Collected Stories (76 page)

‘What are you doing?’ The boy was staring at him in panic.

‘I’m going downstairs to have a word with Andrea.’

‘No!’

‘I won’t be long. You’ll be fine.’

Mal shut the door before the boy could say anything else. He put his ear to the keyhole but heard only the commercials, which, no doubt, Wallace was mouthing the words to.

Andrea was waiting. They walked quickly through the part of town Mal was familiar with, past clubbers and those looking for restaurants, into a more dilapidated area called the Old Town. He was surprised to see working fishermen preparing to take their boats out for the night. Behind this, the streets narrowed; the close houses seemed to lean across the lanes and almost touch at the top. There were red lights in some of the windows here. She pointed at a house. ‘You could score here.’

They entered a pub that seemed full of rough, tattooed late adolescents, most of whom looked like addicts. She went round the place, greeting those she knew. They were pleased to see her, but she was not like them.

Outside again, she said, pointing, ‘We could put the camera there and the actors could run into that alley. We could follow them – that way!’

He turned, needing to see and feel what she did. He noticed there was a sort of silence or poverty – of inactivity or emptiness, he would have said – which you didn’t find in London.

She told him, ‘The people here think London’s a stew full of foreigners. They hardly go there.’

‘It’s about time we declared independence.’

Mal’s legs ached but he went on, pursuing and, at times, questioning her enthusiasm. At last they stood in a cobbled square where the streets seemed to lead in all directions. Mal heard a shout and Wallace came rushing towards them, wearing his pyjamas, football gloves and trainers.

‘I followed you!’

Mal wanted to pick him up but the shivering boy was too heavy.

‘All this way?’

‘You tried to leave me!’

‘You were safe in the hotel.’ He crouched down and embraced Wallace, kissing his petrified hair.

‘Someone was going to steal me!’

‘No!’

Andrea took off her sweater and tied it around his neck. Holding hands, they ran back. In the hotel lounge, Andrea ordered hot chocolate and crisps for him.

‘You two.’ She was laughing. ‘You look exactly the same.’

‘We do?’ said Wallace.

‘How could you be anything but father and son?’

Mal and Wallace were looking at one another. Mal said to him, ‘I would never leave you for long. We were only trying to figure out how to make Andrea’s movie.’

Wallace asked, ‘What’s it about? You’re not going to run away from me again, are you?’

‘I’m too tired. In fact, I’m exhausted and broken.’

Mal fetched drinks for himself and Andrea.

Andrea said, ‘The story is this. I was nearly grown-up but not quite when my mum and dad said they couldn’t live together any more. From then on, I would have to move between them.’

‘Like a parcel, like me,’ said Wallace. ‘You don’t want to be posted everywhere all the time.’

‘It was worse than that,’ she said. ‘The film is called
Ten Days
and is set around the time I was sent to stay with Dad – quite near here – for a holiday. Mum wanted to be with another man, you see, which Dad guessed. When I arrived, I found that my poor father couldn’t get out of bed for fear of falling over. All he moved was his arm, to drink. I would sit with him, listening to his stories or watching films. While he was asleep, or passed out, I’d roam about the town on my own, making friends with the locals. Kids always complain there’s nothing to do in such places. We found plenty to do, oh yes.’

Wallace nudged his father.

‘She was so bad.’

‘The baddest, me. Back home, when I was asked what Dad and I did on our hols, they worked out that Dad had gone crazy. I was never allowed to see him again.’

‘In your whole life?’

‘He liked drink and they thought it made him a sick person, a fuck-up.’

‘She swore!’

‘Dad died a month later. They didn’t tell me properly. I heard about his death from a relative. I ran away from home to attend the funeral and I stayed down here a few more days, meeting his friends and sleeping in a tent in the woods. I got into more big trouble at home. I didn’t like my new stepfather and came down here to live.’

‘It was naughty to run away.’ He asked, ‘Did you see your dad’s dead body?’

