The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  He had to move on – to the woman who was keen on ‘Hands Off Our Hospital’ and didn’t fancy travelling to get seen to – to the man who sat down and said, ‘How do you live with yourself? Putting people out on the streets?’

  In a break he surveyed the lackadaisical Saturday shoppers, the already tired-looking cleaning woman with her mop and cart, the hand-lettered SALE! signs in windows, the urchins with faces buried in candyfloss. It was the community, right enough, and to be encountering it here in this manner was an improvement on the office, which could seem, at times, like a police station. But sat behind a desk in the thoroughfare he could never quite escape the feeling that his business was hardly superior to that of the grafters selling raffle tickets or fake Gucci watches or cable TV subscriptions with an unbeatable offer on the weekend’s big title fight live from Vegas.

  Just as he could see lunchtime ahead, he realised Margaret Whitton was fending off a pained-looking woman of Sub-Saharan complexion under her jilbāb, clutching a crying baby. He stood and hastened over.

  ‘She’s not on the list, David, I’m trying to explain—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he winced at the woman. ‘You’re not my constituent, I can’t give you the time I owe to them.’

  Bob came through the swishing doors, looking gaunt, and stalked up to the table. ‘Oh, David, sorry, I’ve just had the police round, someone’s only gone and done the office overnight.’

  ‘They broke in?’ Blaylock looked to Andy, thinking about computers, hard drives, classified files.

  ‘No, they just put all graffiti on the outside walls.’ He passed Blaylock his phone, on which he had snapped a photo of said graffiti, daubed in high, lean red letters: WHO DOES BLAYLOCK SPEAK FOR?

  ‘Now, not to worry, I’ve got ’em slapping the whitewash on.’

  ‘There must be CCTV of it?’

  ‘The bloody thing of it is, the police reckon they’ve knocked the one in the car park off its pole. It’s full-on criminal damage, right enough. They must have brung a twenty-foot ladder.’

  ‘Any theories on who “they” are?’

  ‘Well, I said, didn’t I, I thought they’ve been getting organised …?’

  *

  When lunchtime came he was driven a mile or so to attend a ‘culinary festival’ of ‘fresh local produce’ – there to drink half a glass of bitter beer and eat a baked savoury slice glutinous with gravy. Then he dropped by a newish ‘extra care’ apartment complex for the over-sixty-fives, bought a couple of bracelets and a wooden doorstop fashioned by some handy retired residents, joked with the old-timers about the merits of ‘armchair exercise’ and listened quietly to an ashen woman whose grandson was forever calling in to tap her up for drug money. He just made it to Bishopton Road for 4 p.m., where Bob was waiting outside the ground bearing scarves for each of them, and together they watched Thornfield Town take on Ryhope in the day’s big Wearside League clash. At half-time, with Town two goals down, he had to get going if he was to catch the 17.55 from Darlington back to London.

  ‘Fucking Town’s had it,’ he heard from a sedentary position as he mounted the steps to the exit. Then a crumpled betting slip whizzed through the air before him. He stopped to note the offender, a bloke in a bobble hat who returned his look with interest.

  ‘Aye, you an’ all, Blaylock.’

  7

  So what did we learn about David Blaylock this week? The ex-soldier remains handy with his fists and not afraid to have a go. Commendable as that might be, does it have the slightest bearing on his fitness for the job of managing the UK’s borders, protecting its citizens from crime and terror threats, and upholding our cherished rights and freedoms in the bargain? Has he got the bottle – not to mention the subtler political skills – needed for those larger, more complex and crucial encounters with reality?

  Yadda yadda, thought Blaylock. Mark Tallis had not let up texting him to the effect that the Correspondent’s profile was something he ought to see, so at last he had asked Martin to pull over at the next Esso garage. But the fifteen hundred words of Abigail Hassall’s piece read to him like discount psychoanalysis.

  ‘David’s big problem’, one estranged ex-ally told me, ‘is that he sees everything as personal, and everything becomes a fight, from which he never backs down or sees where he might be wrong. He just stands there and flails away. I don’t know who or what inflicted the psychic defeat on him that made him that way, but it must have been a sizeable one.’

