Damascus (2 page)

‘Not today, darling.'

Hazel's Mum smoothes Hazel's hair. She finds it desperately sad that children in general, but her own daughters in particular, must one day find out how vulnerable they are. She reads her newspaper every morning and the growing number of hazards to be avoided constantly horrifies her. Left to itself on any normal day, like today for example, life can deliver meningitis or a mugging or murder, a car crash or a cliff-top fall or kidnap. Every single day it seems as if there is someone mad and reckless and dangerous, out there somewhere, which is why Mrs Burns considers it her duty as a good parent to teach both her children, little by little, how easily things can go wrong.

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
06:48

William Welsby inched open the door of his shed. He peered carefully out at the vegetable garden. As far as he could tell the unrashed daylight was doing its usual job clearing up the grey mess of dawn. It was overcast and rain looked likely, but he couldn't be discouraged by that. In fact it seemed altogether an excellent day for changing his life.

He pushed the door wide open and filled his lungs with the morning. As of today, according to the newspaper he read, William Welsby was a new and changed man because overnight, through no great effort of his own, he'd become a citizen of the European Union. In honour of this occasion he'd searched out his special-occasion clothes, which were the same as his normal clothes, only cleaner: white shirt, black braces, black trousers. He checked the shine on his German army boots, and then pinched himself on the upper arm. Then he punched himself on the jaw, though not very hard.

‘A pinch and a punch,' he said, ‘first day of the month.'

He stepped down into the garden from the raised floor of the shed, lost his footing and nearly fell. As he steadied himself, it started to rain. He ignored it, just as he ignored the low-level noise of traffic from beyond the walls, and wondered whether moving to Europe would have made any overnight difference to Georgi Markov. William listened closely, recognised the song of a mistle thrush and then, exactly on schedule, the morning warble of Georgi Markov, a Siberian robin who should have been half-way to Asia. Instead, he'd decided to stop over in the garden's only mulberry tree, and William habitually made a point of wishing him good morning. He vowed to continue doing this no matter how dramatically, after today, his life might change for the better.

He stepped back into the shed, found a mirror, and tried to flatten his wiry grey hair. The rain should have helped but it didn't, and William's hair refused to be flattened. Giving up, he then manoeuvred himself past a shoulder-high stack of yellow plastic buckets, and leant to inspect a potted plant in its specially reserved place on an upturned box beside the bed. This flowerless shrub was William's ambitious attempt to cross a pimento plant with a tomato plant, supposed eventually to create a sweet though spicy fruit he would call a tomento. He crumbled one of the small leaves between his fingers. Once he'd developed it, perfected it, and found someone to buy it, the tomento was going to make him a fortune.

First of all though, he had to re-learn the under-rated skill of going outside. This meant beyond the garden, beyond the house, and out into the London streets. Today was the day.

He'd successfully turned into a European, overnight, and with a bit of luck maybe other changes could be made just as easily. Because despite being nearer sixty than fifty, William still refused to accept the jowly conclusion that he wasn't a lucky man. There was no obvious reason why unexpected but brilliant things shouldn't happen to him, like they did to his brother. No particular reason why, on this special day, he shouldn't rise to the challenge of going outside.

This would actually be the third time he'd tried it in the last month, on each occasion hoping there was still something of Britain left to be seen. With hindsight, he now blamed his earlier failures on errors of timing. For the first attempt he'd studied the newspaper in advance for a day of sufficient significance to inspire him, and eventually settled on the 96th anniversary of the poet Edmund Blunden's birth. When this didn't work he tried to be more spontaneous, and his second attempt was an impulse decision on the day
Mr Confusion
won the two-thirty at Newcastle. Now he was back to his original theory, believing that certain days were special, and marked out for special deeds like his. He'd therefore waited attentively for a day of greater significance than Edmund Blunden's birthday, and the newspaper had been in no doubt that the beginning of Europe was it.

William looked at his watch. Spencer would be making breakfast in the kitchen, the table already laid and
The Times
in its usual place between the knives. The teapot and the mugs would be arranged in a diagonal across the table, just as they always were, and Spencer might be wearing his apron which said
If you don't like it write to the Queen
.

William hoped it was kippers. He closed his eyes and said a little prayer for kippers, and then pulling on his black jacket he peered into the top bucket of the yellow stack. It was half-full of water and three small goldfish turning slow circuits, one after the other. Another day and all still alive, and if there was one thing which could be said in favour of fish, William always thought, it was that at least they weren't horses.

Behind the buckets was the beginning of the disordered jumble which filled up the rest of the shed. William reached in and rustled around for a plastic bag. He rejected the first one he found because it had holes in the bottom to stop children from suffocating. He wanted one of the old-fashioned child-killer type bags, with no holes in it, and eventually he found a white one with a Union Jack printed on either side. He dipped his hand back in and this time came up with an orange plastic sandcastle mould, which he used to scoop a fish out of the bucket. He then emptied the fish into the plastic bag, along with a generous amount of water.

