by D. J. Taylor
As usual Barrett put his own gloss on the local gossip. ‘Of course, my man, wasn’t always this way. Let me tell you, twenty years back they nearly ran Ron Van Hart out of the county. Car stealing, mostly. Folks who came into town on a Saturday night used to leave their doors unlocked in those days and Ron, well, he just used to help himself. Not that that would have got him run out of the county, but the guy had a mean streak. Wouldn’t think it to look at him maybe, but he busted a girl’s head open with a bottle back in ’68.’
‘Why would he want to do a thing like that?’
It was a simpleton’s question, but Barrett only grinned. ‘Who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t come across. Maybe she made too many jokes about pig-shit. He worked on his daddy’s farm, you see, and people used to piss themselves about it. Anyway, Ron laid her out cold. If his daddy hadn’t played in a poker school with the DA’s brother-in-law he’d have been lucky to keep out of jail.’
Whatever the truth of these allegations, no trace of them remained in Ron’s current behaviour. Kind of weird, people reckoned – he had a habit of staring at you and not quite listening to what you said – but pleasant with it. You saw him doing the rounds of the roadside diners and barbers’ shops, shaking hands with folks who’d known Spencer. Come late October he disappeared – out West, people said, doing a movie with Dustin Hoffman – but then a fortnight later he was back again and a contractor’s firm from Jackson came and took down the shutters from The Rebel Den and started re-laying the split pinewood floor.
November dragged on and the light faded away into mid-afternoon shadow. The wind started bringing down trees over by Choctaw Ridge and there were a couple of hurricane warnings. The ex-County Treasurer emerged from the state gaol at Dyersburg and announced that he was suing the DA for malversion. I was busy around that time, checking through slides with some field biologists over in the forestry department at Johnson City, so I didn’t get to see what was happening out at The Rebel Den, but Barrett kept me informed. Around Thanksgiving his voice came crackling down the portable telephone we used out in the camp at Choctaw. ‘Seems as if Ron’s opening up the Den again my man. Grand re-opening party, transport laid on and a zydeco band from New Orleans, you name it.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Beats me my man. Just pouring dollars into the swamp is the way I look at it. Said something about respect for his uncle, but you want my opinion he’s out to spite those two strawchewers from Lexington…’
There was a pause as the wind whistled over the wire.
‘Jesus,’ Barrett went on. ‘You hear the news? Hurricane Tony’s due in from Tampa Bay in seventy-two hours, they reckon. Lee-Ann about these days?’
‘Off sick.’
‘Ain’t none of my business,’ said Barrett. ‘But if I were you I’d check up on that girl one of these times.’
I was driving out near the Junction the next day, as it turned out, so it wasn’t hard to check out Barrett’s account. In late autumn the place had a dreary, downcast look. Only a dozen or so of the cabins were occupied now, the smoke drifted up out of the tumbledown chimneys and the main street was a lake of dirty water. At The Rebel Den there were a couple of glaziers putting in a new plate glass window and a roller flattening the bumpy forecourt. Ron stood in the doorway clawing at his chin with quick, uneasy movements, but when he saw me he grinned and beckoned me over.
‘Hey. Photographer, ain’t you?’
When I nodded he went on: ‘Could use you in a couple of nights’ time, if’n you’re agreeable. Take some pictures of my party.’ He pronounced it ‘partay’. There’s some big stars coming in you know. Maybe you could sell to the newspapers afterwards.’
I smiled, although it struck me that he was just looking through me, that he saw something else way back twenty yards from where I was standing. Then I headed off, only stopping to confirm what I’d suspected as I drove in: that the pink Chevy parked by Van Hart’s forecourt was Lee-Ann’s.
Lee-Ann turned up at the site two days later with a bruise on her arm that everyone tried to avoid noticing all through the grey, windy morning. That night Hurricane Tony blew in, bringing three larch trees and a power cable down across the foresters’ cabin, so I missed the re-opening. Barrett, who struggled in through the gale and had his windscreen busted by a falling branch, reported that it was a weird party. ‘No-one you ever saw my man, and if Pacino was there it was a grade-A disguise. And Ron, Ron kind of flipped. Just sat there and talked about the guys he knew in Hollywood and how he once got to use Stallone’s Jacuzzi.’ The wind gusted on through the night. Next morning a squad car called at the Rebel Den, but Ron had already disappeared and the storm had taken the roof right of and laid it over the newly flattened forecourt. Later Barrett filled me on the details, about how Ron hadn’t worked in Hollywood for five years and was wanted for a string of unpaid hotel bills and a couple of assault charges.
They found the body a week later, sprawled over the disused railway line. There was an old photo of Gene Hackman in the pants pocket and a putdown letter from an agent dated four years back. ‘Taking a dip in Van Hart’s trashcan,’ Barrett said jauntily when I bumped into him at Brackus’s that night. Lee-Ann was sitting at right angles from us so she missed the wink that Barrett gave me. Ron’s two brothers had a bulldozer come and clear the site – they had plans to sell it to the county amenities department now – and I stood in the clearing where the line of log cabins met the trees, turning my head against the force of the wind, and thinking that it was nothing you could complain about, that all of this – Spencer, Ron, The Rebel Den and the picture of Gene Hackman – just wasn’t something you could expect a fruit farmer from Kentucky to understand.