  Who, he wondered, had sung? What ‘ex-ally’? How recently ‘estranged’? On a handful of prior occasions, friends he counted honourable had warned him of their intention to pass comment. He was unaccustomed to the anonymous knife in the back. It had the inflection of something Jennie might say, yet he knew her as the soul of scruple whose silence with the press was staunch as his own.

  He tossed the Correspondent aside, knowing he needed to have his head right for an afternoon with his children. They read him too easily now, saw all too clearly if clouds hung over him, and he had to have them see that they had all of his attention. Otherwise, the risk of further decline in their relations was too grave.

  Even from what Blaylock had felt to be the invincibly strange early days of post-divorce, the kids had shown themselves remarkably adept in the new dispensation. For sure, they had favoured their mother, though Alex had for a time seemed to waver – his dad’s loyal little lad, back then. But they had all missed him a fair bit at first, he knew as much. He had strained every sinew to indulge them without fuss, playing one off against another if affections seemed to slip. It was with stunning rapidity, though, that the kids grew older and wiser, saw through his guiles, computed his now essentially adjunct status to the family. Nowadays Sunday was a familiar duty, ever much the same, regular as clockwork, handing Blaylock the same old lesson on a plate.

  It was then, very sharply, that Blaylock remembered Jennie’s request that he come collect the children earlier this week – a request he had disputed, resigned himself to, then forgotten. He fumbled into his jacket for his phone, where a curt text message already awaited him.

  *

  For all the difference it made, he ran up the mosaic pathway and hurdled the stone steps to Jennie’s door. She had fastened up her hair with a blue brocade scarf. Batting aside Blaylock’s apology she blew out her cheeks. ‘Listen, Cora’s not well, she can’t come out.’

  ‘Not well how?’ With Cora that could mean a range of issues.

  Jennie gestured for him to step indoors. ‘Female trouble.’

  ‘Oh … poor lamb. Can I go see her?’

  ‘She was dozing just now. Maybe leave it and look in at drop-off?’

  Across the threshold Blaylock felt the familiar estranging sense of being, for a change, in a real home – a shared habitat crafted with proper care for all persons within it. Jennie directed him toward the living room. Stairs led down to a big basement kitchen and den, the heart of the house, somewhere Blaylock was somehow never invited.

  ‘Daddy.’

  Molly was tripping down from the upper floor, shyly smiling, sidling up for an embrace. She remained, with reservations, his fan.

  ‘Get your boots on, Molly.’ Jennie moved things along.

  ‘Where’s the boy?’

  ‘Up in his room, looking at college websites. Seeing what size of mortgage he fancies taking out on his future.’

  ‘Is he still thinking about filmmaking?’

  ‘Yep, that’s the passion.’

  ‘Does he think he really needs to give three years and ten grand to it? When he’s already making little films on his computer?’

  ‘Ask him. I know if your lot had your way he and his pals would be square-bashing.’

  He watched her reach up and unfasten the headscarf, shaking out her long locks, until she met his eye coolly with a look of Yes, what?

  She had caught him, for he had quite suddenly and unwisely fallen to thinking of how much he had always loved to watch her divest herself of clothing
, in a major or minor way, whether she minded him or not. Then again, he had liked it just as well to see her putting her clothes on – the ritual draping of those curved lines of hers, all the way up to the dark crowning glory of hair, the canny gleam in her eye, that broad red mouth in that pale and fine-boned face.

  She was – she remained – the loveliest woman he had ever known. He congratulated himself on the neutral maturity with which he could make this inward acknowledgement.

  ‘So, you bested me in court. With your Bosnian.’

  ‘Not personal, as you know. It was the right ruling.’

  ‘You’re totally sure of that?’

  ‘There was a child involved, that child deserved consideration.’

  ‘Right. And as for her delightful father, we’re lumbered with him too for the foreseeable.’

  He sat back into the deep crimson sofa and glanced around. The Observer was on the coffee table, DVDs lined up by the big telly, thick hardbacks spine-out on their shelves, glossy magazines under the coffee table. He knew she was watching him, and what she was looking for, suspecting him – quite rightly – of keeping watch for telling signs about the house, most especially for vestiges of some new male presence.

