Jammy Dodger (15 page)

An accountant by training, he had moved into business in his late forties, opening a couple of sportsgear outlets just as the government began building leisure centres all over the place in a bid to divert young people away from violence. Now he had his own chain, including two sports superstores, and could swing his clubs every day of the week if he wanted, which he didn't because he didn't trust anyone else to run his empire, not even my brother Fenton, who was in charge of a few of the smaller shops. (I wouldn't trust Fenton either.)

My mother, who had worked in a bank before she was married, played a significant part in setting up the sportsgear business, stepping down once it was established to concentrate on her passion, gardening, and to devote herself to attending charity fundraisers. (She was much more outgoing than my father and in several quarters her pledged attendance at a social event was considered crucial to the planning process.) Eventually though, none of this was enough to engage all of her scattered energies and she opened a shop of her own in the village, selling gratuitous gew-gaws at hilarious prices to people who already had too much. It was an instant success.

I hung the blazer back in the wardrobe and closed the doors. The dialogue in the courtyard, which had eased to a low grumble, now rose sharply with a yelp of genuine pain from my father.

‘God's Teeth woman, what the hell are you doing?'

‘Keep still you silly man, it's going everywhere …'

‘Owwww … It stings like buggery!'

‘For Godsake it's only liniment. Anyway, how would you know?'

‘What? I've read reports. Owww, it burns!'

‘It'll stop in a minute and then you'll feel better. Sit down there.'

I looked out. My father, his shirt pulled up and his shorts low on his buttocks, was perched on a bench with his back to the house, my mother standing beside him, stroking his hair. She was murmuring something to him. Then he said something and they both laughed and she put her arm around his neck. The pose reminded me momentarily of a photograph that hung in their bedroom: a black-and-white seaside snap from the year they got married – him in shirtsleeves, strong, engaging the lens with easy assurance; his new wife gazing past the camera, her hair blown back, tilting her face to the warm breeze as though it were the future itself. (What is it with these freeze-frames? These postcards from the past? Why do they break the heart so?) More laughter rose from the courtyard. They seemed content enough, the pair of them down there in the sunshine, looking about them at the stone walls and the big solid house, with its mortgage paid off.

Neither of my parents had grown up with money. My mother came from farming stock – strict Presbyterians who believed in hard work, abstinence, and the redemptive power of hessian underwear, and while she had to a large degree managed to out-run her upbringing, part of her would, I sensed – for all her adult worldliness and agnosticism – always expect to answer to the Lord in the final hour, in the spiritual equivalent of a deserted, rough-hewn kirk on a storm-whipped headland.

Her husband, meanwhile, whose Huguenot ancestors had fully understood the value of transportable skills, had emerged from a long line of smiths: ironsmiths, silversmiths, woodsmiths. After the war his father had become a cabinetmaker, second generation, and shaved out a living patently incommensurate with his craftsmanship – an imbalance that wasn't lost on my own father, who secured a university place and from there a snug berth in the world of numerical drudgery.

Needless to say, they found me utterly baffling. Neither of them was able, for the life of them, to work out where ‘the pay-off' was, in what they referred to as, ‘the poetry business'. My father, especially, had little time for things lyrical, nodding along tolerantly if the topic ever came up before clapping his hands to signify that enough was enough and trotting out Groucho Marx's quip about how the poem that begins
Thirty days hath September
was his favourite – because it actually tells you something.

My mother was more indulgent of my artistic interests and would occasionally even show support by reciting verses she had been forced to learn at school – usually Wordsworth's
Daffodils
or
The Fairies
by William Allingham. Even so, I think she still hoped I would somehow grow out of it. I caught her sometimes looking at me in the same way as she might regard a plant whose flowers had turned out a different colour to the one advertised on the seed packet.

 

*

 

At dinner that evening around the kitchen table, inevitably, the subject of me and my future came up. I braced for the customary probings, inferences and freighted silences.

‘So Arthur,' my father began as we passed the baked potatoes around. ‘How's the poetry going?'

I bought myself a moment by pouring a glass of Mateus Rose.

