England and Other Stories (21 page)

But he kicked it as if to save them the trouble. He kicked it even when it was beaten. He didn’t care about its owner, who must be somewhere. The owner of a dog like this wouldn’t, or couldn’t, entrust it to a dog-walker, and the owner of a dog like this would only own it in order to feel a vicarious power. Yes, that was why people had dogs (he’d never had one), in order to have the illusion of mastery and control.

It was all split-second stuff, but he kicked it more than once, enough for him to imagine that when people later discussed his daring action they might add, ‘But did you see the way he kicked it?’ Enough for him to think (and this was perhaps what made him stop): What would Lucy think, of her father furiously kicking a dog? Would she grow up with this whole scene indelibly imprinted on her? Her first and enduringly scarring memory of her daddy.

But of course it was for
her
that he’d done it, it was because the child in the buggy might so easily have been—

Lucy in fact, he realised, was bawling, screaming. Some well-meaning bystander was seeking to comfort her. Other buggy-bound infants were also in a state of howling terror, or else of white-faced shock, at what had happened to another of their kind, and thus at what could happen—it was plainly possible—to them. Lucy wasn’t concerned with the gallant actions of her father, she was concerned with her own appalling vulnerability, and she was particularly concerned with the fact that her father had taken his hands off the buggy, thus abandoning her to such horror.

He quickly went to her, to place his hands back on the handles, and almost at once, as if some electric current of safety and assurance, or of something deeper, had passed between them, she was calm again, she was almost her untroubled self again.

‘It’s okay, Lucy, everything’s okay. I’m here.’

In a matter of moments she even began a subdued, speculative version of her customary burbling, as if this encounter with a dog, from which her father had come off visibly discomposed (he realised he was shaking a bit), was already moving out of her mental compass. She seemed, in mere seconds, almost to have forgotten it—never mind bearing the image of it for the rest of her life. Her father, wrestling with a dog! This rapid shift both relieved him and disappointed him.

‘It’s okay. Everything’s okay.’

They had to hang around for some time while the matter was dealt with—while a parks policeman (so parks policemen had a purpose) arrived and notes were taken and calls made, and while he tried not to listen to comments being uttered about him. ‘He was amazing . . . Just think what might have happened, if he hadn’t . . . Just think what might have happened—you know—to that little kid . . .’

He could have done without it all. He had never in all his fifty-six years heard himself being called amazing, but he could have done without it. All the while he kept his hands very tightly on the buggy handles, except when he stooped to pat and stroke Lucy’s head. His place was with Lucy. He wasn’t even interested, now, in the poor child he’d rescued—had he been told its name?—whose life he’d quite possibly saved. That wasn’t so far-fetched. It wasn’t every day that you, possibly, saved a child’s life.

He wasn’t interested in the sudden paean he was getting—distress turning to relief and almost hysterical gratitude—from the child’s mother. ‘How can we ever thank you enough? How can we ever repay you?’ That sort of thing. He actually wanted to say, ‘Control yourself, woman.’ He said, ‘It was nothing.’ He wasn’t interested in his own patent prowess. He’d moved like lightning. Younger men around him—twenty-eight-year-olds!—had stood rooted to the spot. He didn’t have any of these feelings.

And he wasn’t interested in the dog, least of all. He knew it was done for.

He wanted to get away. He wanted just to be pushing Lucy again. There was no question now of spending any time with her in the play area, where all activity seemed suspended anyway. He knew that she wouldn’t feel let down by this. It was the buggy ride that mattered.

Eventually, with anxious looks at his watch, he excused himself and edged away. He had his own child to look after—clearly. Her mother would be wondering. No one seemed surprised that he said ‘child’ not ‘grandchild’. It wasn’t a rare phenomenon. And anyway he’d just behaved with the speed and agility, not to say sheer ferocity, of someone half his age.

He pushed Lucy back the way they’d come, alone with her again and totally in love with her, listening to her burblings resume their joyful commentary. It was as if nothing had happened. He very much wanted it to be as if nothing had happened. He envied his daughter’s eclipsing amnesia. He didn’t want to tell Julia about any of this. He looked at his watch again. Allowing for the time they might otherwise have spent at the play area, they wouldn’t be unduly late back, so he need say nothing.

