by Hatch, Ben
The second tenet of Jainism is limiting possessions.
‘You set parameters,’ says Dr Mehta. ‘I will only have eighteen shirts, so if my son gives me another for my birthday, I will not reject it. Instead I give away a shirt. As you get more spiritual your parameters become smaller. Do you see?’
I nod. I do see. I look at Dinah nodding. She looks at me looking at her nodding and smiles. We nod at each other. Dr Mehta has rather hypnotic eyes. They seem to make you want to nod. There’s a liquidity about them, a gentle softness, an openness I suppose that I have only ever seen in one face before. The face of the woman who recruited me to be a Samaritan volunteer in Ealing.
Dr Mehta disappears to check it’s OK to go upstairs.
‘What do you think?’ I ask.
‘I think he’s great.’
‘Me too.’
‘Have you seen his eyes?’
‘I love his eyes,’ says Dinah.
‘They’re like Khan the snake’s in The Jungle Book.’
‘Only in a good way,’ says Dinah.
‘That makes you nod.’
Dr Mehta returns.
‘One moment,’ he says.
While we wait for upstairs to be readied he explains that the third tenet of Jainism is multiplicity of viewpoint. He holds up his index finger.
‘Do you see my finger?’
I nod. I do see his finger. Dinah nods. She sees it too.
‘You see the nail and from my angle I see the pulp. We’re both right.’
I nod again. What a good point. Dinah clearly agrees, judging from her nodding. What a novel way of expressing a difference of opinion, I think.
‘Conduct is also important,’ says Dr Mehta. ‘To have a small ego and be humble. I used to get annoyed when someone left off the doctor in front of my name. Now I don’t care.’
I look at Dinah. I left it off. I called him Mr Mehta when we shook hands. Dinah doesn’t look back. She’s staring into Dr Mehta’s eyes. He tells a story about turning up at a function and there being no place set for him on the top table. In the old days he might have been angry.
‘I am president of the largest Jain temple in Europe. Why haven’t I got a seat? Now, I sit on the floor. I don’t mind. They see me on the floor and invite me to the top table. I have been humble. Now, if the children are ready.’
We follow Dr Mehta. The temple, from the outside, looks like a slightly fancier than usual Methodist chapel. Inside, with over forty-four hand-carved sandstone pillars weighing 250 tons that took 100,000 man hours to complete, it looks like a forest. The altar is its clearing. Here incense burns. There’s an amazing, light feeling of peace. The images at the centre are of the sixteenth tirthankar, while stained glass windows tell the story of the twenty-fourth and final tirthankar, Mahavir’s journey from birth to nirvana.
As Charlie puts the devotees off by attempting to dismantle the statue to the sixteenth tirthankar, Dr Mehta, seemingly oblivious to this, informs us anyone can become a Jain. It doesn’t need a ceremony. To be a Jain all you do is act Jain.
‘Charlie!’ I shout.
Dr Mehta flaps his hand. ‘It’s OK,’ he says, and Dinah and I exchange a look of wonder. Dr Mehta is the nicest man we have met in Britain. We go back downstairs. It’s been a very enjoyable hour and now I don’t want to go. I want to nod at more things Dr Mehta has to say. I shake his hand by the shoe rack. He holds both of mine this time, a symbol of how we’ve connected, I like to think. It’s now clear he came in today especially to show us his temple and now he’s going home. And suddenly it all makes sense. Everything he says. Dr Mehta is right – everyone should be a Jain. It would make the world a better place for everyone. Well, except those working at Thomas Pink, maybe. As he prepares to leave, Dr Mehta doesn’t ask when the guidebook’s coming out. He doesn’t want to know how many words we’ll write, isn’t interested in copy approval or what pictures we’re planning to use. All he wanted to do was tell us about Jainism. I thank Dr Mehta once more and before he goes I shake his hand one final time and stare into his liquid eyes half hoping, somehow, he sees into my soul, reaches out, and calls me to his faith with some simple instantly understood words of spirituality. He says something I don’t quite catch because the kids are shouting. I ask him to repeat himself and lean forward expectantly to hear his wise words.
