by David Nobbs
Yesterday he had gone with Liam to the municipal tip, and had thrown away many other things, including a slim volume entitled Great Recipes of Doncaster, which he had picked up for a snip at a car boot sale and which he now knew he would never use, all his videos of Nappy Ever After, Cobblers in Koblenz and Get Stuffed – he couldn’t bear to watch Naomi in them now – and all the photos of his two weddings.
‘Are you sure, Dad?’
‘Absolutely, Liam. Sorry.’
‘No, I’ve no problem with it.’
‘It’s not meant as an insult to your mum or Hannah, Liam, it’s just…over.’
‘OK. Cool.’
He had tossed these things into the skip one at a time, with carefree wristy flicks, as if throwing a frisbee or sending ducks and drakes skimming over the water. Liam had been embarrassed, had tried to look as if he wasn’t with this strange man. Timothy had felt a great surge of liberation, of sloughing off dead skins, of freeing himself from failed relationships, of greeting the future with open arms. Afterwards there had come the inevitable reaction, the fear, the emptiness, the memory of Sam, the sharp, almost unbearable desire for Naomi.
It’s a morning of bright sunshine and sharp showers. Liam at sixteen has grown tall and, though not handsome, has a quirky attraction about him, which, Maggie has told Timothy in a letter, ‘is standing him in good stead’. He seems to Timothy to be a reassuringly normal kid. His ambition is to be an industrial chemist, or an international surf boarder. Timothy has worried that the task of helping him load and unload will be tedious to the growing boy, but in fact he is clearly delighted to help his dad.
‘Thank you for doing this,’ Timothy says. ‘It’d be very depressing on my own.’
‘That’s OK,’ says Liam. ‘I can’t believe how few records you have. It’s pathetic, Dad.’
‘I know. Several movements in popular music culture have passed me by completely.’
‘You’ve got quite a lot of books, though.’
‘Not compared to some people.’
‘I’d never read a book if I didn’t have to. Books are boring.’
Timothy stops and looks at Liam gravely.
‘I once heard Tim Henman say that on television,’ he says. ‘You know. The tennis player. I thought, “No, Tim, books contain all the magic of thought and imagination that great minds think up. If you can’t find anything stimulating or interesting in any book ever written, I’m afraid it’s you that’s boring.” Say that you aren’t bookish, as unfortunately seems to be the case with you, but don’t ever say, in my presence, that books are boring.’
Liam looks at him, stunned by this attack. Then he gives a really friendly, uncomplicated, freckly smile and says, ‘Sorry, Dad.’
He continues loading the car in silence for a while, then says, ‘Dad? About books. I was just, you know, being obnoxious really, cos it’s what kids do. If we aren’t obnoxious to our parents, who will be? I don’t mean it. I might read a book one day, when I’ve left school.’
He picks up a particularly heavy suitcase, making light of it, pleased to show his manliness.
‘I’m not a yob, Dad,’ he says. ‘I like antiques. Like this suitcase. In fact, you could put the car and its contents on the Antiques Road Show as a job lot.’
Timothy grimaces.
‘I know. I know. But this is a new start, Liam. A new Timothy will emerge, brighter, trendier, smarter.’
‘You ought to leave this picture, then. It’s terrible.’
‘Dreadful.’
‘Probably a silly question, but why are you taking it, then?’
‘Not a silly question at all. Your Grampa saved up his pocket money to buy it to hang on his wall because he was planning to run away from home and was gathering a few possessions together. I haven’t the heart to abandon it.’
‘A bit heavy, I’d have thought. I wasn’t going to take anything when I ran away from home.’
‘You ran away from home?’
‘No, I was going to. I told Mum. I said, “That’s it. I’ve had enough of you.” She said, “Hang on a moment. You’ll need to eat and do your laundry in your new home. I’ll just write you out a few instructions.” I looked at the instructions and I thought, “Hell, that’s complicated.” So I told her I was giving her one last chance.’
He grins infectiously.
