East of Innocence

by David Thorne

  ‘Dressed like that?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  He nods across the garden, to a stump, a spade next to it.

  ‘Wasn’t that the willow?’

  ‘Diseased. Got to come out.’

  I cross the lawn, pick up the spade, start digging around the roots. My father watches me as I work, bleak and unblinking, like an overseer debating when to start flogging. The roots are deep and I know that I will not get it all out today, that I have been set an impossible task; I work for forty-five minutes until I can feel blisters forming on the fleshy bottom of my thumbs and the stump is beginning to rock, the roots on one side excavated and broken, showing bright white where the spade has cut through them. It needs a digger but my father would not spend the money, or let its tracks cut up his lawn. I know that he will not be satisfied, that he will have some comment to make, but I am accustomed to these hopeless situations; heads I win, tails you lose is a game my father has been playing with me ever since I was a child. In trouble at school, I was warned he didn’t want me turning out like him. When I graduated with a degree in law, he supposed I was something special, too good for him. When I lost my job in the City, narrowly escaping being struck off, he couldn’t believe I’d thrown it all away, what was wrong with me, after all he’d given me?

  I put the spade down and cross the lawn to get a glass of water; I think my father is asleep but as I pass him he grunts out, ‘Giving up, are you? Lazy cunt.’

  I sit back down next to him, sweat dripping off my forehead. My shirt is stuck to my back and the muscles in my shoulders and arms are humming. I press the glass to my face. My father belches loudly, a growling, meaty sound, teeth bared like a baboon, then levers himself up on to his elbows and looks at me. Here it comes.

  ‘Got any money?’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘Fucking never have enough, so whatever you can spare I’ll take.’

  I knew that he would ask, and I know he’ll take whatever I have whether it’s offered or not, so I pass him my wallet, which I filled with exactly what I can spare before I left to see him, a sum that won’t be anywhere near as much as he’ll want. I have never properly known how my father made what little money he has; but I do know that there are limited opportunities for stertorous sixty-five-year-old ex-wannabe gangsters, and that he would never demean himself by working a regular job. He takes out the £200, looks at me, sneers.

  ‘And there I was, thinking the legal profession was a licence to print money. The fuck’s wrong with you, son?’

  I do not answer, there is no point; as far as he is concerned, being born was my one unforgivable sin, the wrong that can never be righted. It was my father’s misfortune, and of course mine, that my mother disappeared days after she gave birth to me. I often wonder what our life would have been like, had she stayed around. It could hardly have been worse.

  We sit in silence, listening to the buzz of insects, my father slurping occasionally. I can hear his breathing; it is heavy, and I wonder about his health, his heart, wonder if there is any force on earth that could kill him.

  ‘Talking to you.’

  I shake myself out of my thoughts. ‘What?’

  ‘Derek’s granddaughter. Been missing nearly a week.’

  ‘Yeah. I heard.’

  ‘D’you know her?’

  ‘Not really. To speak to. No news?’

  ‘Not even eighteen.’

  I know her by sight, a small girl, dark hair, quick words and a disarming smile, somebody I instinctively liked the few times I met her. Derek is a drinking friend of my father’s, someone to share war stories with from the days when they were, if not respected, at least feared.

  ‘Fucking nonces. Only got to open the paper. Know what we used to do with them?’

  I tune out, not keen on hearing my father’s creative methods for dealing with sexual deviants, a subject he’s made very much his own in recent years. So much unrealised violence lives within him, continually on the lookout for a suitable outlet. His reserves astonish me; would impress me, probably, if I hadn’t lived with them for so long.

  ‘Be seeing you, Dad.’

  ‘Stump’s still in the ground.’

  ‘Call me if you can’t manage it.’

  ‘Saying I can’t manage it?’