‘I said they can finish their Quavers now,’ he says.
I laugh and Dr Mehta smiles.
‘Wow,’ says Dinah outside.
‘Wow,’ I repeat.
We steer the kids across the road and Dinah says, ‘I think my neck’s a bit sore.’
She waggles her head about.
‘The nodding?’
‘Yeah.’
The Leicester Mercury building has been upgraded, I notice walking down Charles Street. The outside sparkles with a new blue plate-glass skin. We separated in The Shires shopping centre – Dinah to buy general bits and pieces with the kids, while I’m seeing an old colleague from the newspaper. The lobby also has a different layout. White and modern. The receptionist rings the newsroom and I wait for Jeremy flicking through that day’s city edition. A few minutes later he steps out of the lift looking as scruffy as ever in a string tie with his white-collared shirt untucked. I haven’t seen Jeremy for fifteen years. Apart from a few grey hairs, he looks the same. On my last day at the newspaper in 1997 I asked Jeremy if he’d swap ties with me. I wanted it to be like the Pele and Bobby Moore shirt swap in the 1970 World Cup. A mark of mutual respect for each other’s reporting. Jeremy refused, or didn’t take my request seriously. ‘Yours has a cheese on toast stain on it,’ he’d said. I’d been slightly insulted at the time.
Jeremy laughs when he sees me, I’m not sure why. I laugh too. He wants to know where the kids are. I tell him and all he keeps saying is, ‘Well, well, Ben Hatch. Ben Hatch.’ The canteen’s now on the ground floor. It’s new, Starbucks-like. We have tea here and talk about old characters. Jim McPheator, the recently deceased no-necked news editor we all loved, respected and enjoyed writing for (‘Sprinkle some magic dust on that for us’). Rookie reporter Chris Benjamin, who on the 6 a.m. shift covered a fire at a hosiery factory in a pair of new trousers he couldn’t work the fly on. He interviewed the chief fire officer, a detective inspector and the factory owner before he realised the reason the workers lined up outside the plant were laughing and pointing at him was that his flies were down and his boxers shorts wide open and everyone could see his cock. He hadn’t noticed before because the ‘heat of the fire was so intense’.
‘All gone,’ Jeremy says, laughing. ‘Just me left – too fucking old and jaded to leave.’
He laughs like Mozart in the film Amadeus. It’s high-pitched and I laugh too. And a memory returns. It’s of giving Jeremy a lift somewhere, and telling him that he was the best writer on the paper and that he should be working for the nationals. Jeremy’s deputy features editor now and I wonder whether he remembers this. He’s got three children in city schools, his friends live here. He supports Leicester City, has written a book about them. Why would he leave? I wouldn’t. At the same time it makes me wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed.
As if reading my mind Jeremy asks, ‘I can’t remember now. Did you leave under a cloud?’ He laughs. ‘They usually do.’
My mum had died three weeks before. I was back in the newsroom after my compassionate leave ended and I remember standing by a pillar next to the table where the news diary was kept and reading in it I was down for the next weekend shift. The news editor, Simon Orrell, fancied himself as a heavy metal fan, although actually had his hair cut at Toni & Guy. I asked him if I could swap shifts with someone else. My dad was drinking a lot. He’d been talking about Kenneth Williams’ autobiography. ‘Nobody knew whether he killed himself or not,’ that sort of vague hint. I didn’t want to leave Dad on his own. Only I couldn’t say this to Orrell. He wasn’t that sort of boss.
‘You’ve been off a fortnight.’
I rememb
er my flash of anger.
‘I’d love to smack you in the face,’ I said, squaring up to someone for the first time in my life. His marriage was breaking down. He had stuff he needed to work out himself. I think this explained his response. He didn’t even look shocked.
‘Do you want to go outside?’ he said.
