by Tony Parsons
Just like heaven.
When we came through the big Victorian square, Farren was sleeping in the back seat, worn out from his performance, or maybe just overwhelmed by jet lag. I was trying to avoid the evening traffic on the main drag, to get him to his hotel this side of midnight, and that was when I saw the man with the woman.
The man was pushing the woman out of his car. A Renault or a Peugeot – some piece of French crap. The man was in the driving seat and he had leaned across to open the passenger door and now he was trying to shove the woman out of the car.
The man had one hand on her and one hand on the wheel and he looked like his only hobby was lifting weights. He had a shaved head, and bad tattoos, and he was wearing the sleeveless T-shirt that his kind always wear just so you know that they have lifted a lot of heavy objects that they didn’t really need to.
The woman was crying. She didn’t want to get out of the car. The man was calling her names and before I had time to think I was doing something about it.
The knuckle dusters that Andrzej had loaned me were in the dashboard – a pair of them in this injected polymer, lighter than plastic and harder than brass, just four holes for the fingers and a grip that sat snug in the palm of your hand.
Just in case they decided to come back.
But now I was slipping them on, thinking that they weighed nothing at all, as I got out of the car and began crossing the square to where the man was pushing the woman from the car with the sole of his boot.
I was almost on them when I heard Farren call my name. Tom, Tom, Tom. It made the man in the car look up. I kept walking. Farren kept calling my name. I didn’t even know that he knew my name.
The woman was completely out of the car now, tugging at the hem of her dress, struggling to stay on her feet as she had lost one of her shoes. She was crying. I held the knuckle dusters tighter, and I felt the grip dig into the palm of my hand, and the man was getting out of the car with this sneering smile because he knew he could take me, but then the smile was less certain because he saw the black dusters curling above my fingers and he wasn’t sure what difference they would make.
Then all at once Farren was on me, his arms wrapped around me, surprisingly strong, and I could smell the money on him.
‘It’s not the smart move,’ he said, his face almost touching mine, his mouth in my ear, the voice an urgent hiss. ‘You don’t know these people. They mean nothing to you. Think of your family, Tom.’ I struggled against him but he held me tight. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Your family needs you. Who are these people? Nobody. You can’t worry about the rest of the world.’
It was true.
All of it.
I felt the fight go out of me, and let myself go loose in his arms, and I felt him slip the knuckle dusters from my hands. As we started back to the car, his arm around my shoulders as if I might change my mind, he quickly crouched and dropped them both down a drain. Then he patted my shoulder as my head fell forward.
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
At the car I turned to look at the couple. The woman was wiping her nose with her fingers. She had found her missing shoe and put it on. The man had come around the car and the smile was more confident now.
‘Change your mind, little man?’ he said.
That’s right. The little man had changed his mind. We got in the car. Farren leaned forward.
‘You’re a good man,’ he told me. ‘Let’s just go.’
I nodded, not daring to speak, and as I drove Farren to his hotel the road ahead blurred through a veil of tears, and I felt him place a hand on my shoulder, as if checking that I was still there, and I felt my face burning with shame.
13
The next night I drove him across the river and we left it behind us, heading south, deep into the unvisited depths of the city, and all the while those sharp blue eyes in the dark tan face were watching me in the rear-view mirror.
Now he knew me.
Now he knew exactly what I had done, but he did not try to talk to me about it. It was as if we did not need to talk about it. Because he understood.
The further south you went, the faster the money ran out, and Farren turned his eyes to the bleak neighbourhoods of boarded-up shops, and groups of hooded figures on their mountain bikes, and the brutal flats rising on every side.
‘The reason this was such a great country is because there was once a ladder,’ Farren said. ‘It reached into every corner of every town and every city. And then one day they kicked the ladder away.’
It was night now. We had spent the day wandering London and beyond. Most of the firm’s clients covered a familiar patch, from Canary Wharf in the east and across the City and out as far as Chelsea in the west. That was where they did it all – making their deals, breaking their bread, resting their tired but wired executive heads.
But Farren was different.
I took him beyond the A to Z to a huge house with a gravel drive in Middlesex, and deep into the suburbs to a place with an Olympic-sized swimming pool out in Essex, and beyond the guards of a gated community in Surrey. While I was waiting for him at that one I found a glossy brochure on the back seat with a view of a still blue sea seen from the shade of a coconut tree on the cover. Wild Palm Properties, it said at the top, and in bigger letters below: PHUKET, THAILAND. ESCAPE TO PARADISE. I was putting it back when he came out of the house.
‘Keep it,’ he told me.
Now we went deeper into South London, the lady on the sat-nav gently urging me on, although I felt there had to be some mistake. There was no money here.
‘You have arrived,’ said the sat-nav lady, and the car idled near a patch of knackered grass on the edge of a dark forest of tower blocks. Faces watched us from the pavement, their eyes blank and shining. I looked at Farren in the rear-view mirror, waiting for instructions, and he met me with his blue eyes.
‘Let’s just sit for a while,’ he said.
