by Tim Orchard
21
Meanwhile, Henry Stick looked down from his bedroom window at the back of the house as Dick pulled away the ivy, strung like a curtain down the walls and over the high old cellar doors. Henry Stick loved his son. He’d spent years bringing him up. That was more free love than anyone else had ever had from him. All right, he had to admit, sometimes he hadn’t been perfect, but under his bluster, Dick was the one person who’d made his life bearable over the years. His boy. Wouldn’t be worth the bother otherwise. No point otherwise. Was there really no future, like that song by the band Dick liked so much? Henry knew Dick didn’t understand, didn’t know, that despite the way things looked, he’d always tried to do his best.
What remained after the hurt of Sylvie leaving had gone, after all the years, was a sense of mistrust so deep and profound it had hampered his whole life. What did he have? Who were his friends? Who loved him? Life was pretty empty when he looked about. What Henry knew was you can’t hold on to anything. It was all a matter of timing, and Henry understood that he was on the way to losing his son. The fact that he’d been to see his mother had complicated things, made it all stranger. Still, there was nothing to do but let things take their own course. He’d kept them apart since she’d left, but even he knew that hadn’t been right. Just his cussedness. It was all over now, though. Worse now, now he’d been to see her. Things were coming to the surface. It was only a matter of time. He wanted to tell Dick everything: how she’d left like a thief in the night and how his once best friend had let her stay without even telling him. It was a rift between John Newman and himself that had never been resolved.
Below, Dick was scraping the vegetation he’d pulled from the wall away into a heap. Nobody ever went to the old cellars anymore. Sure, like Dick and Si, Henry had played down there when he was a young chavvy, playing cowboys with John in its half-dark world. A lifetime away. Sometimes he wished he could heal the rift between himself and John Newman, but it had gone on too long and he didn’t know how to start. He pushed open the window and shouted, “What the hell you doing down there, you dozy git! Haven’t you got enough to do without this? That bloody ivy takes years to grow and you get rid of it, just like that!”
Dick looked up at his father, hanging half out the window. His father pained him. He watched his friends with their parents, sometimes wanting whatever it was they had. But he didn’t really know what it was they had and would never know. Casual as, he said, “I just thought I’d try and tidy the place up a bit.”
Henry waved a hand about as though it had meaning. “Tidy up! I’d have thought there was plenty to do after the winds, and have you checked out those bloody hippie workers? What are they doing? Have they all turned up today?”
Dick picked up a tin of WD-40. “Why don’t you go down and check? If you try hard enough I’m sure you can annoy them so they all go home and nothing gets done. Just leave it to me.”
Dick squirted the WD-40 into the lock and down the heavy, old cast hinges. Henry watched him. He had his mother’s looks, slim and handsome. Henry didn’t want to look anymore. He shut the window. He hadn’t a notion why his son was oiling the lock and hinges. Half rising, he thought about asking Dick but instead sat back down and began to pull on his boots. He’d take a look around, keep them useless casuals on their toes, measure up for the replacement glass. Maybe Dick was going to start a mushroom farm. He’d talked about that once. Commercial mushroom wrangling. There was a good market.
Later, Paloney went to see Postmistress P and found Julian Crabbe buying tinned pears, tinned pineapple chunks, and cling peaches, and Paloney wondered, What are cling peaches anyway? To Paloney’s eye, Julian Crabbe was a trifle red-faced, and behind the counter Postmistress P looked particularly severe. It wasn’t in his remit to interfere in what people called their personal life, their peccadilloes or whatever. He smiled at them and held his helmet in his hands.
After whatever years on the island, he’d got to know his own shortcomings quite well and almost everybody else’s too. Which was unfortunate. He’d had to cultivate a blind side, like anybody who lives in a small community must develop a blind side and sometimes a deaf side. Paloney could see that Julian’s fly was only half up, the zip caught in the tail of his shirt. Paloney said nothing.
