Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  It had been the same when we’d lost our father, who’d seemed nothing but a killjoy and table-manners tyrant, but then not having him at home with us had been disastrous, albeit gradually, like pulling at an irritating thread and accidentally unravelling your cuff, then your sleeve, then the whole jumper. After a short while we felt the lack of him and yet felt uncomfortable with him. The problem was, we didn’t know him any more. Each day that passed we grew and changed, and every time we saw him he seemed settled more snugly into his new life. He even got a new dog.

  My sister said it wasn’t that having a man was good, but that not having one was bad. And that men were just irritants of one sort or another that you’d rather have than not. And it was that (the rather having than not) that explained all the unpleasant, crosspatch fathers you saw in armchairs and driving seats, and reading newspapers before anyone else was allowed. Women and children would simply rather have them than not – even with all their habits and bad breath – and that was the basis for the repeat pattern we were desperate to repeat.

  Anyway, Mr Phil Oliphant hadn’t shown any signs of popping in with news of a suitable pony for me, and since there was no one else on the horizon and nor did we feel inclined to scrape the bottom of the barrel and apply for the retired mechanic or the gardener quite yet, we said we’d do what we could to repair Charlie and our mother’s relationship.

  I know it doesn’t make sense and I’m sorry, but that’s life, I’m afraid.

  My sister’s recent reading led her to the conclusion that Charlie’s love for our mother had ‘fallen asleep’ and just needed reawakening. This mostly happened in ancient marriages where one partner has gone to seed physically or mentally. Apparently love couldn’t be awakened with the gentle opening of the window blinds or a cup of tea at the bedside, but needed a proper jolt – a metaphorical pulling off of the sheets and a dead leg.

  My sister thought it through carefully and devised the following plan to reawaken Charlie’s love. One of us (me) would go to the Piglet Inn and blurt out to Charlie that our mother was paired off with someone else. This news would be said as if blurted out without thinking and would make Charlie wild with jealousy and regret. I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘paired off’ meant, so I double-checked.

  ‘You’ll just drop into the conversation that she’s going out with Mr Lomax,’ my sister said.

  ‘Mr Lomax – really?’ I said.

  ‘It’s got to be Mr Lomax,’ said my sister.

  ‘Not again,’ I said.

  ‘Well, why not? He’s the obvious choice,’ she said.

  ‘Not the crab,’ said Little Jack, with a bored person’s very good memory for things from a long time ago. ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘Look, she doesn’t actually have to go out with him. Charlie just needs to think she is. And someone just needs to mention it in front of him,’ she said, with her hands up in a USA-style gesture meaning ‘Come on, guys!’

  ‘We just need to accidentally-on-purpose blurt out that she’s having a romance with someone,’ she said. ‘Anyone would do … but Lomax is probably best.’

  Jack’s objections caused a brief discussion as to who the fake new lover should be for maximum impact, but we remained in favour of Mr Lomax as the reawakening conduit – him being a handyman of repute, a holder of the Confederation of Registered Gas Installers certificate and a Liberal, plus his alleged ability to sit through Shakespeare, if need be, which Charlie couldn’t (having once said to our mother that he’d rather stick a pin in his eye than see Hamlet at the Haymarket).

  The plan was that I would go to the Piglet Inn and buy two fleur-de-lys pies. And accidentally bump into Charlie. I had a few rehearsals and the following Saturday I mounted the Raleigh Rustler and went to the Piglet Inn. Charlie was there, which surprised me for some reason, leaning on the bar reading the racing paper. I tapped him on the elbow and he looked down at me and nodded.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ he grunted.

  ‘I’ve come to get two pies,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ve come to get drunk,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘I ask myself the same thing all the time,’ he said.

  ‘You should try to cut down on it,’ I said.

  Then the barman asked Charlie what he was having and Charlie said he’d better serve me first – before I put the Piglet out of business with my prohibitionist talk.

