Shtum

by Jem Lester

  ‘The outcome will be the same.’

  ‘But it could give you another year or so.’

  ‘To see what? My grandson sent away and my son leave too, as soon as the cock crows the day after?’

  As if he understands, Jonah skips over to Dad and sits on the bed next to him. Now I see it. Now I know. Cunning old bastard. He is looking away from me, but I can still catch the corners of his mouth turned down in a smile. How do I feel good about either of the sides of this bargain he’s foisting on me? You can’t bluff my father, you can’t bluff a man with a Luger, two bullets and a belly full of cancer.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I say.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Look at me then.’

  He turns to face me, knowing, the sly old sod.

  ‘Jonah will stay at home, with both of us, while you are alive.’

  ‘So you’ll cancel this tribunal …’

  ‘Postpone it. It’s the best you’re going to get.’

  There’s no way I’m going to postpone, so what am I doing? Hoping that he dies sooner rather than later, before I have to admit I’m lying?

  ‘I do not believe you.’

  I don’t blame him.

  ‘You’ll just have to trust me. Bit hard to swallow?’

  ‘Everything is hard to swallow,’ he says.

  ‘Everything will proceed until all the reports are in, then I’ll halt it, but only if you have the treatment.’

  ‘Suddenly my son is a haggler.’

  ‘You’re the stall holder, Dad. It’s either take your medicine and have another possible year with Jonah at home, or be the martyr and say goodbye to him in three months.’

  ‘And you will stick to these odds? Honour a winning ticket?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘But you are betting against your own team?’

  ‘You’re both my team.’

  But in the end, I have to make a choice and make a promise I have no intention of keeping.

  ‘It’s a win-win situation, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t treat me like a shmock. When do they start to fry me?’

  When Mr Stonehouse arrives from the conference he says that they’ll start radiation tomorrow. ‘Would you like me to explain the procedure to both of you?’

  Dad points at me. ‘He has an O-level in Chemistry, tell it to him.’

  Then he turns away and sticks the hospital radio’s earphones in his ears.

  Sad

  He is not a good patient. Stoicism may be bonded to his haemoglobin but the house has become his own private clinic, complete with personal nurse – Maurice; personal porter and lackey – me; and entertainment – Jonah. With all the radiotherapy, I’m run off my feet. God knows how I’ll cope when the chemo starts next week.

  ‘Do not forget the prescription requests.’

  ‘I have them.’

  ‘No, you do not, they are still on the kitchen table – why should Jonah and I suffer more because you have a head like a sieve?’

  I grab the three slips of paper. ‘Have you got a spare twenty quid?’

  ‘What for? Jonah and I don’t pay for our medicine and yours is only about seven pounds. What do you need twenty pounds for?’

  ‘Sundries.’

  ‘I am lying here like a burnt offering and he wants cigarettes. What a sensitive boy I have raised. Behind the carriage clock, there is some cash.’

  I take two twenties.

  ‘You cannot let everything around you go to the dogs because of this, Ben, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  The sound of Maurice’s key in the door is a familiar one since Dad started the radiotherapy. Only Maurice is allowed to touch him – and Jonah, who is disconcertingly gentle, as if he understands, or it may be he just likes the sensation of the soothing cream against my father’s scorched chest hair. Every morning Dad strips to the waist and Maurice bastes him like a turkey.

  ‘Maurice,’ Dad shouts. ‘Tea, and don’t forget to test the temperature.’

  ‘Georg, I know how to make tea.’

  ‘For the throat, Maurice, a nice temperature, please.’

  Maurice ambles to the kitchen. Dad lowers his voice.

  ‘Benjamin, take care of the business and the business will take care of you, how many times?’

  ‘A million.’

  ‘Do not be facetious. Valentine is a hard worker, but you cannot expect him to run the business. This is our deal: you sort out the business – as best you can – get it into shape, get the accounts up to date, do an inventory and I will do all the paperwork for Jonah.’

  I have very little wriggle room. ‘Okay.’

  Maurice returns with the tea and a pump-action cylinder of emollient cream to help ease the fall-out of the radiotherapy.

  ‘Okay, Georg, shirt off.’

  Maurice helps him, but I can see the difficulty he is having. Because of the scorching, the neckline on all his sweaters has been cut to ease the pressure on his neck. Maurice is very gentle, but I still see the grimace on Dad’s face.

  Maurice pumps a cricket ball of cream into his hand and begins to gently rub it in circles across Dad’s neck and upper torso.

  ‘Not so rough, Maurice.’

  ‘Georg, shut up.’

  I head for the door.

  ‘Remember the repeat requests and look after Valentine with a few quid – do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  The first course of radiotherapy is almost over and it’s finally beginning to bend him. There was just some redness after the first two treatments, but now, like a mass prison break, the heat has come out fighting – blisters and scabs that weep and burn. The hospital recommended a Macmillan nurse, but he wouldn’t have it.

  He is due another scan in two weeks, to see whether the beams of radiation have shrunk the tumour and then, inevitably, the chemotherapy, a cocktail of poisons that will denude him of his thick silver hair, eyelashes, eyebrows. I’m not looking forward to it. Valentine can wait, I need a drink first.