  I do not answer, know from experience which questions to avoid. I walk into the house, through the patio doors, pull them closed after me. I stand at the window watching my father, the back of his head, his tanned body lying on the lounger, old blue tattoos showing through the bronze. He’s still got all his hair, stiff grey brushed back in rigid waxy waves, a vain man underneath the careless exterior. Lost in my thoughts, I don’t notice him turn in the lounger, struggle around and look back over his shoulder at the house, the patio doors, at me. Some strange sixth sense, the predator’s instinct. He arcs his glass at me and it smashes against the window, liquid streaming down and making my father’s face, seen through it, unreadable. Why would any father react like that, at the sight of his own son?

  3

  BILLY’S GOT ONE leg in traction and he tells me that the worst of it is that he can’t lean to one side, part a cheek, break wind discreetly. He says there are one or two pretty nurses and the last thing he wants is a reputation for uncontrolled flatulence. What he actually says is: ‘You don’t let one go around the fanny, Danny. Trust me, they don’t like it.’

  I assure him I’ll take it on board, take his word for it. I even make a note on a pad I’ve brought, the kind of thing any proper lawyer should carry. Billy watches me in fascination, his jaw worrying a piece of gum agitatedly, his whole body a tightly wound coil of enforced inactivity almost humming with frustrated movement. This is probably the most still Billy has ever been. Anybody who questions whether hyperactivity is a real disorder, all they need do is meet Billy. He would make a cat with a firework tied to its tail look lethargic.

  Much of my work involves what society would disparagingly call ambulance chasing, though I can’t claim to do a lot of chasing. Any personal injury work I do walks through my office door. Or, in the case of Billy Morrison, calls my office line, as even hyper Billy would struggle to walk with a broken spine, broken femur, two fractured tibiae and a collarbone that is, apparently, ‘utterly fucked’. He was hit by a car at a pedestrian crossing, in front of witnesses, at eleven o’clock the night before last. And now, rather than dead, he’s potentially in line to win a lot of money in compensation, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Less my ten per cent, naturally.

  That he’s not in the morgue, that he was lucky enough to be mown down in front of witnesses who gave a description of the car, even caught a partial registration, sits in stark contrast to the Billy I know. A ubiquitous, if not popular, face in the local bars, Billy has a reputation for bad luck and worse judgement. He once stole a television from a house, then went to a pub later in the day and unwittingly attempted to sell it back to its owner. The television had a sticker on it, Billy told me after he was discharged, which read ‘I ♥ Alicante’, a strange decoration for a television but a stone-cold clincher for the angry and inebriated scaffolder whose television it turned out to be. Billy still carries the scar from where the man snapped apart his glass in Billy’s cheek; they had him laid out on the bar, ran out of beer towels to staunch the flow of blood, had to get new carpets after he’d been carried away. In hindsight, Billy told me, he perhaps ought to have taken the sticker off. Billy deals almost exclusively in hindsight, foresight being something he appears to have been born without, like some children lack an arm.

  Billy is grinning at me happily. ‘How much, do you reckon?’

  ‘Depends,’ I say.

  ‘Right,’ says Billy, nodding wisely, not an idea in his head.

  ‘First we need to find the car. The police have spoken to the witnesses, got a description, a partial registration. But we’re not there yet. You say you don’t remember anything about the accident?’

  I alr
eady know he doesn’t, want to check his story for inconsistencies on the off chance we go to court and a lawyer tries to find holes in his account, catch him in a lie. Though the eye witnesses we’ve got make anything Billy says largely irrelevant, all three of them sure that the crossing signal hadn’t even begun to flash its warning at the point Billy went over the car’s roof. Anyway, Billy isn’t listening, his mind jumping ahead to the point when he’s got a pocket full of money, revelling in the swagger and authority he imagines any significant sum will automatically bestow upon him.

  ‘You know how big the biggest plasma screen they make is? Like, I’m talking, I’m going to hit up the store, get the biggest ass screen, just walk up, say yeah, I’ll take that one. Gimme that one, I’m not even joking.’ He looks at me. ‘You got Blu-ray?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Like, it makes things so real, you don’t even know you’re watching TV. Seriously, you’re like…’ He opens his eyes wide, mimes astonishment. ‘You think you’re there. It’s mad.’