  ‘Two takeaway steak pies,’ I said, and the barman went away to get them and that was my chance to blurt out the lie. But in spite of many successful rehearsals, when it came to it, standing there with the overwhelming stench of cigarettes and beery carpets and the sense that the whole room was staring at me, it was hard to deliberately blurt it out. It’s easy to blurt things out naturally when you don’t mean to and you shouldn’t, but when you’re trying to the time never seems right, then you wait too long, the perfect moment passes and then if you wade on and insist on blurting it, it seems 100 per cent deliberate (which it is).

  Plus you can only drop something into a conversation if you’re actually having a conversation, which you never are with Charlie – him not being a conversationalist.

  Anyhow, I didn’t manage to blurt it out. I paid for the two pies and said, ‘Bye, then,’ to Charlie and he looked at me with his red eyes and said, ‘Bon appeteeto,’ which was strange, him hating Italy so much.

  I left the bar and went to get my bike. As I was leaving the Piglet car park, I saw Mr Lomax go into the bar. I waited a moment and then watched through the window from the roadside. Mr Lomax went to the bar. Then he and Charlie went together and sat at a little round table, like best friends, with their pints and what looked like pies. It was strange because when, previously, I’d mentioned Mr Lomax to Charlie, he said he knew of him but hadn’t been introduced.

  I cycled home, and though nothing awful had happened I was troubled by the thought that I could easily have been mid-blurt when Mr Lomax arrived. And that Charlie might, right this moment, be relaying the lie to Mr Lomax. I felt that panicky feeling you have after a stupid near-miss. At home I couldn’t face telling the others that I’d failed to blurt out the lie about Mr Lomax, nor could I bring myself to say that Charlie and Mr Lomax were having a drink together like old friends, and maybe even a pie.

  ‘Was he there?’ my sister crowded me.

  ‘Yes, he was at the bar,’ I said.

  ‘So what did you say?’ she asked.

  ‘I just let it slip that Mum was dating Mr Lomax,’ I lied.

  ‘Dating?’ said my sister.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you say “dating”?’ she persisted.

  ‘No, I think I said she’s going out with Mr Lomax,’ I lied.

  ‘Good, “going out with” sounds more modern and sexual. What did Charlie say?’ said my sister, excited at the thought.

  ‘He looked really furious,’ I lied. ‘His eyes looked sideways, like he was imagining it.’

  Then, for some reason, my sister decided to bring our mother in on it.

  ‘Lizzie has told Charlie that you’re going out with Mr Lomax,’ she said.

  ‘What did you tell him that for?’ asked our mother.

  ‘To make him jealous,’ I said.

  ‘To reawaken his love,’ my sister said.

  ‘Oh?’ said our mother. ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘He was furious and jealous,’ I lied, quietly.

  Jack and I sat down to the fleur-de-lys pies and I put my troubled feelings to the back of my mind. But then around five o’clock that afternoon Mrs C. Beard came over and told us something that brought my troubled feelings back to the front of my mind. Mr Lomax’s van had blown up. Mr Lomax wasn’t in it, he’d been moving a radiator in Mr Terry’s flat above the butcher’s shop when the van, parked in Mr Terry’s space behind the shop, suddenly and for no apparent reason blew up and caught fire.

  My sister gripped both my arms.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘O
h my God! Charlie’s tried to kill Mr Lomax,’ she said, ‘because of what you told him.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it was probably just a coincidence.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a coincidence,’ she said. ‘It’s when things coincide.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘they coincide and that doesn’t mean the two things were connected.’

  ‘What two things?’ asked our mother.

  ‘Lizzie telling Charlie you’re dating Lomax and Lomax’s van being blown to smithereens,’ said my sister.

  ‘It wasn’t smithereens, it’s still in one piece,’ said Little Jack, who’d somehow seen it.

  ‘It sounds like a non-verbal message,’ said our mother, seeming awfully pleased.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, ‘or it might have been a coincidence.’

  I looked at my little family all smiling and quite happy at the thought that Charlie had tried to maim or kill Mr Lomax – or at least blow up his van – and I realized then that I was the only normal one.

  Just as I was assessing the different levels of madness represented by my family, the Longlady twins appeared at the door. It was unusual for them to call and I wondered if something bad might have happened. Like both their parents having been killed in a car bomb and them needing to move in with us.

