by Nick Hopton
Do you, do you know me, wondered Si? How could Jimmy know him? As The Who had put it: How can you say you know me / When I don’t even know myself… Perhaps Jimmy knew him better than most. But he was judging Si by his own low moral standards, and Si recognised the acute gulf that lay between them. Growing up together could create strong bonds and loyalty. But friendship didn’t mean understanding. They were two very different people doing very different things. So how could Jimmy claim to know him?
‘Ah, come on, Si, if you’re not going to tell me, who are you going to tell? Eh?’
‘Yeah, all right, I’ll tell you everything. Not that there’s much to tell. But go get me a pint first, okay?’
Jimmy grinned victoriously and scampered off to the bar. Another midweek night in the pub, thought Si. Nineties life… Great, wasn’t it?
~
Si was bored at work; he tried to ring Mary. No reply. So he rang Jimmy.
A female voice answered. She declined to give her name, but told him Jimmy was out. ‘Playing football,’ she said, ‘training.’
Who was this girl? He supposed it might be the blonde Jimmy had got off with the other night. But surely she hadn’t moved up to Manchester after a one-night stand. No, Jimmy was obviously playing the field.
Then Bill came back with the coffee and a bright idea for a story. ‘I’ve got a mate who works in an art gallery and she says she saw Will Carling and the Princess of Wales at an opening last week. Apparently they were getting on really well.’ He raised an eyebrow and waited for his editor’s reaction.
Si sipped his coffee slowly before reacting. ‘Bill, that’s old news. It was all over The Sun months ago. Nice try, but we’re meant to come up with scoops. And anyway royal stuff is too hot for the Diary… You know that. Dougy would take it straight to the news boys, or to that toad Andrew Smaltings-Rogerson.’
Si was no fan of The Courier’s balding royal correspondent. Since his arrival at the paper, the hack had made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of fraternising with an upstart nobody such as Si.
‘I know that,’ said Bill patiently.
‘Really? So what’s the story, then?’ Si felt despondent. Bill’s thinking had never struck him as particularly original.
‘Well, my friend told me that Will Carling was interested in buying a picture…’ He paused for effect.
‘Yeah?’
‘A portrait of Diana’s mother… Now what about that?’
‘Still too hot for us. Tell the newsboys. They may be interested but I doubt it. This is probably one of those stories we should just sit on. At least for the time being.’
Bill looked crestfallen.
‘Nice effort, though. Keep it up, eh, Bill?’
Bill cheered up a bit.
‘By the way, did he buy the picture?’
~
‘So, how’s work this morning?’ drawled Ricky.
‘Well, it’s not really morning any more, is it?’
One thirty in fact, and Si was hard at it putting the final touches to his lead story for the day. A celebrity adultery-and-shopping book launch had produced a gobbet of gossip the previous evening. The usual tripe really, but it made good copy. Some bimbette snogging someone else’s husband. In fact the authoress’ husband—hence the story.
‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. Hey man, I mean I only just woke up, that’s why I thought it was the morning like.’
‘Right.’ Since their first meeting at Richard’s party, Ricky had attached himself to Si. He rang him at least once a day about nothing mostly and they met a couple of times a week after Si finished work. Ricky had grown on Si and since Jimmy had gone north, Si welcomed the American as a substitute. But he was slightly bemused by Ricky, who seemed to do nothing in London and have no plans. Questions produced the same non-committal ‘I’m a surfer looking for a wave…’ line, which didn’t help much. Clearly Ricky wasn’t short of money. Si couldn’t help feeling envious of his ability to exist for each new day.
On the whole, Si looked forward to his lazy conversations with Ricky, but appreciated the fact that he would not be disturbed in the mornings when he had to get the day’s work sorted out and assign stories to Bill and the other Diary staff. The mornings were quiet because Ricky never got up before midday.
‘So what’s your scoop today?’
‘What?’
‘Your scoop? You know, your job, man?’
‘Oh, right. Well there’s this writer who’s just about to lose her husband…’
‘Doesn’t sound that interesting to me.’
