Last Orders (18 page)

Oil for oil, that's what I call it, oil for bleeding oil. And all it is is his kind of fun.

There goes Vince Dodds who sold his daughter to an Ayrab.

He comes in, that first time, with his coat draped over his shoulders and his shades tucked in his top pocket and I can see he don't have to slum it. They're feeling the squeeze in the City, so I'm going up-market while they're going down, but that aint this one's caper. He don't have to deal with Dodds Autos, he could buy motors in Berkeley Square. Except he's got what they've all got, if you ask me. Haggle fever, call of the old bazaar.

All I've got to interest him is an '85 Granada Scorpio and he sniffs round it for a bit, more than he needs if he aint going to cut cake, but I see him looking at Kath, I see him clocking her as much as he clocks the car. She's sitting there in the office, behind the partition, with the door wide open, and it aint my fault she's wearing a skirt like an armband and a tight white T-shirt, and where he comes from they dress 'em up like nuns. It aint my fault she's grown up from being my little girl Kath, that she's eighteen and out of school and can't get no job. I said, You can work in the showroom, if you like, if it'll get you off your arse.

So I let him hover another thirty seconds till I can tell what makes him tick, good and proper. Women, motors and haggling. That's fair, them's fair hobbies. Then I go over, slow, unpushy, and say, 'Can I help you, sir?' And he looks at me, and one eye's saying he don't want to bother with the likes of me, he aint interested in a three-year-old Ford, and the other's still trying to peek round my shoulder at Kath.

He says, 'I was looking at the Granada.'

I say, 'Sweet car, sweet engine, all tuned and tickled. You won't get better value. Want to run it round the block?'

I can see him backing off, so I say, watching his eyes, 'Keys are in the office. Shall I get 'em?' Then I say, looking at my watch, 'I'd come with you myself, but I've got another client coming, three o'clock appointment. But I'll see if Kathy here can't do the honours. You in a hurry?'

And he says, looking at his own watch, it's a bleeding Rolex, 'Maybe not.'

So I poke my head round the office door and I say, 'Kath, will you go with this gentleman while he takes the Granada for a spin? I'm tied up myself. Mr—?' I turn round and he's right at my shoulder. He says, 'Mr Hussein.' I say, 'Mr Hussein.' Then I pick the keys off the rack and toss 'em to her and they land in her lap.

I'd never asked her to do that before and she looks at me, uncertain. But one thing you can say about Kath is that she aint no dummy when it comes to cars. I taught that girl how to use a motor soon as she could get a licence. Took to it like a natural, like her dad's daughter.

So she even backs it out for him, neat and nifty.

It aint my fault she was built like she was, it aint my fault she was her mother's daughter an' all.

I said, 'This is Kath, my daughter Kath. You're in good hands with Kath.'

Other client coming, my arse.

So I say when they get back, 'Well? Goes a treat, don't it? Vince Dodds don't deal in duds.' And he looks at me as though to say, Throw in the girl and I'll buy, and I look at him as though to say, Throw in an extra half-grand and she's yours. He says, 'Okay.'

Then he says, getting all chummy, 'My little weakness, Mr Dodds, my little indulgence. I buy a car, then I grow tired of it, then I get another one, like toys.' The coat's a camel-hair. 'You should look out for anything I might like. I could make it worth your while.'

And I knew he never meant to buy the Granada. I knew he'd be back before long to buy another and there'd be extras in it if I so much as hinted that I was missing Kath around the place, that a girl of her age ought to be earning a decent living.

There goes Vince Dodds who pimps for his own daughter.

But it aint as if she didn't know what she was doing, it aint as if she can't take care of herself. Her mother's daughter. And she aint on no regular rummage. Not like Sally.

But now if he wants to ditch her, if he thinks he can chuck her out on the street, another motor, another muff, then he's got another think coming. I'll pop over to that posh pad of his and bust in the door. Then I'll bust in his head. And it don't matter, I don't care, if he don't buy the Merc and he never forks out that extra grand. Because maybe a grand aint nothing, it aint nothing at all, now Jack aint nothing neither. But Kath's my own living daughter, she is. She's a Dodds. And she turns up at Jack's funeral wearing the best little black outfit you ever saw, which must have cost half a grand for a start, half a grand if it was a penny. And maybe I aint done right by her, maybe I aint.

