A Friend of the Family (2 page)

Bernie never had any grand ambitions for her boys, never expected them to go to university, to make anything more out of life than she and Gerry had managed. A nice house, a happy family, a few quid in the bank. All she’d
ever wanted for her boys was that they be good boys. And, if she could blow her own trumpet for a moment, she’d done a bloody good job on them. They were fine, fine boys, her boys, each and every one of them. Of course every mother thinks her sons are perfect, but hers really were. She honestly couldn’t fault them.

Bernie turned to the black-haired man and smiled. ‘Proud as punch,’ she said with a laugh and a wink, ‘but what mother isn’t?’

‘So. Are you a
happy family,
then?’

‘What sort of question is that?’

‘A very interesting one.’

Bernie smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘we’re a very happy family. We’ve been lucky. They’re good boys, my boys – very good boys.’

They fell silent for a moment. ‘And what about you?’ she said. ‘Have you got any kids?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Well, sort of. I’ve got a boy. He’d be about sixteen by now, I guess.’

‘Lost contact?’

He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Yeah. Long time ago. The mother didn’t want to have anything to do with me.’

Bernie gulped and laid a hand on the man’s arm. ‘You poor thing.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Well, you end up paying for your mistakes in life one way or another, don’t you?’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Charlie.’

‘Nice name.’

‘D’you think? I hate it. Sometimes wonder if I’d recognize him now. You know? If I saw him on the street or something. My own son.’

They fell silent again.

‘Look,’ he said, picking up his drink and draining it, ‘I don’t want to get in your face or anything. I just really wanted to tell you how great your voice is. You’re very talented.’

‘Bless you,’ said Bernie, ‘that’s very kind and I appreciate it. Will I see you next week?’

The man’s face suddenly softened. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘deffo. I’ll be here. My name’s Gervase, by the way.’

Bernie grinned at him. ‘You don’t look like a Gervase,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t, do I? I sometimes think that I was never supposed to have been a Gervase. You know, in a parallel reality and all that. D’you know what I mean?’

Bernie smiled and nodded.

‘Thanks for the chat, Bernie. See you next week, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ smiled Bernie, ‘see you next week.’

He nodded at her, and smiled his awkward smile, before forcing his hands into the tight pockets of his jeans and sauntering out of the pub and into the chill of the January night.

Gerry Gets Technical

Hello Ned… How are you? I’m just using this computer at work. Deandra’s showing me how so I hope I don’t mess it up. I was going through some old stuff at home last week and found some letters me and your mum wrote to each other when we were dating. Turns out our first date was on 26th May 1961, forty years ago. I took her to the Ritz for a cocktail and then we went to the cinema at Piccadilly. It cost me a week’s wages. Also turns out that 26th May lands on a Saturday this year so I was thinking that instead of just celebrating our wedding anniversary like we always do, maybe I’d do something a bit special that she won’t be expecting. I’m going to have a party for her at the Ritz – and book us a few rooms so we can stay over. Once in a lifetime, you know. I’ve spoken to your brothers about it and they’re both keen. Anyway – I know money’s tight for you and I can help you out a bit, with a couple of hundred maybe. Tony and Sean said they’ll cough up for the rest. Just bung it on your credit card and we’ll sort it out at this end. Hopefully you’ll stay
for a while, too – your mum would be the happiest woman in south London! And Monica’s more than welcome if she can afford the fare. I’ve booked you a double room so it seems a shame to waste it! Anyway, I’d better get off. Write back soon (or call me at work) and let me know if you can make it or not – it wouldn’t be the same without you, though – you know that?

Love to Monica. And love to you.

