by Tim Lott
Well. There may be another way.
Good. That’s great.
But if I find the money, you’ll come in with me? Right, Victor?
A hundred per cent, Frankie. For sure. Shake on it.
They gravely shake hands.
Okay then. Okay. Thanks, Victor. Thanks for everything.
You’re welcome, mate. Good luck.
And you won’t breathe a word of this?
Not a syllabobble.
* * *
Flossie brews him a cup of tea, and sits lumpily on the white wooden chair on the far side of the table.
You don’t usually drop in to see me without calling first, Frankie. Is it an emergency?
Not exactly. But I do sort of need your help.
You know me, Frankie. I’ll always help my boy. Always.
I know you will, Mum. I’ll get to the point then. You know that money you’ve got saved up? Your nest egg that Dad left you? I was wondering . . . well, I was wondering if I could borrow some of it.
Borrow it? How much of it do you want to borrow?
I don’t know. A hundred K?
Seeing the expression on Flossie’s face, Frankie finds himself starting to gabble.
Mum, it would be completely safe. I could give it back to you in three years. With interest.
Don’t be silly, Frankie. It wasn’t anything like that much.
Fifty K then?
I don’t know what to say. He left me thirty . . . And, well, I’ve spent quite a lot of it.
You’ve done what?
On cruises and stuff. And other bits and pieces.
Cruises?
Me and Gordon. We’re going on a Caribbean cruise together. For a month. First class. Who’d have thought it? Me rubbing shoulders with the quality.
Flossie announces this defiantly. She pauses to take a long draught of tea.
How much of it have you spent?
All of it. More or less.
She puts the tea mug down on the table with an almost-slam.
All of it?
Don’t look at me like that, Frankie. You’ve been looking at me like that all my born days. Like I was a half-wit or something. Now you with all your flash suits and books and everything, it’s like I was some kind of burden to you.
No, Flossie. I didn’t mean that.
I’m doing this off my own back. I don’t even care if I’m wrong. I want to do something by myself for a change. For fun. Just fun. You know? Your father, he never let me do anything. And now you’re being the same. Well, I’m sorry, Frankie. But I can’t help you. I just can’t.
Frankie nods.
What about the house?
What house?
This house.
This house? It’s my home.
You could easily raise a loan of a hundred K against it. There’s got to be a hundred K of capital in this place.
And what if it all goes down the drain? says Flossie.
I’ve got the house, there’s capital in my house too. So I can always pay you back.
What, so, I’d make you and my grandchild-to-be homeless so you could pay me back?
It wouldn’t come to that, Mum.
Starting a business is risky. Even I know that. And you’d take the chance of me losing a hundred thousand pounds?
Frankie feels a rush of shame
I’m sorry, Mum. I shouldn’t have asked. You’re right. You’re right.
I’m sorry, son.
It’s okay. I’m sorry I asked.
I mean – I would if I could.
Frankie puts his head in his hands and groans.
Now don’t take on so, son. There must be another way, Frankie. Surely?
Frankie slowly brings his head up and exhales heavily.
Perhaps. Perhaps there’s another way.
He rubs at his birthmark with the tip of his fingernail.
I just can’t think what it is at the moment.
* * *
Frankie drives around the streets of Shepherd’s Bush in a daze. Ralph has gone. His partnership has gone. The hope of a new business has gone. All it’s going to be now is nappy changing and clock watching and bean counting and grovelling to Ratchett. He’ll just be another mug, stumbling endlessly over the world’s tripwires.
He decides to go right there and then to the office and cast himself on the mercy of Ratchett. There’s nothing else to do. He should never have had a tantrum when he did. He can get the old job back, hack it out for a couple of years and start the agency then. It just takes him to swallow his pride is all. Ratchett will take him back. He makes too much money for the firm to refuse.
He drives towards the shop and passes the brightly lit plate-glass window in the car he bought after he resigned, a second-hand Ford Mondeo. Ratchett at that moment looks up, catches a glimpse of him at the wheel. He seems to smirk – at the humbleness of the car, Frankie presumes.
