Meltdown (24 page)

‘You must find a place for him in another school.’

‘I can’t afford one. That’s the point. If I could afford one I’d be paying you, wouldn’t I?’

Mr Lombard raised an eyebrow. He narrowed his gaze and he pursed his lips. He had something to say but he didn’t want to say it, any more than Jimmy wanted to hear it.

They had arrived at the unthinkable.

‘Mr Corby,’ Mr Lombard said quietly, ‘I did not mean a fee-paying school.’

‘You mean . . . ?’ Jimmy couldn’t say it.

Mr Lombard was a busy man. It was clearly distasteful to him but somebody had to take the plunge.

‘I mean that you must place Toby in the . . . state sector, Mr Corby.’

The headmaster said it as if he was pronouncing a death sentence. And of course in Mr Lombard’s mind he was. He was the headmaster of a private school and he was casting out a boy that school had nurtured, condemning him to fall among the barbarians of the underclass, to be taken into the realms of the demoralized, terrorized, unionized leftist apparatchiks of the National Union of Teachers. To spend his days attempting to communicate with a peer group whose English was gutter Estuary, or worse, for whom it was a foreign language. To go to a place where knives, drugs and perhaps even guns were more common than books and where vast overweight mothers pushed chips and pies through the school fence into the faces of their pasty, angry children. Wasn’t that a sort of death? Death of future. Death of prospects. Death of any remote chance of becoming a well-educated, rounded and cultured individual?

Death of the opportunity for this poor boy to join the elite, to spend his adolescence and young adulthood forming the connections that would cushion him through his professional life.

State education. That absolute impossibility. The one thing that one
simply could not do
. The thing that Jimmy, Monica and everybody they knew had spent a decade decrying, insulting, despairing of and dismissing. The thing that had been ruined by its makers, deserted by its middle-class constituents and left to rot.

State education. The University of the Damned.

And here was this
private school headmaster
blithely condemning an Abbey House boy to this terrible fate. What of solidarity? What of
no man left behind
? What of all the principles of comradeship and loyalty on which Abbey Hall prided itself? What of the honour roll of the glorious dead from two world wars proudly displayed in the school hall? Had those men died for nothing?

Toby was an Abbey Hall boy. That was who he was. His name had gone down at birth. He had gone there immediately on graduating at four from the Jumping Beans Advanced Fun and Learning Module off Ladbroke Grove. Did it really mean nothing at all?

‘But surely, Mr Lombard,’ Jimmy stammered, ‘surely there must be some way round this?’

‘Can you suggest one, Mr Corby?’

‘Well . . . I sort of hoped that . . . I don’t know. I mean Toby belongs here, he’s one of you. Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘It’s extremely distressing for all of us, Mr Corby.’

‘Don’t you have a system? I mean to help people through when . . .’

‘We have waited a term, Mr Corby. We have let you build up considerable arrears.’

‘Isn’t there anything else?’

‘We have scholarships, of course. We think it’s important to put something back into the community in which we live.’

‘Well then . . .’

‘But they are all taken and massively oversubscribed far into the future. Besides which, although Toby is by no means without ability, were he to sit the exam I doubt he could compete with the standard of the non-fee-paying pupils to whom we offer an education. They are all of exceptional ability.’

Of course, Jimmy remembered, the scholars were all brain boxes, that was why they were there. It had nothing to do with putting anything back into the community. These kids were selected in order to push up the ranking of the whole school. Jimmy had appreciated that once. He had appreciated the fact that Abbey Hall outshone even its local rivals in the private sector in the exam league tables that he and Monica used to read with pride when they were published in the
Daily Telegraph
. Then it had felt good, good to know that through Jimmy’s hard work they were able to send their firstborn to a school whose exam ratings were among the best in London. And of course very far above any level that the state could offer. It was stats like that which confirmed absolutely the necessity of
never
going anywhere near a state primary.