‘Not in life.’ Andrea took a notebook from her rucksack and wrote, ‘“Goes to see dead body of father in morgue”. In the film, she will, now.’

‘Dad looks normal to you,’ said Wallace. ‘But he was in trouble once. He ran away too and he drank cider. He was a burglar, and he had rainbow hair. Didn’t you, Dad?’

‘Wow,’ said Andrea. ‘He doesn’t look like that kind of guy now.’

Wallace said, ‘Will you still let him work for you?’

‘What d’you think?’

‘I think you should let him. But only if you put me in the film.’

‘There might be a small part for you. Have you acted before? Tell you what, I’ll pretend to hit you and you have to react. Remember, the action is in the reaction. The camera and the people will be looking at you. Stand up.’

She pretended to hit him a few times. Wallace was sufficiently histrionic on the floor.

Wallace let Andrea kiss him goodnight. Mal accompanied Wallace upstairs and got into bed beside him. Mal’s young son often slept between Mal and his wife, but Mal had never slept beside his first son. Wallace fell asleep almost immediately, his comforter twitching in his mouth. He was still filthy; no water had passed over him on this trip.

Mal cuddled Wallace but couldn’t sleep. He listened to the sea through the open balcony door. He got up, dressed and went out, locking the door from the outside. On the street it was dark and windy, but there were plenty of people about. The sea was further out than he thought, but he got there.

He realised that he seemed to breathe more easily with so much space around him. He wanted to drift along the beach, following the lights and voices to a crowded bar, to drink and talk with strangers, to find out whether their lives were worse or better than his. But Mal could still see the hotel and what he guessed was their room, the sleeping child just beyond the open balcony door. He couldn’t lose that patch of light in the distance.

Mal noticed a group of kids not far away, older than students, listening to a boom-box and passing around plastic bottles of cider. Mal went over to one of them and said, ‘Can I dance here?’

‘Everyone needs to feel free,’ said the kid, who appeared to have been in a fight. Mal hesitated. The dance he had last been familiar with was ‘the pogo’. ‘Feel free,’ repeated the boy.

Mal offered him a swig of whisky from the bottle he had brought out. ‘It’s been a long time though.’

The boy left him. Mal moved closer to the music and began to shuffle; he jerked his body and shook his head. He was hopping. He began to pogo, alone of course, jumping up towards the sky with his arms out for as long as he could, until he fell over in the wet shingle, getting soaked to the skin.

The sun came brightly through the window of the hotel dining room as Mal, wearing shorts and shoes without socks, filled himself with buttered kipper and fried mushrooms and toast, a starched napkin tucked into the front of his shirt. He had become the sort of man he’d have laughed at as a boy.

‘I wonder if you’ll remember much of this trip,’ he said to Wallace. ‘I think I’ll get the hotel manager to take a photograph of us outside. You can put it next to your bed.’

‘Dad … I mean, Mal –’

Newspapers were excellently designed for keeping boys’ faces from the sight of their father.

They were on the train when Andrea rang to say she liked the idea of helping Mal move his cutting-room and family to the town for the duration of the film. She had been nervous of suggesting it herself for fear it would put Mal off the job.

Wallace was saying, ‘I need to speak to her urgently.’

Mal passed him the phone and heard him explain that he was prepared to be in the film only if he didn’t have to cut his hair or kiss girls.

‘Andrea agreed,’ said Wallace. ‘But will mum let me be an actor for her?’

‘She might if you tell her you’re getting paid.’

The house was deserted when they got back. Mal had guessed his wife would want to avoid them. He opened the doors to the garden and cooked for them both.

Over lunch, Wallace mentioned his piano lessons for the first time. Mal hunted out a Chopin piece played by Arturo Michelangeli and put it on. As they listened, Mal tried to say why he loved it, but he began to weep. He carried on talking but couldn’t stop his tears. What he dreaded was driving Wallace home. How could any love survive so many interruptions?

