Fish 'n' Chip Shop Song and Other Stories

by Carl Nixon

  He may ask you if he can smoke. You will say that you would prefer it if he didn’t. You are in charge now. It is in your hands whether to take or to give.

  Toys are scattered over the back seat.

  ‘I see you’ve got children?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word grandfather will be avoided.

  And you will tell him that they are good boys, that you are a good father. A better father than he was. And it will be as though you have punched him.

  And then it will truly begin.

  You are eighteen. From all the hundreds of photographs on the walls you have selected three. These are the finalists, the shortlist for the vacancy that has opened up in your life for the position of father. You take them and pin them in a line on the ceiling over your bed so that you can lie back, hands behind your head, and stare at them. For hours and days and weeks. For years.

  The one on the left you call Ted. (You think that your father’s name had a hard sound, a ‘t’ or a ‘d’.) He definitely has your round eyes. His hat is tilted to one side and he is staring into the camera, posing for the boy. On the back is written: 1981, Parker Street Tavern. 12.30pm. Eyes blue. All the photographs have the place and time written on them in case you finally decide that he is the one. In case you need to go back and find him again.

  You are now uncertain of the one in the middle, Don. He is in profile and looks right, but he has an old scar that creases his face from his cheek bone almost down to his jaw. You are sure that you would remember the scar even over the ocean of twelve years. It is possible, however, that it happened after he left. But on this particular day you are sceptical.

  Dave is your favourite. You want him to be your father. He is standing next to the trunk of a plane tree, its bark mottled and peeling. His face is lined from sun, smiling. He has seen you and he is smiling down on you now. You look for recognition in his eyes. 1983, Walker Park. 5pm. Dave’s hand is in view, leaning against the tree. His fingers are long like yours. His hair is dark and wavy.

  By the time you are twenty his is the only photograph left. You place it in a frame on the bedside table.

  It is this face that you use when you imagine your father.

  Several days, or maybe it will be weeks later, he will turn up at the studio. You will be busy arranging a family group, tilting a daughter’s head towards the light or placing a rolled magazine in the father’s hand. You will ask Linda to tell him to wait.

  As you are saying goodbye to the family, shaking hands and reassuring them that the proof-sheets will be ready within the week, you will see him. He will be sitting in the corner of the reception area, not reading a magazine but just sitting. Watching you. His face will be clean-shaven, scrubbed Kodachrome red. His wavy hair will be smoothed down.

  He was in the area, he will tell you, and just popped in for a chat, perhaps some lunch if you’re not too busy?

  ‘Why not?’ you will say.

  You will eat sushi in the park. He has not tried it before, but does not complain. Says, perhaps, that he quite likes it. You are still deciding whether you will warn him about the wasabi.

  You are unsure of how the conversation will go after that. What will happen? Will you talk like old friends? Like father and son? Or will the only sound be the laughter of families drifting over from the children’s playground? You have been to the park many times, trying to see how it will be. You are here now.

  The bench is cold and there are not many people around. The light is fading. Two teenage boys in heavy coats walk towards the toilet block. They eye you wearily.

  You imagine your father sitting next to you on the bench. Your old camera is in its brown leather case between you. The face you have chosen for him comes into view like a partially developed photograph slowly appearing from the bottom of the tray.

  You can see him now. Can see Dave’s face. Can project your father into a probable future full of happiness. You smile.

  You can picture it all.

  Dreams of a Suburban Mercenary

  these days I care about very little and look forward to even less. The best of it is when the nurse changes the sweat-soaked sheets or the chaplain with the frozen eye drops by to talk, although I imagine that I am poor company. I cannot concentrate for long enough to hold a proper conversation. I drift in and out of uneasy sleep. My particular sandman wears a white doctor’s coat and visits this hospice bed often, dispensing a heady mixture of painkillers and false cheer. But the dreams he brings me are not soothing. They are nearly always the same: full of faces from my past swimming into view and then flicking away like fish in a tank. And, of course, there is always the fat man.

