by David Nobbs
But he doesn’t leave. He finds an empty little side chapel, and there he kneels and prays.
‘O Lord,’ he says silently, but moving his lips in an attempt to feel more fervent. ‘I’m not a Catholic. Well, you know that. If I was a Catholic, and if I was therefore going to confession, I would confess to one great sin. When I was told that my son was dead, I wasn’t told which one, and when I saw that Liam was alive I felt a little stab of disappointment. I can’t forget this. I’m reminded of it every time I see my son. So I have had to come to terms with it, and I have. I’ve done this by accepting that I am imperfect, that it would be inhuman and robotic, as a father of two children, not to love one more than the other. To love them equally, that seems a rather theoretical kind of love, perhaps a bit like your own love for all mankind. Which worries me a bit, to be honest. I mean, can you really love St Francis, Jack the Ripper and Steven Venables equally? So I no longer feel guilty. I feel that it would have been a sin if I had not loved either of my sons. To love them both, but one a little more than the other, seems to me to be reasonable. And, if it is a sin, I hope I redeem it with my actions, for I make every effort to be a truly good father to the boy. I believe that what we do is far more important than what we think. Our acts are far more important than our motives.
‘I’m just an ordinary, unsophisticated, Northern English taxidermist. I’m not particularly good at it, certainly nothing like as good as my dad, but I get by. So I don’t know if I’m really clever enough to know how prayer works or how it’s supposed to work. I mean, you can’t hear every word that everyone who prays to you is saying. You aren’t a great telephone exchange in the sky. So what do people expect when they pray? How can they expect you to answer? If I pray to win a football match, and one of my opponents also asks you to let him win the same football match, that would be putting you in an impossible position, so clearly that kind of prayer is simply wrong. But people must expect some kind of action or at least reaction from you, otherwise why would they pray? Clearly, if prayer is effective, you must be able to give some kind of answer to millions of people all virtually at the same time. And you must, in a sense, be all the Gods people believe in, because there surely can’t actually be more than one God? So, unless all the other prayers made in the world are a waste of time, they must somehow come to you. Maybe you’re a kind of electronic person or a person made out of waves or even of things that I don’t know about or can’t dream of, forces we don’t yet know about. The owl sees at least two hundred times better than me. Maybe you can understand millions of things at the same time.
‘I have a feeling that theologians and bishops would have answers proving that what I think about prayer is very naive indeed, that I’ve missed the point, but if that is so then I have to say, I’m sorry, and hope that it’s true that you love ordinary human beings as much as bishops and popes.
‘All this may suggest to you that I’m having doubts, and, yes, I am. Lord, I want to ask you two things.
‘The first, and the most important thing, is that I want help to overcome my grief. The thing is, a great part of me doesn’t want to overcome it, but I know that I need to if I am to be a good father to Liam. Maggie has been true to her word – I’ve never liked her as much as I have since we parted, and I see Liam a lot. I know you know all this but somehow it doesn’t work for me unless I tell you, even though I know I’m probably wasting my time. Anyway, Liam and I do quite a lot of things together, but my heart isn’t truly in it, and children are very perceptive about hearts, and one day he will realise and I will lose him too. That prospect terrifies me.
‘My second request is…I feel a bit self-conscious asking this. There’s a story about all the diplomats in some country being asked what they wanted for Christmas. The English ambassador said, “A new camera.” Then he heard that all the other ambassadors had asked for things like an end to poverty, world peace and fresh clean water for every human being on earth. Well, I feel a bit like him, because at this very moment people are praying for an end to war and poverty and cancer and earthquakes and all the other things that you have chosen to let us endure for reasons that I only dimly perceive, and I am asking you to help me meet a young woman whom I realise I love. You know her name, but I’ll remind you. It’s Naomi Walls. Or Naomi Prendergast, née Walls, but she still calls herself Naomi Walls for her work.
‘I know that in the scheme of things this is a pretty trivial request, but I love her so much, and I am so sorry that we messed up our first chance of happiness. I promise you this isn’t some weird obsession – if she doesn’t want me I will accept it happily, well, no, not happily, but you know what I mean. I’m not some kind of metaphysical stalker. I’m a man who has made a right old cock-up, if you’ll excuse my French, of his personal life, and wants to put things right.