—1991
The Disappointed
South of Chelmsford they lost their way in a tangle of B-roads and ended up in a lay-by looking at the map. The sun, dormant until now behind hedgerows, climbed suddenly into the sky and drenched the car’s interior in blinding white light, so that, twisting round to look at him from the passenger seat, she could see only a glare of reflected surfaces, orange swirls and dense, aquarium shadows. Outside dragonflies bounced against the windows. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘Not far from Thorpe le Soken,’ Douglas said. He was staring at the map with what she realised was a characteristic grimace: the way at any time over the last ten years he had stared at CD players that refused to function, documents that declined to yield up their intent: peevish, momentarily affronted, but innately confident in his own resourcefulness.
They cruised on for a while through fields of green sedge, eight-foot lanes engulfed by cow parsley. The smoke from Douglas’s cigarette dribbled out of the wound-down window. In the distance grey stone rose beyond small, densely packed trees. The air was turning fresh.
‘Where did Alain get this place anyway?’
‘Some friend of his mother’s. Just for the summer while he roughs out that treatment.’
There was an edge to the way Douglas said treatment. It was his usual way of referring to friends’ accomplishments: Toby’s novel; Greg’s first night; Nick’s piece about Mrs Thatcher in the Economist.
‘Silly question, I suppose, but what are we going to do when we get there?’
‘Watch it, of course.’
‘Watch what?’
‘Have you been living on Mars for the last fortnight? The football.’
Actually, Alexandra wanted to say as they negotiated a winding gravel drive, hemmed in by lofty rhododendrons, I might just as well have been. There was a weekend colour magazine lying in the pile of detritus at her feet with a picture of Gascoigne on the front and she picked it up and looked at it with faint incredulity. Once, not long ago, she had seen him on some lunch-hour chat show and marvelled at, well, what exactly had she marvelled at? The absence of any kind of inner resource? The capitulation of everything – every question, every idea – before an overwhelming, bedrock chirpiness. He was like something out of a cartoon, she decided,
every response hypertrophied into burlesque. How could you take him seriously, what he did seriously? Even more, how could you take seriously the people who were impressed or even just interested or amused by him?
Douglas’s voice came floating through the ether. She realised guiltily, but not perhaps as guiltily as she might have done, that he’d probably been talking for a minute or more. ‘… And so Roger said that what with all the arts supplements expanding and the Independent taking on people again, there was a good, no a strong chance, that…’
The gravel drive was thinning out now into not much more than a cart track. Great clumps of rhododendrons grew close to its edge, sometimes threatening to obliterate it altogether. Tipping her sunglasses back onto the bridge of her nose, she looked upward and found only inert grey sky, a plane tracking slowly along the horizon’s edge.
‘This is the real back of beyond,’ Douglas said. He was turning faintly irritated now, she realised. ‘Where did you put those directions?’
They pressed on through the rhododendrons until finally the track swung left to meet a high flint wall. Slowly and incrementally the house took shape before them.
‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ Alexandra said. Together they contemplated the troughs and cornices of weathered, salmon-coloured brick. ‘Almost Brideshead-y.’
‘Of course,’ Douglas said seriously. ‘You have to realise that Alain could never actually afford to live somewhere like this. He can’t earn more than twenty thousand a year.’
Which is more or less what you earn, Alexandra acknowledged. Another thought struck her. ‘What’s this girlfriend of Alain’s called?’
‘Claudia… No, Candia.’
‘What does she do?’
‘I don’t know. Works for some newspaper.’ Douglas looked at his watch. He was definitely cross about something, Alexandra divined, some lingering slight not yet confided to her. ‘Come on. If we don’t get a move on we’re going to miss the opening ceremony.’
Later they had supper in a large white-walled kitchen with red tiles on the floor and a view out over rows of neatly planted apple trees. Cats came in through the open door and sat grooming themselves on the inner steps. Silent at the far end of the long oak table, Alexandra ate salade niçoise and French bread and listened to the football talk.
‘Did you see that free kick against Egypt? And then Wright’s header? Magic.’
‘And Platt’s one against Belgium? Gazza loops the ball over, he’s got his back to goal, but he just turns round and wham!’
There were times, Alexandra thought, when it was possible to believe that all this knowledgeability, all this expertise, was wholly bogus, assumed in the same way one might put on a fashionable piece of clothing. People who knew about football, she suspected – and she knew nothing, she was happy to admit that – would trip the likes of Douglas up, overturn him and leave him sprawling on a mat of exposed limitations. She wondered if this was what was making her irritated – and she was irritated, she could feel annoyance rising in her like mercury – and decided that it was not the sound of Douglas and Alain talking about football, not even the faintly absurd and self-conscious attitudes they struck while they were doing it, but the long-term memory of their lavish but somehow unfocused enthusiasms. She remembered Douglas ten years ago in a college bar or a pub in North Oxford expounding some theory about pop music, something about Pink Floyd and punk rock, and almost bit her lip at the pain it caused her, all that ghosted seriousness about something which in the last resort you had no serious interest, the attitudes of a college tutorial taken out into real life.
