There Are Little Kingdoms (17 page)

I’d rather work in the sewers.

‘If you seek an answer to the sense of vagueness that surrounds your existence like a fine mist, please press four.’

I pressed four. A happy voice exploded in my ear. It was the voice of heartiness. It was the voice of a resort manager at a mid-priced beach destination. It was a kind of stage Australian.

‘Watcha!’ it said. ‘Feelin’ kinda grooky, mate? What ya wanna do, ya wanna go down yar garden, ya wanna go down them fruit trees, and ya wanna find the ladder that’s hidden there, right? Then what do ya do? YA BLOODY WELL CLIMB IT!!!’

The phone cut out—dead air. I proceeded directly to the garden. I put on a pair of plimsolls. I removed the handkerchief from my head. I walked down to the dense, summer tangle of fruit trees. I pulled back the hanging vines, parted the thick curtains of growth, and I could see nothing, at first, but then my eyes adjusted to the dappled half-light and I made out a dull, golden gleam, and yes, it was a ladder. I pushed my way through, thorns snagging on my trousers, and I began to climb. Slowly, painfully, I ascended through the thick foliage and I came to the treetops, and a view of my suburb, its neat hedges and mossy slate rooftops, and I climbed on, and I went into the white clouds and I climbed still higher, and the ladder rose up against rocky outcrops. I found that I was climbing past the blinding limestone of a cliff-face, and at last I got to the top, and I hauled myself up onto the salty, springy turf.

I walked. The marine breeze was pleasant, at first, after my sweaty efforts, but soon it started to chill me. It was a bright but blowy spring day, and the first of the cliff-top flowers were starting to appear: the tormentil, the early orchids, the bird’s foot trefoil. A milky white sea lapped below, it had latent aggression in it, and I looked down the stretch of the coastline and oh, I don’t know, it may have been Howth, or Bray, or one of these places. There was nobody around. Black-headed terns battled with the wind and rose up on it, they let it turn and throw them: sheer play. I walked, and I concentrated on clearing my mind. I wanted to white out now. I wanted to leave all of it behind me again.

Yes I walked, I walked into the breeze, and after a time I came to one of those mounted telescopes, the kind that you always get at the seaside. I searched in my pocket, found a half-crown, inserted it, and the block slid away on the eyepiece and I looked through. There appeared to be a problem with the telescope—it was locked in place, it wouldn’t swivel and allow me to scan the water, the shore, the sky. It was locked onto a small circle of grey shingle, just by the water’s edge, and I saw that it was a cold and damp day down there. It was winter by the tide-line, it was springtime on the cliffs.

I kept looking, and she appeared. She crouched on her heels and looked out over the water. She wore a long coat, belted, and a wool scarf about her throat. It wasn’t a close-up view but even so, I could see that age had gone on her. I could see the slump of adult weariness. The view was in black and white, flickering, it was old footage, a silent movie, and I knew that the moment down there had passed, too, and that she herself was long gone now. If I was to find her again, it would be pure chance, a random call coming through the Exchange. And I would try to explain, I would. I’d try to tell her why it had happened the way that it did, but my words would sink beneath the waves, where shock-bright colours surprise the gloom: the anemones and starfish and deadman’s fingers, the clam and the barnacle, the brittlestar.

The eyepiece blacked out and I walked back the way that I came. I descended the ladder to an autumn garden. Russets and golds and a bled, cool sky: turtleneck weather. My favourite time, the season of loss and devotion.

Nights At The Gin Palace

W
ireless ten years, at large in the ancient house, prey to odd shudders in the small hours, Freddie Bliss had more or less given up on the idea of sleep. Subsequently he had gone a little daft. But sleep? No. He had no time for it anymore. Life is precious—grab as much of it as you can. This was the Freddie Bliss philosophy.

‘They’ve stopped the night outside High Hesket,’ said his daughter, Angelica, a large peach-skinned woman in her flailing forties. ‘They’ve bunked up at a Roadsleeper and they’ll be heading here first thing. There’s a crew of twelve. There are two trucks for equipment. They want to know if there are any characters among the builders.’

‘What builders?’

‘Well, this is the problem, isn’t it? I wonder is it too late to get Joe up? He’s larger than life, Joe. But there’s the question of his tags, isn’t there?’

‘His what?’

‘TAGS! His probation. Though they might make an exception for TV.’

‘Jailbird, is he? Another one, Angel?’

