‘What are they saying, exactly?’
‘I can’t hear a word, it’s too windy. It’s so windy even the seagulls are walking.’
Outside the phone-box it is dark. A single spotlight across the road glares between a stranded post-box and a swinging pub sign for the White Hart or the Rising Sun. There is no-one out there, though it’s true about the wind. Two seagulls walk ludicrously along the road. It’s cold and Spencer is wearing his work jacket, the warmest one he has.
Hazel laughs. ‘Alright then, inside the box. What’s it like, right now, on the inside.’
‘Lovely and warm,’ Spencer says, ‘in my brand new RAF leather bomber jacket.’
‘What about right now, inside your head?'
Easy. Spencer plans to tame the future by training as an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon so that he’ll never have to worry about money again. In his spare time he’ll become an invaluable Private Secretary to a member of the aristocracy, to the Countess of Minto or the Duke of Kent or Viscount Goschen, all of whom tolerate his frequent trips to London because he’s also a world-famous actor working the London stages opposite Emma Thompson or Alice Krige or Fiona Shaw. That, right now, is what occupies his head.
Hazel is still laughing out loud. ‘Spencer, you’re absolutely brilliant and I love you to bits.’
Right now, however, she has to dash, and not displeased with the effect he’s had Spencer smiles and puts down the phone.
It rings again almost immediately. It has to be Hazel so he snatches it up, and a man’s voice says hello there you terrorist enemy of law and order. Spencer puts it down. It rings again. He stares at it and lets it ring. This is new. He bites his lip. The cash-box, refilled after his conversation with Hazel, swings open. He closes it gently. The phone continues to ring so he picks it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello there. This is Operation Clean Hands.’
‘Hello?’
‘Hello hello hello. I’m Robert Walker and I’m a British Telecom undercover agent. No joke. This is Operation Clean Hands and you have recently broken into the cash-box of this public telephone. True or false?’
‘I don’t know,’ Spencer says, ‘did I?’
‘All boxes at risk are now connected to a central system. The moment you rob one an alarm goes off. We know where you are and I can phone you up, see?’
‘I didn’t know they could do that,’ Spencer says.
‘We’ve had complaints from the Director of Property himself.’
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says, and then adds: 'I haven’t hurt anybody.’
He puts the phone down. He gets out of the phone-box fast and tumbles his bicycle upright and pedals home like a maniac, helped madly on his way by the wind. Weirder things have happened, he decides, but not often to him.
At home he finds his Dad, the one parent in his new one-parent family, sitting on the sofa drinking beer and watching Eurogoals or Trucks ‘Tractor Power or Ringside Superhouts. The divorce is now official, and Spencer knew it was finished when his Dad said:
'That chapter of our life is over.’
He was wrong. In fact Mr Kelly spends most evenings re-living episodes from the past and cursing the injustice of it all. He now suspects that Spencer’s real talent was for something to do with horses. He’s an untried champion jockey or a potential Gold Cup showjumper, but how is someone on Mr Kelly’s salary ever supposed to afford a horse? His son’s talent will therefore remain latent simply because it’s for a sport outside his father’s social bracket. Because if it isn’t horses then it’s probably world championship bridge, or windsurfing, or chess. To alleviate his despair, and with any money left over after buying beer, Mr Kelly takes up gambling. He tells Spencer that apart from sporting success a big win on a game of chance is the only other way out of the ghetto.
‘We’re not in a ghetto, Dad. We never were.’
‘Always were, always will be.’
Spencer still considers himself the only sane member of the family, but in real life, right now, he isn’t the surgeon or private secretary or actor he wants to be. He works in the warehouse with his father. Each day is taken up with the barely sane activity of shifting boxes of furniture which belong to famous people.
His Dad asks what’s for tea, then settles back in his armchair while Spencer goes to look in the kitchen cupboard. As usual all they have is packet soups. He asks his father anyway what he wants.
‘What flavours are there?’
