Twenty-five yards now, almost there.
I am close to the top of the hill.
And the moment of truth.
I have to go on, I have to know, to see – and then I have to stop it; maybe even prevent it happening. I cannot let him do what I believe he is doing; or is going to do. With a sweet boy. Or a cute girl. I don’t know which. Does it matter? What will he do, how far will he go? The thought sickens me. Makes me feel nauseous.
I am at the top of the hill. I look ahead, down the slope – nothing.
I turn to the right. Towards the play area.
And I see Adrian straightaway. And what he is doing.
TUESDAY 25 JULY, 12.10PM
I am back at the bungalow. In my room. Trying to stay calm. To think over what I saw, and what I must now do. My mind races, never settling, always going back to Adrian, focusing on something else for a second or two, something practical, something mundane, and then returning to Adrian once more, time and again. What I saw him doing. What he may have already done.
What he is likely to do next.
What I should do now.
What I have to do.
I do not know how I can bring myself to do it.
I am angry. I feel frenzied inside. Beside myself after what I saw. I need to let it go for the moment. To steady myself. Be calm. In control. Be prepared. For when he comes home. I fear I must confront him. Talk to him. Stop things. Before it’s too late. I have to do this alone.
He has to stop.
I have to stop him.
No matter what.
For the time being, I shall return, as best I can, to my diary, to finish my recollections of my final days at HMRC. This will calm me a little. The thinking of what to write. The phrasing of it. The working it out in my head before I put the words down on the page. The carefulness of it all. I have to be in control when Adrian comes home, puts his key in the lock, steps into the porch, kicks off his shoes and enters the hallway. Where I will be standing waiting.
The matter with the young lady all came out, inevitably. Her original text to me had been meant for another work colleague, the same age as her. A girl. A ms-ss-ss. She should not have been texting anyone in that way on her work phone. It was a misunderstanding of mine, a foolish fancy and, had it not been for that bully of a stepfather of hers, no harm would have been done.
But the police were called and the fat stepfather and I were driven away to the station. And there were statements and interviews and DNA was taken, which worries me more than I can say and, finally, the matter was put to bed by both sides accepting a police caution.
That was not the end of the matter as the young lady and her family complained to HMRC with quotes from some of my texts being provided. Some of these, when written down and read aloud, showed me in an unflattering, albeit misleading, light.
(When I turned to the right I saw the play area. Two slides. Swings. Three climbing frames. Young mothers on benches. Smiling, talking, laughing. Pushchairs galore. Children everywhere. Running, tumbling over, getting up again. And big, lanky, stupid Adrian.)
My employment with HMRC, although the paperwork and forms to sign will pile up for some time yet, ended swiftly.
Ms Williams – she pronounced the Ms with a long ssss when I called her Mrs in error – called me into an office and opened a file, read down the front page and then closed the file and looked away with a sigh. (Much as I used to do with taxpayers.)
She would not meet my steady gaze.
She would not say why, as such, I was being dismissed (for that was what it was, we both knew).
I do not think she even shook my hand at the beginning or the end of the meeting. Nor did she, as others had done before it was passed to her, make particular reference to the various incidents, which I could have explained given a proper opportunity.
(Adrian had his shirt off. He was on the far side of the play area. So much, and so many children, between us that I could not see him clearly. Bare-chested. Snatches, sudden glimpses. A clear view of his upper body. Standing there, clapping his hands in delight, this curious, freakish man-sized child.)
Mssss Williams made vague references to centralisation and deregionalisation and said I could transfer somewhere or other up north if I “really wanted to” (the implication being that it would all be an awful nuisance if I did).
When I made a tentatively positive noise to suggest I might be interested in doing that, she shook her head and said, with a thin-lipped smile, that this was “for the best… your pension will not be ungenerous… for the government”.
(I studied Adrian for a minute or two. Saw him clapping. Shuffling about. No one seemed to think it was anything out of the ordinary. I could not see any young mother looking at him, admonishing him or pulling her child away. I turned away in disgust, as I saw Adrian, his head down, concentrating, starting to dance a little Scottish Highland jig. I came home, I am not ashamed to say, close to tears. At what he has become. At what I have to do.)
Mssss Williams did not look at me as she smiled, would not meet my eye. I think I was meant to smile back, but I did not. I simply got up and left without a word.
I cleared my desk that same day – within minutes actually – and have not been back nor seen or spoken to anyone there since I left.
These are the facts of the matter. I have moved on and I have now put it all completely behind me. I will not write of it again. Not ever.
I have now completed my diary, going back over all of the incidents that led to my dismissal and me being here in the bungalow all of the time.
I cannot say I feel any the better for having written it all down again. Nor can I state in all honesty that I am any more accepting of what has been done to me.
But I cannot think straight right now. My mind is racing, returning always to Adrian and what he is, what he has turned into, and what I have to do when he returns home later today. Before that, I need to try to relax and think about how I am going to do it.