  The Guinness is cold and smooth. There is so much going on in my head at the moment that I can’t seem to hold it all in. I can take it in, I understand and accept, there’s no denial, but I can’t organise my thoughts into any kind of coherent action – so the only course of action seems to be to do nothing. It’s sensory overload that requires the dampening effects of alcohol. Prozac may work for an adolescent Californian, but they’re Smarties to a miserable bastard like me. I have a second pint and then run the car the three hundred yards round to the warehouse. The ancient white Luton is still parked outside.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Valentine.’

  He should be well on his way with pick-ups by now, but there’s no sign of action whatsoever. I jump out, light a cigarette and walk to the metal shutter door. Not only is it pulled down, but the padlock’s there too. As I bend down to check if it’s locked, I spy an envelope poking out from underneath. It’s brown and addressed to me and marked ‘Inland Revenue’. My stomach churns the Liffey Water as I pull it out. It’s already been opened, which is strange, but there is a letter inside it that I unfold like a set of exam results.

  I QUIT

  VALENTINE

  P.S. FUCK YOU!

  Which for Valentine is verbosity gone mad.

  As I drag the shutter up, the smell hits me like the Delhi-to-Mumbai express. Sunday’s Indian wedding for four hundred. Four hundred of everything: plates, side plates, knives, forks, spoons, glasses – all unwashed and piled high and hopelessly muddled, a shanty town of glass, metal and ceramic with an exponentially growing population of flies.

  I check the cash box in the office and count through the notes. It’s all there bar Valentine’s weekly wage. He’s paid himself and taken nothing else. Twenty-two years of dirty slog has finally prov
ed too much for him. Well, really, ten years of me. I pocket the wad of cash with no thought of pleading with him to come back, just a mental note to drop in some money for him, and stand staring at the shit. I’m not going to do it. I know I’m not. So it won’t get done. Even with the industrial washers it will take me all week to run the stuff through, then count and wrap and stack ready to go out again.

  I’m done. Dad’s business – gone. My income – gone.

  The phone rings.

  ‘I need a water boiler, dolly, for a shiva, this afternoon. And could you bring twenty tea plates for the marble cake?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Streatham.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nu?’

  ‘Bye.’ I slam the receiver down, pull the phone from the wall and toss it into the pile of washing-up.

  I have a pocket full of cash, a mild Guinness buzz and a few hours to kill. Jonah is at school, Maurice is with Dad and I can’t think of a single solitary thing to do that will give me any pleasure whatsoever.

  I may as well have driven to Streatham, but all I know there is the Jewish cemetery where I attended the funeral of some distant cousin.

  I sit and spin myself around in the office chair for five minutes until I’m giddy, then pull at a bulldog clip hanging from the wall, holding a thick wad of invoices addressed to customers stamped UNPAID in red.

  I go through the debtors’ invoices with a feeling of rising anger, directed both at them and at me – this is Jonah’s money and I’ve been too lazy to call in the debts.

  The warehouse is a shithole, because I’ve allowed it to become so. Valentine has left because I treated him with contempt and these people never bothered paying me because I couldn’t be bothered to chase them, while other regular clients melted away because I got orders wrong, never checked properly and on some level wanted to destroy the house that Dad built as my only means of escape from my personal prison camp.

  I work my way through the invoices carefully – some of them date back three years – and divide them into private clients with home addresses and caterers that may still, or no longer, exist.

  I arrange them into date order and pin them on the map of London, pasted on the office wall.

  Finally, I grab a calculator and tot up the money owed to me.

  There are seventy-two outstanding invoices. It takes me ten minutes to finish and then there is a sudden surge of adrenalin and shame.

  TOTAL OUTSTANDING: £18,724.84

  Trick or Treat

  I could ask God for a favour, but my call would probably go straight to voicemail. The warehouse is quiet and cold and I warm myself with whisky as I run the numbers through my head and prevaricate as I always do when something awkward needs to be done. How can I ask these people for money after – in some cases – three years? If they say no or deny the debt, I’m likely just to say sorry. They may even laugh at me, at which point I normally become abusive and threaten violence. You’ll never be a captain of industry, Mum used to tell me, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but you’ll always be the captain of my heart, which is clearly bollocks. I could hire debt collectors, but that would require letters, phone calls and proper procedures. I don’t have time for that.

  I visit the warehouse’s filthy toilet, where there’s a mirror. My hair is unwashed and matted, my eyes glassy from the Guinness and my face adorned by six days of stubble – not a proper beard by any means but a dirty-looking straggle that enhances the effect. My fleece is rank with weeks-old sweat and my combat trousers are streaked with archaeological curry stains all the way down to my heavy black boots. And I see, as I examine my upper torso from various angles like a bodybuilder, that all the years of schlepping tables and chairs in and out of venues and up and down stairs has beefed me up, considerably.

  It’s the perfect look.

  I start to shadow box, but have a coughing fit.

  I phone Johnny.

  ‘We’re going into the debt collection business,’ I announce.

  ‘You are joking?’

  ‘No, Johnny, I’m deadly serious.’