At that moment Frankie knows he will not go back. Cannot go back.
Then, as that thought dies, another idea occurs to him, a notion that has been swilling around his mind for some time, but that he has pushed back down insistently. Now it breaks through to his consciousness with more force than he can resist, sets up a tent at the front of his mind, unzips the opening.
He pulls over.
Slowly, as if moving through glue, he takes his Nokia out of his pocket and sits staring at it for a full thirty seconds before doing anything. He picks it up. Then puts it down again. Then picks it up again.
Then he runs the contacts, selects and dials.
The phone is answered almost immediately.
Hi, it’s me, Frankie. Yes, that Frankie. Are you alone? Good. No, everything’s fine. I have something I want to talk to you about. Well, need to talk to you about actually. Can we meet? Great. Great. Sooner the better.
2003: The March
They have all arranged to meet at Embankment station. Veronica and Frankie are the first to arrive. The station is busier than he has ever seen it, even though it is a Saturday and the office workers have gone home for the weekend.
Frankie surreptitiously checks his watch.
I get it, says Veronica, noticing.
Get what? says Frankie, looking up with slow, affected casualness, anxious to emphasize that the time was of no consequence to him whatsoever. He has begun to find Veronica’s acute observational gifts increasingly rattling. Her ability to notice tiny gestures or hear significant noises in far-off rooms – even now they have a three-storey house – disconcerts him. Marriage, Frankie has been known to complain – thanks to the perpetual surveillance – is more like living in North Korea than North Kensington.
You don’t want to be here, do you? I don’t know why you bothered.
I was just checking the time.
I knew you didn’t want to come.
I wanted to go to the zoo instead. So did China.
You wouldn’t have gone to the zoo, anyway. You would have just gone to work. You’re always saying you’re going to take her to the zoo.
She’s too young for this.
She’s too young for the zoo as well. She wouldn’t have appreciated anything about it.
Children like zoos more than marches.
It’s not about ‘liking’.
Veronica is holding a large hand-made banner with ‘Make Tea Not War’ scrawled in red lipstick on a white linen tea towel, supported by two bamboo sticks uprooted from the garden. It keeps catching in the wind and she struggles to control it. Frankie, to her annoyance, makes no move to help her.
China is in her pushchair, a sand-coloured Dutch Bugaboo Frog ‘Concept’ stroller. Her hazel eyebrows, almost joined in the middle, have a quizzical cast. She wears a hairband decorated with three consecutive tiny white flowers. It holds in place softly curled brown hair, the same colour as Veronica’s. Her nose is a tiny mushroom, her lips like jelly sweets. There is nothing about Frankie’s own face that he can recognize in his daughter’s.
China is eating a
huge slice of red watermelon, and has covered herself in pulp and seeds. She smiles at the mess as if it amounts to a considerable achievement. Frankie makes an attempt at cleaning it with wet wipes and manages to get pulp on his white shirt in the process, leaving a large pink indeterminate stain just below his breastbone.
I’m just not sure all this commotion is good for China, he says.
It’s important that she’s here. It’s her future, after all.
She’s two. She doesn’t know what’s going on. How long’s this going to take, do you think?
You don’t have to stay the whole time. Peel off once we get to Hyde Park if you want.
Where’s the rest of them?
On cue, Nodge and Fraser appear at the top of the escalators and walk towards them, through the ticket barriers. They are, as usual, arguing. Fraser is dragging a large, immaculately groomed dog, a Dalmatian, wearing a yellow tabard with ‘Pets Against the War’ inscribed on it.
I used to think like you, Nodge is saying. When I was a teenager.
Don’t patronize me, yeh?
I’m not. I just grew up. Also I’ve got a vague idea what it actually means to be broke. Politics isn’t a game for me.
Or for me either.
Nodge gives up and turns his attention to the small family group.
Hi, Frankie. Vronky. China! Look at you. What a catastrophe.
China giggles and spreads more melon around her mouth.