We walked to the lift, waited patiently for it to descend. On the ground floor Orrell, shorter than me, although in better shape, must have decided it was probably unwise to scrap a recently bereaved member of his news team in front of readers entering the newspaper’s office, which was also right opposite Charles Street police station. He suggested we fight in the canteen. So we rode the lift to the fourth floor. The canteen was empty. It was 10 a.m. There was a clatter of trays being cleared away. My anger dissipated, I had to do something, so I pressed my index finger into his goatee and called him a twat. I said everyone on the paper thought he was twat as well, which wasn’t strictly true. He smiled knowingly, sympathetically almost.
‘That it?’ he said.
He smiled. I smiled too now and we rode back down to the newsroom occasionally smiling again at each other. At my desk I was shaking. I expected to be sacked any minute. Instead, when Orrell wandered over with the editor it was to give me a story. He had his favourites and I wasn’t one of them. But he gave me the chance for the front page lead. We’d behaved like old-fashioned newsmen – come close to brawling – maybe he liked that, that idea of himself. Perhaps it was an apology. Maybe he knew what would happen next. I had to door-knock the family of a man who’d fallen to his death inside a grain silo. Two hundred and fifty words and a pic. Most reporters shied away from death knocks. Sometimes they’d knock on the bereaved relative’s door hoping nobody was in. Sometimes they wouldn’t knock at all. I liked death knocks. It was a bit sick and I kept quiet about it, but I liked them. ‘I’m from the Mercury – we’re here to do a tribute piece.’ A tribute piece. Not a news story, always a tribute piece. I’d sit in their front room. They’d make tea, I’d flip through their family photo albums. ‘Ah, this is a lovely one.’
‘Do you want to take it?’
‘Thank you, yes.’
They’d tell me how much their father, mother, son or daughter was loved. Stories about them. They’d tell me how they died, how they heard the news, how they felt. Sometimes I’d want to stop them. I’d want to say: shut up, don’t tell me that. But I’d write it all down. Sometimes I’d be moved, close to tears. I’d feel tremendous empathy. I’d want to protect them. Be a part of their grief. But then in the pool car, returning to the office, the words would form and back at my desk I’d make the story as sensational as I could within the bounds of accuracy to ensure I was bylined on the front page, feeling not a shred of guilt.
It was a terraced house behind the rugby ground. I went up to the front door and I didn’t realise until my finger was right over the bell that I wasn’t going to be able to ring it. I told Orrell they weren’t in and somebody else went back later and got the story. Not straightaway but soon after, I quit the paper and journalism altogether after more than ten years. I don’t tell Jeremy this. I cut the tale off at the aborted fight with Orrell. It’s funnier that way.
‘But you wrote a fucking novel,’ he says. ‘Two fucking novels.’
‘That are out of print,’ I remind him.
We finish our tea. Jeremy asks if I want to come upstairs.
‘Say hello to Carter. He’s still here, of course. He’ll die in his fucking chair.’
I don’t fancy it, though. Too many memories.
Before the lift doors close, he shouts back for me to send him a copy of the guidebook. He’ll review it. ‘As long as you promise to say what a shithole it really is here,’ he jokes. He laughs his infectious laugh and I promise I will.
Dinah’s fraught when I meet her. The kids have been acting up, running off in shops. She hasn’t found a Currys so hasn’t been able to replace the lead for the Bébétel we realised this morning we’d left at the last hotel.
‘Basically I’ve failed. How was it?’
‘Strange.’
‘Did you miss it?’ she asks.
‘A bit.’
‘The newsroom buzz?’
‘Having work colleagues. It was nice seeing Jezzer. What are we going to do about the lead?’
‘We can brave it for a night.’
But can we?
The Bébétel is a French device that allows us to go to dinner. It works like this: I enter my mobile phone number into the box, which is plugged into the room’s phone socket in the kids’ room. There are three noise settings that we joke are: sensitive (my phone’s rung at the slightest sound in the room), medium (I’m rung if the noise is slightly louder) and NEGLECT (if a bomb went off it wouldn’t trip the device). When I answer my ringing phone I can talk to the kids through a loudspeaker on the box (‘It’s all right – we’re here’… Or if it’s the fifth time it’s happened and there’s nothing the matter: ‘Mummy and Daddy are drinking Pinot. Go to sleep.’).
