by Tim Parks
It was important to go to the police station at once because Mark’s mother was leaving tomorrow. She knew one, back in their part of town. On arrival, they were fourth in the queue in a room that felt like the dentist’s except the posters were all about police recruitment and a bright future. Since his father left, Mark had lost any sense of having a future. Even starting at university seemed more like a kind of limbo than a path to anywhere. Meanwhile, as always, his mother struck up a conversation, this time with a stranger who was distressed about the obscene words someone kept writing on her garden wall.
‘My son’s had his scooter stolen,’ Mark’s mother told this woman, then began to explain how she was going to Zambia for six months to teach in a school for poor children who would very likely never be able to afford a bicycle, never mind a scooter. Mark did not think the other woman was listening. Yasmin had once said that her parents would never get her a scooter. She had too many brothers and sisters. He thought how nice it was when she was sitting on the pillion behind and put her arms round him, and again he felt he might cry. Almost anything made him cry these days. He was becoming a complete sissy.
‘Round the back of the school, you say?’ the policeman repeated, making a note. ‘And why did you go round the back, if you’d parked it at the front?’ ‘Because his girlfriend thought it might be there,’ Mark’s mother said. The policeman remarked that the question had been addressed to Mark and Mark said, ‘There’s some waste ground, I thought it might be there.’ ‘She goes to that school,’ Mark’s mother explained. The girlfriend. The policeman said the computers were down and they would have to come back the following day to pick up the printed report, which must then be sent on to the insurance people. In the car going home Mark’s mother told him he would have to do that himself. ‘I’ll have left already.’
The house was a semi-detached near the top of a steep hill about fifteen minutes out of town. As they arrived their dog Ricky put his paws up on the garden gate, wagging his tail furiously. After they had eaten, the animal moved anxiously back and forth from Mark’s bedroom at the front of the house on the first floor, where Mark sat on the floor drawing and texting, to the kitchen at the back of the house on the ground floor, where Mark’s mother spent the evening sorting out the fridge. It seemed Ricky, who was a cocker spaniel, would have liked to herd the two together, but they did not talk to each other even when they went to bed. Next day Mark’s mother took the dog to friends and set off on her journey.
The following Wednesday, Mark, who was attending university in Liverpool during the week, called his father who had recently changed jobs and now also lived in Liverpool, but on the other side. Mark was in a prefab corridor in a building where he felt a fish out of water. The signal was not great. He should have taken a gap year, he thought, but hadn’t known what to do. He felt limp and inadequate. His father, as always, wanted to hear good news so he wouldn’t have to worry about him. He was busy. ‘The fact is,’ Mark told him, ‘Yasmin thinks she knows who took it; she says she might be able to get them to put the motor back on.’
His father seemed to be finding it difficult to concentrate. He hadn’t said where he was, exactly, but Mark had the impression he was with other people.
‘You’ve reported it to the police, right? And the insurance too? If the Vespa turns up now, on the road, with its motor and all, they might think you were lying to get the insurance.’
Mark hadn’t thought of this. His father asked where the bike was now. On the waste ground behind the school, Mark said. Mark had phoned the insurance people to give them the details and get them to check the damage to the bike, but they said he had to get it moved to a repair place before they would look at it. He couldn’t see the point of doing that, though, if Yasmin could persuade the vandals to put the motor back on. He wanted his bike back.
His father didn’t seem to know how to respond. Mark was between lessons and needed to hurry if he was to get a decent position in the life class. It might be better, his father thought, simpler that is, if they picked up the insurance from the old bike and got a new one. That would be the easy thing. Mark said emphatically he didn’t want a new bike. He wanted his old bike back. He couldn’t understand himself why he felt so strongly about that.
