Last Orders (6 page)

'Don't it, Vince?'

Vince says, all fierce and hissy, 'I'm here. I came.'

He moves out to overtake a truck.

Lenny says, 'Daughters.'

The sky's clear and blue and clean with just a few wisps of cloud. There's a breeze stirring the trees at the side of the road. The signs say 'Sevenoaks, Dartford Tunnel'. We're clear of London but the view either side can't make up its mind whether it's town or country. It's like we're travelling but it's all the same place.

I say, 'That box must be getting heavy, Vie, you want to pass it back here?'

Lenny says, 'So when you going to put yourself out to grass, Vie? When you going to let them boys take over?'

I look at Lenny. I think, Don't quit yet, Vie, there's the two of us.

Vie says, 'No rush. There's a few customers I should stick around for yet,'

I can't see Vic's face but he isn't chuckling and he hasn't turned round and winked.

'And the lads aren't kicking me out yet. You hungry, Lenny?'

' I'm thirsty.'

Vince says, 'You could swan it, Vie. You could do better than Margate.'

Lenny says, 'Big Boy here's aiming at the Bahamas.'

Vince says, 'At best part of a grand a throw.'

Lenny says, 'Jack cost that? Joan better start saving.'

Vince says, 'That's what I'd guess.'

Vic's keeping quiet.

Lenny says, 'You aint picking up the tab, Big Boy?'

I say, 'So if you want to pass him over here, Vie.'

Vie says, 'Sorry, Raysy,' like he'd forgotten. 'You want to hold him for a bit then?' He turns and smiles gently, as if he don't want to upset any feelings.

Lenny says, 'Still, Vie, if you ever pegged out on the job, it'd be handy.'

Vie says, 'I'd thought of that. Here.'

He passes me the box.

'Dick and Trev do the business?' Lenny says.

'Course.'

'Neat that,' Lenny says, 'sweet that. Daughters, eh Raysy? Nothing but trouble.'

I'm holding the box now, Jack's on my knees. We all watch what's passing by for a bit, then Lenny says, 'Still, you should retire, Vie. If young Kath can, I reckon you can.' Vince says, 'She aint retired.'

Lenny says, 'No? So it's true she aint having to scrounge? You know, you lost quite an asset there, Big Boy, I reckon she pulled in the punters.' Vince don't say anything.

'I reckon one of her skirts was worth six of your ties.' Vince don't say nothing, but his shoulders sort of winch up.

'What I hear, she's pulling in punters of her own now.' Lenny's face is all rough and hot. I've never known if it was the fights, years ago, or if his face was always like that, it was never smoothed off at the start. He looks at me, quick, with the box on my lap, and I feel a fool now for asking for it, for sitting holding it like a kid needing its toy. Vince says, 'Yeh, maybe we should stop off for a break.' Lenny says, 'Maybe it was just as well she never went to see Jack. That way, he never had to know his granddaughter was a—

Vince says, 'She weren't his granddaughter.'

'And the other bit?'

Vie says, 'Gents - remember who's on board.' He ought to have a whistle.

Lenny says, 'He can't hear nothing, no more than he can see. Unless you believe Big Boy here.'

I lift the box off my knees. I mean to put it on the seat between Lenny and me but there's Vince's jacket there.

Lenny says, 'Funny that, since if you asked me if Vincey had a motto, I'd say it was "Out of sight, out of mind".'

Lenny looks at me juggling with the box. He says, 'Jack in a box, eh Raysy?'

I put the box down on the jacket and give the cloth a little pat like I don't want to so much as wrinkle it. Vince angles the mirror a bit to see what I'm doing but I can tell somehow he dbesn't mind, it's not his jacket he's thinking of- He doesn't shift back the mirror.

We drive on in silence, though it feels like Vince is working up to saying something. He keeps looking at the box on his jacket. At last he lifts his head and tilts it as though to say he aint talking to anyone in particular but if he is, it's Lenny. There's an odd pitch to his voice.

He says, 'I used to think they could see me. I used to think, I couldn't see them but they could see me.'