She would go and see June twice a week. Mondays and Thursdays, regular as clockwork, like she still does. And this was when I swung it so I only worked three days at the office, Mondays to Wednesdays, two days less for only a quarter less pay, taking into account my increment. Hen-nessy said, 'You're up for promotion, take it from me,' putting a finger to his lips. 'All you have to do is be a good boy till your annual review.' He was taking pity on me, I think, on account of Carol, and had put in a word, reminded them I was still working at the place. He said, 'About time too, Ray, if you ask me. How old are you these days?' I said, 'Forty-five.' But I wasn't interested in promotion, I wasn't interested in getting on in insurance. I was interested in the opposite. I said, 'They could do me a better turn than that. Less time for less pay, that's what I'm interested in, I don't want no leg-up.'

It stood to reason, with only me to consider. And a camper-van.

Besides, I was getting lucky, I was getting canny, I was starting to live up to my name. The gee-gees were doing me favours, if no one else was.

And why shouldn't a man who's all on his own, with no one to fend for but himself, arrange his life to suit his own hankering? Mondays to Wednesdays at the office, Thursdays to Saturdays at the races or on the open road.

It's just the gypsy in my...

And any shortfall in my pay-cheque the horses made up, more or less, sometimes with extra on top. It's the same business, after all, the chance business. Insurance, gambling.

Hennessy said, 'And by the way, what do you fancy for Goodwood?'

So Amy would go and see June on Thursdays and I would be chasing off all over the country, following the nags. And for a long time I thought about it before I said it, for a long time I chewed it over, then one day I plucked up and I said it. I said, 'Amy, I aint going nowhere this Thursday. I suppose the horses can run without me. That's a long old bus ride you have to do. Let me drive you over to see June. Let me take you in the camper.' So she said, 'All right, Ray,' and I took her.

And it was either the second or the third time I took her, either the second or the third Thursday, that I said, 'I met you same time as I met Jack, did you know that?' She looked at me, puzzled, and she said, 'What, in the desert?' I said, 'Yep, in the desert. Egypt.' She sort of frowned and laughed at me at the same time. So I said, 'I saw your photo,' and when I said it my voice wasn't like I meant it to be, like I was just playing a game, answering a riddle, it came out different, it came out sort of like the truth. I aint ever been a dab hand with women.

She looked at me, long and hard, soft and sharp at the same time, and that was when I knew that she knew, or that she'd wondered all along. That I'd just had this thing about her, always. In spite of Carol, in spite of Sue, in spite of her being Jack's anyway, in spite of her having lost her looks by now. But there's a beauty in that itself, I reckon, that's a lovable thing, fading beauty, it depends on your attitude. And they aint all been lost. In spite of her and Jack getting stuck in their ways as if they'd been put in a mould long ago and come out and gone solid. But I suppose we all do that. We all need something to stir us up.

I'd had this thing about her always.

And I'd say it worked in my favour that Sue and then Carol did a flit, one after the other, because I reckon she took pity on me. Not Hennessy's kind of pity. Maybe she'd always taken pity on me, and if all it ever was was pity, I suppose I wasn't going to complain.

It was a long way over to that place. She'd get a 188 to the Elephant, then a 44, and sometimes she'd have to change again in Tooting. It wasn't so far from Epsom. So even by the route I took, the route I already knew, there was plenty of time to talk. But we used to hang around afterwards anyway and just sit in the camper or on one of the benches in the grounds if the weather let us. She said Jack had never seen June, or only the once, only that first time. He'd never gone to see her in the Home. I'd never known that for certain, though I had my guesses. I thought maybe there'd been a time once or he had his own arrangement still, his own private arrangement, he just didn't like to talk about it. But he never went. That was Jack's failing plain and simple, she said, that he didn't want to know his own daughter. And her failing, she could see it, she could tell me, was just the opposite, that she'd kept on coming, two times a week all these years, and it made no difference, but she couldn't stop now, a mother was a mother. And if he'd only come himself just now and then, just once in a while, it might have balanced things out, she might have spared some of her visits for some of his, and they wouldn't have become the people they'd become, pulling opposite ways on the same rope. But it was too late now.