  It wasn’t that, though. They’d had their ears pierced at Green’s of Church Gate and now stood there with tiny gold rings in their ears, and though it was exciting and a talking point I saw how diluting a twin could be (if mismanaged) and decided an ordinary sister was probably preferable. I vowed that if I ever had twins, I’d separate them at birth and let them meet at mealtimes and by accident only, like other types of sibling, and not have them trolling around in matching pinafores and similar hair and sharing momentous moments. Soon after the piercing, though, Miranda had to remove her sleepers due to her lobes having gone lumpy in spite of being dipped into a saline eggcup before bed every night. Not satisfied with saying her earlobes had gone lumpy, Miranda announced she was susceptible to keloid scarring, which sounded more worrying and more interesting than Melody’s perfectly healing ears.

  Soon after the exploding van and the pierced ears, I was in the street. I’d thrown a sweet wrapper down and Mrs C. Beard came rushing out of her house to tell me to bloody well pick it up and dispose of it properly. It was rolling away in the breeze and she waited while I ran after it, and gave me a short lecture on what the world would look like if everyone threw WigWag wrappers down. And then asked me if I’d heard the news about the Bateses’ bungalow. It was actually a Curly Wurly but she said WigWag, being originally from abroad.

  I hadn’t heard about the Bateses’ bungalow and half expected to hear it had been blown up. Mrs C. Beard told me that Mr and Mrs Bates had moved out of their bungalow at 12 Bradshaw Street and into one of Charlie’s other properties (presumably one of his bungalow shells). And that 12 Bradshaw Street had been sold to a young couple who’d got it at a renovator’s price.

  I liked Mrs C. Beard and didn’t mind that she always told us off. But I didn’t like the bungalow news – especially the bit about the renovator’s price – and decided it would be best if our mother didn’t hear about it quite yet.

  I told my sister, though, and she was livid, especially the bit about the renovator’s price.

  ‘You know what that means, Lizzie?’ she said.

  ‘I think so,’ I said, thinking she meant that Mr Lomax hadn’t actually done the kitchen renovations. I struggled with the idea, as I couldn’t think why he wouldn’t have or what it meant.

  ‘That Liberal candidate never did the kitchen, that’s what I think,’ she said.

  We rode our bikes over to 12 Bradshaw Street to see for ourselves and snuck round the back and, peering in through the window, we saw the kitchen – the same cementy mess as I’d seen before. The backdoor window boarded, no cascade effect glass to be seen, no new cupboards, no pan carousel, and no A–Z spice rack. I felt sad for the second time over that kitchen and vowed never again to get emotionally involved with a room, especially someone else’s kitchen.

  My sister and I decided to wait a while before telling our mother. However, the very next day in the pharmacy, we heard Mr Blight saying to her, ‘I see your friend has sold his bungalow, then.’

  ‘What bungalow?’ said our mother.

  ‘Number 12,’ said the pharmacist, and then he said what I knew he was going to say, ‘to a young couple. They got it at a renovator’s price.’

  ‘Renovator’s price?’ said our mother. ‘But –’

  ‘Come on,’ my sister interrupted, ‘let’s get going.’

  We walked home, our mother’s mind ticking over, her hand softly, protectively at her throat and, I suppose, her heart slowly sinking.

  Back at home our mother sat drinking coffee. ‘Sold it to a young couple for a renovator’s price?’ she said. ‘But it didn’t need renovating. Mr Lomax renovated what needed renovating.’

  ‘Mrs C. Beard told Lizzie they were a retired couple,’ said my sister.

  ‘Mrs C. Beard? What’s she got to do with it?’ said our mother, somehow missing two other points.

  Later, she phoned Charlie, a thing she hardly ever did – if ever; well, maybe once. A woman answered and said that the Bates had moved house and she didn’t have their new number.

  She rang Mr Lomax and asked some direct questions and said, ‘I see,’ a few times and after saying, ‘OK, then, cheerio,’ hung up.

  ‘What happened?’ my sister asked. ‘Why didn’t he do Mrs Bates’s kitchen?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘Mr Lomax did the work, as discussed, but not in that property.’

  ‘What?’ said my sister. ‘In what property, then?’