‘No, but listen, will you. She wrote this book about glamorous people bonking each other’s wives and husbands and they launched it last night.’
‘Were you there?’
‘Yeah, for a while.’
‘So?’
‘So the blurb on the cover describes Jane Furness, the author that is, as a happily married mother of two children. And, quelle surprise, Mr Furness was making out with some girl at the party. They thought they were out of sight but…’
‘But you saw them?’
‘No, not exactly. But someone I know did.’ Si felt dirty. This kind of story often made him feel like that. But Dougy considered such gossip to be bread and butter for the Diary. If he couldn’t pin down what Dougy wanted on Jack Derrida, or whatever he was called, then Si had to keep his boss happy with this kind of fodder.
After the last marriage-break up trumpeted by the Diary, Dougy phoned especially to say well done. ‘More of the same please. That’s what we want, Si. Some sex to add spice. Counterpoint, really. Know what I mean?’
Si had grunted affirmatively, although again he wasn’t really certain of Dougy’s meaning. But it was still early days for him at The Courier and, if Dougy liked marriage break-up stories, Si knew he should produce them, even if he felt uncomfortable doing it.
‘Great story, Si,’ Ricky’s voice oozed sarcasm. ‘Catch this, man, I’m off to get some brunch and then I’ll meet you tonight. Seven thirty at Larry’s Bar.’
‘Well, tonight’s a bit tricky…’
‘Why, what’s up? You got plans? A chick?’
‘No, no chick.’ It felt foolish using Ricky’s Californian sun-soaked expressions. It was raining outside, for God’s sake.
‘What, then? A better offer?’ Ricky sounded a bit uptight all of a sudden. Strange, unlike his cool hipster image. ‘Hey, no problem, man, like we can hang out later, okay.’
‘No, listen, Ricky. My mate Jimmy’s playing soccer tonight and I want to watch him. It’s on the box…’
‘The box?’
‘TV. So why don’t you drop by and we can watch it together? You might learn something about English culture.’
‘Hell, I know all about English culture. Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh and all that stuff. I got enough culture Stateside.’
‘No, you plonker. Real English culture. State of the art stuff. What drives this country. Not your stereotypes, but football—that’s far more real. It’s the religion of the masses.’
‘Oh.’ Ricky seemed non-plussed. A rare event. ‘Like opium, you mean? In that case, okay, I’ll give it a go. What time, then? And where?’
‘Come by my place at seven thirty and we’ll go down The Feathers in time for kick off at eight. Okay?
‘Sure. I’ll catch you then.’
‘Later,’ mimicked Si.
‘Later, man,’ replied Ricky without the slightest hint of irony.
~
‘Could’ve been killed… Blown to pieces.’
Si was telling Ricky about his afternoon and the bomb scare in Central London.
‘You sure were lucky. What I don’t get is, why do these guys keep planting bombs anyway? I thought there was a cease-fire.’
‘There is. Only they keep sounding false alarms to keep everyone on their toes.’
‘So there wasn’t an explosion in the end?’
‘No, not even a bomb. Just a scare. But it disrupted the whole of L
ondon all the same.’
‘Right. But what do they want? That’s the bit I don’t get. I mean, there’s already an Ireland, isn’t there? That’s an independent country?’
‘I think they want the bit in the north too. You know, Northern Ireland. That’s still part of the UK.’
‘So what’s the problem, man? It makes perfect sense to me. Why not let them have it? Then the bombing will stop permanently.’
‘I’m not sure it’s that simple.’
‘I figured it wouldn’t be. Things never are in Europe.’ Ricky grinned and sucked down the rest of his beer. Well, he called it beer but, as far as Si was concerned, it was lager.
‘Surely Ireland should be all one country, united, you know. Keeping a bit separate is like so colonial. You Brits should give it back.’
‘But it’s the Northern Irish, who don’t want to go back.’
‘Why not? Don’t they want to govern themselves?’
‘Well, they do already. They have MPs in Parliament, and they consider themselves British as much as the rest of us on the mainland. And I suppose they are.’
