A Patient Man

by S. Lynn Scott

  My nephew was born that evening, a couple of weeks early. He has made up for it ever since by being perpetually late for everything else. My sister called him Dean Elton and he’s all right, is Dean. He’s thirty-four now, teaches Yoga and Meditation and goes on retreats whenever the hurly-burly of the spa gets too frenetic. I don’t see much of him, but he pops up every now and again wearing sandals and carrying a canvas bag. He doesn’t own a watch, mobile phone or computer and only recognises daytime or night-time. He doesn’t say much, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile or laugh and yet he is still the happiest person I know. He does look at you as if he can’t quite work you out but then I suspect that most people look at him that way, so I suppose it is to be expected.

  Anyway, I am wandering from the main point.

  I was rummaging in the cupboards above the toaster in the kitchen when I had the feeling that I was being watched, which I was. I turned to find the pale eyes of Bones fixed on me.

  “’Lo,” I said, taking a bite out of a Garibaldi that had gone soft with age.

  “Yeah,” he said with a shrug.

  I pulled the kitchen stool across the Lino, perched on it, and sank deep into thought.

  Bones just loitered. He wouldn’t sit down unless I told him to. He was polite like that. But I wasn’t. Polite I mean. I left him standing there whilst I pondered weighing anchor (whatever that meant) and sailing the clubhouse down the estuary and on to warmer climes. It was a very tempting prospect but with two things against it. My dad would no doubt charter a much faster and more seaworthy vessel to pursue me and I wasn’t entirely sure that I would be able to prise the old tub free of the thick, adhesive Canvey mud that gripped it. I eventually relinquished that escape plan as alluring but impractical and let out a deep sigh.

  “They’re sendin’ me to one of ‘em effin’ posh schools,” I leaned back on the cheap plastic stool and looked at Bones to reflect my outrage.

  “No kiddin’” he breathed. I considered explaining the strange occurrences of the day to Bones but it seemed to me that as it would, inevitably, only elicit a ‘no kiddin’’, it would not be worth my time. Nor could I quite summon up the courage to break the restrictions that had been imposed on us by telling Bones the whole truth. The surprises of the day were not over, however. I had sunk my head into my arms in lonely despair at my impending scholarly doom when Bones, unusually for him, moved to my side and plucked at my arm.

  “What?” I snapped. I didn’t like being touched.

  “They’re givin’ me money,” he whispered.

  “What?” I bellowed, hating him instantly and passionately. He retreated to the other side of the table.

  “Not now…” he muttered hastily. “When I’m eighteen.”

  “Oh, bugger,” I hissed. After my instant fury it had flashed upon me that Bones with money might be another opportunity to escape from my predicament but again my hopes were dashed. Bones’ eighteenth birthday was years and years away. It could be a hundred years for all that it would help.

  “’Ow much?” Well, it might come in handy to know at some stage.

  “Five thousand pounds…” he whimpered, shamefacedly. “Only I don’t know ‘oo it comes from and I ain’t s’posed to ask.” I stared at him, hopelessly. It wasn’t much compared to the riches that had been showered on my undeserving family, but I could see the deep delight that it brought to Bones and how he was, Bones-like, trying to suppress it for my sake. I was as bitter as hell but even so, I could not begrudge him. Not Bones.

  “Wanna eat something?” Of course, he did. Boys of a certain age are always hungry. I opened a can of baked beans and toasted a couple of slices of stale bread. I put the television on in the living room and we watched The Sweeney. We didn’t talk. There wasn’t anything to say. No one else was home.

  I fell asleep stretched out on the threadbare settee and when I woke, Bones had gone and, in his place, sat Dad, staring vacantly at the ceiling. I stood up guiltily, though I have no idea what sparked the guilt. Dad didn’t move so I shifted uneasily from my right to my left foot and said, “All right,” which was neither a question or a statement but whatever he wanted it to be. He decided to take it as a question.