The Belmont Hotel is between the Mercury building and Victoria Park. We have two bedrooms: one large with a widescreen TV and a second with bunk beds so small it’s not wide enough to put Charlie’s travel cot up in. We have bitter experience of sleeping in the same room as Charlie so the only alternative arrangement is that we sleep in the bunk beds and give the kids the widescreen telly room.
Without the Bébétel, we must all have dinner together. We order wine and, over fillet of scotch beef with apricot, mint and chorizo, Dinah and I have fun competing to see who’s the most Jain. Dinah’s in the lead when I send a stale bread roll back.
‘I think that’s violence in the verbal realm, Ben.’
But I swiftly counter that I didn’t want to acquire the roll. I’d set my parameters for bread rolls, and having now advanced spiritually since my asparagus salad, I’d decided to give it away.
But we’re soon reminded why we usually come down alone to eat when Charlie stands up in his high chair like a pearl diver preparing to plunge from a cliff face and Phoebe starts massaging her ham omelette with her hand like a surgeon trying to restart a heart.
In the tiny bunk bed room it’s also a little depressing at 8 p.m. There’s no telly as it’s in the kids’ room, and nowhere even to sit comfortably upright. I lie on the bottom bunk, Dinah’s on the top one. She calls her mum. I try Dad but nobody answers, Pen switches her phone off after 7 p.m. and in the end I call Buster.
‘Hi, I’m in a bunk bed in Leicester about to go to sleep.’
‘Really? It’s eight o’clock. Where are Phoebe and Charlie?’
‘In the much larger room next door with the widescreen TV. Probably watching a paid-for movie and eating a tube of Pringles from the minibar.’
‘How’s that happened?’
‘Too boring to explain. What’s the latest on Dad?’
He tells me Dad has an appointment with Gorhard his surgeon next week about the stent. The stent might relieve some of the pressure on his bile duct. It’s this that’s making him yellow.
‘And how are you?’
‘I’m good.’
He tells me about his summer holiday plans, a presenting award he’s up for. The contact’s nice but at the same time it seems so alien and out of keeping with our new life on the road he might as well be telling me about conditions inside the service module of the Mir space station.
‘How is it generally, then?’ he asks.
‘OK, except we came away without coats.’
‘You’re driving around England for five months without coats.’
‘I know, it’s like going to the moon without oxygen.’
‘So what’s the worst place?’
‘Your old city, Swansea.’
‘You went to Swansea!’
Buster used to run a bar in Swansea.
‘The National Waterfront Museum, the Dylan Thomas Centre and the Swansea Museum. Guess what the most interesting thing is in the Swansea Museum
? A 1754 Georgian half brick.’
‘Not even a whole brick.’
‘Exactly. Half a brick. We couldn’t believe how drunk everyone was at bus stops in the middle of the day.’
‘That’s Swansea.’
‘And that drive in!’
‘You came in via Port Talbot, then?’ says Buster. ‘Where else have you been?’
‘Cardiff. That was as bad.’
‘There are some good museums there,’ says Buster, defensive now of Wales. ‘The National Museum.’
‘We were due to go but then we heard about a Dr Who exhibition but when we got there it wasn’t on. So we went on a free tour of the next door Welsh National Assembly instead.’
‘You made up an attraction?’
‘We made up an attraction. We heard there was a great viewing gallery. We thought it meant views over Cardiff Bay. It was of the debating chamber.’
Buster laughs.
‘And there wasn’t even a debate going on. We saw a few laptops.’
‘Nothing for the kids, then?’
When he hangs up, Dinah’s still on the phone so I climb off the bed and check on the kids. Phoebe’s curled up like a comma across the double bed. Charlie’s lying with his arms outstretched and his legs apart like he’s waiting to be patted down by the cops. Tomorrow we’re heading to Nottingham. Back on my bunk, Dinah chattering away, I get the Rand McNally map out and work out our route.