Taken by surprise, and as he was considerably larger than me, his blow knocked me to the ground. As I sat there slightly stunned listening to him effing and blinding away over me I noticed that, while one or two people had looked up and across as he came running and shouting, they soon looked away again after that and hurried on their way. That is what people are like.
I had expected a long and sustained assault from the man, a variety of kicks and blows as I was on the floor struggling to get to my feet. But he stood there, bent aggressively towards me shouting all the words under the sun. The young lady and her mother had come out of the shop and chased after him by this time, both grabbing an arm and holding him back in a rather theatrical manner.
As the three of them stood there, the man twisting and turning with words of anger and fury and dramatic screams and shouts from them, I got to my feet, took a biro from my jacket pocket and went to jab him in the eye with it. He was fortunate that he turned his head at the last moment as he would otherwise have been blinded by it and serve him right. He would only have had himself to blame. As it was, the pen simply caught the edge of his ear lobe and drew a black line across it.
As I explained later, my gesture was purely and simply in self-defence and had the desired effect of quietening him down until the police arrived, alerted to the incident by a passer-by presumably, a few minutes later. I do not wish to add anything to that; it was an unfortunate matter from beginning to end and I do not want to dwell on it further, thank you.
It is getting late now. Adrian has been in the loft, found whatever it is he was looking for and gone back to the garage and packed the step-ladder away before retiring to bed.
It is dark outside.
And still hot.
And I feel as tense as ever.
I will make my way to the bathroom and wash myself down before lying on my bed for another endless night of heat and noise and wondering what it is that Adrian is doing. I assume the worst and it preys on my mind and worries me to death.
TUESDAY 25 JULY, 9.10AM
We have had breakfast – the same endless ‘round and round we go’ routine as yesterday and every other day for as long as I have been at home. I now lie here on my bed, the window open and a slight breeze (at last) cooling my sweating skin. I can smell the pig farm today, which is even riper than usual in the heat, but makes a change from cabbages and cauliflowers. I think it must be close to 80 degrees already. I can feel my shirt sticking to the small of my back.
I am listening to Adrian as he packs away the breakfast things. It is easier for both of us if he does it alone. He has his routine. His ways. His order. His places. Once he has done that, and worked through all of his other ‘to do’ things, he will go out again, I think, disappearing for hours as he has been doing lately.
I do not know what he does.
It worries me.
I fear for him – and me.
He has finished in the kitchen now. I hear him moving to the bathroom. He shuts the door. I listen to the tap running as he washes his fingers. Squirts soap from his little dispenser. Once. Twice. Three times. Making sure. He dries his hands on his towel. Another clean one today; as every day. I hear the toilet seat creak up. A long pause. An endless sound. Coughing. Coughing. Coughing. I hear the flush. Pulls it twice, making certain; then once more, so hard I think the handle must break. Opens the door, shuts it quietly.
The endlessness of it all drives me mad.
I keep it all inside me, as deep down as I can.
I cannot let his madness overwhelm me, take me over.
Now Adrian is in his room. I hear the click as he opens his wardrobe. He is taking a shirt out. All quiet. He is looking at himself in the mirror, full length. He checks first this way. Then that. Not happy. A rustle and another click. He pulls the next shirt from his wardrobe. Takes one off. Puts one on. Checks himself again in the mirror on the wardrobe door. First this way. Then that again. All quiet. He stops. Starts. Tries on more shirts. Trousers. Socks. Shoes. Each time, this way, then that. Taking things out. Putting them back. Agonising over every single item.
I have to listen to this all the time.
The rustle, the bang, the creak, the irrational knocking.
God help me, it drags me in, tears at my nerves as I lie here waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Now he has turned on his music on his phone, quietly, but I can still hear it. Boom boom boom. Boom. Boom Boom. I cannot hear the song. Nor the singer. No tune at all. Just the endless bass. Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom. No rhythm. No logic. The endless, never-quite-the-same repetitive noise. No pattern. No sense. On and on it goes.
My nerves are torn and jagged. The sweat runs off me. I could just lie here and scream from deep down inside my lungs.
I thought he was going out. Not listening to music.
I don’t know what he is doing.
I wait, stay calm. Count to 10, 20, 30 and 40 and more, just focusing on the numbers, nothing else. On and on I go. 50. 100. 200, then 300.
Now there is silence. Sudden. Unexpected. He has turned the music off. I strain to listen, to hear him moving about. The tread of his foot on the floorboard as he rises from the bed. Footsteps as he crosses to the door. Pause. More footsteps in the hallway. The turn of the handle, the signal that he is leaving the bungalow. But I am imagining all of this, of course. It is in my head. My mind is full of his madness. My head is turned, skewed towards his insanity. There is no noise. It is all quiet. He is lying on the bed. Not moving. At least, not moving enough to make a sound for me to hear. I don’t like to think what he is doing.
The silence is as bad as the noise.
I feel my back arching with tension.
Strained and damp, it is all I can do to stop my scream.