How do you know the dog is against the war? says Frankie to Fraser, leaning down to pat the Dalmatian on the back. It barks back at him angrily.
Because he’s my dog, says Fraser. And he does what he’s told. And so he’s against the war.
Nodge leans over China’s stroller and starts cooing. He is wearing a black Thinsulate wool cap and a heavyweight sweater. Fraser has a purple Jack Wills rucksack slung over his back. His T-shirt, under his olive flying jacket, reads ‘End Israeli Occupation’.
Nodge puts a kazoo in the side of his mouth and begins blowing. No sound comes out.
This thing is useless.
He throws it in the bin. Fraser takes his own kazoo out and starts playing the ‘Internationale’. Nodge takes it from him and hums out the theme from Loony Tunes. There is the persistent drone of helicopters overhead. People all around them are mostly laughing and joking, despite the seriousness of intent.
Twenty yards behind them, Frankie sees a Muslim woman in a full hijab being questioned by a reporter while a man, presumably her husband, has fallen to his knees and prays to Mecca behind her. The woman waves the reporter away and he goes in search of another target, almost tripping over the praying man.
Frankie checks his watch again.
Just think of it as a day out, says Veronica, finishing the cleaning-up job on China that Frankie has abandoned.
Nodge straightens up and starts clapping his hands together for warmth.
We can’t stand here much longer, says Frankie. Too crowded. Colin’s usually on time.
Roxy isn’t, says Veronica. Ever.
I’m surprised he’s coming at all, says Nodge. Politics really isn’t his thing.
He’s coming for the same reason Frankie turned up, says Fraser, quiet enough so that only Nodge can hear. Doing what he’s told.
Give them some credit, replies Nodge. At least they’re here.
Now Colin and Roxy emerge from the ticket gates. Colin is smartly dressed, as he has been since he has begun living with Roxy. His clothes are clearly expensive and even his expression has changed, going from apologetic and placatory to confident, even arrogant. His shoulders are back, his chin high. Roxy, as usual, is buffed, plucked and over-made-up and walks with a cocky rolling gait that irresistibly reminds Frankie of Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday.
Colin shakes hands with Nodge, Frankie and Fraser. Veronica gives him a cautious hug, smells talcum powder and what she thinks she recognizes as Vetiver cologne, doubtless chosen by Roxy. Roxy waves a hand in general greeting.
What’s the route? says Colin, awkwardly disentangling himself from Veronica and aligning himself with Roxy, who is lighting a cigarette with fat fingers. She offers the pack around, but nobody else smokes now, Frankie having given up, after lobbying from Veronica, in the wake of China’s birth, and Nodge under pressure from Fraser.
Up towards Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly, says Roxy.
If we make it that far, says Nodge. The streets are jammed.
She winds her arm around Colin’s. He stands slightly stiff and uncomfortable.
Who’s speaking again? says Colin. At the rally in the park?
Tony Benn. Harold Pinter. George Galloway, says Fraser
Bianca Jagger, says Roxy, excitedly.
All your old heroes, Nodge, says Frankie.
Bianca Jagger was never my hero. George Galloway’s a knob.
I have a lot of time for him, says Fraser.
Frankie notices Fraser’s ‘End Israeli Occupation’ T-shirt.
What has Israel got to do with anything? says Frankie.
You wouldn’t understand, says Fraser, tickling the Dalmatian under the tummy. They wouldn’t understand, would they, Harvey? Would they?
What does it actually have to do with anything? says Nodge.
All part of a continuum, says Fraser, breezily, standing up to his full height, of historic Western colonialism. He vigorously pets the Dalmatian who indifferently stretches his neck. Harvey understands. Don’t you, boy?
Someone in new age dress – all tie dye and artful rips – with crusty locks is touting balloons from a vast bunch. Nodge goes across to buy one for China. He walks past an American flag with the word ‘shame’ scrawled in large letters across the horizontal stripes.
I’m hungry, says Colin. Can we get something to eat? They must be doing hot dogs or something.
