Meltdown (17 page)

‘I know the bloody theory,’ Jimmy said, getting some toilet paper and picking up the turd, ‘but it’s not bloody working, is it?’

‘It’s not working because we’re not consistent!’ Monica replied angrily. ‘That’s the most important point of all. The book says you have to be consistent.’

‘Bugger the book!’

‘Don’t say bugger, Daddy. It’s swearing,’ said Toby.

‘I didn’t, I said bother.’

‘No you didn’t, that doesn’t even rhyme,’ Toby insisted, drinking the milk from the bottom of the cornflakes bowl.

‘You know the theory,’ said Monica.

‘Yes, Mon! I know the theory.’

Both their tempers were rising now.

‘Well, bloody well apply it then!’ Monica said, suddenly snapping. ‘Children need
routine
. You can’t keep changing the rules. It says in
The Big Happy Baby Book
that—’

‘You know what?’ said Jimmy. ‘Screw
The Big Happy Baby Book
. That book is fiction! It’s written by a childless fantasist. I have shown Cressida a hundred turds! I’ve cooed over them, admired them, sung to them, pinned medals on them, placed them back in the potty on velvet cushions and stuck her on top of them and the little bitch
still
prefers to shit on the floor. All right?’

Monica began to weep.

‘Shut up!’ she cried. ‘Shut up, Jimmy! I can’t stand it. I really can’t. We have to try. We can’t just . . .’

She had been pulling a jumper down over Toby’s head as she broke down and when his little face emerged he was crying too.

‘Don’t worry, baby. Mummy’s just being silly,’ Monica croaked. ‘We need a brush, Jimmy. Look at his hair. Don’t cry, baby, please don’t cry.’

Cressida and Lillie were wailing too. Jimmy wasn’t, but only on the outside. Inside he was crying as well and as he cried inside it occurred to him yet again that he had once more forgotten that Robbo was dead.

His best friend was dead and he couldn’t find a hairbrush. Could life get any harder?

‘Oh God,’ Monica said through her tears as she inspected Toby’s head, ‘he’s got
nits
.’

‘Can’t worry about that now,’ Jimmy said, sticking a bit of toast between his teeth, shoving the makeshift grandpa project into Toby’s fist and grabbing his sports kit.

‘Try not to scratch your head, darling,’ Monica called after them as they headed for the lift that connected the family room with the garage beneath it. ‘I’ll put conditioner on it and comb them out tonight.’

A lift. A
lift
.

Jimmy was counting the cost of single nappies and yet he still owned and operated a private elevator. Jimmy had never been exactly sure what the word ‘surreal’ meant but he imagined that a jobless, penniless, debt-ridden loser taking a lift to his private underground car park might fit the bill.

Underfloor parking

When Jimmy and Monica had bought their last and finest Notting Hill house in 2003 it had had ample room to park three cars in a large area at the front. Indeed this had been one of the features about which the estate agent was most enthusiastic.

‘Look,’ the agent had said conspiratorially, ‘don’t say I said it but you could probably service the interest on your mortgage
renting out
one of your parking spaces. The parking problem in London is out of control. I mean they bang on and on about the homeless, but actually there are a lot less people with nowhere to sleep than people with nowhere to park, and they need help too.’

The first thing Jimmy and Monica did with the parking area was get rid of it.

It was Lizzie’s idea. She took one look at the front of the house and very forcefully explained to Monica and Jimmy that it simply wouldn’t do. Such an arrangement was ridiculous, insane even. Here they were, Lizzie insisted, the owners of one of the loveliest detached town houses in Notting Hill, a house which by some quirk of Georgian architectural caprice was set much further back from the road than the other houses in the street, and yet the previous owners had seen fit to squander this precious feature and use it as a place to
store their bloody cars
.

‘Vandals!’ Lizzie had pronounced. ‘People who cannot appreciate beautiful things should be banned by law from owning them.’

She stood on the granite-paved surface between the big new family Range Rover and Monica’s spunky little Mini convertible and spread her arms wide.

‘I shall tell you what this is,’ she said dramatically. ‘This, Monica, is your front garden.’

‘Oh my God,’ Monica squealed with childlike excitement. Nobody had a front garden in Notting Hill. Not even Gwyneth.