‘I know you’ve got far more important matters to deal with, so I’ll let you get on with them now, but I’d just point out one thing. If you grant me the second part of my wish, you’ll also go a long way towards granting me my first wish, because with Naomi I am sure I could learn to have joy and fun again. And if you granted me both wishes, all my doubts would disappear and be as mist – well, no, you can see mist, but I’m thinking of that moment when the mist just disperses into nothingness. My doubts will disperse just like that.
‘So really all my requests are tied in together, and so I don’t think it’s unreasonable or greedy of me to ask for so much. Thank you very much for listening to me. Amen.’
By the time Timothy and Dave reach the Calle Mateos Gago, Naomi has gone. The coincidence doesn’t happen.
Their paths will cross very soon, however, and this time it won’t be a coincidence.
PART FOUR
Get Stuffed 1995
It’s a cold evening in West London, with flecks of rain on a north-westerly wind. The wind is creeping round the corner of the BBC Television Centre. Processions of cars, white vans, taxis, buses and lorries grind with agonising slowness in both directions along grimy, unlovely Wood Lane. It is not a scene, or an evening, to excite or warm a person. Yet Timothy is in a fever of anticipation, and a fire burns inside him.
No. It’s too soon to be talking of fevers of anticipation, of fires burning inside Timothy. How could that be?
It is in the nature of our experience of existence that we see the world around us entirely from the viewpoint of our own eyes. This may seem obvious, trite, banal, self-evident, tautologous and worthy of many other uncomplimentary adjectives. Painters, sculptors, writers, actors, musicians show us the world through their eyes, but we can only see the world that they show us through their eyes through our own eyes.
Timothy is sitting in the back bar of the Wig and Mitre. It’s the ‘Happy Hour’.
No. It’s too soon even to be talking of happy hours. The concept would have seemed indecent to the Timothy whom we last saw in Seville. So what has happened?
Nothing.
Except…Timothy has been thinking. He’s quite good at that.
He has realised that, when he sees the world entirely through his own eyes, he is entitled to grieve, he is probably doomed to grieve, for his lost son for the rest of his life. He will also wallow in guilt. But if he makes a determined effort – and, my God, it has to be determined – to see the world through other people’s eyes, everything changes.
He has already tried to see the world through Liam’s eyes, and has realised that he must rediscover his capacity for joy, true joy. Young children can smell out insincerity. The older they get, the more insincerity they are faced with, and the more weary and blurred their instinct becomes. If he is incapable of true happiness, he will be unable to bring any joy to the life of his surviving son. He has to recover his spirits, for his son’s sake.
‘Oh, very convenient,’ the cynic observes.
But there is also Roly. Timothy sees Liam from time to time, but he sees Roly almost every day. Roly is thrilled to have him back in number ninety-six. He has hated all his lone
ly suppers in that dark house. Timothy is by far the most important element in Roly’s life. He has to be positive, for Roly. It’s his obligation. It’s his duty.
‘Oh, brilliant,’ cries the cynic in tones dripping with sarcasm. ‘How very fortunate.’
But Timothy does not see any of this as convenient, or fortunate. His sorrow is his greatest friend, his lover, his indulgence. His first forays into true recovery are painful indeed. Every moment of pleasure is a challenge to his integrity. Every laugh is an outrage to his sensitivity. Sam is dead. He insults Sam by smiling. Yet he does no good to Sam by crying. By crying, he feeds only his self-esteem.
It’s a deeply ironic and deeply sad fact – though, not being saints, we may permit ourselves to relish the rough justice of it just a little – that the most egotistical and selfish of people actually deny themselves much of the pleasure of life. They have fewer friends than the unselfish, receive fewer presents, are less well treated by the rest of the human race. In the sad world of the elderly there are many lonely old people who have never learned to give and are reaping a meagre and deserved harvest.