In life drawing they had had the same fat old model who had been posing all the first five weeks of term. Once again Mark pinned out his paper, took his pencil in his hand and looked at his subject. Why had he chosen a course where he was almost the only boy? Why hadn’t he done engineering or something? The woman was sitting on the floor this time, so the twenty or so students arranged in a semicircle were looking slightly down at her. She had put a white towel on the floor, no doubt for reasons of hygiene. She had her legs out straight, slightly apart and her hands were propping her up behind her back. Her breasts and stomach sagged. Her red face was slightly tilted back, showing her nostrils.
Drawing, Mark found the woman’s fat disgusting, but fascinating too, its volume and orange-peel surfaces. Every few minutes he exchanged a message with Yasmin, who had gone to school today, but there was no teacher in her lesson. Yasmin was so slim, so lithe, so living. She had had lots of boyfriends already. Mark worried what she could see in him. He felt so vague beside her, so unsure of himself. Sharpening his pencil, he decided he would try to get across the grossness of the model’s fat in as few lines as possible. Fat people were gross, he thought. They were losers. His mother would never let herself go like that. She was thin and nervy and strong. She went running or swimming every day. Yasmin was naturally thin. Mark wanted to be thin too, but he had a big bum, he thought. His trousers were always tight. Most of all he did not want to be alone. It made him feel anxious when he closed the door in his tiny college room and went to sleep in a narrow bed in a space that was really a box, a sort of regulation white packaging for a no-name product: himself.
Eye moving from object to paper, Mark worked on the wrinkles at the top of the woman’s big thighs where they sank down between the legs at the crotch. Now the teacher stood behind him to look at his work. ‘Whoa,’ he said, ‘that’s scary, Mike.’ ‘Mark,’ Mark said. The teacher apologised. ‘I’ll get all the names before the end of term,’ he promised. The model’s stomach lifted and fell very slightly when she breathed. Then Yasmin sent a text to say that the motor was already back on the Vespa. ‘Fantastic, I love you,’ Mark texted back.
Now that his mother was away, Mark’s father was happy to come home at the weekend to be with him, though Mark only went back to Manchester to be with Yasmin. He couldn’t really forgive his father for leaving. Meantime he had phoned up the insurance people to say the motor had reappeared on the bike and he didn’t want the insurance after all. Yasmin had assured Mark it worked fine, though he couldn’t understand how she could know this since she didn’t have a key to start the bike. His father, meantime, insisted that before picking it up they must go to the police again and change their report, because if by a stroke of bad luck – and his father was always expecting strokes of bad luck – the police should stop him for a routine check, or if he had an accident, God forbid, then it would come out that he was riding a bike that was supposedly stolen, or at least its motor was stolen, and they might incriminate him for having tried to defraud the insurance company. ‘All these records are computerised,’ he said. ‘They would only have to put the licence plate in their search engine and it would seem you were a criminal.’
This time there was no wait at the police station. His father had phone calls to make and walked up and down on the pavement outside while Mark explained to a tall, alert young man that the bike he had described as being vandalised the week before was now working again. The young man dithered; he had thin, white hands that were long and alive. Mark found hands the most difficult thing of all to draw. The policeman picked up a pen and put it down, scratched a knuckle, then invited Mark to come through to a small room with a table in the middle, and left him there.
After ten minutes an older
man arrived and sat down opposite. He put the previous report down on the table and laid both hands on it as if to fix it there. These hands were heavy and meaty. His forehead was puckered and his cheeks tensed in concentration and disapproval. Mark’s heart sank. He wanted to phone his father and have him come and help but he knew the man wouldn’t let him do this. Messages were vibrating in his pocket but he didn’t dare to look at them. He felt as he used to when he was ten years old and his mother yelled at him for making a mess or losing things. His mother was writing long emails now saying how sad the squalor was in Africa but how brave the young mothers and their undernourished children were. The policeman looked up at him and their eyes met. ‘So how did this happen?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘First a motor disappears, then it reappears. I never heard of such a thing.’
Mark hesitated. He tried to explain the circumstances, but his voice sounded defensive.