  I see him walking towards me out of the darkness. He is still a fair way off but I know without doubt that it is him. I hear the hollow thump of the explosion, as loud as when I heard it that first time. I feel the ground shake and see the metal fragments rain down like jagged snow on to the dry grass. The laughter of old people echoes all around me. In my dream the fat man raises his walking stick in cheery greeting.

  You can believe my story or not, I say to the chaplain as he sits by my bed. I would understand if you didn’t but it’s nothing to me one way or the other. Not at eighty-seven. Not here in this penultimate place, this staging post between the hospital and the cemetery. Others will tell you differently, wild fanciful stories, but don’t listen to them. The ones who are living at Calbourne Courts now are newcomers. They know only what they’ve been told, sometimes second or third hand. They’ve only been shown the dimpled and chipped concrete walls in Unit 14 and the faded bloodstain that looks like a flower on the concrete path. They weren’t there when it happened. The chaplain nods his head and smiles as though I am a feverish child. One eye looks over my left shoulder in the direction of the window.

  Calbourne Courts Retirement Village sat — sits I should say — at the end of a short cul-de sac in what has become an unfashionable part of the city. In that summer’s hot nor’westerlies litter blew across the mouth of Calbourne Drive, paint slowly peeled and engines revved. After midnight the residents lay beneath thin sheets and listened to the thumping bass of car stereos come closer and then fade away. There were eighteen units in all, although two were vacant at the time, cleared out first by the ambulance and later by the furniture-removal men. I lived in number 15 which, like all the rest, faced into the yellowing central lawn, criss crossed with cracked concrete paths.

  Four rooms. A lounge big enough for a two-seater couch, a chair and a television set. A single bedroom. A bathroom with a shower box lined with a lumpy rubber mat, and a toilet with a handrail. There was also a tiny kitchen with a sink and a stove for those who still did their own cooking. There were meals-on-wheels for the rest. All the units were painted Desert Cream and Seashell Pink over cost-efficient concrete-block walls.

  Calbourne Courts was where you went when your husband or wife of forty years died. When your middle-aged sons and daughters kindly informed you that the family home was too much for you now. When you weren’t quite ready for dormitory beds and white nurses carrying trays of mashed food, or for a more transitory place like St Mary’s where I currently spend all day on my back drug-dreaming about the past.

  I watch Mrs Munro stiffly picking up the slender brown off-casts from the cabbage tree outside her window. The onset of Parkinson’s disease makes her move like a plastic doll. It is hot and she wears a thin summer dress with small yellow flowers dotted across it.

  When she looks up they have surrounded her. There are three young men and they demand cash. When she objects, they push and pull at her until she falls. They are tugging at her paste pearls and taunting her with voices like magpies.

  She holds up her hands to ward them off. The skin is rice-paper thin and just beneath the first swollen knuckle is a flash of diamond ring. The three squawk and peck at her. One of them grasps her hand and pulls. The skin beneath the ring is wrinkled and pink, the skin of a baby mouse. It bleeds easily.

  They run laughing across
the lawn. Mrs Munro’s eyes overflow behind her heavy glasses, and the water catches between her lenses and the folded skin of her face and builds up like a swimming pool.

  I tell the chaplain that Mrs Munro was not able to give a clear description. The policeman explained, in the borrowed tone of a patient parent, that half the youths in the area were skinny and wore their hair short. Considerably more than half wore clothes that needed a good wash. What could they do except warn people to lock their doors at night, and promise that a patrol car would cruise the area whenever possible?

  Despite these precautions, the three returned on several occasions. They took to wearing black balaclavas over their almost bald heads. Only their eyes were visible as they carried away Mr Gardener’s television set. Only their sneering mouths could be seen as they pocketed Mrs Taylor’s ivory brooch, given to her as a present by a second cousin of the Queen. Their eyes laughed and their mouths jerked and twitched as I watched them trample Mrs Littlewood’s tiny vegetable garden with heavy boots. You see, she had nothing valuable to take. Her courgettes paid the ultimate price for her poverty.