I wonder sometimes what he would do, Adrian, if I were to scream. To shout. To push and shake him. To knock some sense into him. To display my frustration. My anger. My complete and utter fury. My helplessness to change any of this relentless, ever-twitching tedium.
I do not know what he would do. Cower? Strike back? He has strong emotions. I know that. A temper too. The thought of what he is capable of frightens me. So I contain my feelings. Push them deep down inside. Subdue them. Squash them. Make them so small that I can lie here without feeling tense and shaking.
The silence goes on.
I cannot bear it.
But I must wait, hold myself together somehow.
I lie here for what seems an age in this unbearable silence. I think of Adrian as he used to be. Before he turned, became what he is today. I remember him as a small child. In a park. Climbing a tree. Running ahead of me. Laughing. Happy days. When did he last laugh? I cannot remember. It is so long ago that it has slipped away into the mists of our life.
I could not have imagined then what lay ahead of us, what he would become. The sour joke of the knicker-nicker. The obscenity of the sauna. The seediness of the department store lavatory. The filth of it all. I will lie here and wait for as long I have to, listening to his endless nip, nip, nip of noise. Until, eventually, I hear him moving about, walking into the hallway, out of the front door.
This time I am going to follow him. See what he is up to.
I am going to uncover exactly what it is he is doing.
I have to deal with this myself. I have no choice. I cannot call the police. I cannot have them here. Not now. I have to do what I need to do. God help me.
TUESDAY 25 JULY, 10.15AM
Adrian is on the bus, on his way into town. I am in the car, following two or three cars behind. I waited for ages. Listening to the silence. Then heard him moving. When he eventually left the bungalow, I went into the porch, pretending to be busy tidying away shoes, with half an eye on him up at the bus stop. As he got onto the bus and it finally pulled away, I held back a minute or two and then slipped out of the front door to the car on the driveway in front of the garage. I then followed the bus.
Adrian will never notice me.
He wo
uld never think of it.
Adrian is completely self-absorbed.
It is not easy following a bus. It does not drive smoothly and steadily from here to there, A to Z, so that you can stay five or six cars behind and follow it at your leisure. When it stops, to drop off or collect people, one or two of the cars in front overtake and carry on. I have to pull over, being beeped by the cars behind, so that I do not get too close. If I were the car immediately behind the bus, Adrian may look out and then spot me.
He would think that peculiar.
He may put two and two together.
He might change his plans, cover his tracks.
At temporary traffic lights, as workmen stand about with shovels by an open trench, the bus moves on into the single traffic lane and I speed up to slip through behind the three cars in front of me before the lights change. One goes through. The lights start to change. The next car accelerates and races through too. One car left in front of me. Go on. Go on. It slows, quite illogically, and stops. Had it kept going, it could have gone through and I could have done too. I shout in sudden frustration as the bus pulls away over the hill in front of me and the long line of cars on the other side of the road starts filing through.
I know where the bus goes. Its route into town.
But he may get off earlier.
At a stop before I can catch up. I may lose him.
He was normal once, Adrian. Not so very long ago. Did his GCSEs. Nine. ‘C’ grades and above. Decent enough. He was good at maths, I remember. Could have joined HMRC. I suggested it once. He shook his head. Dismissed it without proper discussion. A Levels, three of them, not great but good enough grades to get into a proper university, not one of these feeble polytechnics renamed as universities. Off he went to study a business management course in Yorkshire and then, no more than half a term or so later, or whatever they call it, he came home.
Not for him, he said, almost tearfully. The university. The course. The student life. Yorkshire. Something had happened there, I’m sure. I don’t know what. It must have been something serious, something bad. He seemed angry. Confused. Defiant too. Defensive. Always defensive. I did not press him beyond cursory conversation. I did not want to ask. He did not want to say. There was vague and occasional talk of a gap year, maybe doing another course somewhere else at some other time. I don’t think either of us ever really believed it.
He got a part-time job. At a fast-food place. For two or three months. He left. Didn’t like working nights. Spent some time at home umming and aahing about. Then a cafe in town. Open only during the day. Four months there, maybe five. The longest spell. Then he left under another cloud. Something or other. A falling-out with a colleague, the female manager. More time at home.
Then a sales assistant in a furniture store in an out-of-town shopping centre. Next, a kennels or a cattery, I forget which. Each job coming and going in no more than two or three months. A growing awareness there was something not quite right about him. His time at home in between getting longer until at last he was there all the time. Benefits. Signing on. Interviews for jobs he’d never get, nor wanted. Endless meandering his way through life. A wretched existence.
I am being hooted.
Several cars, one with a man leaning out of the window and shouting.
I pull away, racing after the bus now.
His madness, for that is what I believe it has become, came on slowly; like the hour hand on a watch, I never saw it moving forwards. The normal boy – the one who was quiet and loved books and drawing and who would have lived an ordinary, clean and decent life – somehow changed, little by little over the years, to the nervous, twitching, endlessly fiddling wreck of the man he is today. I hate what he has become and fear what he is doing.
I am a car or two back behind the bus now as it approaches the town. Four or five bus stops to the town centre.