TUESDAY 25 JULY, 1.35PM
I am stretched out on the sofa in the living room, trying to still my darting mind; I need to think and plan and work through the mechanics of what I am going to do before Adrian returns. But my mind is never at peace. It hasn’t been for so long. Losing my job. Adrian. What I must do next, later today. And other things. There are things I don’t want to talk about or write down. Not now. Not yet anyway. Maybe never.
My mind always goes back over everything.
It rarely gets a chance to rest.
There are times when I think I am going mad with it all.
And there is always so much noise here, constant, endless noise, from all around. I think this must have been a nice bungalow once, back when it was built in the 1920s and the road wasn’t what it is today. No cars, I’d imagine. Maybe the clip-clop of hooves as horse-drawn carts made their way into town. I would have liked that noise, the gentle, natural sounds of days gone by.
This room needs cleaning properly. I have only just noticed. There are cobwebs; I can see them quite clearly from here with the light streaming in, across three of the four corners of the ceiling. I must, at some point later today, once I have dealt with Adrian, get up on a chair and wipe those over with a damp cloth. I am a clean and tidy man, but it is not easy to keep on top of everything I have to do.
There is a pile of post on the sideboard over by the window. Much of it has been stacking up for a while. Most of it is from HMRC, full of letters and forms to sign in triplicate to return to secure my ‘package’, such as it is. Stuff I don’t want to read, to address at all. Not now. Not at all.
I have not been treated fairly and that’s a fact.
I try not to think about it as it upsets me. I try to blot it out.
I will have to deal with it soon, though. I have no earnings and my savings are running low.
There are times when, almost with a flash of light, we suddenly see things as they really are. And so it is the case now when I look around. Once, fres
hly decorated and with new furniture, saved for and bought properly, this was a simple and attractive room. Now, my gaze takes it all in.
The dated, flowery wallpaper, curling in places at top and bottom. The tired brown-cord sofa and chairs, covered top, back and sides with throws, which I forget to wash as often as I should. The curls and swirls of the carpet, its darkness concealing goodness knows what.
The fact of the matter is that it is tired and run-down.
That bothers me more than I can say.
I should not have to live like this.
Adrian makes things ten times worse. He is what I call ‘a fiddler’. He cannot leave things alone. He has to twiddle, to interfere, to make a wretched nuisance of himself.
If he sees a flake of limescale at the bottom of the kettle he will, even though the kettle has a perfectly good filter, have to clean it out. Noisily, scouring away at it with a brush.
If he finds a mark on a teaspoon, he will pull an anguished face or, worse, make a gagging noise and I will have to listen while he rubs at it with a cloth, making little grunting noises as he does so. It is all too much for me.
Even now, in the middle of the day, this is a noisy place.
And just so hot too. I have the windows open, I have to. Pig smells or not.
Otherwise, I believe I would simply melt away.
I can hear traffic on the road, boys revving engines as this is at the start of a long, clear stretch up a hill. The putt-putt-putter of a car’s exhaust. The roar of a motorcycle. The high-pitched screams of little girls playing in the next garden. The idiot child grunting on one side. The endless drone of Ringo Starr’s voice on the other. His greatest hits CD, whatever they might be, on endless repeat. I ignore it all. I have to. If I give in, I will be done for.
So I lie here.
Sweating and shaking.
The tension of it.
I hear the gate being opened. The latch being lifted off. The slight screech as the bottom of the gate scrapes on the path. It is too early to be Adrian. It is the postman and he is late.
He has been the postman for over 15 years now. When he started he would deliver the post between 7.00 and 7.30am. His round changed and got bigger as other postmen – and women, I suppose – retired and weren’t replaced.
Lately, he has been delivering my post at close to midday. It is not ideal. Like milkmen and paperboys, postmen should all be done before the start of the working day.
I hear the postman’s footsteps on the path and wonder why he is later than usual. A round of junk mail to deliver to every house and flat and bungalow, I imagine. I hear him shuffling his feet on the step up to the porch door. I wait for the clatter of the letter box and the flutter of a letter or the thump of a catalogue.
I hear him cough and clear his throat. He is standing there waiting. He must have rung the doorbell. But there is no jingle-jangle sound in the hallway. I must have forgotten to change the batteries. I make a mental note to get some batteries when I next go to the shops and then replace them. I can’t remember when the postman last came to the door like this. He has not rung the doorbell for years.
I struggle to my feet. Do up my trousers, which I had loosened when I lay down. Run my fingers through my sweat-dampened hair to cover my bald patch.
Walk along the corridor to the door, twelve steps in all. I reach for the lock, twist and open the door. It’s not the postman.
I know who it is, though.
As I swallow and clear my throat, he speaks. Shouts, actually.
“Where’s Dawn? Where is she? What have you done to your wife?”
Part Two
THE HEATWAVE
TUESDAY 25 JULY, 10.01PM
It’s been a horribly long day today, and rather harrowing, what with one thing and another. Adrian this morning. Him at lunchtime. Then Adrian again.
All I had to do, straining and sweating in the heat.
I have now gone to bed.
And it has just occurred to me that I have not eaten a single thing.
No food since my lunchtime meal. But I have been drinking. Drinking and drinking. Lots and lots of water.