Late that afternoon, before they reached the motorway turn-off, Mal stopped at a service station and had a Coke with his son.

He said, ‘When we get to your house, you won’t want to say goodbye to me properly. But I want you to know that I will think of you when you’re at school, or asleep, or with your friends.’

‘I never miss you. I won’t be thinking about you.’

‘You don’t have to. I’ll do the thinking, okay?’

Soon they were at Wallace’s front gate. The boy scrambled out of the car and ran around the back of the house. Mal carried the bags to the front door and returned to the car. He watched Wallace’s stepfather and mother appear and take the bags inside, almost furtively, as though they were stealing them. Mal wanted to look at the couple more, to try and put these two connected families together, but he just waved in their direction and drove away, turning off his phone.

Mal returned to London without stopping. He parked near the house but went past it without going in. He walked to a nearby pub, frequented by northern men working during the week in London. ‘No children or dirty boots’, it said on the door.

Mal bought cigarettes and set himself up at the bar, ordering a pint and a chaser. He was unsure whether he was celebrating his new job or commiserating with himself over what he had just endured, but he toasted himself.

‘To Mal,’ he said. ‘And everyone who knows him!’

He shouted and jumped up and down. ‘See you soon, soon, soon, I hope!’

He continued waving until they disappeared round the corner, his many aunties, uncles and cousins, packed into three taxis. Ali and his parents were standing on the pavement outside the house. The Bombay part of their family had been staying in a rented flat in Dulwich for the summer. Ali and his parents had seen them nearly every day; tomorrow they were returning to India.

‘Come inside now.’ Ali’s father took his hand. ‘I don’t like to see you so upset.’

Ali was embarrassed by his tears. His neighbour Mike was standing across the road, shuffling his football cards and scratching, watching and pretending not to. He had been round earlier. After the uncles and aunts had begun their goodbyes, the front door bell had rung and Ali had opened it, thinking it was a taxi. His cousins had crowded behind him.

‘Comin’ out?’ Mike had asked, biting his nails, trying to examine the faces behind Ali. Mike had lost a clump of hair; his father had pulled it out, beating him up. ‘What’s goin’ on? We could ’ear you lot from down the road, makin’ a noise all day.’

It was the Saturday of the fifth cricket Test. India had been playing England at the Oval. In the morning, Ali’s three rowdy uncles and his father had taken their places in the small front room, pulling the curtains and shutting the door. The men had smoked, drunk beer and cursed the Indian bowlers, while the stolid Englishmen, Barrington and Graveney, batted all day. The uncles blamed the Indian captain Prince Pataudi, who had only one eye. The Indian aunties had been teaching Ali’s English mother to prepare several dishes which she promised to make for her husband and son. The women carried the dhal, keema and rice into the room, which they had been cooking in huge pans first thing in the morning. The men had eaten with their fingers, plates shuddering on their laps, not taking their eyes from the screen. They had yelled abuse in Urdu.

Ali had been allowed to go into the uncles’ room whenever he liked. They had begun to speak to him as another man. One even called him ‘the next head of the family’. The oldest uncle owned factories in India, the second was a famous political journalist, and the third was an engineer who built dams. At home, all three were notorious ‘carousers’ and party-givers. During the cricket intervals, they entertained Ali by betting on tossed coins or on which auntie would come into the room next; they played ‘stone, paper, scissors’. Ali’s abstemious father had a minor job in a solicitor’s office.

Ali was an only child. He wrote down cricket scores next to imaginary teams in a notebook his mother had given him. He spent hours alone in the garden, batting a cricket ball, attached by rope to the branch of a tree, with a sawn-off broomstick. The garden was his kingdom, and he was eager to share it with his Indian family as he had today, opening the windows and back door of the small council house. This was unusual: both his parents disliked draughts, whatever the weather. Today, three of his cousins had played cricket out in the garden; the girls, aged between seven and fourteen, had played chase.