But of course word about the incident, in which he’d played such a central and dramatic role, was bound to get around to Julia, and pretty quickly, through the local grapevine. And there was the simple obvious fact that he himself bore the immediate evidence of something. Though his hands were firmly guiding the buggy he knew he was still shaking, he was shaking in fact quite a lot. He needed to grip the handles to stop it. There was a big streak of mud down one of his trouser legs, there was a tear at one knee, and if his face and hands seemed, remarkably, to have come away unscathed, his jacket was in several places snagged if not actually torn. That was all right. You could replace clothes, with some money. He hadn’t wanted any money from that child’s mother, though she’d offered it, she’d offered to replace his entire wardrobe. She was blonde and totally at his service. It seemed that she might offer him anything.

You could replace a jacket. But the claw marks themselves—yes they were actually claw marks—and his general appearance of having been in some fight, of being a bit of a walking catastrophe, he hadn’t the slightest idea how he was going to explain away these things to Julia.

H
E PUSHED THE
trolley round the end of the aisle, ignoring the stacks of boxed mince pies.

It would be Christmas Day in just over two weeks’ time, but he and Jenny had already agreed, without really talking about it, to abolish Christmas. They couldn’t go through with it. The calendar would be different this year. Remembrance Day had come and gone, but it would be Remembrance Day on Christmas Day. Even that was going to be terrible.

On Remembrance Day itself they’d adopted, without ever talking about it either, a sort of double position, both to mark it and to ignore it, they couldn’t work out which way their superstition should go. But he remembered now—how could he forget?—coming here about a month ago. It was just days before Remembrance Day. The clocks had gone back, it was dark outside. He remembered pushing the trolley then.

How he wished it was still then.

There’d been little boxes of poppies, with plastic jars for coins, by the entrance. He’d wondered whether to buy one. Yet another one. Whether to tip in all his change. But the bigger thing, already, was Christmas. Christmas stuff, Christmas offers. It was Christmas before it was even Remembrance Day. A sudden wave of anger had hit him. It had been Halloween less than a fortnight before. The shops had been full of pumpkins and skeletons.

No one saw his anger, it stayed inside. He wasn’t even sure if it was anger exactly. He’d pushed the trolley in the normal way, his list stuck in one hand, his mobile in his top pocket in case of problems.

‘Shop patrol to base. No fresh ginger, Jen. What do you reckon?’

That sort of problem.

He did the weekly supermarket run—his duty, or his regular volunteering—and for several months now not a time had passed when he didn’t think: And what are Doug’s little problems right now? His tricky two-for-one choices?

He’d never forget how his mobile had rung—right here in the rice and pasta aisle—and it had been Doug. In Afghanistan, in Helmand. That sort of thing was possible now.

He was talking to Doug. And Doug had phoned
him
. So he couldn’t say, ‘I’ll get your mum.’ (Why did he always say that anyway?) Doug had phoned
his
number.

Shit—was it something bad? Was it something he should know first?

‘I’m in Waitrose, Doug. By the pasta. Doug! Doug! How’s it going?’

What a stupid way of putting it: ‘How’s it going?’

But Doug had wanted to know all about his shopping list. He’d seemed tickled by the picture of his father pushing a trolley, holding his list, dithering by the shelves. And while Doug was so keen on the situation in Waitrose, he hadn’t wanted to ask his son about the situation in Afghanistan. His anger, if that’s what it was, had dropped away.

‘You should stick with dried, Dad. Fresh is a scam.’ Doug had said this in Helmand. ‘Try the fusilli for a change. The little curly ones.’

A November evening, days before Remembrance Day. But Christmas was coming apparently. Doug had called from Helmand.

He couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t not think about it. He could hardly enter Waitrose again. It was almost impossible to go now—though he had to—to the spot, in the aisle, where it had happened. Where he’d spoken to Doug and looked around at all the others with their trolleys and baskets and thought: They don’t know, they don’t know I’m talking to my boy in Afghanistan.

He and Jenny would never eat fusilli again, that was for sure, they’d never eat those things again.