  “Your sister had a boy,” he said baldly.

  I wasn’t sure how to react to that, so I shifted from my left foot to my right foot and muttered, “No, kiddin’.”

  “Has your mother been home?”

  I shook my head and his eyes met mine fleetingly before sliding away and back to the ceiling.

  “Go to bed,” he ordered. “Go to bed. I’ll wait for her.”

  He would of course. He knew that from that evening on he would wait for her for the rest of his life. Or hers.

  12

  Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.

  J. P. Donleavy

  I had just under a week at home before I was pitchforked abruptly from the gutter to the stars. Well, not the stars exactly although the calm, grassy quad and ancient stone buildings seemed like another world after my years spent amongst melamine worktops and fag ends.

  Anyway, Mum came home in the early hours of the morning to find dad waiting for her. I heard the low rumble of his tones contrasted with the sharp treble of hers. It was a short altercation truncated by the slamming of the bedroom door. Dad took the car and went who knows where. After that, we all waited. Mum spent the days nervously roaming from room to room, smoking one cigarette after another and waiting for the post to come or the phone to ring. In the evening, when neither was likely to happen, she went out although surprisingly not with Vi. There seemed to have been some sort of falling out. Not only that but mum was remarkably tight-lipped about her prospective windfall and swore Gary and Sarah and me to silence. In the cold light of the next day, a vast disbelief overwhelmed us so whilst we wouldn’t ordinarily obey my mother if we didn’t want to, in this instance, we also remained silent. Dad drifted in and out pretty much as he always had done but there was a watching tension in his presence. Mum never looked him in the eyes or responded to anything he said with any more than was necessary to preserve the barest façade of civility. My brother came home the evening following the day of revelation. He was dirty, hollow-eyed and hung over from a night of alcohol and other indulgences. He threw himself on the bed in our room and barely moved for the rest of the week. He scavenged occasionally in the kitchen and once or twice went out to buy generous supplies of beer but otherwise, we only saw him when the phone rang or when the postman was due. At such times the door of his bedroom would inch open and he would be there listening. He too was waiting for his freedom.

  My sister was gathered up by her prospective in-laws when she could no longer invent viable excuses for the hospital to keep her. She was taken along with her new baby to their home and from all I could glean the child was treated with awe and adoration by his father and grandparents. My sister, however, felt herself to be too ill to engage in the general worship and left the initial caring as much as possible to those clearly more capable of giving it. She was guilty of inadvertently increasing the tension in our house tenfold by causing the telephone to ring every hour or so with anxious enquiry as to whether we had heard anything about the money yet.

  For myself, I escaped whenever I could. Mum dragged me out of bed for the first few mornings. It showed the level of her anticipatory nervousness because she was by no means an early riser. However, she, like my dad, had decided that going to school for a week might actually prepare me for the educational challenges ahead of me. I’m not sure how much ground they thought it possible for me to make up by attending two or three days more, but it was probably more to do with keeping me educationally viable so that I didn’t screw up their chances of getting their hands on the money. At least that would have been my mother’s motivation. I was not quite sure at that point what my father�
��s was. Whatever their true reasons I was dragged from my bed and turfed into the street at 8am with the sharp admonition to “get to school, and I’ll know if you skip off, so don’t even bloody think about it.”

  The weather wasn’t good and now that the threat of leaving the well-known places hung over me I developed quite a fondness for the dour red bricked sprawl of buildings, the gruff librarian and the gang of assorted misfits I called my … well, no, I didn’t call them friends. They just were. Bones was a mate I suppose but the rest were just other boys that I spent time with. Even so with the unknown and the unexplained before me I clung to the familiar faces and well-loved places and tried to ignore the feeling of dread that grasped the pit of my stomach and squeezed until I could hardly breathe with the terror of it.