A pack of kids were nearby, lounging on the concrete steps that led up to the higher floors. They leered and spat on the ground, but it was all nothing. They wanted to do something to us but they did not know what. I felt a surge of admiration for Farren. He was not scared. He did not even notice them.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t look like your sort of place.’
He laughed. ‘I think an Englishman is at home anywhere, don’t you?’ he said.
Then he stirred.
There was an old man with a plastic shopping bag, dragging himself home, heading towards the concrete steps of the nearest block of flats. The spitting and smoking kids made no effort to make way for him, so the old man edged around them, and between them, his eyes on the ground, his hair grey and thinning, moving slowly and carefully, as if they were wild animals he had no wish to alarm. Without saying anything, without even looking at them, the old man seemed to apologize for existing.
‘Who do you think he is?’ Farren asked me.
I shrugged.
‘Some poor old bastard afraid of getting stabbed coming back from the shops with a can of cat food,’ I said. ‘Probably fought in their wars, and worked in their factories, just so he could have a bunch of acne-adverts on mountain bikes pissing on his doorstep. Lovely.’
Farren watched the old man climb the stone steps until he was out of sight. Up on the second floor, at the end of a windy walkway, a solitary light came on in one of the flats.
‘I’ll tell you about that old man,’ Farren said. ‘His wife left him. Years ago. I am talking about years and years ago. Half a lifetime ago. And he had a son. She left them both. The child – the child was four when she walked out the door and left them to get on with it. And the old man couldn’t cope, so the boy was farmed out. Grandparents – that was all right. Your grandparents love you, don’t they? But they were old and they got sick and died. First one, and then the other one. The man first. It’s usually the man first. So then it was other relations. Then foster pa
rents.’ He was silent for a bit, thinking about it. ‘The levels of indifference and negligence and cruelty always rising,’ he said.
I thought of Tess, and the unknown terrors of a child growing up in care, and parents who brought children into the world but did not stick around long enough to bring them up, but I said nothing.
Farren was leaning forward, making sure that I got it. I turned to look at him. Somehow the mirror did not seem like it was enough.
‘All because a man could not cope with one hard knock,’ he said. ‘What do you think about that, Tom? Someone who doesn’t raise their own child?’
‘I don’t think much of it,’ I said.
Farren gave me the nod, satisfied. I started the engine, and the faces in the darkness turned to watch us leave. The blue eyes were on me in the mirror.
‘You know who that old man is?’ he asked me. ‘That disappointed old man?’
I could guess. There had been too many years apart to ever make it good between them. Maybe they had tried, later, but there had been a falling out. Strong words, harshly spoken, all the old resentment and bitterness coming out. My parents had been gone for a long time, but I could see how it was the kind of thing that could happen between fathers and sons, between parents and children. How you could lose each other and then never find each other ever again.
Farren was waiting for my answer.
‘Is he your father?’ I said.
Farren smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s you, Tom. That’s you if you don’t get out of this country. That’s you in thirty years. That’s you if you stay in this place with no ladder. And you deserve better,’ Farren told me. ‘You and your family. A better life than that. You know you do.’
Then he slept. Farren never really got over the jet lag on that trip. I don’t think he wanted to. I think that getting on local time would have brought too much back. The little flat. The mother that left. The father who could not cope. So Farren stayed on Thai time and he slept when he could.
It felt like he was already in that space between time zones, neither really here nor over there, pulled in two opposite directions.
And I sort of felt the same way. Trapped by my life in this city, knowing that if I got any kind of criminal conviction I would lose my job, and trapped by the mad dream that, if we want it bad enough, then there is still time left to break free.
‘It’s time,’ Rory said.
Tess and I stepped through the broken glass doors that led to the garden. The children were waiting for us. Keeva with a shoebox, Rory holding a lifeless bag of brown fur.
Keeva solemnly handed me the shoebox and I held it open for Rory as he gently placed the dead creature inside. A tiny collection of fur and bones that seemed to curl up on itself now that the spark of life had gone.
‘The fox did it, didn’t he?’ said Rory, nodding bitterly. ‘Just scared him to death. Just frightened him so much he …’
I kept the lid open, giving him a long last look, and we both stared at the dead animal.
‘They don’t live long,’ I said softly. Hammy wasn’t the first pet we had buried. Our back garden was a mass grave of goldfish, budgies and hamsters. ‘You know they don’t live long, Rory.’
I slowly closed the lid. Rory’s chin trembled with emotion. On the front of the shoebox he had carefully printed an epitaph:
Hammy Finn – born 2004 – died 2004 – A Gud Pet
‘Longer than that,’ Rory said bitterly. ‘They’re meant to live longer than that.’
Our little funeral procession made its way to the end of the garden, the graveyard for the Finn family’s dead pets. Keeva was in her own little world, muttering to herself and taking long careful steps in some secret game. She could be lavishly sentimental about our animals, but she never really loved them the way that her brother did. As we passed the Wendy House she slipped inside and looked at her bike.
‘The front wheel’s gone all wonky,’ Keeva called. ‘From where they laid it down and trod on it or something. The bad men.’
