by Paul Harris
Bird gave him his name as “Edmund Sprocket”. To this day, I don’t know Bird’s real name, but I have never believed that it was Edmund Sprocket. “What’s yours?” asked Bird, cheekily.
“Clint,” was the straight-faced reply. I squinted at him, waiting for a smile to crack and for him to tell us his real name, but he just held out his hand for the money. The three of us glanced at each other, surreptitiously, straining to hold back a snigger. I cleared my throat and asked Clint what wine he’d got. He told me but, as I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, I ordered three pints of the local bitter.
“Bitter?” queried Bird.
I explained that, as we were on holiday, we ought to pay our respects to the local brew, at least just once.
“I see,” he said, seemingly unconvinced, “and there’s no local lager, then?”
“No,” I replied.
He took a sip of the warm, dark ale, and immediately spat it back into the glass. “Christ!” he exclaimed, with a horribly contorted look on his face, “That’s bloody awful!”
“You Aussies,” I said, taking a tentative sip, “no culture.”
“You Brits,” he retorted, “no taste buds.”
I took another sip as if to prove his point.
“You honestly telling me that you like that?” persisted Bird.
“No,” I whispered, “I know its shit but we can’t offend the locals.”
He pushed his pint of bitter towards me. “If you like it so much,” he whispered back at me, “have that one too. Clint!” he called, “No offence, mate, but you got anything that don’t taste like donkey piss? Lager, for instance?”
“No offence taken, Edmund. Stella Artois do you? Or Foster’s?”
Amos pushed his bitter towards me too, without even trying it, and they got themselves a pint of Stella each.
“Cheers, Edmund,” said Amos, with his tongue in his cheek.
“Yeah, cheers, Edmund,” I nodded, sarcastically.
The next morning, I rolled out of one side of a double bed. Bird was sprawled naked on the other side, a white stain on the blue sheet between us. I eyed it, suspiciously, but came to the conclusion that it was a very old stain that had probably been there since before either of us was even born. I dabbed a finger at it just to put my mind at ease, and quickly pulled my boxer shorts up tight. In the opposite corner, was a single bed; empty, neatly made; that hardly looked as if it had been slept in at all. Through the partially open sash window, I could hear a row going on outside in the street; raised voices and the sound of metal on metal; and I realised that Amos was repairing my scooter. I walked over to the window and flung it fully open. It crashed against its frame and a splinter of dark green paint drifted, mournfully, down. I caught it in my hand and crushed it to smithereens.
I peered out of the window at the street below and, beyond the ground floor bay window, I could see my pride and joy and Amos leaning on it, talking to someone who appeared to be wearing a uniform. Amos threw his hands in the air and began to explain something, quite animatedly, emphasising his point by continually prodding his finger. I craned out of the window, for a clearer view, until my stomach was pressed hard against the sill. I could just about see, around the jutting façade below, that Amos was talking to a policeman. I raced down the stairs and through the dining room, to the astonishment of a breakfasting family from Lichfield, and out into the street.
“No, no, no, Amos!” I yelled as he rounded on the officer with a clenched fist and a puckered scowl. “What’s the problem, officer?” I asked, and then answered my own question, “There is no problem, officer. Easy, Amos, there’s no problem here. Is there, officer?”
“Is this your vehicle?” pursued the policeman, totally unfazed by Amos’s undue aggression. I suppose he was used to nutters and such like.
“It’s mine,” I panted, “mine.”
“And you are, sir?”
“Er…er…” I faltered, “I haven’t done anything.”
“You don’t need to these days,” sneered Amos as he crouched to wipe a smear of grease off the toe of one of his white Adidas trainers.
“Merely a routine check on the vehicle, sir,” said the constable. At least, he was being polite about it. I showed him my driving license and he radioed the details back to his station. “Ever been in trouble with the police before, Mr Peddle?”
“Er…” I don’t normally stammer, but the close proximity of anyone in a uniform seems to develop a speech impediment. “Do I need to answer that?”