Susie puts the dryer down and gives her head a couple of brisk, stern shakes to loosen the hair and I think, I can't deny it, she's better-looking than Carol ever was, even Carol at her age. It's a kind of disrespect and unfairness to Carol to think it but that don't matter because she's a part of Carol, there's a part of Carol in her, we're all part of each other. It's not as if, given a second chance, I could choose Sue not Carol, because without Carol there couldn't have been no Sue. But it's still true that if I were a different man, a younger one, if my name was Andy and I came from Sydney, Australia, then I'd fancy Sue, like I fancied Carol, only more. I'd fancy my own daughter.

And another thing's still true, that they have it better now, better, easier, quicker. When I was her age it was time to get your kit and get fell in. Should've been born later perhaps, like Vincey. But I aint like Vincey. And then there wouldn't have been no Susie alive and eighteen now.

Her transistor radio's going. Round, round, get around, I get around... She moves her shoulders to the beat like she's dancing but sitting down. I knock again on the half-open door. She didn't hear me the first time, what with the dryer going and the radio, so I've stood there for maybe half a minute, holding the mug of coffee.

Carol's down the shops, Sue's washing her hair. Saturday morning. And any second I'll be off myself. The regular run: the baccy shop, the betting shop, the boozer. The cup of coffee's a way of smoothing my exit, but it's also a way of spying on my daughter.

She looks round, smiles, tosses her hair again, this time just for the sake of tossing it, and I say to myself as I said for the first time years ago when she was hardly out of her pram, She's a flirt, she damn well knows how to flirt. She flirts with her own father, she knows when she's doing it and it means she wants something.

She says, 'Thanks,' turning down the radio, and curls her fingers round the mug and takes a quick sip, blowing first across the top. Then she puts down the mug and starts combing her hair and looks at me, suspicious, like I'm up to no good, and says, 'Off down the Coach?' It's not a question that needs asking since I'm off down the Coach most Saturdays, but she asks it anyway to catch me off balance, which is another reason why I know she's after something. And when I make the old joke - 'The Coach won't come to me' - she smiles but she frowns at the same time, there's a little hard pucker just above her nose, which makes me think it's not something small.

She drops the smile and sips her coffee again. 'Well don't go just yet.' She takes a deep slow breath. She holds the coffee in her lap and looks into it, hair tumbling, like she's making a wish, like she's saying her prayers, and I think, Christ. I almost say it aloud. Remembering Sally, remembering how Lenny came to me: 'Raysy, I need a winner, quick.' Remembering the name of the horse that won at Kempton: Bold Buccaneer, eleven to two. She looks up. She can read my face like a results board. 'No, it isn't that! she says, almost with a laugh, almost with relief. 'It's not that, it's something else.'

Then she pats the bed for me to sit down, the little narrow single bed she's slept in since she was six years old.

She said, 'He's looking for his roots.'

Carol said, 'What are they when they're at home?'

She said, 'His ancestors, his origins. He wants to trace his family, he wants to go to where they came from. A lot of them do it, if they're over here for a bit.'

All looking for their roots.

And it was a handy thing that his lot started out from some village at the far end of Somerset, because that way it made a neat holiday, it made a neat little jaunt to the West Country. They could take in Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, Cheddar Gorge, and all those other sights an Aussie over here might care to see. With a tent and an old Ford Anglia he'd cadged off a mate. It was a handy thing that it was summer, her first summer in college, and times were changing, long hair, short skirts and short odds. Don't tell me that wasn't why he was here in the first place, origins my arse, and I don't suppose it would have mattered if they'd never found Little Dunghole, or whatever it was called, so long as they found a few fields of long grass to roll around in together.

We'd never have said yes if it wasn't for his bleeding roots.

But you had to give permission on account of it was the permissive age, never mind what your own folks might have said, your own ancestors.

Can't all have it all, can we, Ray boy? Gee-up! I see Daisy Dixon's getting spliced.

But when they were gone I wished them well. I wished I was them. I thought of them travelling across England. Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, over the hills and far away. I pictured them putting up their tent and curling up together with the smell of grass and only a thin fold of fabric between them and the night. I could tell you some things, girl, about camping out under the stars, desert nights'd freeze your bollocks off. And, whether they ever did or not, I couldn't help imagining them finding some tucked-away churchyard, green and quiet, and looking at the names on the gravestones.