  ‘We’ve got to find the car first, Billy,’ I say. ‘Let’s not get carried away just yet.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Nah. They’ll find it.’

  I wish I shared Billy’s childlike confidence, but the truth is I’ve had little joy pressing the police for a result so far. A partial registration involves man hours of follow up, which they’ve told me they can’t spare at the moment, particularly given the search for the missing girl. I picture the worst-case scenario, an unrepentant sinner matter-of-factly scraping Billy’s blood from his headlights, washing his hair off the windscreen, arranging an alibi, getting away with it. Not that I really believe that will happen; in my experience, it is more likely that the driver is holed up at home, missing work, downing booze to deaden the dread he, or she, feels at having hit a man and run, more than ready to confess all to ease the maggot of guilt burrowing into their staid, suburban psyche. Whichever, the car needs to be found before we can begin any litigation. And in this particular case, the case of Mr W. Morrison of no fixed abode, I suspect the police – and part of me, sadly, understands their point of view perfectly – really aren’t that fucked.

  Billy nods at me, winking, jerking his head towards the other side of the room where a nurse with limp greasy black hair and acne scarring reaches up tiredly to adjust a tube above a grey-faced man’s bed.

  ‘She’s who you’ve been holding it in for, is it, Billy?’

  ‘Gloria. She’s from Brazil. Want to guess how many brothers and sisters she’s got?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Twelve,’ says Billy in satisfaction. ‘Fucking twelve. All the same parents. You believe that? Same mum, same dad. Unbe-fucking-lievable.’

  I recall some details of Billy’s home life, his feckless mother whose eventual dependence on narcotics led her to prison and Billy into a care home, allegations of abuse by a stepfather, or uncle, or casual interloper, these distinctions unrecognised within the human chaos that habitually orbited the Morrison family home. It strikes me as amazing that Billy can for ever wear that sunny face, present that breezy smile to a world that has shown him nothing but disdain.

  ‘I know you’ll do the right thing, Danny,’ he says, looking at me shyly, unused to any declarations of trust. Why do people keep saying that to me? I’m a lawyer, not a priest. I smile at Billy, give his shoulder a squeeze, tell him I’ll be in touch. He nods vaguely, gone, lost once again to blissful dreams of easy affluence and the unfathomable wonders of Blu-ray discs.

  I leave the hospital, pass worried relatives and sickly pensioners in dressing gowns smoking guilty cigarettes, happy for the sun on my face after the chemical yellow fizz of the hospital’s neon strips. At my house, Sophie will be packing her things, filling bags as quickly as she can, possibly checking the windows as she empties wardrobes, praying I don’t come back while she’s there. Three nights ago, I reacted to a petty provocation, an offhand comment on my upbringing and the chip on my shoulder, by kicking over the coffee table as we watched I cannot now remember what. What I can recall, and what shames me as I think about it, are her eyes wide in her face as the rest of her diminished, toes pushing her shrinking body into the corner of the sofa; I could almost see her reduce in size from the sudden exodus of her trust in me. Her brother, a self-righteous colour sergeant in the Rifles, will also be there to lend his muscle and I know too well what will happen confronted by him, how I will react at the slightest rebuke or the merest hint of a sneer as he helps shift the wreckage of another failed relationship. I can’t go there.

  The unlovely concrete of my hastily built town is bathed in late-afternoon light by now, softening edges and reflecting warmth, uniform grey taking on subtle pastel shades of yellow, pink, orange; even the shadows are a cool blue. Every pub spills out into the street and laughter is, for now, winning the battle over traffic noise, delighted shrieks overwhelming the hiss of air brakes at red lights; close your eyes and you could almost believe you were somewhere else, a busy Spanish resort, a seafront bar. An evening like this is not one to spend alone, dissecting the ineptitudes and failings of my life, taunted by the sounds of friendship and intimacy. An evening like this calls for the company of the one person in this life I regard as family.

  4

  ‘I LIKED SOPHIE,’ says Gabe. ‘There you are. Should have known.’