“I don’t suppose you do.” His radio crackled to life and confirmed, in a gruff but female voice, that the scooter wasn’t stolen. Then, he enquired about my previous convictions and she rattled them off to his obvious amusement. “Tut, tut,” he gloated whilst slowly shaking his head, his keen eyes fixed on mine, waiting for a reaction. “Assaulting a police officer? I’d better watch my step, hadn’t I?”
I felt myself reddening, and shrugged. “A long time ago.”
“The last one was eight months and thirteen days ago, to be precise, sir.” He tapped his radio. “Any chance of getting this pile of junk off the public footpath and back onto the road?”
“Suppose so,” I murmured.
“A bit sharpish!”
“Don’t rush him,” I protested, “you’ll get me killed.”
“Don’t worry,” said Amos, standing up and laying a reassuring, although oily, hand on my shoulder, “I’m used to working under pressure.” He winked at the policeman who turned on his heels and marched off down the road to hassle some other poor bugger.
When I went back inside, I saw that one of the Lichfield children had been leaning against the bay window, from which vantage point, he had been observing Amos and I under interrogation. He was a boy of about ten with neatly cut sandy coloured hair and a twinkle in his eye. His face was permanently flushed from spending too much time out of doors, up to mischief. He stood with his back to his family and, as I approached in my underwear, he stuck his thumb up, holding it tight against his sky-blue sweater, as a sign of admiration. Both of his eyes closed simultaneously when he winked at me. I reciprocated the thumbs-up, and smiled.
“Jamie!” sighed his mother, despairingly, “Come away!”
The boy turned away from me but, rather than face his mother, he faced his father. “Damned pigs!” he announced. His father laughed.
I went back up to the room, to have a shower, and start packing, so that we could get moving as soon as our technical officer gave us clearance. When I got there, Bird was already washed, scrubbed, shaved, and packed, and was waiting to go. “Guess we missed breakfast, then?”
I nodded. “They’re going to want us out about now or we’ll end up forking out for another night.”
“Let’s go then,” he said, enthusiastically.
“Don’t I get to wash?”
“You should have got up earlier, then, mate,” and, with that, he dragged me out of the room and down the stairs while I was still stuffing my toiletries into my bag and before I could tie my shoe laces.
“See you, pal,” said Jamie as Bird slammed the door behind us. He stood at the window, making the ‘V’ sign at us, as we mounted our scooters and headed off down the coast road towards flocks of seagulls dancing over the corpse of a window pane sea.
We followed the coast road as far as Dartmouth, and then cut inland towards Plymouth; over the toll bridge and into the grand old Duchy of Cornwall. We were racing along, making up for lost time, and resisting the temptation to stop anywhere. At times, we were riding three abreast, signalling obscenities to one another, poking our tongues out through raised visors, pushing and shoving, vainly kicking out, and slaloming between the broken white lines down the centre of the road.
I was weaving, merrily, from one side of the road to the other when I sensed something hit the tarmac. I could hear a piece of steel rolling along the road behind me, attempting to catch up with the rest of its mechanical family. Once more, Bird and Amo
s were accelerating away from me. I pushed harder, trying to keep up, but the scooter went slower and slower, until I had to put a foot down to keep myself upright.
I dismounted and held the scooter at arm’s length by the handlebars, and kicked it. It fell to the ground in a heap, as did I. I just sat there; on the steaming tarmac, on the side of a hill, in the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere, just outside a village called Tywardreath, cross-legged; and almost cried.
I took my cigarettes from my pocket. They had been, hopelessly, crushed. I drew one, carefully from the packet. It was snapped in two and was haemorrhaging tobacco. I tried another, and then another, but ended up tossing them all, one by one, at the wrecked Vespa.
I sat there, desolately, waiting for Bird and Amos to double back. I scanned the distant horizon for any sign of them. I heard a roar overhead, and looked up into the darkening sky. An airliner bridged the gap between two enormous clouds and left a vapour trail in its wake. The clouds shifted and the gap between them was closed, the airliner removed from sight, and then it began to rain.