‘Why did you park the bike at the school, if you were then going to take the bus into town? Why wasn’t your girlfriend at school, if you say it was her school?’
Mark should have explained that he hated riding through the underpass and the two big roundabouts. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s what I did,’ he said.
The policeman’s jacket was rather tight across his barrel chest. He seemed very powerful physically. ‘Another thing I don’t understand,’ he was saying, ‘is why you left the bike there after the motor was stolen.’
Mark was silent.
‘The normal thing would have been to have it taken to a repair place, no? Or a demolition yard. Don’t you think? As it is, it looks like you knew you could get the motor put back.’
‘This never happened to me before,’ Mark muttered. His hands were shaking. At this point his father knocked on the door and opened it. He asked if he could come in. Mark felt his shoulders go tight. The policeman said no, he couldn’t come in and he certainly shouldn’t be knocking on doors in police stations unasked. ‘Wait in the waiting room. If I want you, you’ll be called.’ Mark felt his leg trembling. He hated himself.
‘It may never have happened to you,’ the policeman said, ‘but it rather sounds like your girlfriend is an old hand at this, right? You leave your scooter in a prominent place and go off with her. Lo and behold, it gets stolen. She tells you where to find it. Lo and behold, there it is. With no motor. You report the theft and make an insurance claim. Your girlfriend says not to worry. Lo and behold, the motor reappears. What is this story all about? Who is this know-it-all girlfriend?’
Mark had never been so frightened. ‘Her name is Yasmin,’ he said. He felt he was betraying her. Her parents were Brazilian, he explained. They lived just the other side of Galaxy Shopping. She was seventeen. He had known her almost a year. They had been going out for six months.
‘Does she have a criminal record?’ The policeman was very blunt. ‘Or a brother with a criminal record?’
Mark didn’t know what to say. There ought to be someone here to protect him, he thought.
‘She had some dope on her once,’ he said carefully, ‘when the police stopped us. On the Vespa. But she wasn’t fined or anything.’
‘She smokes marijuana?’
‘Everybody does,’ Mark said.
‘Speak for yourself, young man. I certainly don’t.’
Nor did Mark. He hated smoke except when watching it coil from Yasmin’s lips. Somehow it was impossible to say this.
The policeman wanted the girl’s full name, address and phone number. Y-A-S-M-I-N, Mark said.
‘Isn’t that a contraceptive pill?’ the policeman asked wryly.
Mark bit his lip. Please God he wasn’t betraying her, he thought. It occured to him that if anyone were a criminal in a couple it ought to be the boy, not the girl. ‘Her surname is Pinho,’ he said. The policeman made him spell that as well. He didn’t know her exact address. But he gave the man her phone number. ‘You can warn her to expect a call from us,’ the policeman said. Then he dismissed the boy and called in his father; ‘for a word in private,’ he said. In the waiting room Mark sent a text to Yasmin telling her the police wanted to call her about the Vespa. ‘I’m so sorry, but how could I say the motor reappeared without mentioning you?’ His hands were shaking so much he could barely text.
Mark’s father reappeared and they went outside to the car. ‘The police think Yasmin is one of the vandals,’ he sighed. ‘Or she has a brother who is.’ He swung the Audi out into traffic. ‘Otherwise why would they put the motor back when presumably they removed it to sell it? You can see their point, frankly. They don’t think you were involved, but they think she’s leading you up the garden path; that she’s not the innocent person she says she is.’
After a few moments he added, ‘An ex-boyfriend, maybe.’
Mark wanted to scream.
‘There’s her dope-smoking too.’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, it suggests a lifestyle that …’
‘Yasmin’s completely honest,’ Mark suddenly shouted. ‘Listen, she just told everyone at school that if the motor wasn’t put back she was going to talk to the headmaster, because it was her boyfriend’s bike. Then it reappeared. That’s not her fault, is it? It was nice of her.’