‘Miscarriage of justice,’ she said, and with a noiseless swivel of her powerful shoulders she swung the giant mallet hammer at an internal wall.

‘That bitch was psychotic! Joe acted purely in self-defence. Of course he had previous, I grant you.’

Freddie Bliss mouthed a soft note of sympathy, and he continued his search for drink.

‘It’s an outrage, Daddy, what these old bastards in the courts get away with. Whoremasters, the lot of them!’

‘What’s he inside for?’

‘Are you listening to a single word? Turn your ears on! I said PROBATION! I said MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE!’

‘Oh!’ said Freddie Bliss. ‘You needn’t tell me! I lost all faith in the legal system in 1974, Angel. Remember the business with the gypsies? Remember whose side the courts took? Well! Never again, I said. Never again will I submit to those dogs.’

Angelica put down the mallet hammer, wiped her brow, and paced the faded linoleum of the kitchen floor. She was in a condition of high wrath but she stopped, suddenly, and stared off into space—she had been arrested by gentle thoughts. She closed her eyes, and held her head at a respectful incline. She slid a stockinged toe up her calf to attend an itch.

‘Joe,’ she whispered, ‘is a gentle, oh a gentle man! He is so loving, Daddy, and kind. It’s the small things that he does, the tiny things! They make the man. I can actually say that I consider myself a very, very lucky woman.’

‘I’m delighted for you, dear. It’s time you had some luck. I’m afraid you’ve rather been through the wringer.’

Dapper Bliss rummaged among the bottles for something to stiffen the coffee. Angelica wasn’t a terrific one for sleep either, and now the pair of them were often to be found, late on, arranging a brew, as the night birds fluted outside, and the old shale earth sent up its black breaths. She had come home, at last, to settle. The plan was to turn the place into a guesthouse. But no, not a guesthouse. If he said guesthouse, she flew into a rage.

‘I’m not talking a bloody B&B! I’m talking A BOUTIQUE FUCKING HOTEL!’

The Bliss place was big enough, certainly, and it had bags of character. The countryside was bleak but impressive: fells and stone hills and sudden gorges. Angelica felt there were opportunities with walkers, dreamers, romantic types. She admitted there was work to be done. The house had animals in its walls. It had structural concerns. There was the wafting presence of the Bliss ancestral dead.

From an exotic assortment of spirits, Freddie considered something green and conceivably… Venezuelan? He held the bottle against the window and moonlight made lurid the unreal green of its liquor. Well, one took one’s chances.

‘I must say,’ he said, with a relaxed grin. ‘I’m very much looking forward to the guided badger walks.’

‘Nothing is decided on badgers,’ she held up a warning finger.

‘But it’ll be a unique attraction,’ he argued. ‘Badger sightings are terribly rare. And I happen to know just the spot. I’ll tell you now, Angel—I can all but guarantee badgers. Of course, these will be nocturnal events, obviously, but that just adds to the fun of it. Night-time expeditions! A cloak of darkness!’

Freddie Bliss was about to go with the Venezuelan when he spotted half a bottle of decent-looking Spanish brandy at the back of the press. This was a definite result. He waved the dusty treasure at his daughter and set free a suave smile.

‘Come, my darling,’ he said. ‘The night is young.’

Angelica narrowed her eyes. She retained—despite it all—a good posture. She wore light fabrics in bright colours. She had a fondness for ethnic trousers, loosely worn, and these did not flatter. She had some handsomeness still but it was turning into something else. She had moved from city to city, and from town to town, propelled by a talent for hopeless optimism.

‘I’m warning you, Dad,’ she said. ‘What I’ve told you about Joe is in the strictest confidence. He’d be livid if he thought every old sod knew his difficulties.’

‘Where do you find these blokes, Angel? Pubs?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Seedy night-spots?’

‘Shut up! What do think I am? Some kind of tart?’

‘Well where did you meet him?’

‘We met on the Internet.’

‘I see,’ said Freddie Bliss, assuming some kind of motorway junction.

The warmth in the air was still and oily feeling. Soon the lake would turn stagnant and rank. The yellow flowers of the gorse would dry out and become a nose-tickling dust. That was the first sign of the year turning.

‘I’ve been wondering…’ she said.

She picked up the mallet again and swung it thoughtfully to test its heft.

‘I’ve been wondering if maybe we should… knock through some more? We’ve started so we’ll finish, kind of a thing.’

‘More, sweet? I’d be worried about draughts.’