Chapter Fourteen
Cricklewood Broadway
More than a year would pass before we would finally make our great expedition to France. In the meantime, we had more pressing engagements to take care of, like getting the scooters road worthy, and getting some cash together. It’s always hard to save money when you spend most of it in the pub. No matter how tightly you budget, your building society account is always empty at the end of the month.
Bird’s plan was to dispose of the lease on the house, on the off chance that he didn’t make it back from France. “You never know,” he would say on a regular basis, “You never can tell what the future will bring.” So, Amos and I had to find somewhere to stow our gear for a while. Not that this was a huge problem as there wasn’t a great deal to stow; all we really had were the scooters.
Before he could secure the asking price for the house, and before I could get the required amount of cash saved up, Bird went through four more lodgers, Amos went through three Lambrettas, and I went through five barmaids. In a way, these were our salad days and we would never be able to recapture them in France, or anywhere else for that matter. Of course, at the time we never realised it, not until it was too late and those days had passed us by forever.
Bird bought a box van and started advertising in shop windows for removals work. The venture started slowly and he could fit it in easily around his newspaper work. Occasionally, he roped me and Amos in to give him a hand at the weekends. It helped me earn more money, but the problem was that the more I earned from it, the more they earned from it, and the more they would drag me down to the pub on an evening.
As the summer came, the work picked up. From an average of one move a fortnight, it became two or three a week, and then five or six. Bird bought himself a mobile phone so that he could take calls twenty-four hours a day. He painted the number on the side of the van, underneath the words, “Removals-Competitive Rates”. He convinced me to retire my hod to his shed and sign on the dole so that I could be available to do the jobs as they came in. Customers would phone him on his mobile phone and then he’d drag me out of bed and we’d be off, carting stuff all over London.
It was heavy work but I was used to that. Bird paid me a fair cut and treated me more like a partner than an employee. At the height of the summer, the work was coming in so thick and fast and the pound notes were piling up so high, that it got to the stage where I couldn’t see him forgoing it all for a foolish sojourn to France. By now, he’d given up his job too and was in the midst of persuading Amos to do the same whilst also considering buying a second van. I was earning more than I’d ever earned before and was finding it harder and harder to envisage ever giving it up for what was becoming more apparent as a foolhardy jaunt to the Continent in search of someone whose whereabouts we were unsure of.
One day in July, an Irishman phoned up from Roehampton. He wanted us to move him up to Kilburn and it was arranged for the following Saturday. England were playing a World Cup qualifier against Poland at Wembley, the animal liberation people were marching on Westminster, and Michael Fish had forecast the hottest day of the year.
We picked him up at about eleven and our shirts were sticking to the sweat on our backs before we got there. Bird and I made the trip alone as Amos had gone to the match with two of his pals from the City. I weaved the van along the meandering crescents of the Alton Estate until Bird cried, “There! There it is!”
The flats were stacked high, like shoeboxes in Clarks’ stockroom, overlooking Richmond Park. The sun reflected off seventh storey broken windows and off ten years of damp which had leaked from broken drainpipes. Washing hung like rags from the cracked balconies above our heads and the atmosphere stunk of menace and fear. Two schoolgirls loitered outside the shuttered laundrette, smoking cigarettes; each spitting out her venom against the other’s steeled indifference. One of them gently rocked an unstable pram.
O’Leary lived in a downstairs maisonette. In themselves, the little row of tidy two storey buildings didn’t seem too bad; it was the stuff that surrounded them on all sides that made them barely habitable. Bird gave the front door a robust pounding with his fist. There was no reply. I climbed from the cab, went to open the tailgate, and joined him at the door. He knocked again. We heard the sound of vociferous cursing from within and the door was opened by a red-faced giant who beckoned us in. He led us inside and boiled the kettle. Everything was clean, dusted, polished, hoovered; everything was cared for; everything was in its place.
“Nice gaff,” I commented.
He grunted, by way of reply.
“Why you moving?” enquired Bird, as intrusively as ever.
“Made the mistake of buying the place.”
“So?”
“Negative equity and all that?” I asked, ignorantly. Bird shook his head at me.