Then he said, “You remember those two men? You know, the ones in the car? Did they stay with you, Julian, is that right?” Paloney studied the vicar and he was easy to see—almost everything he did was easy to see, written in every move and every gesture, every little facial tic—and it was obvious the vicar, Mr. Julian Crabbe, was a man who struggled with the concept of good and evil almost every day. His ability to believe in his chosen God often wavered, but good and evil were always manifest. He struggled. He struggled but his little pink cheeks and his zip at half-mast showed he didn’t always win. Paloney didn’t care.
Sticking up for her lover, Postmistress P said, “What would you expect a man of God to do? They had nowhere else to stay.”
Paloney didn’t care. He said, “I’m not here about anything, not really.” He looked from face to face. Julian was all wide-eyed, like some kind of Bambi, caught in dangerous headlights. Postmistress P adjusted her glasses and, looking down, began to write in some ledger, cool as ever. Paloney said, “What did you make of them?”
She looked up. “Thugs,” she said.
Julian pulled a little unsure face. “The big one seems okay…” He glanced from one to the other. “All right, perhaps both of them aren’t. I don’t know. But the other one…”
He looked at Postmistress P and frowned. She said, “Go on, tell him what happened.”
Julian stuttered his way through the story, being as fair as his nature would allow to all concerned, and Phil Paloney listened in the same way, until Julian puked on Carter, then he laughed out loud. It was a vision! He said, “I wouldn’t have liked to be in the car with that smell all the way back to London.” All three turned up their noses.
Julian Crabbe said, “It was almost like he had a fit. Simp, the big one, pulled him off me. I don’t quite know what happened, it was all too quick. I think he talked him down. He sat him in the corner, he washed quite a bit of the, ah, well, mess off. Then he gave me some money and they left. After that, I went to the church. Pensioners’ coffee morning.” Deception now unnecessary, Julian turned and put the tins of fruit back on the shelves and asked, innocently, “Why, did they do something?”
Paloney shook his head and, although he didn’t care, asked, “What did you do with the money… Simp, was it, gave you?”
He had to stop himself laughing as the little pink blobs on Julian’s cheeks flared red and it was all there in his skittering eyes. The money was in Julian’s pocket and it was going to stay there.
When Julian had finished hemming and hawing, Paloney said, “It doesn’t matter.” He had a sudden urge to give the pair the full info, to bring them into the fold, as it were, but the vicar’s dodgy eyes held him back. Soon enough would be soon enough. The thing was, between the two of them, they would probably see just about everybody on the island over the next couple of days, so he needed their help. On the way to the door, he said, “Can you start to put the word about—phone people and all that—we need to have another island meeting, everybody.”
“About what?” Postmistress P asked.
As he went out the shop door, Paloney looked over his shoulder. “It’s about the ferry. There’s been some new developments. There’s a chance we can save ourselves. It’s really important. We need to organize a meeting fairly quickly. Say Saturday night at the church?” Both started to speak but Paloney stopped them—“I’ll explain later”—and was gone with a wave. At that moment there weren’t any questions he wanted to answer.
Meanwhile, down South London way, about that time, other family issues were being sorted out. Amber was fed up and she made no bones about it. Eighteen. School was done, it was over, and it didn’t matter what her father said, she wasn’t going back and she w
asn’t going to university either. Yes, she probably would have got the right results, but what did that mean? It would just get her on the rail track to middle-class heaven, mortgaged out of her mind. It wasn’t going to happen.
Her father had found another way and she wanted a different way again, except she didn’t have a clue to what that was. Simp had told her a while back that her dad was like an erratic dynamo and sometimes it went a bit too dynamic and needed a shove to set it straight. She’d seen him giving her dad the pills. There wasn’t anything she could do. Her father was what he was and it wasn’t always nice. She’d seen his rages, not physical but a bit mental, against her mother when she was young, against Simp when there wasn’t anybody else, and, recently, against herself, when she’d turned up all chipper on the doorstep.