‘They think at the very least she knows who they are,’ his father said. ‘I mean, why would they do what she wants otherwise? What do they care about her boyfriend? They stole it for a reason, didn’t they? To sell it. And if she knows the perpetrators of a crime, she has a legal responsibility to report it to the police.’
‘She does not know them!’ Mark was indignant. What a pompous prick his father was, using expressions like ‘perpetrators of a crime’! The fact was, he said, his father didn’t like Yasmin because she was an immigrant and coloured and her dad only worked in a warehouse. ‘You don’t know what a nice person she is.’
‘If she’s telling the truth then she hasn’t got anything to worry about, has she?’ his father said. Somehow this sounded frightening.
From the police station, they drove over to the other side of town, to the waste ground behind Yasmin’s school. They stood by the Vespa and examined it. It was looking a bit rain-stained after a week outside. Then they put the licence plates back on. ‘Take it straight to the mechanic’s,’ Mark’s father told him. ‘And go really easy in case something’s not working properly. The last thing we need is an accident. Check the brakes right away, and the steering.’
It was a mild October morning and, getting on to the Vespa, Mark felt good. The helmet was still there under the seat. Amazingly, the motor started first time using the battery and starter, something it didn’t always do even when he’d left it in the garage. Mark rode it slowly round the muddy track on the waste ground while his father watched. ‘It brakes fine,’ he told him and his father said, ‘Okay go for it,’ and walked back to the Audi.
Mark took the bike out into the traffic. The motor was a bit louder than it had been, he realised now, and it felt a bit more powerful too. It surged and growled when he twisted the accelerator. His back responded to the sudden movement and his knees closed a little tighter. He grinned. Then he noticed that the rear-view mirror was missing. That was annoying, but he could drive without it. It felt so good when he had got through the traffic on the ring road and turned right beyond the lights, heading out towards Pendlebury. There was fresh air from the fields, which were hazy in the autumn sunshine and he felt absorbed in the movement of the bike along the strip of road between hedges and green verges with the low wooded hills in the distance. This was great. He was living again. But soon the police would phone Yasmin and accuse her of being involved with the vandals. Life was unfair. Turning in to the mechanic’s, he hit a pothole, had to put his foot down and scraped his shoe.
The gangly young man had trouble following what Mark was telling him about the motor. ‘I’ll look it over, if that’s what you want,’ he said. ‘The back light was missing,’ he pointed out. Mark hadn’t not
iced. It would be ready next weekend, the mechanic said. Right at the moment he had more than a dozen bikes to look at. Now Mark had a mile and a half to walk home through the muddy countryside. He texted Yasmin to ask if there was any chance she could come out to his place and stay the night. Perhaps he could persuade his father to pick her up if she got the bus as far as Salford. Then they would find some way to get her back home tomorrow. Mark began the long climb up the hill to their house. When the phone rang he thought it must be her.
‘Mr Paige?’
It was the policeman. Mark found it odd being addressed as if he were adult.
‘We have been making some enquiries regarding your girlfriend’s phone number, Mr Paige.’ There was a pause. ‘Perhaps you can explain to us why this phone is registered in your name, not your girlfriend’s.’
His heart was beating fast, as if he’d been caught out. But again there was a simple explanation. When they had gone to buy her phone Yasmin didn’t have any identification with her, which it turned out the phone people needed for the sort of contract she wanted, so he had given his name and address as a guarantee.
The policeman cleared his throat. Again there was a long pause. Then he said: ‘So, just by chance, the very day this young, er, lady goes to get a phone she doesn’t have any identification with her even though she knows which deal she wants and has presumably checked the requirements on the Internet. What’s more, she just happens to go with someone who has got identity and is naive enough to lend it to her, so that now if there should be any suspect traffic on this young lady’s phone it cannot be attributed to her.’
Mark was silent. He couldn’t believe it.
‘Could I have your father’s phone number?’ the policeman asked.