The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (23 page)

Laura panics. She turns round in Fenwicks doorway, colliding with two women entering behind her, and walks fast back up Bond Street. Please God let it still be there. Too proud to run, she pounds the pavements with the big cat prowl of the professional walker. The silver-grey outfit dances before her mind’s eye, now shining like the moon, dazzling and taunting her with its desirability.

Anna Ford to marry Moon Man, she says in her head, in time to her hurrying footsteps. Anna Ford to marry Moon Man.

South Molton Street is entirely filled by elegant women carrying Browns bags. Any one of them could contain her outfit, leaving the rack bare, the morning a failure, and the coming Saturday an evening of self-punishment and regret. She wants to snatch the bags from their hands as they pass, demand the right of search, seize back what is rightfully hers, saying like a child in the playground, I saw it first.

Sweating slightly for all the chill of the day she reaches the door to Browns and storms the stairs. The same assistant is there. From the look on her face Laura knows the assistant understands the entire psycho-neurotic scenario playing in her head.

‘Not gone yet,’ she says.

A wave of blissful relief bathes Laura’s trembling frame.

‘Though one woman said she might be back for it.’

Not necessary. No sales pressure needed now. The deed is done. The moment of commitment took place in the doorway of Fenwicks. These processes are mysterious.

‘I’ll have it.’

The assistant takes the outfit off the rail. Laura examines it carefully, lovingly. Yes, it will do. It will be perfect. It will be hers. Thank you God.

As the assistant swaddles the delicate garments in layer upon layer of tissue paper, Laura sits on the padded window bench and experiences the final stages of this emotion-packed morning. She feels a sense of relief, of course, but this is now fading. Beneath the relief, a warm layer of satisfaction. Beneath the satisfaction, some eddies of unease. The price is £1,035, less than the eleven hundred quoted, almost half the cost of the little leather Donna Karan jacket. Not therefore too much of an extravagance. And the classic styling will never be out of fashion. Suppose she’s still wearing it in thirty years time, that comes to, oh, not much more than thirty pounds a year. Really rich women have designer dresses costing tens of thousands. You couldn’t call this really rich shopping. Well-off, maybe. Not rich.

Oh. Money.

At Victoria Station, where Laura is in good time for her train, she gets herself a cup of carrot-and-coriander soup and an
Evening Standard
. Anna Ford is to marry Colonel David Scott, who commanded the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, and walked on the moon. Colonel Scott is sixty-seven. He is, says Anna Ford, lovely, extraordinary, and very learned. Ms Ford is fifty-six. Her two teenage daughters have given their blessing. We are very happy and hope to spend our future together.

On the train, Laura holds her Browns bag close, feeling the soft fat bundle inside, and reads about the lives of strangers. As the train enters Sussex, so her special day comes to an end. The jealously guarded space she has created and within which she has moved is opened to the waiting throng of her everyday concerns. Has Carrie had a good day at school? Did Henry speak to that teacher? What will she give the children for supper? Has Annie remembered to remake the beds in the spare bedrooms? Does the Volvo need filling with petrol? When does half term start? There are haircuts to book for the children, and friends to play, and oh God there’s dinner to make for Nick, just a simple supper but let it be delicious, let it haunt the rest of his life. Cold roast fillet of beef, new potatoes, pick up the beef at Middle Farm on the way to school. It’s all getting very tight.

Her shopping trip slips into the past, and becomes a memory of a simpler age. Only the crisp cream carrier bag remains as proof that it really happened. In it, her hard-won treasure.

We are very happy and hope to spend our future together.

26

Jack watches till the cars have passed and then makes a run for it, across the open track to the cover of the derelict barn. Here he waits, his heart beating violently, for the Dogman to pay his daily visit to the sheep.

Your dad’s mental
.

‘You tread on my dreams!’ Toby Clore imitates Jack’s father, pointing his finger at Jack and not smiling, which makes it not a joke. ‘You tread on my dreams!’

I don’t care, Jack says. Not my problem. Oh no, says Toby, not your problem having a dad who’s mental. Not your problem until they take him away to the funny farm.