Lizzie insisted that Monica summon Jodie the nanny from inside the house.

‘She must bring sheets of Toby’s thickest and most beautiful paper from the craft cupboard, and lots and lots of coloured crayons and pencils.’

Jodie rushed out with the required articles followed by a chuckling Toby, and to everyone’s delight Lizzie set to work on the bonnet of the Mini, sketching out her entire garden concept right there and then.

Robbo smiled indulgently at his wife’s enthusiasm and suggested to Jimmy that they mooch off to the pub. Which they did, leaving Lizzie scribbling away furiously while Monica brought strawberry tea and Toby and Jodie sat in the Range Rover and headbanged to ‘Highway To Hell’.

Lizzie sketched palms, vines, great earthen pots with small trees in them, Japanese stones, soothing water features, pergolas with wind chimes attached and even a miniature English meadow. The end result was so lovely in itself that Monica had it framed and hung in her en suite.

And from that one beautiful vision plucked from the heady upper reaches of Lizzie’s imagination had begun a feat of civil engineering more costly and more complex than had been the construction of the original five-storey house and those on either side of it put together. It was not, of course, the garden that was the problem. The problem now was where to put the cars.

‘The answer’s obvious,’ Lizzie said as Monica and she toasted her creation with champagne. ‘You put the cars
under
the garden.’

When Jimmy and Robbo got back from the pub (having had six pints in all, two for Jimmy and four for Robbo), they found Lizzie and Monica giggling over their champagne and announcing that the deal was done and the whole design was complete down to the minutest detail. Not the actual engineering, of course, but where all the shrubs and herbs were going to go and what colour smoked glass to have in the lift.

‘Of course it’ll take years to get the planning permission,’ Robbo said, searching for more beer in the huge steel fridge. ‘God, Jimmy, why do you always buy American beer? It does not make you look cool and it’s
too bloody sweet
!’

‘Horrid little Nazis,’ Lizzie said.

‘Who? Americans?’ Robbo asked.

‘Town planners.’

‘Ah. That I agree.’

‘Don’t they understand that a city is
alive
, a living, breathing entity, not some museum piece to be pickled in aspic.’

As it turned out, getting planning permission was a breeze because Lizzie had been able to show that when the house had been built in 1814 it had actually had a front garden. In fact, by a happy chance it was the paving over of this garden in the sixties in order to create the parking area that was now revealed as illegal. No planning permission had been granted.

Jimmy’s luck held yet again. It turned out to be his
civic duty
to install a four-car garage under his home. The Historic Buildings Trust (of which Lizzie was a benefactor) had fervently taken up Jimmy and Monica’s case and the council, mindful of their legal obligations towards a Grade 2-listed street, were positively anxious for the Corbys to proceed with the massive renovation. Indeed, at one point there was even talk of a council grant to part fund the work since it was perceived as being in the best cultural interests of the community. Jimmy and Monica were sent the paperwork and invited to apply but graciously declined the offer.

‘Sure, it’s silly to walk away from a co-funding initiative,’ Jim said at the time, ‘but have you seen the length of the form? You know what? Life’s too short.’

The job was a colossal undertaking since the entire five-storey building had to be underpinned while the garage was excavated under the front garden and partly beneath the house itself. Understandably this had not endeared Jimmy and Monica to their new neighbours but, as David had said when he heard about the scheme at the next curry night,
fuck the neighbours
.

‘I’m an architect, mate,’ David said. ‘Neighbours object to all building plans except their own. Believe me, the same bloke telling you your Kango hammer woke his baby is secretly plotting to add an extra floor plus patio that will directly overlook your sun deck.’

During the work many a historical artefact including a number of Roman coins had been unearthed. These Monica sent straight to the British Museum.

‘I suppose they might have been worth quite a bit,’ she said, ‘if we’d tried to sell them, but you know what? Life’s too short.’

Eventually the work was completed, with 80 per cent of the parking space reclaimed as a splendid front garden (or local cat toilet as Jimmy and Monica soon discovered) and just 20 per cent reserved for the ramp which led up directly on to the pavement. This ramp was very steep but nothing that four-by-fours couldn’t handle, so Jimmy got rid of Monica’s Mini and bought her a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser.