  ‘She was frightened of me.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’

  Gabe isn’t. Gabe never has been. Our friendship, I am sure, owes almost everything to this one simple fact.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Fuck all.’ Honest pause. ‘Well.’

  ‘Hate it when you say “Well”.’

  ‘Well, kicked over the coffee table.’

  ‘Hard?’

  ‘Enough. Enough to frighten her. Took something she said the wrong way.’

  ‘Danny. You silly bastard.’ Gabe looks at me, concerned, not afraid to hold my gaze, challenge me. He has eyes that are a pale unwavering blue, like a husky’s, and seem to have an almost clairvoyant power. Next to my bulk he is whip-thin, lean and muscular; a man with an easy, almost loping animal physicality. He sighs, shakes his head, and when he looks back at me his eyes are bright and crinkled. ‘Just the table, was it?’

  We are sitting outside the Branfield Road Lawn Tennis Club, a place that, while I was growing up, became as much a home to me as my own; more, if a home is somewhere you feel welcome and valued. Strangely, it was my father who introduced me here, tennis becoming a fad that he and his socially ambitious cashed-up friends wanted to buy into. His presence at the tennis club did not last long, a combination of his own lack of co-ordination and, though he’d never admit it, too many sideways glances from the fascinated-yet-petrified respectable middle-class members. I, on the other hand, soon discovered that I had a serviceable forehand and an instinctive, explosive backhand, which could punish any serve from the juniors upwards, and was asked, practically begged, by the club’s committee to keep coming back.

  Gabe and I played doubles together for years, had success on a county level before my backhand came up against serves that even it didn’t know how to reply to, and I could no longer cover for Gabe’s unreliable volley. And while disappointing, the stability and generosity that the club showed me during those years of success opened my eyes to a way of thinking, a philosophy not exclusively governed by self-interest, which previously I could never have imagined existed.

  I seem to be surrounded by people, and in that number I count myself, for whom something is always missing, lacking, for whom disappointment is the default state. But Gabe has always radiated the air of a man whose life is complete, who could not want for more. During a tour of Afghanistan with the 1st Royal Tank Regiment two years ago, he was patrolling behind a Challenger main battle tank when an IED disguised as a pile of camel shit exploded, shrapnel shearing his left leg off just below the knee, the surgeons taking more so that it now ends just beneath where his kneecap starts. From the day I saw him
back in the country, attached to a drip at Selly Oak, he has given the impression that this minor inconvenience has utterly failed to exert any influence on his life, or diminish him in any way. But recently I have noticed a distance in him, a lack of focus in those unnervingly clear eyes, as if he needs dragging back from some other, unknowable place. He has been gone too long, and seen too many things, for me to know where to start in reaching out to him; and besides, I am sure that he can look after himself.

  I am in awe of Gabe, always have been. I consider him remarkable. The fact that he was accepted into the Cavalry tells its own story about his class background, orders of magnitude above my aspiring working-class origins, but this was never an issue for him and soon became irrelevant to me, too.

  One of the courts has stopped playing, four men in tennis whites passing our table, glowing with the satisfied aura of health and not inconsiderable wealth. ‘All right, Hopalong?’ one of the men, whom I know by sight but not name, says, laughing and clapping Gabe a little too hard on the shoulder. He has wiry black hair on his tanned forearm and a Breitling on his wrist that must have cost more than my car; possibly a lawyer, one who’s doing infinitely better than I am. His group stops at our table.

  Gabe smiles but I see his lean frame stiffen; still, discipline is discipline and he does not let the jibe, whether meant well or spitefully, provoke him. I, on the other hand, cannot accept this casual arrogance so equably. I look the man in the eyes, my dead fuck-off stare. He attempts to meet my look, his pleased smile faltering like a birthday boy who’s just been told his dog’s died.

  ‘What?’ he asks, a braver man than I had given him credit for.

  ‘I hear you say something like that again and I’ll put you on the floor,’ I say.

  Gabe reaches over and places a hand on my forearm, tendons raised from my closed fist. ‘Excuse my friend,’ he says to the man, who now will not look at me. ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean anything by it. Right?’ An edge to his voice.