There’s a moment when Timothy thinks of breaking the silence of the years, but it passes.
‘All done, captain,’ says Liam. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’
Timothy feels that he is being hurried and harried. He wants to wander round the house slowly, on his own, taking a last look at the empty rooms, at the workshop stripped bare, at the kitchen in which, in another century, Roly had made his doorstep sandwiches, and at the old, now badgerless office where Naomi had given him the news that had blighted his life. He wants to imagine that he is saying farewell to his old home in a book. He wants to indulge in purple passages as he wanders for the last time along the passages which are, actually, almost purple. What deliciously conflicting emotions…
‘Come on, Dad. Don’t want to be unloading in the dark.’
‘Right. Right.’
They’re off. The loaded elderly Ford estate car is not a responsive beast, but they make reasonable progress towards the motorway.
‘Sorry to rush you back there, Dad,’ says Liam. ‘I thought it best.’
Timothy looks at Liam in amazement.
‘Well, got to be a painful day for you, forced to be, so I thought, get it over. Maybe I was wrong, but I think farewells are fucking awful.’
‘Well…thanks, Liam.’
‘I can’t fucking stand them.’
‘Well, no, they are difficult. Liam, on the question of…oh, Lord, I suddenly feel so old…but on the question of…bad language, don’t get me wrong, I’m no prude and there are far worse things in life, but I find it basically very boring and depressing and…I don’t want to sound as if I’m cross with you, you’re helping and it’s great and, as I said, this would have been very depressing for me on my own, but…I just don’t think the F word, while not exactly a hanging offence, I just don’t think it’s a word dads and sons should be using in their conversations with each other. All right?’
‘Absolutely. I just thought I’d test my boundaries. Isn’t that what kids do?’
‘Do you test your boundaries with…your mother?’ Timothy wants to say ‘Maggie’, but finds he can’t.
‘Yeah. She just gives way. No contest. Disappointing, really.’
‘I should spend more time with you.’
‘Up to you. Wish you would.’
Liam reaches for a CD.
‘Don’t know this one. What is it? Rock? Rap?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘OK, let’s try it.’
By the time they have listened to both sides of the Jake Thackeray CD, they are halfway to East Anglia.
When they get there, Timothy parks on the gravel opposite the row of terraced cottages. Hostile gulls shriek at them. A cat looks at them in disgust and walks very slowly away. The air is salty. Across the marshes the sails of a fine windmill are not turning. Liam looks at the house and says, ‘Christ, it’s tiny,’ but after he has unpacked, and as they set off to the Fishermen’s Arms for a well-earned meal, he looks back at it and says, ‘Actually, it’s quite cool, Dad.’
‘My boy, Liam,’ says Timothy to two grizzled regulars seated on bar stools. He introduces them to Liam. ‘Scrubber Nantwich, Mickey Fudge.’ Liam shakes hands with them and tries to hide his amazement at how sociable his father is being. They order fish and chips and Timothy decides that there’s no harm in letting Liam have a beer on this auspicious day.
Things are going so well, in this lively and cheery, low-ceilinged boozer, that Timothy suddenly realises that this is the moment. Miss it, and Sam’s death will be a black hole between father and son for ever.
They move to a far alcove, and in its privacy Timothy dives head firs
t into the cold water of remembered death, says what he’s wanted to say for more than a decade.
‘Do you often think of Sam?’
‘It’s funny, Dad. One of my friends asked me the other day, “Do you ever think of your brother who died?” and I said, “What the fuck do you—” Oh, sorry, Dad.’
‘No, no. I accept it in reported speech.’
God, that makes me sound pompous.
‘But I did say it. I said, “What the fuck do you think I am? Of course I…er…fucking do.” Well, I was pretty angry.’
‘You were fucking right to be angry.’
It’s Liam’s turn to look at his father in amazement.
‘Dad!’
‘I threw that one in. You can have it. You deserve it.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Not a problem. So what do you think when you think about him?’