Your dad X

Dear Mon

Sunday 8 April 2001

Dear Mon,

By the time you get this letter I will be on a plane and on my way back to England. I’m really sorry to bugger off like this without saying goodbye properly, but, as you know, the past few weeks have been quite stressful for me and the more stressful things got the more we seemed to be arguing. Losing my job was just the last straw and I can’t see any reason to be here any more. I haven’t made the life for myself over here I was hoping for. I’ve just got stuck in a rut doing crap jobs and hanging out with the same people and as time goes by I miss my life back at home more and more. I miss my mum and dad. I miss my brothers. I miss just sitting on the sofa with Sean watching
The Simpsons
and I miss all my old friends. So much has happened since I’ve been here with you – Sean’s had a book published, Tony’s got divorced, and now Mum and Dad are having a big anniversary party back home. I don’t want to miss it and I don’t want to be away from my family any more. I miss England, too. I miss the weather and the TV and the people. I know I should have waited till you got home, talked to you face to face, but I’ve tried that before and you know how things always turn out – you go into mental meltdown, I try to make you feel better, we end up staying together.

Things started off so great for you and me, Mon. Meeting you was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me and coming to Oz with you was the greatest adventure of my life, but it’s over now. Finished. I’ve never really managed to make you happy, Monica – you know that and I know that. I think you’ll agree with me when I say that our relationship really ended ages ago. I don’t know what’s kept us together for so long. I think it might be a combination of fear and habit. You were such a strong person when I first met you, Monica, but you’ve let me make you weak. I can’t hold you up any more. You’ve got so much going for you – you’re so funny and cool and clever. It’s only your own insecurities that are holding you back – and me. You can make a go of things in Oz, I know you can. You’ve just got to get out of your shell and into the world, become the person I met in Leicester Square all those years ago.

I love you, Mon, I really do. You’re one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, but it’s time for me to go home and it’s time for you to get on with your life without me. I wish you happiness and success. I’ll think of you for ever, Mon. Good luck.

Ned XX

PS: Enc: $250 for the next month’s rent. I’ve also left you my football and my PlayStation, and the Fatboy Slim tickets are in my top left-hand drawer. There’s some hash in the coffee jar next to the phone. I’ve sold my car to Spencer. And if you find my Titleist golfballs you can have them.

Unbridled Parental Joy at Prodigal Homecoming

It was a perfectly miserable April morning when Ned finally came home. The city cowered glumly under a thick grey blanket of cloud and the air smelt of damp brickwork and diesel.

London, thought Ned, staring at the back end of a used-car depot through the misted-up window of a black cab. Look at it. Just look at it.

It’s so beautiful…

The cab sped seamlessly through the empty streets of south London, stopping pointlessly at deserted traffic lights, gliding across roundabouts. Ned smiled as the Crystal Palace mast hove into view – a symbol of homecoming since the day he was born.

A few eerie, solitary figures moved through the mist that hung over Brockwell Park; early-morning dog-walkers and out-patients from the Marsden. A man in a red waterproof jacket practised t’ai chi under a just-budding horse-chestnut tree. Down Norwood Road, past West Norwood Cemetery and up on to Beulah Hill. And there it was: number 114. A two-storey Georgian villa, a bit like a child’s drawing of a house. Steps up to a greying stone portico, large, stripped-oak front door,
sash windows on either side. It was looking tattier than ever. Flaps of cream stucco peeled from the walls, last year’s autumnal fall was still heaped in mulchy piles up against the front wall and rivulets of green mould streaked the paintwork.

The old bubble car that Tony had bought with his first pay-cheque when he was seventeen sat half-shrouded under a sun-bleached tarpaulin on the front lawn. In front of the bubble car sat Sean’s Vespa, once the apple of his eye and the centre of his universe, now a mildewed and pitiful-looking creature, slouched defeatedly against an old set of Formica-topped drawers. Edwardian, Victorian and Georgian chimney stacks sat in a kind of Stonehenge arrangement on the other side, and between the detritus all manner of robust-looking weeds had taken root.

Ned had once brought a friend home from university who lived in the area too. He’d looked rather uncertain as Ned ascended the front steps, jangling his door keys. ‘You live here?’ he’d said. ‘Uh-huh,’Ned had said. ‘Shit – I always thought this place was a squat.’ Which was, Ned could see with his newfound objectivity, exactly what it looked like.

