Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  I rang Sam right away and asked him what he’d been playing at. The question received no answer. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, with weighty sarcasm, as if I were a supposed friend who’d been unaccountably out of touch for rather a long time. Again I asked him what he’d been doing in North Street. ‘Same as everyone else – planning a lifestyle upgrade.’ Immediately he added: ‘Only kidding. Nice stuff you got there. Really nice stuff. Silly prices, to be frank with you, but nice stuff. Nice people too. Staff, I mean. Nice staff. Some of the customers I’m not so sure about. Up themselves. You know what I mean? Like: “Look at us. We spend as much on a fucking chair as you’d spend on a car.” But nice staff.’

  I tried again: ‘What happened this morning?’

  There’d been a misunderstanding with a couple of stuck-up women, he said, and before I could ask him to clarify he said that we should meet.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Doing where?’

  ‘Here. In Guildford. Aren’t you working in London?’

  ‘Well, obviously not,’ he answered.

  ‘You’re working here? In this area?’

  ‘What’s the big deal? You telling me I need a passport for Surrey or something? I just thought I’d take a look around. Anyway, I’ve got something for you. A surprise,’ he said.

  I told him that I was still recovering from his previous surprises and would rather know right now what was in store. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you living now?’ I asked him.

  The caravan was berthed in a field near Elstead. He’d done a deal with the farmer who owned the land, he explained: in return for repointing the side of the farmer’s house, he’d been allowed to tuck himself under the trees for a month or two. I proposed that we should meet there, and he gave me directions.

  We met the following morning. He was sitting on the bonnet of the Toyota, holding a cylindrical package that was wrapped in brown paper. ‘You don’t want to go inside,’ he said, jabbing a thumb back at the caravan. ‘It’s in a bit of a state. Needs a good clean. Lovely spot, though, isn’t it? Better than the last shithole,’ he said, presenting the panorama of the fields.

  I agreed that it was.

  ‘Doing my best to lower the tone of the neighbourhood,’ he joked. ‘Peter Sellers used to live around here. Did you know that?’

  I didn’t know that.

  ‘With that Swedish bird. Actress. Blonde. Tits. What’s her name?’

  ‘Britt Ekland?’

  ‘Yeah. Her. Tasty number, she was. Here you go.’ He held the package out to me, saying nothing, as if this meeting had been arranged by me, so that I could take delivery of the item. I asked him what it was, though I could tell it was a bottle. ‘Open it,’ he said. I peeled back a ribbon of paper, and saw the name Laphroaig on the top of the tube inside. ‘Very nice stuff, I believe,’ he said. ‘You like whisky, I hope?’

  I don’t much like whisky, but I thanked him, before asking why he was giving it to me.

  He said it was by way of an apology. ‘I put you in a situation,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to say sorry.’

  The apology was offered as if in compliance to an order, like a young hooligan forced by his parents to apologise to a neighbour for breaking a window. ‘How did you know my address?’ I asked. His look of perplexity made me hope for a few seconds that all he’d given the police was my name, and that they’d done the rest. ‘The police,’ I prompted him.

  ‘They called you in?’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. Then, after a sustained pause, he asked: ‘So what did you tell them?’

  I hesitated, but not for as long I should have, before replying: ‘I told them you were a maniac.’

  For the past minute or so he’d been staring at the ground. Now, startled, he looked me in the face, with such alarm in his eyes – and something else as well: grief at my betrayal of him – that I immediately regretted my semi-joke. ‘Of course I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I told them the crash was the other driver’s fault. You didn’t cause it.’

  ‘What about the fight?’

  ‘He wouldn’t back off.’

  ‘That’s what you told them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated.

  ‘You didn’t tell them I’d gone over the top?’

  ‘I didn’t. But they might have drawn their own conclusions.’

  Sam released a long breath. ‘Thanks for that. I appreciate it,’ he said.

  ‘But you did overdo it,’ I told him.

  Gazing into the sky, he grimaced as though recalling what had happened and being slightly puzzled by it. ‘I did,’ he stated. He lit a cigarette and let his head fall slowly back onto the windscreen. ‘I could have killed him,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you were going to.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Sam. Smoking his cigarette, with his head lolling on the glass, he now – no more than a minute after seeming to believe that I had told the police that he was a madman – had the look of a man on holiday.