‘Very straightforward thoughts, Dad. I miss him. I imagine what he’d be like. The way I imagine him, he’s great, and I just miss him so much. And I just think, you know, he had no life. And…sometimes I feel a bit angry, well, very angry, sort of for him, but most of the time I just…no, I just miss him.’
Liam takes a sip of his beer and looks at his glass as if rebuking it for the strange taste of its contents.
‘You don’t…’ Timothy isn’t sure if he should continue, if this next question is perhaps a question too far. ‘You don’t…ever feel guilty that…you know…you have a life and he doesn’t?’
‘No. I know you all think I must be…I don’t know, I’m not that good with words…haunted. Because you never ever mention anything about it, which makes it a bit difficult for me. I mean, I’m sad, of course, sometimes, no, often, but why should I feel guilty? None of it was my fault.’
‘No, no. Quite. Well, good. That’s good.’
‘I may not be good with words and reading and that, but I do think. I mean, if you’re given a brain, you’ve got to. And what I think is, it brings home to me how lucky I am to have a life. I’m not going to screw it up, Dad. I’m going to f—I’m going to live it to the full.’
Timothy feels that a great weight has been taken off his shoulders. What a fool he has been not to mention the subject for so long. Yes, he feels good. A little frightened about his new life, but…lifted by his son, encouraged, able to face it a little more bravely than he had expected.
The fish and chips arrive, and with them there comes to Timothy a slight feeling of disappointment. It isn’t because of the fish and chips. They look good. It’s because of his conversation with Liam. It’s been almost too easy. For the second time that day, he feels as if he’s been cheated of a big dramatic scene.
Naomi walks slowly up the long, wide hill. The bronzed, slender legs of the sailor are gone, replaced by lumps of weary lead. She’s very nervous. A tiny part of her wants to turn back before she gets to number ninety-six, where, almost a quarter of a century ago, she told Timothy that she was breaking it off with him.
Workmen are removing the flower beds from the centre of the dual carriageway. It’s the first stage of the vastly expensive Coningsfield Supertram project. Naomi can just remember her Uncle Spencer holding her on his shoulders to watch the very last tram pass by in the sixties, before the tramlines were removed, also at vast expense, to be replaced by flower beds. A spasm of anger at the way the country is run passes through her, and this, by giving her concerns outside her own life, calms her just a bit.
Number ninety-six looks smaller than she remembers. The board announcing that it’s a taxidermist’s has gone. The garden looks naked without it. Naomi feels a quick flutter of relief, soon overtaken by fear. She crunches up the path, rings the doorbell, listens to the silence. She rings again, waits, peers through the frosted glass, raps the knocker quite violently, waits again, peers through the frosted glass again. She can see what looks like a small pile of mail on the floor. The house is utterly silent. The house is dead. She peers through the window of the lounge. The room is bare. The room on the other side of the front door, the room never used, is equally bare.
Timothy has gone.
She turns away, goes to the garden gate, looks back. The windows of the house stare at her impassively, emptily. She shudders.
She walks up the steps to the front door of number ninety-four. She has a vague recollection that it used to be some kind of small hotel. It’s a health centre now.
She goes in, approaches the reception desk.
‘Can I help you?’ asks a crisp receptionist crisply.
‘I’m actually looking for Timothy Pickering. He lived next door with his father. They were taxidermists. He seems to have gone.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ says the receptionist. ‘They weren’t our patients.’
‘Oh. I mean, I just wondered, as they were neighbours, if you knew…um…where they’ve gone or anything.’
‘I’m afraid not. As I say, they weren’t our patients.’ She calls out to a woman at a desk. ‘Gwenda? Do we know anything about the people at number ninety-six?’
Gwenda looks up, frowns, shakes her head.
‘I’m afraid not,’ she says. ‘They weren’t our patients.’
Naomi senses an undercurrent, a subtext of, ‘And, since they didn’t have the courtesy to use us, we wouldn’t bloody well tell you even if we did know,’ but she is in a heightened state, and may be imagining this.