I do not know if Adrian is still on the bus. I think he is.
If he goes into the town centre itself, I will have to find somewhere to park as close by as I can and then try to track him down from there. I suddenly realise I have no coins on me for a car park.
I do not know what Adrian has been doing, is doing now. I had thought the theft of women’s clothing was an isolated matter. That was bad enough, bringing the police and social workers to our door, into our home, rummaging and ferreting about. The others were worse in their way. The sauna at the local leisure centre. Sleazy. The toilets at the store. Seedy. There are things about my son – that side of him, the intimate part of him – that I don’t want to know about. No father does.
He is close, I think, to something else this time; something horrific. There will be charges, a court case, a custodial sentence. The last time the police came round, I was taken aside. Warned. Told that he was on the police radar. “Next time.” Next time, they said. The words left hanging in the air.
The bus pulls in, two or three stops from the town centre. Close to a park.
I hold back, watching, as Adrian gets off and, without glancing around, strolls slowly towards the park gates as if he has all the time in the world.
If I am quick, I can turn into a road, 20, 30 yards further down to the right and park there.
I must be quick, I dare not lose him.
TUESDAY 25 JULY, 10.30AM
I am standing, sweating, drenched as ever in the heat, trying to catch my breath by the park gates. I parked the car easily enough down the side road, then walked back as fast I could, close to running.
I can just see Adrian.
In the distance.
On the main path, going up the hill.
At the top, he can go one of three ways. I hope he goes straight on, follows the main path that meanders down the other side of the hill through gardens and trees and shrubs to a little boating lake and beyond to a café and other ways in and out of the park. He’d spend a few minutes strolling round the lake before wandering out and into town, round the shops, a few errands, and then back home. No harm done.
That’s what I hope.
But I fear it will be to the left.
Or, worse, to the right.
To the left are the toilets. For many years, as long as I can remember, these were run-down and dirty; meeting places for sad old men and scared young boys, hiding away in corners. Fumbling and fiddling. Thrusts and sudden cries. Now renovated, I ask myself if this is where they still meet in secret and whether Adrian at heart is one of them. This wretched, virginal man-child with his dreadful secrets.
I don’t think so. Not really.
Adrian is not that way, I’m sure.
I think he is another way. Something much worse.
So, to the right then, and what will be another turning point, another downturn, in his miserable life. I feel sick to my stomach if that’s where he’s heading. I think it is. It has to be. To the right and the children’s play area.
Young mothers.
Pushchairs.
Sturdy boys and pretty girls.
I walk slowly – I do not want to do this, do not want to know the truth – up the path, following Adrian. At the top of the hill, just before he goes over the brow and disappears, he stops walking. As if undecided what to do. Fighting his demons, maybe. His better self, that long-lost part of him, encouraging him to carry on walking down the path and away and out of the other side of the park.
If he turns, looks back from where he’s come, he will see me. Some way off. Near the foot of the hill. But clearly, unmistakably me. There is nothing I can do about that but hope and pray – if I believed in anything to pray to. There are people dotted about, single men and women, one or two couples, sunbathing, sitting around, talking, laughing. But there is no one else on the path between us I can hide behind. There are no trees or bushes close enough that I can move across and use as cover.
I drop to my knees, dip my head down, as if tying my shoelaces. If he looks this way, he may not notice, will not realise the hunched-over figure so far down the hill is his fath
er following him. I untie my left shoelace. Make a show of re-tying it. Shift knees. Repeat the elaborate nonsense with the right shoelace.
Wait.
Has he turned, moved, disappeared out of sight?
Or is he there, looking at me?
I hold my breath, a moment or two. I have to do something. I cannot kneel here like this much longer. It looks odd. I take a fleeting look upwards, fearing he will be coming down the hill towards me, striding, his face contorted with fury. His shameful secret so close to being exposed.
But he is not there.
He has gone over the hill.
I must hurry to see which way he went, what he is doing.
I follow his footsteps up the hill, walking faster now, as if by doing that I might somehow stop him. Dreading what I am going to see. And what I will do when I see him for what he is. What, deep down, I have always known he has been. Not odd. Not strange. A pervert. Little things. Signs. Things he’s said and done over the years. That all now fall into place.
100 yards.
I still have time to turn around.
To go home and ignore this horror.
I slow down; it’s too hot to walk this fast. And bizarre too; people will look up and across and notice. He will be there when I arrive anyway. Wherever he is. To the left. To the right. In the distance, going down the hill, fading away into the trees and bushes. But I know the truth now. Inside. It won’t be a shock to me when it is finally revealed.
Fifty yards.
I should stop, think what I am doing.
Leave it, ignore it, pretend it’s not so.
I’m walking slowly now, almost slowing to a halt. One step. Two steps. A slow and reluctant shuffle. Not wanting to see what I am going to be confronted by. The truth about Adrian. What will I do? What can I do? I cannot call the police, have them at the bungalow, looking, exploring, digging about. I know what must be done. By me.
Mr Todd's Reckoning Page 6