Now he stood over her, while she pretended to ignore him and read NME on the couch. She had tried to talk to him and now she’d stopped. She turned the pages of the music magazine without really seeing anything, knowing she was annoying him and not caring—that was the plan. Without looking at him, she tossed the magazine aside, got to her feet, and walked over to the window. A little desperate, Carter said, “Amber.” Amber looked out on the dull Dulwich street. The house was in a nice part of South London, away from Peckham, away from Carter’s business, away from trouble.
The way Amber saw it, if her dad didn’t want her to run away from school he shouldn’t have bought her a motorbike. It was preposterous for him to argue against the facts, and anyway, yes, she was spoiled, but he could hardly blame her for that, could he? Anyway, there had to be an upside to having a wonky dynamo for a dad, but she hadn’t bothered to mentioned that. She turned away from the window and exchanged smiles with Simp. He was a sweetie really. How he’d put up with her dad for all the years was something she didn’t understand. She turned on the television. Carter turned it off. Amber stood in front of him, arms folded, and sighed deeply and shook her head. As Carter opened his mouth to speak, Amber spun away, left the room, and closed the door behind her. Carter’s shoulders drooped. Exasperated, he said to Simp, “What’s she like?”
In the hall, Amber listened at the door, a little smile on her face. Get him with silence—he couldn’t stand it for long. She knew what her father was, how he made his money. In that way, he’d been fairly honest with her ever since her early teens, and what he didn’t tell her, Uncle Simp usually did. Big softy. She knew, for instance, her father had graduated from armed robbery into clubs and drugs. She could also guess at some of the things the two had to do to keep it all moving. Having someone like Carter for a father matured a person. Once, he’d actually sat down and explained exactly what it was he’d given up, because she was his daughter and he loved her so much. He’d told her, “I couldn’t go back to prison after you were born, darling, it wouldn’t have been right.” Talk about no illusions! It was so sweet, her ever-loving dad had actually given up guns and the prospect of a life in jail, just for her. Yeh, no illusions. She also knew her mother had slapped an ultimatum on him. Told him, “You’ve got a daughter now, you can’t go waving shotguns about as a viable occupation.” He’d stopped. Moved sideways, as it were. Probably the one and only time he’d listened to her.
At the far end of the hall was a small toilet. Amber went in, locked the door, and sat down on the closed seat top. She didn’t want to use the toilet; she just wanted to get away for a little while. It was a trick she’d picked up in boarding school—the only place she could be really alone and think. The room didn’t have a window but an electric vent set high in the wall. It whirred and she listened. It was like being in a box.
Her mother had been a catalog model once. Now she was just another well-kept woman, two steps away, at least, from the reality of what her husband did. Vacuous. The word sounded harsh to Amber, even as she thought it, but the truth was her mother whizzed about like a headless chicken, from this to that, making endless lists about everything that she forgot about almost instantly. There didn’t seem to be much beyond the surface. Her mother was strange and unreachable, her father was volatile and unpredictable. How they had ever got together still baffled Amber. The fact that they’d separated soon after she had been sent to boarding school didn’t bother her; they were better apart than together. And, for her, easier to manage separately.
Not that Amber was hard; she just had her own coping methods. It was the way her life was. She’d spent most of her early years never knowing what would happen next. Going to boarding school at twelve had been a complete relief for her, a haven, an oasis of rules and regulations, and she thrived on it, and when she’d become friends with some of the other girls, she’d realized some of them had stranger relationships with their parents than she did. But now that was over. It was like a skin she’d wanted to shed for the last year or more. Back home now with her father, she wanted something to do, something that would make her some money.
When she left the toilet and arrived back in the living room, Amber made sure she had a big moody head on her. She stood in front of Carter and wagged a finger at him, as though he were the recalcitrant child, and picked up the argument where they had left off: “No! Don’t be obtuse. I don’t want some money to go and buy clothes. You can’t just throw a few quid at me and think I’ll go away. I’m your daughter, remember? Help me. I want to make some quick money, enough to do something. Be a bit independent, yeh? Come on, Dad, you’re a drug dealer. If I can’t make money with you, who can I make money with? Please?”