Glancing along the table, she stared hard at the two of them in an attempt to work out what that decade had done to them. Made them more self-possessed? Less? Physically they seemed unchanged, or rather more defined. Ten years ago they had been clever middle-class teenagers moving confidently into their twenties. Now they were clever middle-class twenty-nine-year-olds moving a little less confidently into their thirties, spending a July evening in 1990 talking about the genius of Paul Gascoigne.
There was more food arriving now, bowls of fruit and yoghurt, and the movement made her shift her gaze. Candia, Alain’s girlfriend, sat opposite and a little to one side: a plain, square girl of about twenty-five with what Alexandra had the nous to realise was a prohibitively expensive designer haircut, a kind of savagely inept Eton crop with tendrils escaping down her cheeks. Sphinx-like until now, Candia suddenly caught at something in the conversation and gave a tiny rap with her fork on the table top.
‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘You just – forgive me if I didn’t get it all – used the word aesthetic about this, this game. Now, allowing that the people playing it create something that can be described in these terms, how far do you think they’re aware of what they’re doing?’
‘What do you mean?’ Douglas asked.
‘Well, what’s his name? – Gascoigne? – scores a goal, let’s say. Now, to you watching from the stand – well, from your armchair maybe – I can see that there’s some pattern to it, some, well, architecture. But how do you think Gascoigne sees it?’
‘Pure sensation,’ Douglas said briskly. ‘If you really want to know, I see Gascoigne as a kind of human racehorse. The beauty’s all in the eye of the person beholding him. I mean, I don’t see Gascoigne articulating it in any way, do you?’
‘That might be an articulation problem, not a perception problem. Who can tell what Gascoigne thinks when he scores a goal?’
‘He’s a thick Geordie who left school at five or something. He’d probably be on the dole if he couldn’t play football. I don’t see the distinction.’
‘And yet you admire him? I mean, all this stuff he does, it’s an achievement of some kind?’
‘Of course it is. How couldn’t it be?’
‘Thanks,’ Candia said, ‘I just wanted to know.’
Listening to this exchange, which struck her – at least on Candia’s part – as angled or even premeditated in a way she could not quite comprehend, Alexandra found herself thinking of a boy in her primary school class called Gary Nichols. Coming from the middle-class end of a socially mixed collection of eight-year-olds, Alexandra had not exactly been forbidden to associate with the likes of Gary Nichols, but a certain amount of circumspection had been unobtrusively enjoined. She remembered … it would be difficult to say what she did remember. Gap teeth, certainly. An unfailing good humour in the face of what even at that age was a large amount of official asperity. Mild exhibitionistic tendencies. Chronically limited social repertoire. Oddly, Alexandra had rather liked him, even to the extent of inviting him to her ninth birthday party (he hadn’t turned up), and had regretted his eventual departure to a special school on the other side of the city. But there was no doubt about it. In her eyes, Gascoigne and Gary Nichols had been forged in the same crucible.
Moving into the sitting room she heard Douglas saying, possibly to himself but perhaps to the room at large – as if there were some doubt about his fervour which he wanted to rebuke – ‘We’ve got to win this one. We’ve just got to.’
‘Why? Why have we got to win it?’
‘It’s Germany again. Like in 1966. 1970. Surely you can see the historical significance of playing Germany. I mean, surely you can remember what you were doing that day in 1966?’
‘I burst into tears,’ Alain said seriously. ‘When Weber equalised. I threw myself on the floor and burst into tears.’
‘My dad gave me a pound,’ Douglas capped. ‘Can you imagine? A whole pound.’
‘I was five,’ Alexandra volunteered. ‘We must have been in Hong Kong. I don’t remember anything about it.’
‘1966,’ said Candia, coming in through the doorway with a tray full of coffee mugs. ‘I was in my cradle. What is it about this sporting nostalgia?’
Sitting in front of the widescreen TV, drinking coffee and smoking what Alain described as ‘some high-grade Moroccan stuff, fresh off the boat’, which Alexandra thought wa
s incredibly juvenile but still consented to go along with, she heard that there were various preliminaries – warm-ups, handshakes, loudspeaker introductions – to be got through before the match began. Somehow this annoyed her even more, on one, abstract, level because it lashed a yet more complex and many-layered wrapper around the meagre kernel of these twenty-two hooligans kicking their ball about; more immediately because it gave Alain and Douglas a chance to proceed from the Football Talk and its lesser variant the Football Nostalgia Talk to what Alexandra always thought of as the Absent Friends Talk. Leaning back in her chair, watching the line of haggard, crop-haired men in white shirts being presented to a fat person in a blazer, she listened dreamily to the familiar fragments of rumour and disparagement.
‘… Got fifteen thousand from Chatto & Windus, but Peter says he doesn’t think he’ll ever finish it.’
‘Peter said that? If it was Peter he wouldn’t even start it.’
‘… When I last saw him he said the Statesman had stopped running his strip because they thought it was too depressing.’