  Old people crowd around, they push into the small room, shuffle into my field of vision. A meeting has been called. Voices chatter like temple monkeys.

  ‘It’s only a matter of time before someone’s killed,’ says Mrs Munro. As the very first victim she prides herself on being something of an expert. There is a mutter of agreement, a clicking of tongues. It echoes in my head.

  ‘But what can we do about it?’

  ‘We can lock our doors.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t hide inside all day like rabbits in a burrow.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘What? Speak up! I can’t hear!’

  ‘Be quiet! Be quiet all of you!’ Mrs McDonald rolls forward in her wheelchair which makes a gentle electric whirr. ‘Listen to all of you clucking like a lot of chickens afraid of the cat.’ Her face is collapsed and small like an apple that has sat in the fruit bowl for far too long. Her ears, too big for her face, have lobes that dangle beneath the overhang of her perm. ‘The police can’t help us, that much is plain.’ There is a chorus of agreement. ‘We need to get help. We need to get someone who’s not afraid to put these young thugs in their place.’ She pauses for effect. ‘Maybe break an arm or two.’

  Everyone stares at her. Mouths normally half open, open wider.

  ‘But that’s …!’

  ‘We can’t …!’

  ‘You’d never …!’

  Mrs McDonald holds up her hand until there is total silence. ‘I know a man.’

  Mrs McDonald’s husband had been in the army’s motor-pool and later taken a keen interest in the sometimes shady world of horse-racing. Friends of friends had been contacted. Friends of friends made calls to old acquaintances who owed them favours. They in turn picked up their receivers and dialled. The word of Mrs McDonald’s need had trickled down through the city like water through dense soil. Two days after her first call she had a name.

  There was another meeting where she told us everything that she knew. That he was an ex-soldier. A hard man. A man who knew that violence had to be met with violence. That the meek inherited bugger all. The word mercenary was never said, but it hung in the air of number 6 Calbourne Courts like tobacco smoke. It stained the pink walls an altogether darker shade.

  It was Mrs McDonald and Mrs Harwood who went to meet the man. Mrs McDonald had been the obvious choice to represent Calbourne Courts. Mrs Harwood’s inclusion had, however, been the subject of vigorous debate. At sixty-two she was the youngest resident of the retirement village and so lacked a certain standing in the community. Some saw her taste in bright summer frocks as too ostentatious, the hems too short by half. I myself considered it unseemly in a woman of advanced years to flaunt her legs — even if they were the legs of a woman twenty years younger.

  I am uncertain of how they travelled, although I knew once, I’m sure. I remember that some of us gathered in the car park to see them off and wish them luck. Perhaps they were on foot. Or rather Mrs Harwood was. Mrs McDonald would have rolled along in her wheelchair over the hot ground. They left us like the Boers trekking down through Africa. Or is that fanciful nonsense? Perhaps I do recall a taxi with a device on the roof for the wheelchair. I prefer to imagine that they moved slowly through the suburbs under the hot summer sun, pioneers searching for sanctuary through shimmering air. It could have happened that way.

  I know that I am dreaming but cannot wake myself. He walks towards me, close enough now that I can make out the brown plastic buttons on his cardigan. The darkness is lifting and I can see that there is a faint stain near the left-hand pocket. He is so big that he rolls slightly as he walks, in the same way that a calm ocean rolls in to the shore. I cannot bring myself to look down at his hands. I am afraid of what I will find there. I know that his coming is a good thing, but I fear his arrival.