‘Oh, you know … flourishing. What did Goethe say?
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry and see a fine picture every day so that –
how does it go? –
so worldly cares don't obliterate the sense of the beautiful that God has implanted in the human soul
.'

‘What?'

‘Oh, nothing.'

No one spoke. I looked up from my buttering operation. They wanted more.

‘Yes, we put out a very good issue of the magazine a couple of months back and we're due another in September. It's very popular.'

My father mis-swallowed.

‘Really?' he squeaked, reaching for his wine.

‘Oh yes,' I said. ‘It's definitely, well … certainly in the top five arts publications in, um …'

‘The Province?'

‘I was going to say Ireland, actually.'

‘Really? You mean … including the Republic?'

‘Yes. We would be very well regarded.'

My father chewed for a few moments, his forehead flexing. I could tell he was searching deep within himself for some coalescence of pride but finding only the usual nebulous disquiet. He gave up and turned his attention to the tiny portable television that was switched on with the sound down on the worktop beside him.

‘Well I think that's excellent, Arthur,' my mother said. ‘We're very proud of you.'

I glanced up and caught her giving me the wrong-flower look again. She converted it into a loving smile.

‘By the way, I ran into Beefy Campbell's mother the other day,' she said. ‘She told me Beefy's doing very well at the bar.'

‘Really? I'm so glad.'

A close-up of Beefy's face loomed. It was the last day of term at the end of second year and he was straddling my chest, trying to strangle me with my own tie. His blubbery lips were distorted with the effort, saliva seething through his dental brace. I could still see his snakey eyes dilating with panic in the moment before I passed out.

‘He's with one of the top law firms in London now. Very prestigious. She did tell me the name but I can't – '

‘Burke & Hare?'

‘No … no that wasn't it – '

‘Moloch, Belial & Mammon?'

‘No, I would have remembered that. It was more – '

‘Grynne & Barrett?'

‘No, sshh, you're confusing me …'

‘Was it Cavill & Gouge?'

‘Yes! Yes that was it. I knew it was something posh. He's paid a fortune apparently. Anyway, she was wondering if you'd give him a ring when he's home for Christmas. There's just the two of them there now. It's terribly sad.'

Beefy's father had checked out a long time ago; his policeman brother Soupy, who was two years ahead of me at school, had been killed some months previously by a booby-trap bomb under his car.

‘Yeah, sure.'

My father made a noise like a dray horse attempting to adjust its mouthpiece.

‘Hazel, did Arthur hear Fenton's news?'

‘I don't know. Arthur, did you hear Fenton's news?'

‘I don't know,
did
I hear Fenton's news?'

Communications between my elder brother and myself were intermittent at best.

My parents raised their eyebrows at each other. My father coughed, and in a sepulchral voice said: ‘Fenton has branched out on his own.'

‘Yes,' my mother chirped. ‘He's moved into the glamour business.'

My glass paused en route to my lips.

‘He's become a topless model?'

‘No Arthur,' my father said. ‘He's opened a tanning salon. In the village. And it's booked solid. And he's opening another in the city centre next month …'

So, every member of my family was some kind of shopkeeper, except me.

‘… If he's judged demand right it could be an absolute goldmine,' my father went on. ‘They've really cracked the technology on these tanning machines, you know. You get inside them and they do your whole body at once, like a rotisserie. And the beauty of it is, it's very addictive. Once you've got that lovely golden tan you can't help yourself, you've got to keep topping it up …'

Great. My brother was going to be rich. That was sure to improve his personality.

‘Are those sunbed things safe?' I enquired, just to take some of the exultation out of the air. ‘I thought I read somewhere that they cook your internal organs or something.'

‘Nonsense, they're perfectly safe,' my mother said. ‘Pixie Dixon's got one at home she's been using for years. Never done her a bit of harm.'

‘Maybe not on the inside.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘Well … look at her.'

‘Pixie? What's wrong with her?'

‘Are you serious? Look at her face.'

‘What's wrong with her face?'

‘She's completely overdone it. She looks …' I pronged a baked potato and held it aloft. ‘… Like that.'