She said she chose between him and her. It was a simple fact. She couldn't help it. She knew it and he knew it.

I said that was a hard choice, or I tried to say it, because choosing my words wasn't so easy either: to pick the one who didn't know who she was and maybe never would, not the one who was sound and whole and she'd been married to anyway for nearly thirty years. And she looked at me, slow and careful, as if it wasn't my turn to speak, and I thought I'd torn it.

She said, 'You think Jack knows who he is?' I said, 'Never met anyone more sure about it.' Then she smiled, she laughed under her breath. 'He's not such a big man, you know, when it comes to certain things. He aint such a big man at all.'

I said, 'He got me through, in the desert.' But I didn't say, like I half wanted, like I was half going to, 'And so did you.'

When she went in to visit I used to stay put in the car park, or I'd mooch around the grounds. There were lawns and paths and some of the inmates would be shuffling about. They didn't look so different. Like you could get mistook.

When I watched her walking across the car park and in through the entrance I used to think, She looks about as on her own as I am, and I'd start to ache. But it never occurred to me, not at first, that maybe it would clinch it if I went in to see June too, if I did what Jack hadn't ever. And maybe that's what she was wishing me to do all along. I thought I was holding back because it was only right, because it wasn't my place, I was only there to drive her. Or else I was just plain scared. But on the third or fourth Thursday I said to her, 'Can I come too?' And she said, 'Course you can, Ray.'

I don't know what you say about some things, some sights. I don't know what you say about a woman still in her twenties with a body that was just like any other woman's, soft and curved, and if it was dressed up better and you could blot out the rest, you might even say it was lovely, but with a swollen, slobbery head that only a mother could ever love. I don't know what you say about a woman who's twenty-seven years old and whose name is June but she don't know it because she hasn't even got the brains of a child of two. I suppose you should say that life's not ever so unfair that there's not a worse unfairness than yours, and that you can't ever get so stuck in your ways that there aren't worse ways of being stuck, like from the word go and for always.

But one thing I learnt sitting there that Thursday afternoon, not saying nothing, just sitting there, just like June herself, with that nurse eyeing us, wondering where I'd sprung from, was that Amy hadn't been going there twice a week for twenty-two years because it was some duty she just had to go through, a habit she'd just settled into, like she said. She'd kept going there because she'd kept hoping that one day June might recognize her, one day June might speak. You could tell that just by looking, by looking at Amy. And you could tell just by looking at June that it wasn't ever going to happen and that it was all wrong. It was as wrong that Amy had been coming here all them years as it was wrong that June had been born like she was in the first place, as wrong as there should be a mother of forty-six who still had her faded looks while her daughter aint never had any. But two wrongs don't make a right.

So I thought, I've made the first move, there's another move I should make now.

We sat on the bench, watching the pigeons. We didn't have to go straight back. It took half the time in the camper it would take her on the bus. I didn't know what to say about June, I didn't know what you should say, but I felt like saying some crazy things that didn't have nothing to do with June. I reckon Amy was all sort of fragile on account of having seen June for the first time with a stranger. Friend. I reckon one way or the other she needed a hug. I felt she was leaning on the little slice of air I left between us, like she should've been leaning direct against me, and I felt my pecker starting to grow like it hadn't ever much since Carol left. I wonder if women can tell.

But what I said was, 'Have you heard from Vincey at all? I hear they're going to ship 'em all back home.'

But next time when I picked her up I had the words all ready and the opportunity all crying out to be taken. It was a bright, breezy day in April. It was like this day, with Jack's ashes. I felt, Life can change, it can, even when you think it can't any more. All the same it took me all the way to Clapham before I said it. The sun was flickering through the trees on Clapham Common. I said, 'We aint going to the Home today, Amy, we aint going to see June.' Somehow I knew she wouldn't argue. I said, 'I've got a picnic all ready in the back there. Sandwiches, thermos.' It was the spring meeting at Epsom. I said, 'You fancy a day at the races?'