  The chaplain is sitting by my bed. I do not remember him arriving or sitting down, but there he is anyway. I continue telling him my story. Mrs Harwood herself told me the rest, I say. He nods and his bad eye roams around the room. No matter. I want to finish my story. As much for my own sake as for his. She told me how they were surprised that the address they had been given was a modest state house, nothing more than a two-bedroom box painted cream, with fly-spotted venetian blinds in the window. She said that they found him mowing the lawn. He was moving in straight lines, every now and then bending awkwardly to pull out weeds. Mrs McDonald described him to me as portly. When I saw him myself later, I thought him fat. But of course the thing that struck them most was his age. Mrs McDonald’s scratching voice drifts to me over the years: ‘Seventy-five if he was a day!’

  I will not pretend to know the ins and outs of their conversation. A few details told to me come back now. That he used a walking stick with a shiny knotted handle. That his house was pleasantly cool after the summer heat. He rolled a cigarette while they talked but did not light it. She said that his breath smelt of peppermints.

  He is closer than before and as fat as I remember. His hair is white and his goatee beard neatly trimmed. His beard has been left to grow in a thin line down the edge of his face, framing an otherwise borderless expanse of skin. He limps toward me through the fog. His voice comes to me as if over a great distance, and it is deep and soothing.

  ‘I fought in Crete and at Tobruk. Don’t be fooled. It’s not how young or strong you are. It’s the intent that matters. The willingness to hurt or kill before they do the same to you. That’s all violence really takes — the will.’

  By all accounts the negotiations went on for some time. The residents had agreed to put in a hundred dollars each, but the fat man wanted more. How much more I cannot remember, but enough. They haggled. By the time Mrs Harwood and Mrs McDonald were finally led to the front door, things had been settled. A price had been agreed, the bulk of the money payable on completion of the job.

  Out on the street Mrs McDonald observed that the fat man grunted and huffed a lot for a soldier of fortune. She personally thought that the three young thugs were going to make mincemeat of the old fool. Mrs Harwood said nothing. She later told me she was thinking about the way that, as they went out the gate, he patted her fondly on the buttock. She could still feel his large warm hand through the cotton of her summer frock.

  Three hooded youths walk boldly across the lawn. It is almost midday and the bone-dry grass bends and snaps beneath their feet. We have been told to wait inside and out of sight, but of course we watch. Curtains twitch and watery eyes are pressed to hidden slits.

  A newly polished oak clock sits on the small side-table just inside the open door of number 14, next to it a set of silver cutlery still in its box. Heavy boots kick up dust. A tattooed knuckle clenches. Laughing, they push into the darkness of the unit, looking for more. Of course I was not inside, but in my imagination he rises stiffly from a La-Z-Boy to greet them.

  ‘Aah, you’
ve come at last.’ His voice would have been calm.

  The three are not afraid. They laugh at him. They sneer.

  ‘Where’s your cash, you fat old bastard?’ The tallest advances, reaching out his hands. His fingers seem to stretch and grow. Before he can touch the fat man there is a blur of movement in the half light and something hard and heavy strikes the side of the hooded boy’s knee. He collapses cursing at the old man’s feet. His groans echo around my head. Is that a stick the fat man is holding? It is hard to see. Perhaps a heavy crowbar, the end a snake’s forked tongue.

  The other two stand still like bald statues silhouetted in the doorway. They look uncomprehendingly at the old man standing over their companion. I’m sure there is a moment when they think about running. I can see it in their eyes, as big as my mother’s dinner plates. But they are young and he is old. And then one of them reaches into his pocket and pulls out a knife. With a practised flick of his wrist he has it open.

  ‘Wait!’

  The fat man’s voice commands attention. It freezes them.

  He reaches into his own pocket and pulls out something round. At first I think it is a piece of fruit, a lemon or a young pineapple. ‘You may recognise this from movies.’ His voice is that of a teacher, as though what he is saying is for their education. He moves forward so that they can get a better look. ‘It is a hand grenade. A little souvenir I picked up from my time in Africa.’

  ‘That’s fuckin bullshit. That’s not a real grenade.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that, which is why I’ve prepared a little demonstration.’ Casually he pulls the pin and throws it aside. I hear it strike the edge of the television, watch it slowly spin as it falls.