  “You make sure you behave yourself at this new school, you hear,” Mum said one evening, elegantly picking tobacco off her tongue. She had always smoked heavily but the last week had seen her perpetually enveloped in a haze of cigarette smoke. On the plus side, she seemed to have cut back on her drinking and on seeing the lovely Vi, both vices that made smoking pale into insignificance.

  I haven’t really said much about Vi and yet she is key to my story. You will eventually understand my reluctance to talk about her. She was tall and big-boned, with bouffant hair and a large nose. She had full sullen lips that were always painted bright red and narrow dark eyes that were too close together. She had been married to one of the more successful London crooks who had gone ‘legit’ or had at least created a couple of businesses that appeared to keep on the right side of the law. He had died of a sudden heart attack a few years ago leaving massive debts and a wife who had briefly tasted the good things money could buy and was bitter that she had now been left without them. She and her hard-drinking son lived in a modest flat on the seafront. She worked in a dilapidated chip shop and Ethan claimed to be a mechanic but had never to my knowledge been employed as such. He was as unpleasant as she was and had a reputation for drug use.

  Since the sudden windfall, Mum had been avoiding her, which given the sort of woman Vi was, was difficult and somewhat foolhardy.

  “Tell ‘er I’m not ‘ere,” Mum hissed at me more than once when Vi was hammering at the door. I did as I was told. Sort of.

  “She ain’t ‘ere,” I said sullenly, not bothering to try and sound truthful.

  “Where is she then?”

  “I dunno. Out.”

  That worked the first time but not the second.

  “Tell me where she is, you little sod. I need to speak to ‘er.”

  “I dunno, I tell yer.”

  “Let me in then.”

  “Dad’s ‘ere,” I said insolently. He wasn’t but I knew that would prevent her from pushing past me which she was making every sign of attempting.

  “Tell ‘er I need to speak to ‘er,” she spat, turning on her platform heel and tottering down the short driveway. I shut the door and went through to the kitchen.

  “She’s gone,” I repeated to Mum who was lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the one still burning on her lips.

  “Yeah, good riddance.”

  “Wot does she wanna talk to you about?”

  “Noffink.”

  “Must be somefink.” I tried to take a cigarette from the packet on the table, but she slapped my hand away.

  “Leave me fags alone. Buy yer own.” I disdained to point out either my age or my financial position and went instead for what I knew would annoy her the most.

  “I fought Vi was yer best friend.”

  “Not anymore.”

  What did she do?” She hated being questioned at the best of times.

  “None of your sodding business, Mikey. Leave it alone.”

  “Did yer tell ‘er?” I persisted. “About the money. Did you tell ‘er where it came from?”

  She put her head in her hands and for one moment I thought all was lost and we would have to go back to the way we were before. It was a wonderful feeling.

  “No.” She shattered all my hopes with that one word. “I didn’t tell ‘er where it really came from. I would never do that. I told ‘er what we all agreed, that it was a whatever they call it, a leg thing from one of yer dad’s relatives but she didn’t believe it. She keeps niggling away at it till I want to scream. It’ll be different when I ‘ave the money. I’ll get away, make up some story and get far away from ‘ere where she can’t find me.”

  Mum seemed almost to have forgotten that I was there but, as I’ve said before, I was used to that.

  “Why is it taking such a long time? If I can just get away, I’ll be safe.” She dragged on her cigarette and gazed out of the window. “I just don’t understand why the bloody banks take such a long time to sort things out. She could really bugger things up for me.”

  She turned back and met my eyes. I felt her flash of confusion and regret that she had said so much.

  “Just ‘elp me to avoid ‘er, Mikey, there’s a good boy. Next time tell ‘er I’m ill – somefink contagious.”

  “Typhoid?” I suggested, helpfully I thought.

  “Yeah, although I don’t suppose it would work anyway. She won’t believe it. Just tell her your dad’s ‘ere again that should keep ‘er away. I just wish we would ‘ear from the bloody bank and I could get out of ‘ere.”

  “Where’re you goin’?” I asked miserably.