Luckily, Timothy is not, by the standards of society, very egotistical at all. He is not, in fact, a very self-conscious person. He worries about tiny matters: what to say at parties, how to tie parcels, which knife to use, whether he will remember his lines. He doesn’t worry about the bigger pictures, no more worries about what people think of him, whether they like him, whether they will be convinced by his portrayal of Romeo. That, coupled with his good looks, is what attracted Naomi to him so strongly, in Coningsfield, in Earls Court, especially on the second night, and even in Iquitos.
Slowly, a step at a time, life returns to Timothy’s soul. He swims with Liam as if they were dolphins, puts onto his father’s dark table meals that taste of love.
It’s a cold evening in West London, with flecks of rain on a north-westerly wind. The wind is creeping round the corner of the BBC Television Centre. Processions of cars, white vans, taxis, buses and lorries grind with agonising slowness in both directions along grimy, unlovely Wood Lane. It is not a scene, or an evening, to excite or warm a person. Yet Timothy is in a fever of anticipation, and a fire…
No. It’s still too soon to be talking of fevers of anticipation, of fires burning inside him.
More than two years have passed since Timothy prayed so fervently in Seville. He has begun to learn to smile and laugh again. He has also, slowly, very gradually, learned how to drink. He has now been on no fewer than nine Pennine Piss-ups with Tommo, Steve and Dave, and each one has become just a little less difficult than the last one. He has had to put on an act for his friends, and gradually it has begun to cease to be an act.
His gradual emergence into the world of alcohol has also led him into the habit of visiting the Wig and Mitre in Granary Lane twice a week after work, just for a couple of pints, and a third on rare occasions such as the upsetting affair of the angry coarse fisherman and the two large pike. The fisherman had been lucky enough to catch a nineteen-pound pike, which he had wanted stuffed, mounted and placed in a glass case.
‘We don’t stuff,’ Timothy had explained. ‘We model.’
‘I don’t care what it is you bloody well do. Just do it,’ the man had said, revealing himself to be a coarse fisherman in two senses.
Timothy had thought of refusing, but it had been a quiet time and he’d needed the money. He’d begun the job straight away, sensing that this man would be quick to complain of delay. And then the man had caught a twenty-one-pound pike and wanted that done instead of the first one. Timothy had said that he was almost halfway through the first pike, so the man would have to pay for the time and materials involved. The man had refused. An altercation had taken place, the outcome of which need not concern us, and Timothy had felt justified in having a third pint. The pub was within walking distance, after all.
And there is another day, a hundred and thirty-eight days before his fever of anticipation in Wood Lane, on which he feels that a third pint is justified. Not only justified, needed. It has been a difficult day for him. He had the dream last night, for maybe the fourth or fifth time, he can’t be sure. It is a very bad dream, and it did begin to occur shortly after Sam’s death, but that has nothing to do with its subject matter. It’s just one more thing that he has to deal with, and it’s something that he finds it utterly impossible to admit to another human being.
He has taken his first pint and his evening paper to a far corner of the large bar. He still isn’t a natural mixer. He has bought the paper, as always, from the seller with the squint on the corner rather than the good-looking one with the smug expression outside the hospital. These little things are important to him. He settles himself down for what he calls ‘My own “Happy Hour”’. The pub itself runs a ‘Happy Hour’, during which spirits are half price, but Timothy’s happiness lies not in the price of his drinks but in his being free from his father for an hour. He is not a saint. He truly loves his father, of course he does, his love for his father has played a great part in helping him to cope with his torment, but looking after a man who is now virtually blind is a responsibility and a tie. And his father has been a brilliant taxidermist, a master craftsman, more than a craftsman, an artist. Timothy is a plodder by comparison, competent enough, making a steady living, but not receiving reindeers to model from admiring Lapps and a shark sent all the way from Cornwall by taxi, as once happened to his father. And all the time, as he’s worked, in the shadow of the dark house and the greater shadow of his father’s reputation, he’s been aware that at any moment he will hear the tap tap tap of his father’s stick, and his father will enter the room, and say, with the curious archaic speech he increasingly favours, ‘How goes it, esteemed product of my then less scrawny loins? Do you think perhaps that branch he’s perched on should be a little higher in the case?’ or, ‘Greetings, thou to whom I bequeathed my business with such confidence. Making progress? Excellent. Um…is the face turned a little bit too much, do you think? Does it look just a little unnatural, a trifle forced? Only a thought, I may be wrong, I can’t see, probably I should shut up.’ And as Timothy had said to Tommo and Steve and Dave in the Mill House at Bugginsby Far Bottom, on one of their ‘Pennine Piss-ups’, ‘He’s always right. He’s almost totally blind, and he’s always right. Always. Every time. Never wrong. Never. Not once. Not that I mind. It doesn’t irritate me. It doesn’t get to me. I’m really cool about it.’ Timothy cool? Come on.
