Birthday (11 page)

Arthur was too fed up to guess, unless to suggest a one way ticket to a less boring country on the other side of the world, where he could stay for good. ‘No, I don't.'

‘I'd buy as much dynamite as I could get my hands on and blow up the Houses of Parliament. Blow all them government fuckpigs to bits. They just fuck everything up, the bone idle lot.'

Arthur wondered what he had done to deserve such a son, whom he'd taken fishing up the canal as a child on the crossbar of his bike, nothing Harold liked better when he had his own little rod and line. He would drive him to all the choice spots in the county, from Cresswell Crags to Hickling Pastures, proud that by eight he could read a map and navigate. At the first mention of hunger he stopped at the nearest café for cakes and a bottle of pop. He bought him an air rifle, books about cars and aeroplanes, even an electric guitar, but on splitting up with Doreen he had lost sight of him for ten years.

‘Anyway, why the fuck should I work? What's in it for me? You slog your bollocks off day after boring day, and get a miserable few quid at the end of the week. So what? It ain't worth it. In any case there's plenty of other mugs to do the work, so I can't feel guilty.'

Something had gone wrong with Harold in his twenties, but Arthur didn't blame himself: it would have happened whether he'd stayed with Doreen or not. True, he had spoiled him rotten, but it was heartbreaking to recall how they used to be so friendly. He had given him more than he'd ever had, which should have made him willing to work and settle down. So what had gone wrong?

Harold's tea was getting cold, and Arthur knew that as a young man he would have sent it down scalding and been waiting for another. He watched him break up the biscuits without eating, so he wasn't hungry, didn't deserve one never mind twenty pounds. He's idle like a lot of blokes these days, who rely on giros not to go looking for work, and aren't interested unless they're offered a job for five hundred pounds a week, or there's a vacancy for a pop star.

It wasn't easy to get work, he knew. When he left school you picked a job from scores of others, and if you didn't like it after a week could tell the gaffer where to stick it, then get another. Not that he had. He'd stayed at the bike factory more than ten years, though often enough thought of packing it in. ‘And if you blew everybody up in Parliament things would be just the same when the dust settled.'

Harold laughed. ‘I know, but I'd feel a lot better, wouldn't I?'

‘For five minutes you would. You think it hasn't been hard for all of us?'

‘On no!' He lay full length along the sofa. ‘Please don't start telling me how much you suffered as a kid, when you only had a donkey's foreskin between the seven of you for Sunday dinner, and one pair of shoes in the family so's you could only go out one at a time when it was snowing. I don't want to get tears all over your nice new sofa. I just couldn't bear hearing about when your dad was on the dole and knocked you about. I've had to listen to such fucking rubbish all my life, and I'm fed up to here with it.'

He stabbed two fingers viciously at his throat, and Arthur regretted they hadn't got steel points at the ends. He knew that if he didn't give him any money he would get it from somebody, being good looking and charming when he wanted. He also had a swaggering self-confidence, as if spoiling him as a kid had actually done him some good, but at the worst of times he looked like Grandfather Merton down on his luck, though Merton would have kicked him from arsehole to breakfast time as soon as look at him.

You didn't know what to think. Last year he and Avril had gone down town for her birthday, thinking to have a drink in the Royal Children. From the doorway they saw Harold with two attractive women, the three of them as close as if he was planning to have one one night and the other the next, or maybe both at the same time. Harold was startled at seeing his father, in no way wanting to be disturbed, so they left him to his love talk, and had their drink in the Trip to Jerusalem.

Harold usually had some woman to sponge off, who might be married or not, though Arthur couldn't fault him for that. He probably didn't need twenty quid anyway, and had only called to play his favourite game of winding the old man up. When Avril came in from the kitchen he sat up and smiled. ‘Hello, duck, I wondered when you were going to come in again and sit by my side.'

‘You've let your tea get cold,' she said. ‘And look what you've done with those biscuits. You've crumpled them all up. That wasn't very nice.'