  Suppressing my irritation, I asked if there had been any further developments. ‘Heard nothing,’ he said. Having finished his cigarette, he stubbed it out thoroughly on the door of the Toyota.

  ‘Now, how about an answer to my question?’ I suggested.

  ‘What question’s that?’ Sam replied.

  ‘Did you give the police my address?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Obviously,’ he answered. I began to wish that I’d continued to pretend that I’d not covered for him. ‘Otherwise it was my word against his. Smoothie in shiny BMW versus yob in van. BMW smoothie all knocked up; low-life unmarked. We all know which way that one would have gone, don’t we? I get some trainee on legal aid, if I’m lucky. He gets some cunt who plays golf with the judge every Sunday morning. Go Directly to Jail; Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect £200.’

  ‘What I’m interested in,’ I said, ‘is how you came by my address. And phone number.’

  ‘What’s the big deal with that?’

  ‘I’m just curious.’

  ‘It’s easy. I’m not as thick as I look, you know,’ he said, taking another cigarette.

  ‘I don’t think you’re thick,’ I said. ‘You’re obviously not thick.’

  ‘Thanking you kindly,’ he responded, with a small mock-deferential nod. ‘But what are you saying? The cops say to me: “Who was the gentleman who was with you?” And I’m supposed to say: “Fuck me if I know”? Is that it? Is that what I was meant to do? Keep you out of it?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  Having swung round so his legs dangled down the side of the truck, he jabbed his elbows onto his knees and set his head in hands, as if locking it into place. He spat out a pellet of smoke and said: ‘So what exactly are you saying?’

  I tried to formulate a reply, but before I could come up with anything Sam leaned forward, aiming the tip of his cigarette at me. ‘I’ll tell you what the interesting question is,’ he said. ‘The interesting question isn’t how I know where you live. Any fuckwit could find that out. Takes a few minutes. If you want to know how I did it, I’ll tell you, but it’s not interesting. The interesting question is why you’re so wound up by the idea that I know. That’s what’s interesting.’

  ‘I’m not wound up,’ I answered.

  ‘Oh yes you are,’ he said, with a smirk that had some malice in it and also some sense of injury. He let some smoke dribble from his mouth and drew it up into his nostrils, taking a steadying shot of nicotine. ‘And another interesting thing,’ he went on, ‘is that you’ve been steering clear of me.’

  ‘That’s not—’

  ‘Two weeks and not a dicky bird. Only one way of reading that situation, it seems to me. In my book, that’s the cold shoulder.’

  ‘I’ve been very busy.’

  ‘Whereas I haven’t, of course? I’ve been lying around on my sunbed and sipping Bacardi all fucking day long.’

  ‘No, b
ut—’

  ‘We’re all busy, mate. Point is, it takes ten seconds to make a call. Don’t matter how busy you are. President of the United fucking States of America finds time to ring his family from the office. Not telling me you’re busier than the President of the United States, are you? I mean, I know business is good, but that’s ridiculous. You’ve been avoiding me. That’s the truth. That’s what’s been going on,’ he said, placing a full stop on the air between our faces with his cigarette.

  Unable to think of a plausible way of disagreeing, because of course it was true, I contradicted him with a mumble.

  ‘You’re my father,’ he protested. ‘You shouldn’t be avoiding me. I know we had a bit of a setback with that dickhead, but I didn’t expect you’d just vanish like that. I don’t think that’s right. It’s not right, is it? I mean, you should have called. For all you knew, I was in the slammer, for fuck’s sake.’ He was no longer aggressive – his manner was plaintive, and aggrieved. Yet there was still something that jarred. When he said ‘You’re my father’, it didn’t sound like a son talking. Rather, it was as if ‘father’ were some kind of job title and nothing more, like: ‘You’re the driver.’ What’s more, crucially, by now I’d observed him closely for several hours altogether, and had yet to discern even the slightest resemblance between us.

  Suddenly he bared his teeth and began scratching at the tops of his thighs, as though there were ants crawling over his skin. That done, he turned to me and gave me a pursed-lips smile. ‘But I know what it is,’ he said. ‘I know why you’ve been keeping your distance. I do. You’re scared of me. That’s what it is, isn’t it? You really do think I’m a head-case.’ Sustained eye contact now followed; his look was not challenging – it said instead that he was patiently awaiting an honest answer, and would wait for as long as was necessary.

  Lying outright was impossible: I told him that I couldn’t deny that the accident and the fight had unnerved me.