  For a good, long and gratifying while, though, Jennie had been just as single as he. It appeared no man could meet the standard. Previous suitors, certainly, had failed to win over the children – Cora loudest in deploring both ‘the geek’ who wrote political satire for radio, and the divorced lawyer with two sons, all three of whom Cora rated ‘slimey’. As long as Blaylock remained notably alone himself, he knew, he was winning points with the children, if not with Jennie, who seemed not to be keeping score.

  ‘So how was your week? Apart from all the punch-ups?’

  ‘I had a game of squash with the Lord Chief Justice. We talked human rights. He told me off about Europe.’

  ‘Never been much of a European, have you, David?’

  ‘Never had the house in Tuscany, right enough, pet. No, it’s a regrettable cast of mind I share with the majority of British people. Backward of me, I know.’

  ‘How did you get on with the cops on Wednesday?’

  ‘They listened politely enough, until I told them I was having an inquiry into how they carry on.’

  ‘Well, no wonder. All I hear about is decline in trust of the police, and from middle-class juries, too. So you’re on to something.’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s funny, I get talking to you and suddenly I feel like I want to defend them.’

  She chuckled, which he appreciated – and yet he longed to get a proper gut-laugh out of her. The same malaise showed in how she would pop her eyes or skew her jaw to show ‘surprise’ or ‘interest’. But it was studied. It had been years since her eyes really sparked at his ‘news’. And so much of what he had done with his life had been designed to seek the favour of those eyes.

  ‘I got a letter from Tamara Sahbaz? Young Davilo’s off to college.’

  But by her Fancy that look he knew she had read the gambit, and he pressed no further, for in any case their son was now hustling into the room, his knees poking out of his torn denims, fists thrust into his hoodie pocket.

  Cut your hair, son, grow up and shave.

  Alex’s barnet was short at the sides but with a crest swept over the top – a sculpted and, to Blaylock’s eye, overly self-conscious look. From the hoodie Alex withdrew a video camera barely bigger than his fist and began to twiddle with its extendable viewfinder.

  ‘Is that new, son?’

  ‘Give him his due,’ Jennie remarked. ‘He delivered an awful lot of pizzas to pay for it himself, didn’t you?’

  ‘Mum, did you ask him?’

  ‘What is it, son?’ Blaylock was ever vexed by indirect address.

  ‘It’s just, there’s an old movie on that I really want to see, down at the South Bank, it’s just on today? And we could still make it.’

  ‘Alex, you know, son – anywhere that we go together has all got to get security-cleared way in advance.’

  ‘It’s just you never get to see this projected on a screen.’

  ‘Sorry, what is it?’

  ‘Battleship Potemkin?’

  Blaylock winced. ‘Howay, Alex, think of your sister, eh? No, it’s owls for us today, bonny lad.’

  *

  In the end the film about one woman’s doughty quest to locate a rare species of owl in the Omani mountains caused no pain. ‘Good’ was Molly’s firmly head-nodding verdict. Alex even ventured some approval of the ‘quality’ use of long lenses. Afterward they sat in a crowded American-style diner, over plates of spicy chicken burgers and curly fries. While Molly embellished the paper menu with doodles Alex appeared pensive under his fringe. Blaylock fought the urge to check his phone, worried, too, that his face was frozen in some absent frown.

  ‘He can sit with us if he likes.’ Alex was gesturing to Andy Grieve, sitting upright at a table for one ten feet away, his eyes flicking mildly around the room.

  ‘Never worry. Andy and I see enough of each other.’

  ‘He’s a surveillance camera on legs, isn’t he? Do you actually worry? About someone, y’know, doing you in?’

  ‘I’m well protected. Over-protected, really. The police do an excellent job.’

  ‘So why are you rucking with them all the time?’ Alex offered this as if innocently over the lid of his oozing burger.

  ‘I don’t “ruck”’ with the police, Alex, there are just some sensible changes I need to discuss with them.’