‘Chicken.’
‘What flavours?’
So Spencer tells him they have Crosse and Blackwell or Heinz or Batchelors or Knorr, and his father says fine, I’ll have one of those then.
Spencer boils the kettle and empties powder into a mug, thinking about his surprise phone call and wondering whether he’s done anything seriously wrong. He’d like to say that he always puts the money he steals back into the phone-boxes, using it to call Hazel. But in the early days he kept some of it to lose on fruit machines or to conquer arcade games like Aladdin’s Lamp or TOC A Shoot-Out Touring Cars or Racing Demon. He spent some of it through turnstiles (Merthyr 5 Northwich 0 or Yeovil 0 Gateshead 2 or Workington 74 Wigan St Patrick’s 6), and he half-remembered renting some videos (Much Ado About Nothing or Mr Wonderful or My Own Private Idaho). But apart from these occasional lapses and his daily quality newspaper, it’s true that he puts most of the money back into phone-boxes, even if he doesn’t repair the locks. He does it to speak to Hazel, which is a way of bettering himself. She used to go to private school. She’s a good and improving influence, and Spencer’s life undoubtedly has significant room for improvement.
Because Right Now, if Hazel’s asking, his life is all about making an instant chicken soup for his drunken father while worrying about Operation Clean Hands and what they’ll do to him if they catch up with him. He decides to ask Hazel for an immediate opinion, and creeps to the phone in the hall with the idea of phoning her. His Dad, however, lurches out from the lounge and gives him a cuff round the ear, though not very hard, not like a professional boxer ($7 million a fight).
The likes of us can’t afford to chit-chat,’ he says, and without arguing Spencer walks out on his father and the instant chicken soup, slamming the door behind him.
Then he has to go back inside and upstairs to get his sports bag, before he can walk out all over again (slamming the door), climb onto his bike, head it into the wind and ride out of town like a hero. At the first suitable public phone, in the middle of nowhere, he swiftly applies the special tool.
Pop.
The phone rings. Spencer picks it up.
‘You hurt all sorts of people,’ Robert Walker says. He sounds at the younger end of middle-aged, and Spencer guesses that at college he enjoyed a contact sport to a decent level, Courage League 5 or the first round of the Regal trophy or the Neville Ovenden Combination League. He likes his job.
‘Especially poor people who need to make urgent calls because they’ve been attacked, stabbed, shot, stoned. We’ll catch you in the end. Public phones are everybody’s miracle, and they don’t only exist to get robbed by idiot criminals like you.’
Spencer drops the phone and lets it swing on its wire. He sits down on his sports bag. He rests his chin in his hands and listens to the tinny voice-sound coming from the telephone, wishing devoutly that he was living another life in which he’d never stolen from a phone-box. His Dad sells the television. Father and son spend the evenings browsing respectable newspapers like The Times or the Telegraph or the Independent, while amiably discussing classic novels by George Orwell or Jane Austen or Jack London. Ah for such a soft sweet life, for the dolce vita. Spencer then easily passes the audition to drama school and in London is quickly identified as one of the greats of his generation, standing-room only at the Adelphi or the Old Vic or the Shaftesbury. The critics say he has a compelling gaze and a good RP accent or the skill to handle sharp individual swings of mood or refer to him as a particular success or a refreshing change or truly rounded.
11/1/93 MONDAY 12:22
Back in the shed, William could look round in some comfort without having to ignore anything. Maybe Hazel was right when she said you had to block things out, simply to go on living, but that was outside. Here in the shed William could take his time, and he realised it wasn’t a question of quantity because he could deal with any number of things, as long as they all conformed to a system.