I ponder whether I might be diabetic. I should not be. You find that most diabetics are easy to spot. I had one such tub of lard in front of me once at the Revenue. A tax dodger. He babbled and burbled away about why he had not submitted returns, nor kept any records. Full of nonsense.
He then leaned forward and spoke with such unexpected urgency that I thought he was about to say he was having a heart attack. But no, he declared he was a diabetic, as though that explained and excused everything. He slapped the palm of his hand on the desk between us not once but twice, as if to emphasise the seriousness of what he was saying.
What his diabetes had to do with anything I do not know. The sheer stupidity of the man. As I said to him by reply, “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse.” (And I thought, but did not add, “nor is being a big thick lump”.)
He just sat there staring at me, scratching his huge barrel of a belly and sniffing. (He had, I think, a blocked nostril as there was a faint whistling noise when he breathed in but not when he breathed out, which I found most peculiar, and rather irritating.) I will be blunt now; diabetics are fat slobs, mostly, with their womanly sagging chests and their undone buttons on their trousers.
I am not like that. I am a smart and dapper man, well turned out. I always carry a handkerchief.
I weigh the same now as I did 30 years ago: 10 stone, 7 pounds, ‘in old money’, if I might be a little humorous for a moment.
Of course, someone in their 50s does not look the same as they do in their 20s. But, other than a little balding of the pate and the wearing of glasses, horn-rimmed and fashionable, my appearance has stood the test of time. There are one or two streaks of grey in my hair, which add a distinguished air. I do not dye it like so many sad middle-aged men with their gingery shades and tell-tale white tufts by their ears.
Some old woman at work once said I reminded her of Napoleon. It is always difficult to see yourself as others do, but, in pictures of him when he was older, there is a similarity around the eyes. I am the same height as the Great Boney too, just shy of 5 feet 7 inches using the British measuring system. This is a nice height for those ladies who do not want a hulking great beast standing next to them. Or lying by them in bed!
I’m not too tall.
I’m not too heavy.
I’m ‘just right’.
I had a stand-up shower in the bath this afternoon – it took ages to rinse it all out – followed by a proper sit-down bath.
Then I rinsed the bath out again.
I repeated the process, to be honest, both the shower and the bath, twice more, into the evening. I could not get myself clean.
These lard-laden diabetics are a burden on the NHS and the state. We all subsidise them one way or the other. They are a drain on society and its finances. I have, of late, noticed that there is a family of fatties living up near the parade of local shops.
I have seen them standing at the front of the 7-Eleven, Tizer and jumbo-sized packs of cheese curls in their hands, him and her, gorged and bloated on their endless state benefits, and two children of indeterminate age in tow, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They both have dummies, the one in the pushchair and the one standing next to him (or possibly her, as its fatness disguises its sex). I’ve stood and watched as they all wobbled off. We all pay for these through our taxes!
I have, in actual fact, put something in the letter box to them recently. (I had, while having an hour or two to idle away one afternoon the week before last, casually followed them home – an end-of-terrace council house painted pink with a broken-down car jacked-up at the front and the usual debris of bin bags and dead flowers in broken pots all around.)
I posted a sheaf of paperwork, statistics on obesity and the cost to the nation, along with a short, some might say pithy, note on a postcard, encouraging them to lose weight. ASAP. I put it in a rather amusing way so tha
t the message might be put across both effectively and nicely.
I cannot sleep. Even when I let my mind wander over nonsense.
Thinking about my little triumphs, relaying them in my mind with the bons mots I said or should have said usually helps. I sometimes re-imagine scenes in my mind for my own amusement.
But not now. Maybe not ever again. I think I am done for.
It is still hot, even at this late hour. But it is not the ferocious heat of earlier in the day. Of this afternoon, when I should really have laid down and stopped what I was doing. When I should not have exerted myself so much. Not that I had much choice.
I don’t need to go into all the ins and outs. The this and that. The why and wherefore of it all. Things had to be done. There and then. And I did what I had to do. I am like that. When something has to be sorted. As a matter of urgency. I get the bit between my teeth. And I do it, come what may.
And now I am in my room and I should be asleep. But sleep will not come and embrace me, taking me off and easing my pain and agony. It is so very far away and I must lie here a while and search it out and wait for it to accept me.
If it will.
If I will ever sleep again.
I don’t know that I will, not properly.
I am trapped. Here in this bungalow. In this sweltering heat. With all of the noise to the front, never-ending, getting ever worse as each year rolls slowly by and there is more and more traffic on the road. To the sides, the idiot neighbours might as well stand outside my windows day and night banging wooden spoons on saucepans and screeching at the top of their voices. And the endless to-ing and fro-ing of freight trains on the line behind me makes me want to scream.
And the worst thing is that I can never go, cannot ever sell this bungalow and walk away and leave everything behind and forget about it all. I have to sit, here in this horrid little box, and wait until the knock at the door, the day they come to take me away. And they will. One day soon. I know they will. It might even be in the morning, first thing.
Mr Todd's Reckoning Page 7