‘Would you
like
to put Toby forward to sit the scholarship exam?’ Mr Lombard enquired in a tone that seemed to suggest that Jimmy might as well put him forward to join the SAS because he had about as much chance of getting in there.

‘No,’ Jimmy said quietly, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then I’m afraid, regretfully,’ Mr Lombard said, ‘that is that.’

Jimmy walked out of Abbey Hall as if in a dream. Mr Lombard had told him that Toby could stay for the last three weeks of the current term, but after that he must not return.

‘That should give you time to apply to your local authority for a state place for Toby,’ he had said, ‘although I should warn you that the public system has different dates and shorter holidays than we do, so you need to get going if you’re hoping to secure your first choice.’

Jimmy had resisted the urge to tell Mr Lombard to shove his last three weeks up his arse. His life was in crisis and the last thing he needed was Toby at home to look after while he tried to sort out the mess at Webb Street and find the best state school for him. Instead he thanked Mr Lombard with as much grace as he could muster and walked back, to find his car had been clamped and was being lifted up on to a low loader.

A quiet sleep

Jimmy watched his one remaining Range Rover Discovery disappear up the street on its way to the council car pound.

‘Fuck!’ he shouted. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck
fuck
!’

He could not pursue the car to the pound immediately because he had a full morning scheduled at the Webb Street site, attempting to fob off builders, contractors and suppliers with promises of immediate payment (temporarily deferred).

He would have to let the car go and travel out to Pimlico later in the day to retrieve it. That inconvenience would be made considerably more unpleasant because Jimmy did not know for sure whether he had a credit card that could take the strain of the fine he knew he would have to pay.

In the meantime all he could do was make his way across London by tube to Hackney, a journey for which, thank God, he still had sufficient credit on his Oyster card. His Oyster card! Six months before he had scarcely heard of such a thing. It was something he had read about in the
Standard
but didn’t really understand.

He owned one now though, a reduced-price travel card without which he could no longer visit the street he still technically owned. A street from which at one point he had expected to profit to the tune of many millions of pounds. Millions of pounds which at the time he had assured himself were not just enriching him but making a significant contribution to the economic well-being of the city. Millions which still existed, in a way, except in the topsy-turvy parallel universe of post-crunch Britain they had changed colour from black to red.

He fell asleep on the tube and nearly missed his stop. If it hadn’t have been for the man with the accordion and the squirrel in his top pocket who loudly informed the occupants of Jimmy’s carriage that he was there to cheer up their day and that any contributions would be gratefully received, Jimmy might have slept all the way to the suburbs.

Jimmy had found that exhaustion was like that; it came and went in oppressive waves. When his mind was engaged in some urgent activity like coming to terms with the fact that his son was about to join a crack-dealing course at the local hoodie hangout or processing the information that his best friend had killed himself, Jimmy was wide awake. Awake in a way that people who were not nearly dead with sleeplessness would never understand, a kind of electrified, other-worldish wakefulness which brought shape, colour and emotion into sharp focus. Jimmy was a big First World War buff and he imagined that this was the kind of wakefulness that the hollow-eyed veterans of the trenches had experienced after three straight nights of constant bombardment.

But when, as on the tube, some never-before-read advert for office air conditioning caught his attention or the legs of the girl sitting opposite drew his eye and momentarily took his mind from the living nightmare in which it struggled to function, Jimmy found that he drifted off instantly. On this occasion it had taken three choruses of ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’ belted out on the accordion to rouse him to consciousness.

By the time Jimmy got to Webb Street he knew that he simply could not operate any longer without sleep. He had scarcely had a wink the night before, after Lizzie had brought the dreadful news of Robbo’s balls-up. He had tossed and turned all night, racked with conflicting emotions. On the one hand he cursed the fact that he was back in the shit, and on the other he cursed himself for worrying about that when Robbo was dead and Lizzie so utterly devastated.