  ‘In one of Charlie’s bungalow shells. It makes sense,’ said our mother. And she seemed satisfied with that.

  Of course, my sister and I were now 100 per cent off Charlie Bates, not so much for blowing up Mr Lomax’s van as for having the wrong kitchen renovated at our mother’s expense.

  Although surprised that he was capable of doing something as serious as blowing up another man’s van, my sister seemed impressed that her campaign to reawaken Charlie’s love had been so successful.

  It was very difficult for me to join in a proper discussion or give my views on this subject, as it had all become like a story in a book you’re not really concentrating on – where one of the characters has told a lie, made a mistake, opened someone else’s letter in error or misunderstood something – I couldn’t remember what was true and whether Charlie might have blown up Mr Lomax’s van or not.

  It gave me a headache and I vowed to tell only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in future – lies being a nightmare to manage. Anyway, it all happened or was lied about and understood or not, and then Charlie suddenly turned up at our house.

  After seeming theoretically impressed by the van bomb, when she actually saw him in the flesh my sister came down hard against him and was most unwelcoming.

  ‘You! What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve come for a cup of tea with your mother,’ he said, barged in and flicked his fag end out behind him.

  He told us to put the kettle on and disappeared into our mother’s sitting room. My sister told me to listen under the window while she made a pot of tea.

  Charlie’s voice was muffled, but I heard him ask if he could borrow an amount of money. I think it was a thousand pounds. It was either a thousand or a hundred, and the way he was speaking it was more than a hundred.

  ‘It’s a lot, I know, and you know I hate asking but … I’m in a bit of a fix,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll try,’ our mother said. ‘I’ll see what I can do … when do you need it?’

  ‘Toot sweet,’ he said, ‘tomorrow at the latest.’

  They must’ve kissed then because it went quiet, and then my sister knocked at the door and went in with the tea. She’d given him my Kellogg’s Corn Flakes mug and I honestly didn’t
think he deserved it.

  ‘What were they saying?’ my sister asked.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t given him my mug,’ I said.

  Not more than fifteen minutes later, our mother called us into the sitting room. She and Charlie were having a minor disagreement.

  ‘No, listen,’ she said to Charlie. ‘Shush, Lizzie won’t mind, will you, Lizzie?’ said our mother.

  Charlie leapt up and said he had to get some cigs from across the road.

  ‘Mind what?’ I said.

  ‘Popping over to sit with Mrs Bates for an hour or two,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Charlie would like to relax here with us and take his mind off his problems for a while, but he doesn’t like Mrs Bates to be on her own,’ she said. ‘He’s a softie at heart.’

  ‘What problems?’ I said.

  ‘His bungalows and the indoor market coming to nothing, and his wife,’ she said, and added, ‘Lizzie, you’re sounding rather unsympathetic.’

  ‘Why me, though?’

  ‘You know her from last time and she really liked you,’ she said.

  ‘Do I really have to?’ I whined.

  ‘We, as a family, have to give something back in return,’ she said.

  ‘In return for what?’ I asked.

  ‘For getting Charlie to ourselves for a bit,’ said our mother.

  Of course I agreed, just in time for Charlie to waltz back in with some Lloyd’s Old Holborn and a paper.

  ‘Thank you, Lizzie, you wonderful girl,’ she said, and she gave me a hard little hug. ‘Lizzie has said she’ll pop over to see Lilian tomorrow to keep her company while you’re here.’

  Charlie gave me a look. A slightly disgusted look.

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I said, and gave him a similar look.

  The next day Charlie was at the table at breakfast time, which meant he’d stayed the night. I asked his advice on how I might entertain Mrs Bates.

  ‘What does she like doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘Yakking, mostly.’ And then he went across the road and got a different newspaper.

  My few hours with Mrs Bates were fine and flew by. She was in a new bungalow and had things in boxes but nice curtains up. She sent me out to Baxter’s to get some Walker’s Ready Salted and a bottle of Hoyes’ lemonade to have with the ham salad we’d be having for our lunch. Before we ate, she took ages over ‘spot the ball’ in the paper, tracing with her finger the way the ball probably travelled after probably being kicked by the player with his leg raised. Then put her ink crosses in a gentle arc.