  ‘Can’t you find someone else?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone else, so short of phoning Equity …’

  I explain the full extent of my negligence and he laughs at me.

  ‘And it’s your money?’

  ‘All of it, every penny.’

  He is truly the only person I can count on, Johnny, apart from Jonah. It’s the kind of friendship that endures despite intermittent periods of a lack of contact – always instigated by me, always for no reason other than my own retreat into isolation.

  ‘I don’t do violence, Ben, you know that.’

  ‘Just stand behind me looking mean, it’ll be a doddle. I only need you for the refusers anyway.’

  ‘That’s comforting.’

  ‘Oh, and your hair.’

  ‘What about my hair?’

  ‘Get it cropped, clippers, number one at least.’

  ‘You want me to shave my head, too? I’ll end up staying at yours tonight if …’

  ‘Please, Johnny. If not for me, for Jonah.’

  ‘God, the things I do for you. Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘Pick me up tomorrow morning at eight-thirty,’ I say.

  ‘You think I’m letting you use my car for this nonsense?’

  ‘It’s gangster, screams drug dealer.’

  ‘One scratch …’

  Jonah has already left for school when I drag my carcass down the stairs, so I clear up the breakfast things and fumigate his room. As I collect up the Tesco bags containing Jonah’s soiled nappies and ruined underwear, Johnny pulls up in his pristine car, the sun bulleting off his newly skinned head. I sit next to him reading the addresses and laughing at his baldness while he programmes his SatNav.

  ‘She’s going to kill me.’

  He looks at the plastic bag on my lap.

  ‘Please tell me the old man’s Luger isn’t in that bag?’

  ‘Thought about it.’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  I open the carrier, to reveal a bottle of whisky.

  ‘I hope that’s to celebrate with afterwards?’

  ‘Dirty, angry and smelling of booze – wouldn’t you pay up?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d have you arrested.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll ask politely first and save the menaces for later.’

  Johnny looks unconvinced as he starts the engine.

  This seems crazily like the start of a holiday, the drive to Gatwick for a flight to the Alps, or a weekend in Dublin. The freedom and drinking, for drinking’s sake, rather than the current reality of drinking insanely for sanity’s sake. A memory creeps into this strange revelry – arriving at the airport on the way to France fully aware that I had no money and asking Johnny to lend me some. Johnny obliging without question. Never paying him back. I just keep taking, I realise. From Johnny, from Emma. Even from my dad. I need to start clearing my debts.

  To me, asking Jewish widows for payments relating to the catering after their husbands’ funerals seems the height of callousness. But I just keep reminding myself that they’ve played on that sense of grief to avoid paying me in the first place – so fuck ’em. Johnny, on the other hand, lies cowering on the back seat whenever we reach an address he recognises – which is a lot.

  ‘Come on, it’s fun,’ I shout, jumping out of the car and running up to a doorstep. Johnny’s presence rids me of my awkwardness, always has.

  ‘Fuck off, that’s my mother-in-law’s house. Don’t ring the doorbell, I’ll pay her debt, just get away from there.’

  His protestations are too late. The chime rings out in the hallway and the door opens. It’s the cleaner, Mrs Caplin’s playing golf. ‘No,�
�� I say, ‘no message.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Johnny says, climbing back into the driver’s seat. I lay the Caplin invoice on his thigh and give it a pat.

  ‘You’re a very generous son-in-law.’

  We make thirty-one house calls before lunch – such is the convenience of a ghetto – and it is proving surprisingly easy. Most people, it transpires, are relieved to pay, many others explain they thought I’d gone out of business because the phone just kept ringing and ringing. Even Johnny appears to be getting into the spirit of the exercise, happily bouncing along to Dr Dre as we pull into a Sudbury pub for lunch.

  Johnny counts and writes down neat columns of numbers as we eat.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘So far, £6,411.50. Not bad for a morning’s work.’

  ‘See, what did I tell you?’

  Johnny’s club sandwich nods. What I haven’t told him is they were in my ‘easy’ pile and I don’t know what to expect from the afternoon, but I keep reminding myself that this is for Jonah and throw down a touch of the old Dutch courage. I phone the hospital to find out how Dad’s latest radiation blast went. When I finally get through to the nurses’ station, I can hear him shouting at Maurice in the background.

  Back on the road, I feel the roll of notes and the thick fold of cheques in my pocket. I don’t think I’ve ever carried this much money before. How much have I wasted over the years? I recall the rush when a customer asked to pay in cash, the delight of feeling that power in my pocket, the guarantees it provided of decent drink – a celebratory bottle of malt rather than blended whisky. Drunk in exactly the same fashion, of course, from the bottle and in the van. The shops and houses become familiar.

  ‘I’ll probably need you here,’ I say as he pulls up outside a three-storey Victorian in Kilburn.

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine, just stand behind me looking gormless and don’t say anything.’

  The bell doesn’t work. So I begin thumping on the door. The curtain twitches next to me in the ground-floor window.

  ‘Afternoon, Kieran.’ Now I’m banging on the window. ‘Kieran, I know you’re in there, open up, please.’