Now, suddenly, he was too far gone to worry about anything. He simply
had
to sleep. But where?

There were still some increasingly angry men working on his site. Men who had not been paid. Men who were turning up each day only in the hope of being paid. Men who carried hammers, screwdrivers and nail guns. If he was once more to win them over with a dose of his ever more thinly stretched charm then he must have his wits about him. He made a plan. One end of the street was fully occupied. This was the end in which the redevelopment was quite advanced – whole houses had been gutted, and new walls and floors put in. Six gleaming new flats were emerging in each house, where previously there had been just a warren of squalid bedsits. But at the other end of the street no work had yet been started and no builder currently trod.

Approaching the street from this still-squalid end, Jimmy slipped into the first doorway unnoticed. He had the keys to all the houses in his case, but he did not need them as a vandal had already pulled the padlocked barrier away. He crept into the house – and nearly let himself straight out again, the atmosphere was so horribly oppressive.

The smells of the past. The house’s history.

Food, many different types of food. All the scents had lingered. People, babies, children, the elderly and infirm. Jimmy could smell them all. The nightmares of the recent past. Overcrowded toilets and inadequate plumbing. Unsealed skirtings and bulging wallpaper, beneath which Jimmy knew the bugs remained. The food and the people were gone but their smells and the bugs which had tormented them lived on.

The house was bare now, of course. The previous occupants’ bits and pieces had been cleared out, leaving only the marks on the floor where their mats and strips of carpet had been and the nails, hooks and globs of Blu-Tack on the walls from which their decorations had hung. Jimmy thought that he would rather die than live in a place like this and yet right now he certainly meant to sleep in it.

He had intended to fold up his jacket for a pillow and lie straight down in the ground-floor front room. But to his surprise he found that the room was already occupied. A tramp was stretched out on the floor asleep. Looking at him, Jimmy realized that some of what he had smelt probably emanated from this sorry figure.

For a moment Jimmy thought he’d retreat back into the street and find another house. But he was reluctant to do that: if he went outside he might be spotted by one of the impatient builders or angry creditors and Jimmy did not want to meet any of them until he had had some rest.

He decided that it was a big house and he would simply have to share it, so he began to climb the stairs looking for the least oppressive room. The one with the least grease on the walls and stains on the floor. The one in which the ghosts of the previous occupants were least active.

Jimmy reached the third floor and selected the largest room. He rolled his jacket up into a pillow and lay down, his head already spinning in anticipation of rest. He fell asleep instantly. Asleep on the bare floorboards of his multi-million-pound nightmare. Had he not already been unconscious he might have considered the irony of the situation.

His phone woke him up, something which seemed to be happening a lot these days.

‘Yeah. Hello. What?’ he spluttered.

‘Jimmy?’

‘What, hello? Yeah?’

There was a momentary pause and then a voice of accusation.

‘You’ve been
sleeping
! Where are you?’

Slowly consciousness was returning. He knew that voice. It was his wife. It was Monica. And she’d caught him having a nap.

‘No!’ he protested, still trying to get his brain and his mouth into synch.

‘You have!’ Monica said. ‘I can tell by your voice. I woke you up! I know I did. Is that what you do when you go to
work
? Get secret sleeps? Have you been lying to me?’

Jimmy wondered whether she’d have been less outraged if she’d caught him sleeping with a girl instead of just sleeping.

‘No, Monica. Seriously, I just nodded off for a moment. I’m working. I’m in one of the houses at Webb Street. I basically collapsed. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh.’ Monica’s voice had lost its outrage. ‘Well, I suppose it’s good to get some use out of our street.’

‘I’m not the only one. There’s a tramp in the room downstairs.’

‘Jimmy, you could be killed!’

‘I don’t think so, Mon. By the look of him he’s half dead already. Oh, by the way, the car’s been towed.’

‘Oh
no
.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I was phoning to find out how it went with Toby’s headmaster.’