All through the first two periods of the day Jack tormented himself in silence, paralysed by humiliation. Why did he do it? Why make a scene in public over something nobody cares about? Why say things like ‘You tread on my dreams’ so that Angus Critchell can hear and say it back to him in a funny voice?

Dimly Jack is aware that if he were Toby Clore and it was Toby Clore’s father who had said ‘You tread on my dreams’ to Mr Strachan in the hall, he would find a way to turn it to his advantage. He would say, See, my dad’s mental, and everyone would envy him and want their dads to be mental too. But this trick is beyond Jack’s reach. All he can do is lie low for the morning and hope that the memory of the shaming incident will fade.

After lunch he risks tagging along with Angus, who when asked he names as his best friend. Angus doesn’t actually tell him to get lost. When Toby Clore and Richard Adderley show up, Toby says, We don’t want mental people in our club, and Jack doesn’t say, I’m not mental, or even, What club?, he says, Why not? Richard Adderley says, Because you’re mental. Jack thanks him silently for his copy-cat scorn, knowing that now Toby will respond differently, just to be different. And Toby does look at him with his head on one side, the way he does. So you’re mental, Jacko? Probably. Jack is beyond resistance. Richard and Angus laugh. Jacko’s mental. But Toby isn’t laughing so they stop. People who are mental, says Toby slowly, can do things normal people can’t do, because they just don’t care. Perhaps Jacko’s like that. Are you like that, Jacko? Probably, says Jack softly. So if we have him in the club, says Toby, he’ll do the things we can’t do. He’ll do anything. He just won’t care. Not his problem.

In this way Jack is let into the club, which is the Dogman Fan Club. The Dogman Fan Club has come into being to record, publish and glorify the sayings of the Dogman.

‘He’s like Jesus,’ explains Toby Clore. ‘We’re like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It’s the Gospel according to Dogman.’

The way Toby Clore says this, without smiling, as if he really means it, makes the parody even more sophisticated in Jack’s eyes. However, as Toby points out, they are only at the very beginning of their enterprise. They have one sentence recorded, one authentic utterance of the prophet: ‘We don’t need any more bloody stockbrokers.’ They must record more, much more. However, the prophet is quick to anger, and carries a gun.

‘Jacko can go. He’ll do anything. He’s mental.’

In this way, by a process he did not intend but finds himself unable to stop, Jack is on his way to intercept the Dogman, and to cause him to shout out some more holy words. Of course, he thinks, as he crouches in the derelict barn, I could always just make something up. I could pretend I saw the Dogman and he chased me and shouted something, and they’d never know. Except he can’t think of anything to make up, and Toby would know. Somehow he just would. So Jack understands that he must wait for a decent interval and hope that the Dogman doesn’t show up.

He peeps over the pile of tumbled flints that was once a wall. The sheep are grazing quietly in the steep-sided Downland hollow. Jack looks at his watch. 3.09pm THU 18.5.00. In fifteen minutes the bell will go for prep after games. He’ll stay ten minutes at the most.

The watch is too big for his wrist, and has ten functions. It tells the time in two time zones, and the day, date and year. It’s a calculator, a calendar, a phone number store, and it has three games. There’s a button that turns on a little light at night. He begged for it and was bought it not even on his birthday or for Christmas, on the grounds that it was a necessity and more or less educational. It cost £25. He gloried in it for one day. Then Richard Adderley came to school with a watch that did everything Jack’s did
and was a radio
. After that it wasn’t the same any more. He goes on wearing it even though it hurts his wrist a little because he feels guilty about making his mother buy it. But he only uses it to tell the time.

Toby Clore doesn’t even have a watch. ‘If I want to know the time, you’ll tell me, won’t you, Adders? But actually I don’t want to know the time.’