And had it been anger, just before Doug called? Anger was sometimes supposed to be a substitute for fear, so they said. Or grief. Had that surge of anger, or whatever it was, been some sort of advance warning? If he hadn’t had it, if he hadn’t got angry, then would nothing have happened? But then if he hadn’t had it, would Doug have called, just then?

Everything, now, was a matter of mocking superstition.

But Christmas before Remembrance Day! And now it was almost really Christmas. The aisles were crammed and glistening with it. He couldn’t bear it. The only good thing was not to think. The only good thing was to ignore, ignore. But he couldn’t.

He pushed the trolley. He couldn’t even bear to think of Jenny. Maybe she took the opportunity while he did these supermarket trips just to sit with her head in her hands, tears trickling between her fingers.

He couldn’t bear to think of calling her to ask, like he used to, about the rice. ‘What sort, Jen? Regular? Basmati?’ Such things. It couldn’t be done, it just couldn’t be done any more. Their little foodie fads, their fancy cooking. Their being nice to themselves and splashing out—Waitrose not Tesco’s—now the lad had left home.

Puy lentils, Thai green sauce. That sort of shit.

He couldn’t bear to think about how thinking about Jenny only half a mile away was the same as thinking about Doug three thousand miles away. He wasn’t here, he was there, but you could talk, just the same, on the phone. Now the simple words ‘here’ and ‘there’ confused him utterly. Doug wasn’t here, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t
there
at all.

Or—and this is where it got really terrible—Doug
was
there. Doug was in a mortuary in Swindon, pending a coroner’s decision. They couldn’t have Doug yet. It was pretty clear now that they couldn’t have Doug before Christmas, maybe even for some time after Christmas. All they wanted for Christmas was Doug. But Doug would be spending Christmas in a mortuary in Swindon. And anyway Christmas wouldn’t happen this year.

‘Christmas is coming.’ He remembered when he was a kid how the words had excited him almost more than the word Christmas itself, the idea that it was on its way. At Christmas, or when it was coming, you made lists, you dropped hints. He wanted to remember now—but at the same time didn’t want to remember—every present they’d ever bought Doug for Christmas, every one.

Had they ever bought him any kind of toy gun? If they had, then it could have been another of those signals, those things that become real. So they must have done. If only they hadn’t. Or if only Doug had been a girl. If so he’d have been called Natalie and the list of presents would have been different.

He tried to think, while trying not to think, of all the presents. But it wasn’t so hard to remember being the man, in years gone by, in the days when Christmas was coming, looking for a gift to give his son. Not to remember being that man was the harder thing.

Fifteen, twenty years ago. Wars on TV. But there were soldiers to do all that stuff, and he’d never thought it was wrong or unmanly of him to be traipsing round Mothercare with Jenny and Doug—‘Dougie in his buggy’—while there were wars going on. He felt it was the right thing to be doing. And it had never occurred to either of them that one day Doug would get it into his head . . .

‘Stick with dried, Dad.’

Why had he been so interested in pasta? Was that what they got out there? Dried stuff. Not stuff in tins. Pasta, all the varieties. Had it been a soldier’s advice?

Before him suddenly was one of those floundering young mums with a loaded trolley, two small kids swinging from the sides, using it as a jumping-off point for marauding charges up and down the aisle.

Nothing, once, on these shopping trips used to get his goat more than these bawling little bastards, these kids their mums or dads seemed unable to restrain, Doug never having been a noisy, out-of-control child. He’d been proud of that. He’d been proud of his soldier-son too. But now these screaming brats in front of him simply made him stand stock-still. They were kids. There was their mother. They were, all of them, both there and here. The kids were only doing what kids do. He looked at the mother’s strained, about-to-burst face. He thought: She doesn’t know how lucky she is. He wanted to look hard at her, to catch her eye, so she would see something in his.

But beyond her was the pasta section. He couldn’t go there. He had to go there. They were out of pasta, he’d checked. They weren’t interested in food any more, but they had to eat. They were out of even basics now: pasta, rice. Fuck mince pies.

He’d told Jenny, of course, about the phone call, of course he had. Should he have kept it a secret? It was why they’d eaten the things, that same evening—with a tomato, garlic and basil sauce. A bottle of Sicilian red. They’d been Doug’s ‘choice’. They’d never eat the fucking things again.