‘I'm sorry, love. I was so busy listening to dear old dad. He nearly had me sobbing my socks off again about the bad old days. I was hoping you'd come back in and save me. He's not very glad to see me. All I want though is to say how marvellous you look today. But then, you always do.'

‘Listen to him! I never know how to take all those things he says.'

‘I'll put my boot in your big mouth if you don't shut your rattle.' Arthur's fist was twitching to be given flight. ‘Just see if I don't.'

The silence frightened Harold. ‘I was only trying to be sociable.'

‘Try somewhere else.'

Avril, as usual, diverted them from their antipathy. ‘If you don't stop annoying Arthur I won't make you another cup of tea. But drink it while it's hot. And eat those biscuits, or you'll have me to answer to.'

Harold went to the window. ‘I've been thinking things over.'

Arthur grunted. ‘Not again.'

‘I have, though. I'm going to get a haircut, and take this earring off. I'll even buy myself a proper shirt, and a suit.'

‘You'll look even more handsome,' Avril said.

‘I want to change my life.' He waved off her compliment. ‘I'm fed up with being the way I am.' When biscuits were finished, and swilled down with tea, he stood tall in stretching himself, the same way as Arthur a few minutes earlier, showing them as so physically alike that Avril added: ‘I'm sure you can change yourself if you want to.'

‘I will. You'll see. It's the boredom that's killing me. And I'm tired of being like this. I'm just not myself, so things have got to alter. I want to stop relying on other people, as well. That's why I want twenty quid, just to start me off.'

She was too soft on him, and however much Arthur argued against it, it made little difference. Harold went whistling down the street. ‘Poor chap,' she said. ‘He told me on his way back from the bathroom that he didn't have a penny to his name, so I couldn't see him without the price of a glass of beer.'

Ten years ago she had been left a few thousand pounds by an aunt, and Arthur never asked how much. She kept it in a building society, and used the interest for a holiday now and again. What she gave Harold would come out of that. ‘You give in to him every time.'

‘Yes, but he is your son, you know.'

‘I'm not so sure about that.'

‘I am. I've never seen two people so alike, allowing for the difference of age. It amazes me every time I see the two of you together. He looks just like you when I first met you.'

Which seemed, if anything, to please him. ‘It's the way he carries on, but he's a lot different to me on the inside. And the trouble with giving him money is he might spend it on drugs. That's what frightens me.'

‘He won't get much on twenty pounds. Anyway, he doesn't need drugs to keep his spirits up. And you heard what he said about changing the way he looks. I think he means it.'

‘We'll see about that.' He stood, bereft for a moment, as if missing hard work at the factory. ‘I've always loved him, and he knows it. I just hope he don't get on drugs.'

‘I can't think he's ever taken more than a puff or two of marijuana, if that.'

‘I've never even swallowed an aspro,' he said.

‘That's because you're hopped up all the time.'

He drew her close for a kiss. ‘I must have been stoned out of my mind when I first made a grab at you.'

‘You mean just after you backed into my front bumper at the supermarket?'

‘It was the only thing I could do. I saw this smashing young woman in my mirror, and got a hard on, so it made me clumsy. You didn't half tell me off.'

‘You dented my lovely new car, that's why.'

‘I'd never heard such language. I thought you were going to rip my eyes out.'

‘There was no other way to get through to you. You just stood there.'

‘Then I bought you a cup of coffee.'

‘And you kept trying to hold my hand.'

‘It was only to steady my nerves.'

‘I was glad you did. My hands were freezing, and yours were burning hot.'

He looked at the framed photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in its frame on the wall, the famous engineer crowned by a stovepipe hat and standing against a heap of enormous chainlinks. ‘I got your bumper off next day, and took it to the factory. Hammered it as good as new. Good job I'd done some panel beating in my time. But I still like nudging into your front bumpers.'

‘You aren't doing badly just now.'

‘It's only because I love you.'

‘If I didn't know that I wouldn't know anything, would I?'

‘That's what I like to hear.'

‘Oh, I'll always say that to you.'

‘You mean you tell lies sometimes?'