Jack ponders the mystery of Toby Clore. Toby’s not exactly Jack’s friend, and he doesn’t exactly make Jack happy. So why do I hang around him? Why do I want more than anything to hear Toby say, Come with us, Jacko. Why am I here, cold and frightened, breaking the rules, risking being shot, just so that Toby Clore will look at me and say, Good for you, Jacko? It’s not as if there aren’t others I could go round with. He pictures them in his mind. There’s fat Daniel Chamberlain. There’s barmy Will Guest. There’s always someone no one else wants to be with who’d be glad, more than glad, honoured, by Jack’s friendship. But the thought alone makes Jack shudder with dread. If he had to go round with Dan Chamberlain or Will Guest he’d be finished. His life would be as good as over. Better to brave the terrors of the Dogman, if by doing so he retains his precarious foothold on the higher terraces where Toby Clore’s slightest word is law.

He hears the distant barking of a dog. Looking out between tall nettles, he sees the sheep begin to move, slowly at first, then in a gathering panicky stampede. They lumber towards the track, where a barbed-wire fence hems them in, and here, caught between the dog and the wire, they surge and cry, while the barking bounces round them.

Jack stands up. Still unable to see, he clambers onto one of the remaining sections of wall. The dog is a small white poodle. It isn’t doing anything to the sheep, it’s just running round and round and yapping at them, as if calling them out to play.

Then Jack hears a vehicle coming down the track, and sees the Dogman’s mud-streaked Landrover. The vehicle stops by the fence and the Dogman is out, a stick in his hand, shouting at the white poodle.

‘Scram! Shoo!’ he shouts.

The poodle becomes even more excited, and yapping shrilly, bounds at the terrified sheep.

‘Down! Get out! Get lost!’

The Dogman pushes through the mass of sheep towards the poodle, his shouts rising in fury. The poodle responds with an ecstasy of yapping. To Jack, it’s all clear. The poodle thinks it’s a game. The more the sheep cry and the Dogman shouts, the more he responds in kind.

The Dogman gets through the sheep and swipes his stick at the poodle.

‘Get away! Get away!’

The poodle jumps up at the stick, yapping, trying to seize it in his jaws. The Dogman kicks and misses, swipes with his stick and misses.

‘You little shit! Get away!’

Yap-yap-yap-yap-yap! The poodle has limitless powers of noise creation. Just when you think the note can go no higher it jumps in pitch and becomes even more maddening. The Dogman is maddened. Even at this distance Jack can see that. Jack is happy enough: he has something to report to the club, and he hasn’t had to show himself.

Then it gets much better.

‘You dirty little brute!’ shrieks the Dogman, and swiping his stick in a ferocious downward swipe, he makes full contact with the poodle’s upward-leaping head. The barking stops. Too far away to see what has become of the dog. The Dogman bends down to check. His mobile phone starts to ring. Jack hears him answer it.

‘Yes. Yes. I’m on my way.’

He returns to the Landrover at a run. He jumps in and drives away, very fast.

The sheep, no longer harried, drift apart and resume their quiet grazing. The poodle lies hidden by the meadow grass. Jack checks his Casio watch. 3.14pm THU 18.5.00. He makes his way back towards the school playing fields, filled with the import of what he has witnessed, and the status it will give him in Toby’s eyes.

The Dogman killed a dog.

The poodle is dead, he’s sure of it. Well, almost sure. The way the barking stopped. The way the Dogman just left it there after his phone rang. If the dog had been just stunned he would have picked it up so he could take it to a vet. Or hit it again, to finish it off.

The Dogman is a kind of god. The poodle is a living sacrifice to his power. Toby will like that. Jack hurries faster across the park.

From somewhere behind him he hears a thin high distant voice, like a bird.
Pee-wee
.
Pee-wee.
He looks back and sees an old lady, walking slowly, far away by the lake’s side. Her bird-like call follows a cycle, first plaintive, then imperious, then angry.

‘Pee-wee!
Pee-wee!
PEE-WEE!’

27

Keep looking down only one more shoe-lace to tie then out of here. Such a special smell the changing room, not stinky like the boys but still sick-making. Should have had a shower but the others always get in there first and it’s not as if I get sweaty, not at rounders, not the way I play.
Just run, Alice
. Never hit the ball, just wave the bat in the air and run. What’s the point? They call it games but it’s not a game it’s a test, everyone’s watching, and you miss and they all groan and shout,
Just run, Alice
.