As well as the stack of yellow buckets, the top one containing water and the two remaining fish, there was a wire bird-cage stuffed with yesterday’s newspaper, and three televisions of decreasing size balanced one on top of the other. There were several colourful plastic sandcastle moulds, and a split carrier-bag full of bargain-basement videos: 17 Balcone, Hellfire Corner, Hell of a Ride, So You Want to Be a Surgeon? Somewhere there was a box of Manoplax, the discontinued heart drag, and a miniature Statue of Liberty, and a chess set, and a folding ladder, and a collection of completed Times crossword books (The Times Book of Jumbo Crosswords, The Times Jumho Concise Crosswords Book and The Times Jubilee Puzzles 1932-1987). He thought he could remember some cancelled novels from the Bern British Council Library, and a pair of real leather PVC Charles and Di oven gloves. And somewhere not too far back there was a booklet of caricatures of people in the news, including John Major, Federico Fellini, Barbara Mills, River Phoenix, Malcolm Reilly, Maradona, Emma Thompson and the Queen.
William never threw anything away: that was his system. And as well as the buckets and the caricatures, the videos and books and things, there were as many objects again which he couldn’t remember or couldn’t recognise or couldn’t name. The shed was full, so what was the point in going outside when he didn’t have the room to bring anything back?
He got down on his knees and looked under the bed and then behind the television sets until he found his black rabbit, who was nibbling at the rind of a kiwi fruit. Animals were good chaps. You knew where you stood with them. He picked up the rabbit and showed him the tomento beside the bed, which seemed to have perked up during the day. The leaves seemed shinier, more likely to partner the best-selling tomento fruit which would make William his fortune. All he needed was the one lucky break, and everything would be different. He would catch up with his brother, who thought that all luck was good. It was his brother who’d inherited well, been outrageously lucky with his investments, gone on to buy a knighthood, eventually meeting the Queen to accept the honour of his changed name. From a common Welsby to Lord O’Brien Welsby, changed overnight. He speculated in the property market and secretly sold arms to the Irish, and his luck never ran out. He openly invested in films without losing money. He’d gradually turned himself into a standard, acceptable, end-of-the-eentury capitalist. He was a charming, cultivated, well-mannered villain.
William put down the rabbit. Believing he was a better man than his brother, he wished he hadn’t been so unfair to Hazel. He shouldn’t have gone on so much about Jessica, even when his future with Spencer felt threatened. It was, anyway, a poor retreat to live every day untested by the reality of women and outside life. Hazel had offered a glimpse of another possibility, where William stepped outside and discovered what was restricted but true. She’d taken him seriously. She thought he could be cured.
And she did look lovely in that dress.
Grace, looking very small, gave William, who seemed to have grown, an enormous hug. He wished her a Happy Birthday while at the same time beckoning Hazel into the shed. Hazel’s feet were freezing. She’d taken off Spencer’s socks to walk barefoot across the damp grass, and now she gratefully stepped inside, shivered, leant against a folding ladder and pulled the socks back on again. Straightening up, she had her first good look at the inside of William’s shed.
‘My,’ she said, ‘you have a lot of stuff.’
Her eyes came to rest on the tomento beside the bed and she was puzzled at seeing a plant she didn’t recognise.
'It’s a tomento,’ William said. 'I invented it myself.’
'It doesn’t look very happy,’ Hazel said.
‘Neither do you.’
As a place to sit, William was offering the shed’s raised doorway, where there was just about room for the two of them. Behind them, apparently as usual, Grace was busy exploring. She’d already squeezed behind the televisions and the buckets, and only one of her legs was still visible. Hazel sat next to William, looked out into the garden, hugged her knees to her chest. Her feet were warming up nicely. She heard a truck braking somewhere, but it seemed a long way away.
‘It’s like a parallel universe out here,’ she said. 'It’s hard to believe what’s just over the wall.’
‘It’s out there,’ William said.
‘I know. I saw what happened when you went to take a look.’
‘I had to give it a go,’ William said. ‘It’s not every day that’s the end of Britain.’
‘It’s not the end of Britain.’
‘You know what I mean. The Maastricht thing.’