Checking the bag didn't leak, he took it with him as he stepped carefully down from the shed, this time without stumbling. It had stopped raining. He closed the shed door and set out along the wet and winding path towards the house. November and a gloss of rain had turned the last leaves on the chestnut trees a rich ochreous yellow. The hornbeams added a different tint, more like lemon. It was like living in a park, William thought, only better than that because no-one came to move you on or spray you with graffiti as you slept. As he scuffed across the damp grass of the lowest of the terraced lawns, William had his first view of the top half of the columns of the colonnaded dining room.

He hoped it was kippers.

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Bath or Hartlepool or Londonderry or Yarmouth, in Haverfordwest or Tunbridge Wells or Stirling or Grimsby, Mr Kelly, warehouseman, asks his son Spencer how much a footballer can make in a week.

Mr Kelly and two of his three children, Spencer (10) and Rachel (8), are standing in the goalmouth of a football pitch in the middle of a municipal sports field. Spencer is wearing a replica Coventry City, Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers, Queens Park Rangers, Southampton football shirt with the number 10 on the back, and Rachel is wearing the same, but with the number 8. Mr Kelly is wearing his work clothes.

Spencer clutches the white football high up on his chest and looks across at Rachel, who says:

‘Average transfer fee, about 2.75 million, for a midfielder.'

Rachel's hair, which could be blonde if it was longer, is cut even shorter than Spencer's.

‘The answer,' Mr Kelly says, as he paces out the boundaries of their pitch, ‘is lots. Bucket-loads. But you have to be strong. You have to be robust. What do you have to be, Spencer?'

‘He has to be robust,' Rachel says, grabbing the ball. She drops it and starts dribbling expertly across the six-yard box, and her legs look just right, slim and strong. She wears her football shirt outside her white, black, blue, green shorts. Spencer's legs are thin and very pale.

Mr Kelly finishes marking out the pitch, determined to prove that Spencer is made of sterner stuff than his brother Philip (13), who because God is cruel to men like Mr Kelly (Mr Kelly thinks), has turned out to be a great wet wimp. Philip likes to read books and newspapers, and always lets a frightening story frighten him. This is his morbid imagination, according to his mother, and Mr Kelly wouldn't mind knowing where it came from. Not from his mother, anyway. Philip is so old, nearly fourteen, that Spencer rarely thinks about him. Instead, he watches the way Rachel runs, is proud of the way her body-swerve bamboozles imaginary full-backs.

‘Last to touch the posts is goalie,' says Spencer's Dad, and touches the post which is right beside him. From the middle of the penalty area Spencer runs as fast as he can, enjoying himself and trying hard but not, in fact, going very fast. Rachel calmly cruises past him. She touches both posts and then starts laughing, making champion fists beside her ears. Catching her breath, she leans her hands on her narrow knees, which are bent inwards slightly. She looks up at Spencer and smiles brightly and in that moment Spencer sees clearly that everything, always, is going to be alright. There is no need to worry because it all turns out just fine.

‘I'll be Argentina,' Rachel says, and dribbles the ball to the edge of the area, turns, flips the ball up for a volley, then flights a beautifully weighted cross to the far post. Mr Kelly meets it with a powerful header which leaves Spencer stranded. There is no net in the goal and the ball stops rolling somewhere half-way down the next pitch. Mr Kelly sighs and tells Spencer to leave it where it is. After a moment of hands-on-hips and significant head-shaking, he fetches a rugby ball and tosses it to Spencer, who drops it but then quickly picks it up again.

‘I'm the Australian defence,' Mr Kelly says, bending his knees and leaning forward. ‘You and Rachel have to get past me and score a try. But remember, no pansying about. This is rugby league, and there's good money to be earned.'

Spencer passes the ball to Rachel who shoots out of the blocks and beats Mr Kelly with an incisive left-right sidestep. She dives and touches down, all smiles.

‘Give Spencer a go.'

Spencer takes the ball, and shadowed by his father he runs in a long curve first one way and then the other, but without actually making any forward progress. Eventually he slips in a pool of mud and falls on his bum. He laughs, and Mr Kelly ponders, not for the first time, whether these days babies still get swapped at birth. Is it too late to take Spencer back?

‘Rely on your natural talent,' Mr Kelly says. ‘Get past me once and you'll never look back.'

Spencer stands up. Rachel flattens him with a tackle and steals the ball and scores another try.

Mr Kelly sighs and fetches a cricket bat and a tennis ball.

Rachel bats first, Mr Kelly bowls, Spencer fields. Rachel scores a brisk 37 off 35 balls. Then she retires and it's Spencer's turn to bat but he claims an injury sustained in the outfield: a damaged rib cartilage or a groin strain or severe concussion. It starts to rain. Mr Kelly looks up at the grey heavens, and follows the smooth flight of a seagull before squatting down to put his hands on Spencer's shoulders. He looks his second son directly in the eye.

‘Do you
want
to grow up to be a warehouseman? Is that it?'

Spencer looks at his feet and kicks at the grass.

‘Come on, son,' Mr Kelly says, ‘there must be something you're good at.'

Rachel looks up at the gathering cloud, and holds out a hand to catch the early rain. She makes a suggestion, only trying to help:

‘Swimming?'