  ‘Daddy has a lot to do, Alex,’ Molly offered without lifting an eye from her artwork. Blaylock looked at his youngest child and felt the familiar gnaw behind his ribs – love, desperate and unalloyed. Because she was the youngest, the one still susceptible to his sway?

  ‘But they’re not happy, are they, the police?’ Alex persisted. ‘Do you think they’ll go out on strike?’

  ‘Coppers? No, never. They’re more responsible than that.’

  ‘Don’t you think they’re just a bit corrupt? Some of them?’

  ‘Oh well, you should ask your mum about that, she’ll give you chapter and verse. Have you and her had that conversation?’

  But now Alex merely stuffed curly fries into his mouth and turned back to gazing round the restaurant.

  ‘You’re allowed to talk about your mother, Alex.’

  ‘Yeah, but we don’t need to, do we?’

  The silence persisted. Blaylock really wished to improve on it.

  ‘What’s your opinion of the police then? I’m not sure I get where you’re coming from …’

  ‘I expect some are alright,’ Alex said at last, having chewed for some moments. ‘But, as an institution? I think they’re part of a whole system … an oppressive system. Like, whenever there’s a big demo or protest, about something totally righteous? There’s the police, just clubbing people down. They take their pay and they defend whatever the establishment tells them to.’

  ‘By “establishment” you mean people like me?’

  Alex shrugged as if to say his father could take it as he liked. ‘What I mean is, we’re all of us the people, right. So, what I think is, the people ought to be the police.’

  Blaylock smiled, feeling himself on terra firma. ‘Well, one of my illustrious predecessors said that, yeah? But public order is necessary, you see that, don’t you? So ordinary people can go about their business? Of course, people have a right to protest what they think is “righteous”, but a protest has to be policed. Otherwise what have you got?’

  ‘Anarchy. Anarchy in the UK.’ It was Alex’s turn to grin.

  ‘Right. Fancy a bit of that, do you?’

  ‘I just think there’s a place for it. Society benefits by a bit of fruitful chaos. Resistance to the so-called done thing.’

  ‘Well, I agree with you.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ The boy indicated a flash of authentic-looking interest.

  ‘Sure, I’ve always thought there should be a proper revolutionar
y party in Britain. There’s enough people who feel that way – who think politicians are all shysters and the rich are bloodsuckers or whatever. All that … energy? It should go somewhere. It should be tested.’

  Blaylock had begun to enjoy the sound of his pontificating voice. His apprentice, though, had resorted to peering beneath the table at his own denim crotch.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You mind if I film you?’

  Now Alex lifted his video camera onto the table-top, its red REC light already glowing red.

  ‘Alex, no, turn it off, eh?’

  ‘Shame. I could have just done it covertly.’

  ‘Then I might have had to have Andy cart you off.’ He sighed. ‘Listen, what I was saying, a revolution’s not a dinner party, right?’

  ‘I’d bloody hope not.’ Alex downed the dregs of his Diet Coke, noisily. Blaylock sat back, now dissatisfied to be sitting where he was, taking the side he was taking, having this barnacle-crusted debate with his adolescent offspring, in language that sounded yet more calcified.

  Molly looked up from her drawing. ‘I’m just asking … but could we maybe do something all together one time? Like a family?’

  Blaylock ruffled her hair, but Alex gave his sister a stagey scowl and fell to polishing his lens with the hem of his hoodie. Blaylock gestured for the bill.

  *

  He ushered them back across Jennie’s threshold. Molly hugged him hurriedly before dashing to the downstairs loo. Alex bounded directly up the stairs, two at a time, as if released from chores. Unhappily Blaylock watched him disappear into his bedroom.

  ‘Go easy on him,’ offered Jennie, now at his side.

  ‘Eh? No, he’s fine. We had a good chat.’

  ‘Did he say he’s had a bit of stick at school?’

  Blaylock frowned. This was an old story with Alex, and no fatherly exhortations to ‘whack ’em back’ had ever been considered helpful.

  ‘God. He’s old enough now, I’d have thought. Big enough.’

  ‘It’s not a physical thing,’ Jennie sighed. ‘They do politics in class, he’s in the debating club … they know you’re his dad.’