He sniffs the air as if he can track distant fast food by smell alone. But the only thing he can see on sale is hot candied peanuts and he’s trying to avoid carbs to support Roxy, who is giving the Atkins Diet a try. Colin expects her attempt to last three days, which is the most she’s ever managed on other diets before cheerfully giving up with a consolatory, ‘life’s too short’.
Nodge comes back with a pink balloon, which he gives to China, who gurgles happily. Then it immediately slips out of her hand and escapes skywards. China begins to cry, softly at first but the volume quickly escalating to a piercing pitch of despair.
Good one, Nodge, says Frankie as he leans over to try, unsuccessfully, to console China.
Do you know what that crusty who was selling the balloons said to me? asks Nodge, of no one in particular.
Was it, ‘Do you want to buy one of these balloons?’ says Roxy.
I asked her what she thought about the war. And she said ‘everyone should just smoke a spliff, chill the fuck out and stop killing each other’. Not exactly Hanna Arendt, is it? Also the balloon was three quid! Someone’s making a killing out of this and it isn’t only the arms dealers.
Outside the station, the painfully slow drift of the crowd is through Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square. The party of seven follow. The movement of the stroller seems to soothe China and she quietens down. It takes an hour to get to Piccadilly Circus, where a second march is being joined. A multiplex hoarding down a side street announces Daredevil, The Pianist and Final Destination 2.
‘Final Destination 2’ was shit, says Roxy, checking her make-up in a small mirror which she has just removed from her Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore bag. Just a stupid gorefest. ‘The Pianist’ was just depressing. Jews being thrown out of windows ’n’ shit. Then I suppose you wouldn’t mind that much, Fraser.
Fraser bares his teeth slightly but does not rise to the bait. Roxy pouts, puts the mirror away, then takes a battered paper bag out of her pocket which is stuffed with Cola Cubes and hands it around. No one accepts apart from Fraser.
Top choice of sweetie, Rocks.
Thank kew. They’re a bit icky.
I like
a bit of ick, says Fraser archly.
A bit of dick more like, says Roxy, guffawing.
You can talk, love, says Fraser, unoffended. By the way, I’m not an anti-Semite.
You just hate Israelis.
That’s different.
Veronica has picked up China and is cradling her while Frankie wheels the Bugaboo, in which he has placed four cans of lager and a bag of blue corn chips. The crowd is a seething sea of grey, black, cream and brown, the shades of Britain in winter.
She needs changing, says Veronica, holding her out to Frankie, along with a nappy bag.
Really? says Frankie, unenthusiastically. Is it my turn?
You owe me about two thousand changes on the latest count.
Frankie sniffs the air and concludes that Veronica is right about China having soiled herself. He looks around for somewhere to change her, but the crowd is packed close and engaged in an almost imperceptible slow surge west. He spots an empty red telephone box, one of those preserved by the heritage enthusiasts. He pushes his way through the mob and puts China down on the dirty floor. She starts screaming. He grapples with her terry towel nappy which is full of greenish shit. He winces at the terrible smell – when she was a newborn, even her excrement smelt sweet. No longer.
The screaming gets louder and China starts to wriggle and kick. Frankie tries to keep her still with one hand, while manipulating the fresh cloth with another, but it is difficult. Someone is knocking on the door, apparently wanting to use the phone.
Fuck off! snarls Frankie, half to himself.
It is a good five minutes before he finally finishes the process, carrying the soiled nappy in a plastic bag, and a still crying, red-faced China. Eventually he rejoins the group.
The joys of fatherhood, says Fraser, mockingly, as Frankie straps China back into the pushchair, wishing, not for the first time, that he could shrug off heterosexuality and join the scene. Roxy, seeing China’s distress, takes a liquorice dip out of her pocket and offers some sherbet to China, but Veronica sees it and gently pushes her hand away.
It’s only a bit of sherbet.
You know how I feel about sugar.
Yeh, I know. ‘It’s a killer’. Least I’ll die happy, says Roxy, licking her finger, as China continues to screech above the clamour of the crowd.