“Nah, the wife left me. Got to sell up and split it with her. Not that there’ll be a lot to split; by the time you’ve paid off all the jackals, there’s nothing left.”
“Oh,” said Bird, “Sorry and all that.”
“Don’t you boys go making the same mistakes.”
I winced. “Where’s your stuff?”
“There it is.” He pointed to an area near the window behind Bird. There stood three suitcases, three cardboard boxes, four Sainsbury’s carrier bags, and a holdall. “Have a cup of tea first.”
Bird and I glanced at each other. “That it?” I asked.
“For now,” replied O’Leary, handing us a mug each.
“You could have got it in a taxi,” said Bird.
We drank our tea and then loaded his things into the back of the van. It’s always more difficult to secure small loads because there’s nothing to jam them in with. O’Leary climbed into the cab with us and directed us around to the rear of his flat where we pulled up outside a row of graffiti-plastered lock-up garages. “Here’ll do,” he said, swinging the passenger door open and climbing out. He took a bunch of keys from his jacket pocket, unlocked one of the garage doors, and then tore it open.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, cupping my face in my hands and lowering my head onto the steering wheel. There were boxes upon boxes rammed into the lock-up. Bird jumped down from the footplate and looked quizzically at O’Leary.
“Records,” he replied to the silent enquiry. “My record collection, man.”
“But, there must be…” For once, Bird was lost for words.
“Hundreds of boxes,” I offered, joining them at the door. “It’s an Aladdin’s cave of…”
“Boxes?” said Bird.
“Yeah, of boxes,” I agreed.
“It’s what’s in the boxes,” smiled O’Leary, “It’d blow your minds. Six thousand, four hundred, and forty-two long playing records; all in pristine condition.
“Christ!” sighed Bird.
“You’re impressed, eh? I see that.”
“It’s not so much that I’m impress
ed,” said Bird, “it’s just that we’ve got to carry the bloody things onto the truck. It’ll take forever.”
O’Leary seemed somewhat disappointed by Bird’s apparent lack of enthusiasm. “That’s why I’ve got no furniture, see; the wife had the furniture, and I got to keep these beauties.” He paused and gave us, in turn, a piercing look. “You haven’t loaded any furniture, have you?”
“No,” confirmed Bird.
“Just checking, that’s all. You’ve not handled any heavy, cumbersome furniture?”
“No.”
“So, you won’t mind giving me a hand with this little bit of vinyl then, will you, boys?”
We set to it rather half-heartedly, spurred on by this jolly, lumbering giant. O’Leary took off his jacket (his Sunday best from fifteen years previous), and rolled up his sleeves. His arms were swathed in a carpet of thick brown hair. Through the hairs of his right arm, the feint blue markings of an ancient tattoo were visible. His biceps bulged, stretching his finely wrinkled skin, as he lifted the first box and carried it to the back of the van.
“Grand day for it, lads,” he said, as he passed us on his return trip to the lock-up.
We both smiled, under the contagious influence of his exuberant charm, and commenced helping him carry the heavy boxes of records, like a small train of ants raiding the larder in a Warner Brothers cartoon.
The sweat was dripping off us by the time we joined the tail-back at Hanger Lane. We had both windows wound all the way down but the air was so still, and the traffic even stiller, that there was little relief from the fiercely pounding afternoon sun. O’Leary sat in between us all the way to Kilburn singing Patsy Cline and rebel songs, with me tapping the steering wheel, and Bird hammering on the dashboard, by way of accompaniment.
We turned off the North Circular at Staples Corner, and drove South down the Edgware Road, past the retail park, and into the solid, chain-link traffic jam of Cricklewood Broadway. Here, fish and chip wrappers stuck to the pavement until they decomposed in the carbon monoxide poisoned rainwater. The red-faced locals, smiling inanely, staggered aimlessly from bar to bar, tripping up curbs and urinating in doorways. We passed the new bingo hall and café after café after café. The Crown stood dominant, in resplendent red brick, as the focal point of a community gone backwards, and in complete disregard for the approaching millennium.