Three internal walls had already come down. All was rubble and wreck. For weeks, Angelica had stomped around in brown padded boots like builders wear, in a facemask, wielding the mallet, with her cheeks a flushed red against the whiteness of plaster and dust. A space the size of a football pitch had been cleared out downstairs. She now spent much of the evenings crawling around with a chalk, marking down where the new divisions would go.

‘You mean,’ said Freddie, ‘that now we put up new walls?’

‘Perhaps just screens,’ she said.

‘Like Japanese?’

‘Precisely, Dad. Lacquered.’

‘Lovely.’

‘I’m thinking fin de siecle. I want an opulent feel. Decadent!’

‘Like a knocking shop?’ said Freddie Bliss.

‘More opium den,’ she said.

The curriculum vitae of Angelica Bliss:

She went first to art school in Leeds, where she discovered no aptitude for creativity, but fell happily pregnant by her free-drawing instructor, Kim, who was kind enough to drive her to Halifax for the abortion, and with a Yorkshireman’s swarthy panache offered to go halves on the cost. Then she took up archaeology at Liverpool, and talked excitedly for two years of Picts, Celts, and Roman walls, and she was neck-deep in mud on digs in North Wales, and the dig supervisor, Frank, vowed to leave his wife of thirty years for her, and there was a dreadful scene in a lay-by outside Wrexham: midnight, winter, early eighties. She had enough of learning then, thank you very much, and with a loan from her parents opened a candle store in Stoke-on-Trent. From there, she progressed to a transcendence workshop in Inverness, then a market stall in Camden Town, then a lost weekend in Murcia that lasted five years, then a period of intense political activism on behalf of the Turks in Dortmund, then a marriage of one year to a financial services executive in Kent, then a squat strewn with needle-thin junkies in Coventry, and finally a dull job at a call centre in Manchester. She had long since gone through her inheritance: all that was left was the house. She now stood in the middle of the house, late on a summer’s night, with the mallet hammer in her hands.

‘What we also need to think about,’ she said, ‘is the breakfast menu. Traditional? Kippers?’

She swung the mallet. She took out a doorframe. There had as yet been little discussion about marketing. Angelica believed that once the camera crew had been, and once the programme aired, their name would be out there, and it would spread, and the business would make itself. She held the firm belief, always, that if your name was Bliss, then the stars were helpfully arrayed. Significantly, this had not proved the case for previous generations.

‘Actually,’ she said, throwing the hammer aside. ‘We really need to start getting some ideas down. They’ll be here for seven. Sharp!’

‘I’ve had a shave,’ said Freddie Bliss. ‘And I’ve given quite a bit of thought to what I’d like to say.’

‘What you mean, like to say?’

‘To camera.’

‘This isn’t about you! This is a renovation show.’

‘Fly on the wall, you said?’

‘Oh you know the type of thing, Dad. We’re battling against the odds. We’re setting up a new business. This is a story about life changes and DIY. The last-minute madness of the renovation. The drama of the first paying guests.’

‘You mean there’s a booking?’

‘Oh shut up! We’ll go out on the eight o’clock slot. The eating-your-supper slot. All we’ve got to worry about is keeping up with the business as it arrives.’

The scullery ceiling caved in. Angelica shrugged heroically.

‘I rather thought,’ said Freddie Bliss, ‘that I’d talk about… courage.’

‘Oh dear Christ!’

‘I’ve never had any. Now you certainly do, Angel. You’re a tremendously brave girl.’

‘You’re background colour! You can say hello and look whiskery and that’s it!’

‘I’m worried about the lights. Will there be lots? Will there be… kliegs? If there are going to be kliegs, I’d better have a word.’

They repaired to what was left of the dining room. It was a house of scurrying and of rising damp. Angelica remained confident they would be open for business in three weeks. Freddie couldn’t see it, unless they were to put the guests on beds of straw. But he was no longer a man to fret. He was, in the calmness of his age, a great believer in doing things right: after dinner, you have some more drinks.

He placed the bottle on the table with a triumphant flourish and then sniffed at the air, sighed, and went to open the windows. Torpid and clammy, it was June, and the gorse on the low hills was an invitation to midges. The smoke from the candlelight would keep most of them at bay. He lit more, to be on the safe side. Angelica poured the coffee. Freddie added generous slugs of the cognac. It was a brand from the northern bit, something unpronouncable with lots of Xs and Ks, and it had a badly drawn bull for a graphic.