He slung his rucksack over his shoulder and crept quietly up the path, kicking a sheet of old newspaper out of the way as he walked. His key in the lock sounded familiar, like it had been just hours since he’d last heard the sound. Even after all this time he still had the knack, turning the key at just the right angle and with just enough of a flick of the wrist, and then the front door swung slowly open.

Mayhem. Total and utter mayhem. He smiled wryly to himself and sidestepped a large stuffed rabbit, approximately the size of a Rottweiler, which for some strange reason was wearing Tony’s Jim’ll Fix It badge and had a packet of rolling tobacco on its lap. Walking into the Londons’ house from the grey street outside was like leaping from monochrome to vivid Technicolor. The bleak exterior of the house masked an interior that made the word ‘eclectic’ seem a little puny in its powers of description.

Bernie and Gerry had a very
laissez-faire
attitude to interiors and made no effort whatsoever to exert any kind of control over their possessions. It wasn’t that they had no taste. There were flashes of class, style and downright
Elle Decoration
in places. Gerry was an antique-silver dealer with a long-established stand at Grays in South Molton Street, and Bernie was a jewellery buyer for Alders in Clapham Junction. They knew nice stuff when they saw it. The problem was that they also managed to turn a blind eye to some truly grim stuff. Like the cut-crystal vase with a small ceramic cat sitting on the rim, a Christmas gift from Tony’s ex-parents-in-law. It had pride of place on the mantelpiece, even though Bernie had hated it on sight and even though there was zero possibility of said ex-parents-in-law ever setting foot in their home again. Bernie had simply forgotten that she hated it. Ditto the carpet, which had been in the house when they’d bought it, thirty years ago, and was of the classic British ‘swirl and square’ design in violent hues of mustard and baby poo. The
fireplace was still surrounded by the ‘Brick-alike’ false brickwork they’d put in when it was ‘modern’, in the seventies, and above it hung a rather nice late-Edwardian mirror that had fallen from its hook years earlier causing the glass to snap clean in two. Other people would have wailed about seven years’ bad luck and rushed it to the mirror emergency ward to be fixed. Bernie and Gerry had simply tutted, sighed and re-hung it, and the fractured reflection it gave of the living room became yet another aspect of their home that you just got used to.

But what really set Ned’s parents’ house apart from other ill-furnished residences was the junk. Not just family detritus that had been hanging around waiting for a trip to Oxfam. Real, actual junk. Old chests of drawers, broken chairs, shop mannequins, boxes of rusting kitchen utensils, old Christmas cards, disembodied doll-parts, unidentifiable bits of oily machinery, mildewed curtains. And there were things that were just
in the wrong place.
A plastic swing-bin in the hallway. A pushchair in the living room. A shower curtain separating the downstairs toilet from the kitchen. A proper front door, replete with letterbox, knob and the number 15, hanging between the front and back rooms. A manky old hobbyhorse with matted hair and a drawn-on moustache stood sentinel at the foot of the stairs.

Gerry was a skip-hound. He could not pass a skip without having a little rummage and coming away with at least one small trophy, be that an old telephone or a piece of skirting board. And Bernie was just as bad, bringing home whimsical odds and ends from the
display storeroom at Alders, things that were going to get thrown away otherwise. She felt sad, she said, thinking that for a few weeks these bits of sculpted polystyrene and plywood had been spotlit and dazzling, enticing customers into the store, and were then discarded like pubescent child stars.

Ned walked from room to room for a while, absorbing the smells – French polish, tired carpeting, dog hair – and taking in the scenery – the junk, the cardboard boxes, the piles of magazines and abandoned embroidery – and thought to himself, This is me, all this clashing and clutter, this hoarding and piling. This is what made me and this is where I belong. And this was why he hadn’t phoned ahead, why he hadn’t told anyone he was coming home. Because he’d wanted to find home exactly as he’d left it three years ago and not as some fussed-over, tidied-up, bunting-festooned facsimile stuffed with aunts and uncles and neighbours and chicken-paste sandwiches and pork pies cut into quarters. Because he’d wanted to smell bed on his dad and see last night’s dinner plates piled up in the kitchen.