‘I find this so confusing, man. So who are the IRA trying to persuade by bombing London?’
‘I don’t think it’s a matter of persuasion. More like coercion or intimidation. They want to persuade the Government to pull British troops out of Northern Ireland.’
‘Sounds fair enough to me.’
‘Yeah, but the thing is a lot of people in Northern Ireland don’t want the army to go. And the government thinks that if they pull out the army then the paramilitary organisations will fight back against the IRA and there’ll be a bloodbath.’
‘Oh. That wouldn’t be good.’
‘No,’ agreed Si. ‘It wouldn’t.’
‘Complicated, really.’
‘Yeah, too much history.’
‘Too much history,’ nodded Ricky. ‘That’s you British all over. Too much history. Stops you even taking a shit without getting lost in your history.’
Si changed the subject. They were in The Feathers and the match was about to start. ‘God, I’m ready for another pint.’
‘Yeah, sounds cool. I’ll get it this time.’
‘Be quick, they’re about to kick off.’
‘Like the wind, man. I don’t want to miss a minute of this great cultural-religious experience.’
‘You scoff.’
‘Moi?’ Ricky raised his eyebrows and flashed a Venice Beach smile.
‘Yeah, you,’ called Si after his new friend. Ricky was already halfway to the bar and may not have heard him.
~
All the Sleeper’s preconceptions of Michael Andrews were wrong. For a start he was younger than his wife, often wore jeans to work, stood five foot eight in his stockinged feet and rarely carried a briefcase. He laughed a lot, mostly at his wife’s comments, and drank a good deal more than he laughed. Englishmen weren’t meant to be like this.
The Andrews family welcomed their lodger as if he was a younger brother. The rent was a nominal one hundred pounds a month.
‘We prefer to let the room to someone we like than leave it empty. The money’s not important,’ Michael told him.
The Sleeper couldn’t understand how they could like him without knowing him. When he asked, Michael laughed. ‘Greta told me I’d like you, and I trust her judgement implicitly. She tells me the Irish have a gift for character insight.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, apparently it dates from the time of the druids.’
The Sleeper smiled uncertainly. Was this a joke at his expense? English humour was something he’d yet to get to grips with.
After that, he didn’t see that much of Michael, who was away during the day. Since the Sleeper didn’t have a job, he kept Greta company or minded the two children when she went out. In the evenings he went to Eamon’s pub or to the cinema in Notting Hill Gate and tried to give the Andrews couple some space. They seemed happy, but occasionally when he came home late at night, he heard them arguing in the front room. When that happened he just went straight upstairs to bed.
The Sleeper listened to the news and read the newspapers—normally The Irish Times. But even that was disappointing, as it was totally biased in favour of the Irish government. Bruton’s election victory filled him with deep depression, not because he cared for either party, but because he could see that the Irish political system was in the pocket of the English, no matter who was Taoiseach.
Time passed but the freezing, miserable weather continued. He stayed in more often in the evenings and waited for a sign of change. But neither on the news nor in any other way could he detect a weakening of the cease-fire. Even the bomb scares seemed to send the wrong message— many commentators thought they were carried out by a small fringe group without the means to pull off a significant terrorist attack. For all the Sleeper knew they were right. But the worst thing about being stuck in limbo out of contact was that he no longer knew if he wanted to be involved in the action or not.
Since moving to Westbourne Park, he was less lonely. He spent the day chatting with Greta, and she inspired new sensations—not always comfortable ones.
He also got to know a few English people. Jo who ran the newspaper shop was from Yorkshire and spoke with an accent that was hard to decipher. But he was a good man.
So was Lenny, the tramp who sat on the bench just along from the Andrews’ house. Often the Sleeper would spend a couple of hours in the afternoon talking to Lenny about his travels. The tramp even reckoned he’d been to the Sleeper’s hometown. But the way he described it didn’t seem right at all. He was probably lying half the time, but the Sleeper enjoyed his company anyway.