Of course it did get to him, and that is why he so enjoys these moments on his own. And on this particular evening, he has opened the paper with a sigh of quiet delight, held it in front of his face to deter conversation, and drifted through its trivial delights. ‘Councillor Arranged Building Contract for Cousin’, ‘Coningsfield Weather Girl Raises a Storm’, ‘Lost Goose Thinks City Dentist is His Father’, ‘Vandals Steal Bus Stop’, ‘Third Time Lucky for Sitcom Sexpot?’
‘Third Time Lucky for Sitcom Sexpot?’? Could it be? It has to be. His heart thuds against his chest. For a moment he thinks it’s a heart attack. Then he realises that it’s more serious than that. It’s love.
He hardly dares read the article.
Lovely local actress Naomi Walls (33) is hoping that it will be a case of ‘Third Time Lucky’ when she takes a starring role in a brand new BBC sitcom, Get Stuffed.
The shapely Lower Cragley Road thespian has appeared in two sitcoms in recent years. Her first, Nappy Ever After, lasted only one series and was what is known in media circles as ‘A turkey’.
Then she had a much more promising role as the sex-obsessed German chiropodist with a foot fetish in the Rhineland romp, Cobblers in Koblenz, where she was known for her catchphrase, ‘Get Them Off.’ The show lasted two series and attracted good audiences but was cancelled by the new BBC comedy supremo, Gladys Mainspring, who said it was, ‘Not my cup of tea.’
Sexpot
‘I’ve not been too lucky in my comedy roles so far,’ bubbly Naomi explained to
me over a cappuccino in the Holiday Inn. ‘Nappy Ever After just didn’t work, and I was embarrassed even to go to the supermarket or the hairdresser’s.
‘Cobblers in Koblenz did much better, but it was hardly Shakespeare and I could understand the BBC’s decision. I didn’t really like people saying, ‘Get Them Off’ everywhere I went. My daughter Emily is ten and I don’t want her growing up thinking her mother is just a sexpot.’
Naomi explained to me that she always tries to put her daughter first, especially in the years since her separation and divorce from her husband, Simon.
What?? Wow-ee. Hurrah. Timothy raises his glass carefully to his lips. He has to use both hands, he’s shaking so much.
Now Naomi has a third chance to really hit the spot.
‘I haven’t seen the full scripts yet’, she mused over her coffee, which she took without sugar. She is very weight-conscious.
Oh. Oh. Your slim body. The tops of your thighs, slender yet substantial. Steady on, Timothy. But oh oh oh, Naomi, my darling, my slim, slender sexpot. No, she doesn’t like that word. Cool down, Timothy. There’ll be someone else in her life. Read on and find out.
‘But the scene I read for the audition was funny and touching, and that’s the combination I respond to.’
Sex-sodden
‘Of course I would like Emily to see me in great dramatic roles rather than in sex-sodden sitcoms, but I’m hoping that this one will have a bit more quality and less innuendo than Cobblers in Koblenz, and you have to be realistic and take what you’re given. Lots of my friends would die for a chance like this,’ opined the level-headed former alumnus of Coningsfield Grammar School.
So what is the new comedy about?
‘I’m glad you asked me that,’ Naomi smiled. ‘It’s about an area of life that many people know nothing about – taxidermy.’