She walks back up the hill, past the staring windows of number ninety-six, and walks up the path, past rows of rather sickly hydrangeas, to the front door of number ninety-eight. She presses the bell. An asinine jingle rings out, utterly inappropriate to this faded Victorian villa.
A pale, tense woman with a scarf round her hair opens the door as if expecting to be hit on the head with a blunt instrument and robbed.
‘Yes?’
‘Oh, hello. My name’s Naomi Walls.’
‘I see,’ says the woman, but her tone of voice says, ‘It’s all very well for you to say that. Where’s your proof?’
‘I used to know Timothy Pickering, who lived next door. We knew each other at the grammar school.’
The woman thaws slightly at the mention of the grammar school.
‘He’s moved.’
Still alive, then, from the sound of it. Naomi relaxes just a bit.
‘Went last week.’
‘Last week!’
The nearness of it devastates her.
‘I think somebody’s bought it, and is going to do it up before moving in.’
‘Do you…’ Somehow she knows, before she asks it, that nothing will come of this. ‘…happen to know where he’s gone?’
The woman shakes her head.
‘I’m afraid not. I think I did hear something about “down South”, but I couldn’t be sure.’
‘He hasn’t left a forwarding address or anything?’
‘No. Hubby has spoken to him once or twice.’ She looks round nervously, then lowers her voice, as if fearing that hubby might be listening from behind a hydrangea. ‘Hubby’s not much of a one for small talk. Not much of a one for big talk, come to that. Puts people off. We weren’t close with him. And, anyway, we’ve only been here nine years. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.’
‘That’s all right. Thank you, anyway.’
She sets off down the garden path.
‘The Post Office’ll know,’ calls out the woman. ‘He’ll have left a forwarding address there.’
‘Thank you,’ says Naomi, ‘but I’m wondering if he has. There seems to be some mail on the floor. It’d be just like him to forget to.’
She smiles at the woman, though she doesn’t feel like smiling, and sets off, but before she reaches the gate the woman calls out again.
‘Don’t I know you?’
Naomi stops, turns round, smiles just slightly coquettishly, rather cheered by this.
‘You might,’ she says. ‘I used to—’
‘Don’t prompt me,’ says the woman urgently. ‘I like to try a
nd remember.’ She lowers her voice again. ‘I’m terrified of Alzheimer’s.’
The woman creases her brow in thought, and Naomi stands there, being observed, being studied, feeling rather awkward. She hopes that it will be Cobblers in Koblenz that the woman remembers, not Nappy Ever After or Get Stuffed.
‘Got it,’ says the woman triumphantly. ‘Didn’t you used to work on the wet fish counter at Morrisons in Staveley Road?’
PART EIGHT
They Say You Should Never Go Back 2003–2004
Timothy sits, as he has sat for the last four lunchtimes, at a little circular window table in the Amalfi restaurant in Old Compton Street. It is a cheery place, the Amalfi, still as cheery as it was twenty-five years ago, and he doesn’t feel that there are many places of which that is true.
He is aware of the chatter and the laughter, but it does not touch his cold skin. He is thinking only of her, and of the days and nights when his skin was not so cold.
He orders spaghetti carbonara and saltimbocca alla romana. If Naomi was with him he wouldn’t be ordering the veal. But of course she is not with him. She has not been with him for twenty-five years.
Lively background music is playing. He doesn’t know what it is. He never knows what the music is. The Italian waitress approaches. He would like to ask her what the music is, he wants to understand about music, live his lost youth, catch up with the world, but he is ashamed to admit that he doesn’t know. She will think he has no street cred.
The waitress is pretty, which does not stir him. He uses her, though, to map his fading memory of Naomi. A little taller than the waitress. A little slimmer, or no longer so? Hair much lighter, or does she colour it now? What a useless map this is going to be. Nose longer, not quite as flared. Deliciously straight, in fact, though if it had been flared he would be thinking of it as deliciously flared. The waitress is talking to him. He has no idea what she is saying. In fact, he resents the interruption.
‘Sorry?’ he says, trying not to sound irritated.