in ages. Time was, you were all on top of one another, every day of the year, their faces and voices were as intimate as your own, and then—whoosh! Blown away. Allersmead is a dandelion clock, its seeds dispersed.
Except him. And Gina is still local, as it were—but she goes global half the time. Did everyone want to get as far away as possible?
Mum speaks. Frequently. Of course. She speaks in torrents, as she ever did, and most of it is just atmospheric crackle, but every now and then a snatch is loud and clear. She is telling him that Dad won’t see that terrible school report: “I’ll sort of lose it, dear.” She weeps, at Crackington Haven: “It was those wretched other boys, wasn’t it? On your own you wouldn’t have done it, would you?” She beseeches: “Give us a phone number. I never know where you are.” From a tempest of her recollections, he hears only this: “Of course you were always my favorite.”
These days, at the Garden Centre, he never lets on where it is that he lives. “Actually, I live with my parents and their—er—au pair girl.” Definitely not. He attracts inquisitive interest, inevitably—too old for this sort of job. Why’s he doing it? What’s the problem? He fends off inquiry, his policy for years now; he is adept at striking up cheery temporary acquaintance without ever letting anyone close enough to probe. The landscape is littered with people who have known Paul quite well—have chatted with him, drunk with him, slept with him—but who have subsequently realized that they know nothing of him. They would say that he appeared to have no past.
Lying in bed at Allersmead, with that inescapable and populous past reverberating, Paul
sorts through those who offer themselves and allows Sophie to step forward, the teacher from that school where he was care-taker for—oh, a couple of years. Commitment, that was, and Sophie was responsible to a large degree. They shared a flat, eventually, they were a couple, the head teacher knew and smiled benignly.
Sophie teaches the infants—the reception class. She is delightful—a small, smiling, sociable girl, and it is thus that he likes to think of her, rather than the other Sophie who will surface in due course. He sees her laughing at him across a table in a pub, he sees her striding beside him on a walk in the park, he sees her in bed, rapturous. But once he has let her appear, then inevitably that other Sophie will muscle in, talking differently.
“Shouldn’t I meet your parents?”
“Where was it you were at college, Paul?”
“The trouble is, school caretaking doesn’t really lead anywhere.”
Sophie becomes someone else. She finds a voice that is tediously familiar to Paul, first heard long ago at Allersmead, and subsequently from one authority figure after another—the voice that tells him what he ought to be doing rather than what he is doing, that questions and criticizes and recommends. He had thought better of her.
She hints at a long-term arrangement. Marriage. A baby.
Once, a while ago now, when confronted with the prospect of an unanticipated baby, Paul had seized upon the notion of another kind of life. But that was then, that was a different girl, she who had him on the ropes. This is not like that. This is becoming another of those occasions when he may have to take evasive action.
Marriage, Paul considered then and thinks now, is for others—not for him. How do people endure that proximity, that having to consider the other person, that fetter? Well, with difficulty; witness the divorce rate, witness the marriages one has known.
Them. Mum and Dad. Dad does not do much considering, on the whole; his study door has saved him from excessive proximity; he has not always felt fettered, it would seem. For Mum, marriage is her profession, or rather, the by-products of marriage have been. Allersmead; us.
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