‘Not these days I don't, but I've never lied to you. I only lied to stop people getting hurt, though it didn't do me much good. Or them, either.'

Talk flowed with an ease he hadn't thought possible with someone so long lived with. After six months – and he supposed it had been as much his fault as hers – he and Doreen had fallen into a putrid trap of resentment and animosity, the first words on whatever matter fuelling them into days of unspoken dislike.

At first Avril hadn't appeared to be his sort at all, though she was no less attractive for that, but she had confidence in all she said, which made her so easygoing that they soon got to know each other as much as two people ever could. Nothing spoken was given too much importance, and there was no need to worry about what might be hidden between their words.

Her years as a catering manageress had taught her how to deal with people, but since being made redundant she did dressmaking, studied botany and bird recognition, and was learning to read music, which told him more about her than if she hadn't had such hobbies.

He used to joke that marrying him had brought her down in the world, to which she replied that since they loved each other what could it matter, providing of course that he came up a few steps to meet her now and again, though not right to her level, because then they would have nothing to argue about, and she would see no reason to laugh at his stories. ‘On the other hand I don't think I ever have told a lie. At least I can't remember when I did.'

‘You must have done, once.'

‘I could never be bothered.' She lit a cigarette. ‘Nobody's worth lying to. You have to hate somebody, to lie to them. Or be frightened by them.'

He'd always thought that everybody lied, that lying was a way of getting what you wanted, or of survival in a perilous situation, or even as a means of entertainment. Life would be dull if people didn't lie.

‘Mind you,' she said mischievously, ‘there are lies, and lies. You tell lies to make me laugh when you want to cheer me up, or when you've got nothing to say and can't bear to stay quiet. I sometimes think you ought to have been an actor. You'd have been good on the stage.'

He growled into her ear. ‘I'd have played Frankenstein, or Dracula. When I tried it in Sunday School they threw me out because I frightened the other kids to death. I'll tell you about it sometime.'

‘I couldn't act to save my life,' she laughed. ‘That's why I've never been one for telling lies. I don't feel threatened enough, not by you anyway. And it's unnecessary to lie to somebody if you love them.'

‘Now you tell me,' he said. You never knew what a woman was thinking, no more than she could tell what was in your mind, but to Avril it didn't matter, and there was no need for either to fish for each other's thoughts. They talked about whatever was in their minds and in his better moods he knew he had been waiting nearly half his life to meet her. ‘The sun's come out, so let's have a look at the garden, before it goes back in again.'

SEVEN

When Derek mounted the steps of The Crossbow for a better view the sweet and playful air seemed to promise eternal life. Beyond the bungalows and council houses stood the grey tower blocks of the tobacco warehouse. Then, as far as the crest – where in the old days a mass of small dwellings with their smoking chimneys had lapped up the hillside like a hurriedly made rug – came the dragons' teeth of highrise hencoops nobody had ever wanted to live in. ‘The street where I grew up has been bulldozed.'

To see him so assiduously reconnoitring the landscape made Eileen think of the verses in the Bible she had read aloud at the Sunday School her father had sent all his kids to. No one who went into the terrain Derek looked at would come back with a bunch of grapes hanging from a stick and say it was the Promised Land, though it was all they had and couldn't be liked any the less for that. ‘The house I was brought up in's gone as well.'

He came down to join her, touched the back of her neck with affection. ‘We got here early.'

‘We always do, but it's better than being late, and I don't mind waiting on an evening like this.'

People were going up the wooden steps to the lower floor of the pub, but he and Eileen sauntered around the large car park bordered by bushes and trees of what had once been a triangle of dense jungle between road railway and canal. In the days before the pub was built Arthur, after coming out of the army with a pair of heavy duty wirecutters, scorned warning notices and boundary fences. Infantry training had taught him to move across terrain without being seen (a childhood skill, in any case) lumbered with fishing tackle, a knapsack of food and drink, and often a bicycle. He ensconced himself where the fishes bit, in spite of juddering trains and the noise of motor traffic.