  This elicited a smile, the smile of a confessor who was glad – for my sake, of course – that I had at last unburdened myself. ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘I understand. I’m scared of me as well.’

  Pleased with this turn of phrase, he paused so that I could register my reaction to it. If my face showed anything, however, I think it would have been something like dismay. It was plain that Sam intended to treat me to a confession of his own, and I was sure I wasn’t going to enjoy hearing it.

  ‘I go off sometimes,’ he said, smacking his hands together, cymbal-style. ‘I snap. I lose it. Totally. And there’s fuck all I can do about it.’ He gave me a few details about his employment history that had been omitted from the first telling. His career as a doorman had come to an end after an altercation from which a trio of lairy lads had emerged in a very much worse state than Sam. A spell as a warehouseman was terminated after a disagreement with a workmate, who had escaped serious injury only because Sam managed to divert his rage onto his surroundings, causing so much damage to the stock that the compensation he was obliged to pay his employers more than cancelled out the pay he was owed. Various pubs had taken him on for a while, but sooner or later some rat-arsed twat had pushed him too far and he’d gone nuclear. A doctor gave him tranquillisers; they made him feel like his head was stuffed with socks. He was gradually getting better, he reckoned. Smashing up the BMW was the worst he’d been for months, but he knew that it would happen again some time, no matter what he did. ‘It’s a flood in the brain,’ he said. ‘Like a dam’s burst and there are all these fucking chemicals pouring out.’ He grasped his skull in both hands and pressed so hard his arms shook. If this was a pretence of anguish, he was an astonishingly good actor, and the distress in his eyes, when he brought his hands down and stared across the grass, seemed equally authentic.

  ‘I never used to be this bad,’ he muttered. ‘I was a handful when I was a nipper. Don’t get me wrong. I could be a right little cunt. Beg pardon. But I wasn’t a mental case. I liked a scrap, but I didn’t go berserk like I do now. Easy to work it out, though, isn’t it? I reckon half the squaddies are cracked by the time they come back home from that place. Some of them fill it with drink, some of them fill it with drugs, some of them go off the deep end. With me, I get the flash-flood and an hour later I’m back on dry land. Other blokes, they’ll drive into trees or they’ll try to kill the wife. They go wandering off to the other end of the fucking country and they haven’t got a clue how they got there. Like they’re sleepwalking. For weeks. Some of them can’t sleep. An hour’s kip at a time. I sleep OK. But I get the horrors. Two, three times a week, I’m seeing things in my sleep like they’re really happening. I wake up, but I’m not awake. Not properly, not right away. For a second or two I really think it’s happening, and I’m clouting the wall because what I’m seeing is some horrible little fucker with a gun in his hand. Or I’m running for cover. In a caravan. You can’t run anywhere in a caravan. I’ve smacked my head so many times, you wouldn’t believe it.’ He laughed briefly but wholeheartedly, as if recalling a bit of slapstick he’d seen on TV. ‘I tell you, it’s fucked up a few relationships before we’ve got past square one. Women I thought I’d clicked with. Early days, very early days, but we were going somewhere, maybe. Then one night they’re having their sweet little dreams and suddenly they’ve got Mr Psychokiller screaming about blood on the ceiling. That sort of thing can really make a girl rethink her priorities. You get sympathy, from some of them, but even when they’re talking you down and telling you it’s OK, you know it’s fucked. Who wants to be shagging a mental-man, eh?’ He shook his head and sustained for as long as he could a smile of resignation, but soon his face went slack and his eyes became hazy. ‘Fuck it,’ he sighed, lighting yet another cigarette. He blew a long jet of smoke skyward.

  Nothing but inanities came to mind: ‘It must be difficult,’ I said.

  He did not respond. It wasn’t that he seemed lost in thought – rather, he appeared to be wholly absorbed in the smoking of his cigarette. Watching the smoke dissolve above his face, he might have been following the flight of a rare insect.

  ‘Have you talked to anyone about it?’ I asked. ‘A doctor, a therapist.’

  ‘A doctor gave me the tranquillisers,’ he replied, as if the whole medical profession were thereby demonstrated to be useless.

  I suggested that it might be worthwhile going to see someone else. This was followed by a louder expulsion of smoke. There was no point, evidently, in continuing with this line of conversation, so I waited for him to say something. After a full minute’s silence he said, quietly: ‘The things I’ve seen. You can’t imagine.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said.