From somewhere behind them Grace shouted: ‘Treaty of Maastricht European Union! Everything changes today!’ Her head popped out from behind the wire bird-cage. ‘We learnt that in school.’
Hazel looked back over her shoulder. ‘You really think everything changes today?’
‘Of course it does. I’m ten.’
Grace disappeared behind the buckets and then immediately re-surfaced. She wanted to know the date of Hazel’s birthday.
‘Soon,’ Hazel said. ‘Or maybe it’s just been, I’m not sure.’
‘Tell me the date. You must know the date. Everyone knows their own birthday.’
‘Not after twenty-one, they don’t. It’s not polite to talk about it. You shouldn’t even mention it.’
‘When’s your birthday, though?’
‘I’m not going to mention it.’
It was only then, looking round to smile and reassure her, that Hazel noticed Grace was holding a black rabbit. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the shed and stroked him nicely, making Hazel suddenly nostalgic for how contented contentment could be made to look.
‘I want to stay here for ever,’ Grace said.
‘You can’t,’ William said.
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
‘I could run away.’
And send your parents mad with worry, William reminded her, thinking their only daughter had been dragged into fields and left for dead, not to be found for years and years until she was completely rotten except for her teeth. Was that what she wanted?
‘Does that type of thing really happen?’
‘Yes it does, but probably not to any of us.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because we’re lucky.’
‘How are we lucky?’
‘We get to have birthdays which are special days with presents and cakes. And you’re lucky because you have good parents who worry about you.’
‘Then why do they make me leam German?’
Grace let the black rabbit hop back into his warren beneath all the junk, and then she wriggled in behind him. William put his hand on Hazel’s shoulder, and gave it a little squeeze.
‘Don’t give up on him yet.’
‘I’m running out of patience,’ Hazel said. ‘He won’t make up his mind about anything.’
‘Doubt is the strongest fear, and therefore the most eloquent emotion.’
‘Says who? Either he likes me or he doesn’t.’
Grace suddenly popped up behind them.
‘Europe is like marriage,’ she said. ‘My teacher says so. Everyone gets together for the good of everyone else. What she really means is that in the Easter term we all have to pay for a German exchange scheme. Hazel?’
‘That’s my
name.’
‘Are you going to marry Spencer?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hazel said. ‘What do you think?’
Grace found Hazel odd sometimes. ‘It’s not really up to me, is it?’
And then she wanted to know where William had hidden her present, because she couldn’t find it anywhere among his stuff in the shed. William said it was a secret, and she had to be patient. Grace’s eyes lit up.
‘It’s a horse, isn’t it?’
8
At this time of year, I should be on the qui vive (watch, guard, look out, patrol, stand to, cave) for saints and souls and things that go bump in the night.
THE TIMES 11/1/93
11/1/93 MONDAY 12:24
Fact: Lime trees were originally popular in London in the nineteenth century as one of the few species of tree robust enough to resist the horticultural rigours of the great peasouper smogs. In these clearer days, aphids and greenfly have become partial to the tree’s sweet flower-buds, and these insects exude a colourless but sticky ‘honey’, which drops on plants or the pavement. This, in its turn, nourishes an unattractive black fungus. The lime trees themselves are therefore largely innocent of the black muck they seem to bleed, even though every year many are mistakenly destroyed, the unwitting victims of a misunderstood chain of events. The correct remedy involves judicious pruning, or spraying the guilty insects with a good strong sprayer.
British Birds and Trees, as taught by Miss Burns.
The area where she was staying was full of lime trees, planted at intervals along the pavement and ceremonially either side of the library steps. Facts, like those she’d taught him about trees, helped to keep Henry calm. They were like a drug, subduing whatever he was really feeling or thinking beneath something clearer and more certain. Knowledge became control, which at this moment was just what Henry needed because Miss Burns turned out not to be alone. Watching the house, he’d already seen a young man, black hair, in a flapping suit. And a small energetic girl with a rucksack, who he nearly missed completely because people kept getting in his way.
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