This basic discussion had been going on now too long. It seemed like forever, and Carter was exasperated but said nothing. She was his daughter, and in some way he was proud of her, but he just couldn’t think in what way that was right at that moment. That pride didn’t do him any good, though, because Amber was the one person he couldn’t slap down, not really. So he tuned out and let her roll on for a bit. She ground him down, wore him out. Sometimes it seemed he’d been arguing with his daughter her whole life. Involuntarily Carter threw up his arms and then stuffed his hands into his pockets and mooched about the room. His head hurt. It was hard to think when she never let him have the last word.
When did it all change? Did this happen to other parents? What had happened to his little girl? Hadn’t he given her everything? What was he supposed to do now? What had she grown into? On my life, he didn’t know!
Obdurately, Amber said, “What do you expect me to be like? I’m your daughter.”
It was a good tactic. She’d used it before. Carter knew he was being got, but it still got him—it was what family did. Link by sentimental bloody link. Control. None of that stuff had ever worked with him, until Amber.
She got at him. She made him feel emotional. He didn’t like emotional. Emotional took him places—uncontrollable places. A sudden vision of himself leaping on that stupid fucking twat of a vicar snapped into his brain. He’d sent the suit to the cleaners, but he knew, deep down, he’d never wear it again. That smiling, genuflecting God-loving cunt! Carter took a couple of breaths, realized he was getting overwrought, and tried to right himself, but what with one thing and another—the lost dope, Stickle, his daughter—he just didn’t know. Simp was watching and, before Carter started to tremble, tapped him on the shoulder, put a big arm around him, and together they left the room, Simp reaching in his pocket as they did for the bottle of pills.
Two minutes Amber sat there, biting back, looking calm. By five minutes she was bored and irritated. Ear to the door again, she could hear the murmur of their voices but not what they were saying. She dropped back down onto the couch. At eight minutes, and as she began to wonder if she needed pills of her own to calm her anger, Carter returned, Simp behind him. “Look, my darling, I can’t have you out there, know what I mean? Can’t have you selling.” Amber started to argue and Carter cut her off with hand movements. “Darling, darling, wait, listen, I’ve got something else you can do. It’s a bit out of the ordinary but that’s you, ain’t it?” He called Simp forward. “Give her the
lowdown, tell her like you just told me, go on.”
22
It was afternoon when John Newman and Si got together over coffee. They talked a bit about the previous night and about what had happened at Julie’s that morning, they talked about the cellars under the Sticks’ house, about Dick and his dad, and Si said, “What’s it all about with Dick’s mum? He’s started going to London to see her and talking about leaving—I don’t know?”
John Newman said, “People change. I mean, believe it or not, Henry and I played down there in those cellars when we were kids, just like you and Dick did. Sure, we were friends for years, before it all went wrong.” He put his second finger over his first and wagged his hand. “We were like that.”
John laughed at Si’s amazed expression. “He was a lot like Dick as a young man, a bit daft, you know?” Si laughed, and his dad said, “Well, in some ways. I don’t mean looks. I know it’s hard to see it now, but Henry was a right one when he was young. With him back then, it was all rock and roll, drape suits, brothel creepers, the lot. He left, went to London, and eventually came back here with Sylvie, Dick’s mother. She was a nice woman and they would have suited each other well, in another place. She tried hard but she just wasn’t a country girl. She wasn’t really fit for Stickle, if you know what I mean. A bit like some of the conchies. I reckon if Henry had wanted to keep her, he should never have come back to the island. When Dick was born, Henry was over the moon, but I don’t think it’s always the same for women. I guess these days you’d say she had bad postnatal depression. Either that or she just couldn’t stand the isolation.”