There was a small flowerbed by our back fence. We knelt down on the grass and I began digging a shallow grave with a toy spade. We all knew the ritual by now. Keeva had joined us again and bowed her head until the shoebox was placed in the grave and covered up with soil.
‘Can I have a new bike?’ she said hopefully.
‘Yes, and I’ll be needing a new hamster,’ Rory said, wiping his nose on the back of his hand.
Tess exploded.
‘There’s no money, okay?’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ! Don’t you two get it?’
The four of us were silent.
‘I’ll get the money,’ I said.
I came out of court and they were waiting for me, sticking their cameras and their microphones and their questions in my face, asking me how I felt. But there were not so many of them now. Other stories had come along to replace me – the man who shot two intruders with his crossbow, the woman who stabbed a burglar in the neck with an oyster knife. They were bigger news, fresher news. The Travis Bickle of Barnsbury was already yesterday’s man.
I would never be much of a story now. Because I wasn’t going to prison after all.
Over their heads, I saw Tess waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, and when I started towards her, it wasn’t like before. They let me go to her.
She wrapped me in her arms. ‘It will be all right,’ she said.
On the advice of my lawyer, I had pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of causing an affray. Six months sentence, suspended, and a £1,000 fine. So that was both a slap on the wrist and kick in the head. Because I was a free man but it was still a conviction. So I wasn’t really free at all.
Tess took my arm and pulled me close, and as we walked away from the courtroom Nick Kazan was waiting for us, away from the rest of them, as though he was different. And he was, because I believe that he just wanted to see me. He held out his hand and smiled, as if we had come through something together.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad it’s over.’
I shook his hand, nodded and said nothing. It was no good trying to explain. Nick was a good kid, and I liked him, but he would never get it. For a man like me, it can never be over once they have you on one of their lists.
‘Coming home?’ Tess said. She understood what today meant. But I shook my head because I had to go to work to give it all back to Andrzej. The car keys. My laminated ID card. All the stuff that I wouldn’t be needing any more. Andrzej would be sorry to see me go. But the firm could not employ a driver with a criminal record. It was nothing personal. It was just the rules. I would lose my job the moment I stuck my head in the door.
So first I was going to make one last run to the airport.
I caught up with Farren just before he was about to go through security.
I later learned that the journey he was about to make – that long overnight flight from Europe to Asia – can propel you from the old life and into the imagined future, where the time is always racing ahead of the old place, and you can become the person you always dreamed of being.
The Thai Airways flight to Bangkok left Heathrow just after noon and with the time difference it would get him into Bangkok at around six tomorrow morning. He had already told me that he would not stay in Bangkok but would get another plane to Phuket – a short hop, he had called it – and as I watched him at the edge of security I thought of how he would be arriving on a day that had yet to dawn for me.
He looked at me with more kindness than surprise, as though he had been half-expecting me. Businessmen went rushing past him to their fast track. He was the only one who wasn’t wearing a suit.
‘I need a job,’ I said.
We stared at each other.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I have a family to support and I need a job.’
‘I can give you a job,’ he said. ‘Phuket is a great place for families. Cheap. Child friendly. You don’t have to be afraid when they walk down the street.’
&
nbsp; ‘What would I do out there?’ I said, and the words came tumbling out, and they seemed to measure all of my limitations. ‘I don’t have any education. I was a builder – had my own business – but that didn’t work out. That’s all I know. That and driving. If I left – what would I do? Would I drive? Would I be a driver out there?’
His blue eyes studied me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the driving would be a start. But you have to start thinking bigger than that. A foreigner doesn’t come to Thailand to pick rubber.’ He watched a giant 777 roar into the sky. Then he looked back at me and smiled. ‘He comes to run the plantation,’ he said.
‘I can do that,’ I said.
Five on a summer morning.
The sky was still dark but it was not late any more. It was early.
I unlocked the back door and went out into the little garden. The glass had been replaced but parts of the wooden frame had been ripped off and looked like fresh wounds in the half-light. I sat on the step with the Wild Palm brochure in my hand, leafing through it in the dawn chill, although I knew its glossy pages by heart.
Escape to paradise, it said, and I understood now why there were no prices, and why there were no people in any of the pictures. You were meant to put yourself in there.
I heard a rustling noise at the end of the garden and the fox appeared on our neighbour’s fence, hung there for a long moment, seemed uncertain, then dropped, tripping the security light. It came forward, not looking at me, and I saw there was something wrong with one of its legs. The front left leg. The fox was hobbling, unable to bear weight on it. Then it stood still, head sunk with exhaustion, and the light went off.
‘Can’t we help it?’ Rory said, suddenly by my side, rubbing his eyes, barefoot in his WWF pyjamas. I pulled him to my lap. He was still young and small enough for me to do that, but I guessed that he wouldn’t be for much longer.
‘I don’t think we can,’ I said.
Then Tess was there with Keeva, my wife fully awake but my daughter swaying with exhaustion. The girls sat down with us and we all watched the fox carefully cross the garden.