It took a war to make me travel, to make me see the world, if that's what you could call it. But there was him having hopped all the way from Sydney to Somerset, and there was her sharing the journey with him, out on the road, and there was me, still living in Bermondsey, still sitting on the old man's yard to keep Charlie Dixon happy. The boozer, the betting shop, the bus to Blackfriars. And in over fifteen years I hadn't taken Carol anywhere.

I said, 'What's the betting that car packs up on them?'

She said, 'What's the betting she conies back pregnant?'

Her face was all fixed and hard, like it would be all my fault, all my doing because it wasn't her who ever said yes in the first place.

Yes, you two, why don't you just go and run off together?

I don't know which came first: whether it was her daughter growing up and having a whole lot of things she never had that made her act like a woman who'd made a wrong choice, or whether she'd been thinking that, anyway, for years, but shoved it to the back of her mind for the sake of bringing up Sue. She was forty years old, knocking forty-one. She hadn't wanted another kid, one was plenty Sometimes I'd think she'd never wanted Sue. Susie was for me. Sometimes I'd think, It aint a fair world, when you think of Amy.

She said, 'So what's the betting, Lucky Johnson? Why don't you put your money on that?'

She takes another gulp of coffee and there's still that pucker in her forehead, and I think, If she hasn't got one in the oven then what's the problem and why's she having so much trouble finding words? Then it's as though I kick myself inside, a big kick, so I almost give a jolt right there on the bed, because I see what's coming, plain as day, and I should have seen it coming long before, more fool me, and I think she sees that I see it, because it's then that she starts in, as if I've given her the all-clear. She flashes those brown eyes she knows how to flash and says, 'Dad.'

She says Andy's going back to Sydney in the winter and she wants to go with him too, to live with him there. She wants to go and live in Australia.

More fool me. Give 'em an inch. First they drive to Somerset, then they want to fly to Sydney. I think, This is one Saturday I aint going to get down the Coach.

She puts her hand on my arm and gives it a squeeze as if she's trying to say that, just for the moment, it's something between me and her only - Andy boy don't come into it -it's something she and I have got to work out. Like if I said no, she'd accept.

But the one thing I don't say, like Carol wouldVe said if it'd been just up to her, is 'No. No, girl. No again.'

I say, 'Aint you got a home here?' But I know that's a poor start even as I say it because all she has to say, if put to it, is 'I'm eighteen and you don't own me.' But she don't say it, she just gives me the look of someone who could say it.

I say, 'What about college?'

Which isn't such a small point, it's not such a small point that Ray Johnson's daughter is going to college and means to be a teacher. The old man would have been proud.

She says, 'There's colleges in Australia, there's teachers in Australia.' She looks at me as if she's ready and waiting if I want to go further down this line of argument, because she knows it aint exactly through my example that she's done what she's done. It's always been a sore point with her, though she doesn't bring it up any more, like she's started to give her own dad up for lost, that I could've found a better use for those brains I'm supposed to have.

'Got it up here,' Jack would say, 'got it up here, Raysy has.'

You could do something better, Dad, than go to that boring office.

But I do, I go to the bookie's. I work, I play the nags.

I say, 'You don't know nothing about Australia.'

She says, 'Til find out, won't I? And Andy' show me.' She winces because she's been trying not to mention his name.

I say, 'I bet he will. I bet I could show him the back of my hand.'

She looks all surprised and hurt and furious at the same time, because it's unfair, it's unworthy, it aint me. Fighting talk. With my brains, with my physique. And I never said I never liked Andy. I do, I like him, I like the toe-rag.

Her face flames up, her eyes glare but then she switches tack - she's not stupid either - and goes all soft and imploring.

And I think, It's only right that she should look better than her mother ever did when she was eighteen, because the world gets better, yes it does, it's meant to get better, it's no one's fault they're born too soon. Except I never saw Carol when she was eighteen, I was still getting fell in. So how do I know? And, anyhow, the fact is, I've never told Sue this, maybe now's the time, I fancied her mum's big sister.