Lenny’s favourite topic of conversation was the English Government and how it did nothing for the homeless. ‘Not that it’ll change if the other bloody lot get in. They’re just as bad. Bloody toffee-nosed lot they are…’ And he was off. Sometimes seemingly for up to an hour without drawing breath. But listening to Lenny was stimulating: it helped fuel his hatred of the English political class.
Michael Andrews also helped strengthen this conviction. Not that the Sleeper had anything against him personally, just that he was always so cheerful and successful, and when he was around, Greta talked less to the Sleeper and more to her husband. The Sleeper took to leaving the room soon after Michael entered in the evenings. Of course, he was polite and subtle about it, but his landlord’s presence was irritating. To be sure, he realised that as a guest in the house he shouldn’t do anything to upset Michael. The time for revenge on Michael and his kind would come later.
~
The church clock struck three. ‘Sun’s nearly over the yard-arm…’
‘Say what?’
‘I said,’ enunciated the tramp carefully, ‘that it’s time for a drink.’
‘Ah, you eejit. I thought that’s what you meant.’ The Sleeper cracked up laughing. Lenny was a laugh a minute, he really was. He’d already had a skinful long before the sun got anywhere near the yardarm. ‘I thought the yardarm was like when the sun sets?’
Lenny pondered this. ‘Sometimes it is,’ he conceded. ‘But on other occasions, it isn’t.’ He nodded sagely to himself, and his matted silver hair swung back and forth in front of his ruddy cheeks.
The Sleeper watched the old man, fascinated. He particularly marvelled at the network of minuscule blood vessels spreading just below the transparent skin covering the nose.
‘Will you get away,’ he exclaimed at Lenny’s sophistry. ‘I never knew that. And when would it not be?’
‘Not be what?’
‘Over the yard-arm?’
‘Are you still prattling on about that? The young today…’
The Sleeper bit his bottom lip to control the giggles threatening to overtake him.
‘And you needn’t laugh, you cheeky blighter.’
‘Lenny, I wasn’t laughing, I promise you.’
The tramp harrumphed and shifted in his overcoat. He wrapped it tigh
tly around him, and then leaned over and peered into the Victoria Wine carrier at his feet. After snuffling about for a while, he straightened up brandishing triumphantly a can of extra strong lager. ‘I knew I had one somewhere in there.’ Lenny pulled back the ring and took a swig. ‘So, young lad, you can stop staring at me and tell me why you’re not at school.’
‘Lenny, I’ve told you a thousand times. I don’t go to school. I’m twenty years old.’
‘When I was twenty I went to school.’
‘Get away! Nobody goes to school that old.’
‘Well, I did. But things were better then. It was a different country.’
The Sleeper cut him off before he could get started on one of his nostalgic reveries, which inevitably involved a good deal of racist diatribe against the ‘immigrants that took all our jobs and homes away.’ Not that they’d taken Lenny’s away, mind. As the Sleeper had found out after a bit of probing, Lenny had been married for fifteen years. The couple was childless and began to blame each other. Eventually, the marriage broke down in acrimony, and Lenny walked out—‘I just woke up one morning and said to myself I’ve had enough. So I packed my rucksack, left the wife snoring and muttering her crazy dreams, and hit the road.’ He’d not only abandoned his wife and home, but also his job as a warehouse foreman. When the Sleeper had asked him if he regretted the loss of family, comfort and a secure future, Lenny challenged him. ‘I don’t know who you are, young lad, to be asking me that. I can’t exactly see you in a good job, now, can I?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve told you… I’m looking for the right job to come up.’ The Sleeper deployed his usual cover story. A job in the advertising industry. It had almost gone wrong with Michael, who’d offered to use his contacts in the business world to sort out an interview. The Sleeper had quickly had to insist that he was grateful but was determined to do it by himself. Since then neither Greta nor Michael had pursued the question of employment, just an occasional throwaway line about how was the job-hunting going. After all, they figured, if he paid the rent and he was a nice kid, what business was it of theirs? And it was useful to have him round the house to help out with the children when Greta was really busy.