‘Makes me laugh when Greenies claim there’s no purpose for serious off-road vehicles in town,’ Jimmy joked. ‘They should see the angle on my exit ramp.’

What fun they all had as a family on the first few occasions they used it.

‘Weeeeeeeeeeh,’ Toby cried and they all agreed.

They held an opening party for the garden which a number of Kate Moss’s circle attended (although not Kate herself) and during which cases of superb vintage wine were presented to mollify disgruntled neighbours. Everybody pronounced the garden a triumph and it was photographed for a number of magazines as an example of what could be achieved in London if people actually buckled down and made the effort. ‘One Notting Hill home restored to its early-nineteenth-century glory,’ the property section of the
Standard
read. And although it seemed unlikely that the 1814 garden had been based around Japanese plants and stones (real Japanese stones, specially imported), it was generally agreed that the overall effect was
incredibly
soothing.

‘No matter how terrible a day it’s been,’ Monica told her guests as she perched on the sixteenth-century Italian marble bird table, ‘this place calms me. It never fails.’

Unfortunately it was not very long before the garden lost its calming effect, and not just because of the cat shit.

‘People drop their litter in it,’ Monica moaned. ‘Can you believe it? Fast-food wrappers and the like. I feel awful seeing poor Juanita having to clean it up. It really isn’t fair on her, but people never think of that, do they? Do you know what annoys me most? The little bags of dog shit. People go to the trouble of picking up their dog’s muck in a bag, but then they seem to think that’s public duty enough and leave it on my bird table.’

Off road, on road

Down in the sub-basement the pauper and his son got out of the lift and into the last remaining car. At least the car still felt good. It was a state-of-the-art 2008 top-of-the-topmostrange Range Rover with all the trimmings. Electric everything, a sound system that could have played Wembley Stadium, massive DVD screens in all the headrests, tinted glass and soft leather upholstery.

A huge tank of a car. An assault vehicle of a car.

Ton upon ton of shiny black steel that Jimmy was sure could knock a Humvee off the road without wobbling the suspension. It still felt good to drive it. Even now, after everything, perhaps not least because the tank was fully paid for, an as-yet-unliquefied asset. Jimmy still had it up his sleeve as a source of ready cash (if he could flog it without MasterCard, Visa, Amex or the bank finding out).

Jimmy tried to relax into the beautiful pale-cream upholstery. Or at least the upholstery which had been beautiful, pale and creamy for as long as Jimmy had employed a handyman and occasional driver to clean it. Sadly, now that the only person likely to valet the luxurious interior of his car was Jimmy himself, the soft leather had become a murky blend of soggy biscuit, McDonald’s fries, baby puke, mud and chocolate.

‘Why is the car always so dirty these days?’ Toby asked.

‘It’s a survival tactic that I read about in an SAS book,’ Jimmy replied, ‘in case we are ever stranded on a mountain or in a hostile country. We could last for weeks just by sucking the seats.’

Toby laughed and Jimmy felt better. He was very proud of the fact that, despite his troubles, most of the time he managed to stay positive in front of his children. Toby was a little boy and he had a right to start his day with a mind uncluttered by doubt and uncertainty. Unburdened by care. Even the dreadful news about Robbo had to take second place to that fact.

Jimmy flicked the remote, opened the automatic trap and powered the huge car up the ramp.

‘Weeeeeehhhhh-hooo!’ he said.

‘Weeeeeehhhhh-hooo!’ Toby echoed.

‘Rock ’n’ Roll!’ they shouted together.

Jimmy glanced at Toby and felt a sudden surge of joy and even optimism. A joy quite separate from his cares and worries. Divorced from the misery of his bereavement and the pressure of his finances. A joy made out of love. He had three wonderful, healthy children. Tobes, Cressie and Lillie. They were his and he was theirs. In real terms, how wealthy could a man get?

‘We’re surrounded, Sergeant, and the men are starving,’ Jimmy said, returning to his joke and putting on a British officer’s voice. ‘Put that baby seat in to soak and boil it up for a nourishing stale rusk soup. And get one of the chaps to go foraging for old crisps in the seat-belt-catch orifices.’