‘Arthur, that's … Do you think so?' Ashamed delight and loyal outrage tussled briefly for control of my mother's demeanour. ‘No. That's not … Pixie's a very attractive lady. She's – '

‘Mother, she looks like she was dug out of a peat bog.'

‘Arthur! That's a terrible thing to say – '

‘She looks like the Tollund Man. She's the Tollund Woman.'

‘Arthur, that's enough now – '

‘For Godsake, would you look at this!' my father exploded. ‘Bloody disgrace.'

I wasn't far from the television but I had to strain my eyes to make out what was happening on its miniscule screen. There was a jumbo-sized set in the adjoining room but I'd noticed my parents seemed to prefer watching the news on this one, as though the horror itself could be diminished, choked off, distanced by keeping the images small and fuzzy. The evening bulletin was running footage of an Orange march being pelted by an enraged crowd. Several youths in sashes were to be seen retaliating. A police Land Rover was lit up by a petrol bomb.

‘It can't go on,' my father moaned.

‘What can't go on?' My mother's tone was weary.

‘All this bloody nonsense. The government's got to get tough … the year we've had. And it's only going to get worse.'

‘Clive, what are you talking about?'

‘Internment. It's the only way – '

‘Oh, for goodness sake, Clive. It doesn't work – '

‘… Round up the chief troublemakers from both sides and put them on ice – '

‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘Why is it ridiculous? These bastards stirring up the trouble are walking the streets large as life and twice as ugly. It takes bloody years to gather the evidence and then you can't get a witness to stand up for fear of being bloody murdered … I'm telling you, it's the only way.'

My mother tilted her head back and sighed heavily.

‘You're getting yourself all worked up for nothing. Calm down. There's no point. There's nothing you can do. We're all just going to have to wait it out …' She pushed her chair back and stood up. ‘Now, who's for Arctic Roll?'

She began gathering up the plates, while her husband tried to compose himself by staring intently at various objects on the table and I fixed my gaze on a portrait of a severely bilious Asian lady that hung beside the archway to the living room.

Dessert was meted out and we ate in silence for a while.

‘By the way,' I said, hacking at my thick coaster of frozen hydrogenates. ‘What were you two doing earlier on? It sounded like there was a bit of a palaver outside.'

‘Oh that,' replied my father. ‘Just a spot of DIY – '

‘We're going to have to get a wee man in,' my mother announced. ‘Your father can't get it up.'

I struggled to keep custody of my eyes. (On the maternal unintentional double entendre scale monitored by my brother and me over the years this was fairly run-of-the-mill. Our favourite was uncorked during the pudding course of a Sunday lunch when she enquired loudly the length of the table whether her charity's honorary president, a man of the cloth, would like some cream up his end.)

‘She means the trellis,' my father said sharply to me. Then to her: ‘And I would've had it up if you'd been holding the bloody ladder properly …' He trailed off.

‘Pass the wine dear,' she instructed. ‘Arthur, I was wondering if you'd do me a favour.'

‘Of course.'

‘Pixie's having an open garden event tomorrow and I really have to go. Would you be an angel and mind the shop for me?'

‘Oh, um, actually …'

‘Your father's playing golf and Fenton's busy. It's just for the morning.'

‘A garden party you say?'

‘Yes. For charity.'

‘Which one?'

‘I'm not sure. Skin cancer research, I think.'

 

*

 

My first split-second assumption – a reflex from living too long in a war zone – was that I was caught up in some kind of rocket attack. In fact, it was simply my first act of the day in my role as shopkeeper: knocking over and smashing a large piece of pottery that exploded as though it had contained a zeppelin's-worth of gas. I had been reaching up to a high shelf to examine an unidentifiable object that now turned out to be a ceramic dustpan encrusted with semi-precious stones. I hid the shards (some of them embedded in a raffia chair ten feet away) in a drawer of the reproduction Welsh dresser on which the object had originally stood, pocketed the startling price tag and shakily took up my position behind the counter of
Knicks ‘n' Knacks
.