  “Dunno, somewhere. Anywhere.”

  “What about me?”

  I don’t know what made me ask that. It wasn’t like me at all and it even brought Mum up short for a moment.

  “You?”

  She stared at me in the sudden realisation that her son should perhaps have crossed her mind, however fleetingly, at some time during the formation of her plans for the future.

  “You’re goin’ to be fine. They’ll turn you into some sort of toff. You’ll be better off in that posh school than you would be livin’ with me…or yer dad. Don’t worry about it, Mikey. They say you’re clever at school. Life will be easy for you. It will be easy for all of us now, once we get our ‘ands on the money.”

  So that was it. The money would solve everything. I was to become posh and none of us would ever have any problems ever again because we were rich. It sounded good, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. Even leaving aside my lack of enthusiasm for my own proposed exile and intellectual improvement, would the path ahead of us be as smooth and obstacle-free as my mother seemed to think?

  It was later that day that I was accosted by the lovely Vi in the Admiral Jellicoe. The Jellicoe was a pub named after some nautical geezer or other that was vast, brick built, glowering and just down the road from our house. They knew me well there and, though I had never yet got more than a very weak beer shandy out of the landlord, I lived in hope. Vi came out of nowhere, I didn’t even hear the metal spikes of her heels puncturing the plastic floor before I felt my shoulder grasped and my body spun to face her.

  “Mikey,” she snarled through the semblance of a false red smile. “I’ll buy you a coke, darlin’. Packet of crisps?”

  Well, you know me well enough by now to know that I never say no to something free. You are probably also aware that I was arrogant enough to think that Vi was no match for me. And she wouldn’t have been without the alcohol that she somehow caused to be added to the orange pop I gulped down. Vodka probably and need I stress again that I was only nine and, despite my best efforts, was not yet accustomed to spirits.

  She ensconced me in one of those brown wooden booths that all old pubs have, placed in front of me a fizzing orange pint glass filled with the sort of lively sweetness that is ambrosia to kids, added a pack of heavily salted, fat immersed potato crisps next to that, grinned at me and, knowing that nothing short of Armageddon would separate me from either until they had both been enjoyed to the fullest possible extent, she struck up a conversati
on with some bloke in the booth next to us. It seemed to be about drains. Having ascertained that, I didn’t listen anymore.

  The mouldy old clock behind the bar struck 1pm at precisely the same moment that Bert walked in the door. I knew but had forgotten, that this was his local and, being routine in his habits, he always took a lunchtime pint here. He stepped through the door and, glancing round, was arrested by my eyes staring at him over a pint glass full of fluorescent orange liquid. Vi chose that moment to lose interest in drains and to witness the long look that passed between us. I thought it behoved me to look unconcerned but all I managed was a hiccup. He, having given me a considering look, turned away to the bar.

  “Another?” crooned Vi.

  Feeling more adventurous than usual, if a bit disorientated, I muttered, “Okay. Crisps too.”

  She went to the bar, choosing to stand next to Bert and I watched fascinated, but Vi always overplayed her hand, and she didn’t have much of a hand anyway. She placed her body so deliberately close to him that he had to acknowledge her presence one way or another.

  “Hello, Mr. Freeman. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  He didn’t really know her, except perhaps that he had seen her around with my mother. He turned to face her, deftly managing to put some distance between them at the same time, nodded curtly, and said “Miss,” with little of the old-world charm that he might have been capable of a year or so ago.

  “I’m here with, Mikey.” Vi indicated me and, even through the alcohol-induced fuddle, the penny suddenly dropped, and I saw her strategy. Dangerous indeed. “Why don’t you join us?”

  Bert’s eyes turned to me once more and, though I was incapable of doing much more than staring blankly back, there was a moment of mute communication. Almost of fellowship.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “The lad should go home. His parents wouldn’t want him to be here.”

  With you. He didn’t say that, but I knew what he meant. So did she. Vi laughed harshly.