  Again he leaned back against the windscreen, then he turned to face me, smiled, and proceeded to tell me – like a man in a deckchair on the beach, chatting idly to the person in the deckchair next to him – that when a tank round explodes in sand it vitrifies the sand, so anyone who’s standing in the way gets ripped apart by a blizzard of glass as well as the steel shrapnel. ‘A mouse dropped in a blender. That’s what it’s like,’ he said, nodding his approval of the accuracy of his description. One afternoon, he went on, they’d followed a smell down an alleyway and come across a man whose head had been removed with hammers. ‘And it takes a lot of hammering to destroy a head. I mean really destroy it. Make jam of it. There was a bit of jaw intact, but apart from that – a mush of bone and skin and brain, with an eyeball in it. Just one. Like a marble in a pile of red cabbage.’ I said that I’d got the picture, but Sam wasn’t to be stopped. It was amazing, he told me, the different ways a human being can disintegrate. ‘You’d think it was like a big toy coming apart, wouldn’t you? All the attachments come away. Arms come off, legs come off, head comes off. Pop pop pop.’ I agreed that this is what the layperson would imagine. ‘But no. That’s not how it is,’ said Sam, giving me the smile of a man who knows a scandalous secret. Then he told about the day they’d arrived at a spot where a car-bomb had gone off. The dead had b
een taken away and the ambulances had carried the injured off to hospital, so the scene was now composed of wreckage and rubble and a lot of wailing people. Sam and his patrol were walking across a road when someone noticed what appeared to be a piece of cloth stuck to a wall, high up, between two windows. ‘Know what it was? Guess,’ said Sam. I declined to guess. ‘A face. It was a face. A whole face, ripped off and stuck on the wall. Like a rubber mask with a fringe of hair. A bit of beard, a bit of ear—’

  ‘I can see it,’ I interrupted him.

  He regarded me for a few seconds, as though trying to find in what I’d said something that could give him a reason not to give in to his impulse to lose his temper. He blinked slowly. ‘Ah, but you can’t,’ he said. ‘That’s the point. I can see it. You can’t see it. That’s the whole fucking point,’ he said, placing heavy stress on the last three words. ‘How can you possibly see it? I tell you about it, but that’s not seeing it. Going to see it on the telly, are you? Of course you’re not. They’re not going to show you what’s going on. They’ve got a message to get over, and people blown to shit aren’t part of the message. Fucked-up squaddies aren’t part of the message. People here, they haven’t got any fucking idea,’ he snarled. This, I made the mistake of suggesting, wasn’t entirely true. He thumped the bonnet with the base of a fist – so hard, it left a dent. ‘Not a fucking clue,’ he repeated, ‘and that’s the way they like it. Got to keep the blinkers on,’ he said, glaring at me with such animosity I couldn’t withstand it.

  In turning away from him, I gave Sam further proof that the great British public hadn’t the stomach for his message. Within seconds he’d embarked on a furious monologue, an incoherent rant of which the essence was that he wanted to put his foot through the screen every time a politician appeared on TV, that Iraq was totally fucked up, and that Britain had been totally fucked up since Thatcher had got her hands on the country. Everything is disposable nowadays – this was Sam’s refrain. ‘Your DVD player breaks down – chuck it away. Washing machine breaks down – chuck it away. Fridge broken – chuck it. Workers giving you trouble – bin them, then get yourself another gang of throwaways. Dumb fucking squaddies come back with legs missing – chuck them away.’ The papers shouldn’t have Page Three girls, they should have Cripple of the Day. Anyone heard using the words ‘flexible workforce’ should be forced to sweep the streets for a month, barefoot. Look at the crap on TV – ‘you want ratings, just point the cameras at a bunch of shit-thick proles and let the middle-class cunts have a good laugh.’ People no longer care about anything, he kept saying, and the implication was unmistakable: I was one of the uncaring. ‘But fuck it, eh? Fuck it. Yeah, fuck it,’ he finished, as though I’d remarked that there was no point in wishing that things were different and he was aping my cynicism. He was on his feet now, rubbing his hands quickly up and down his face. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m doing a job back in London. A week. Ten days, tops. Let’s get together when I’m back, OK?’ This was said in the tone of someone making some sort of concession for the sake of preserving good relations. Then, after another bout of face-rubbing, he added: ‘And there’s something you need to do while I’m gone.’