“So here’s the grift , Bernie boy. He wants to go back to it all. To leave Mamaroneck in Westchester County. To leave all this. To live in the Bronx. Again. To work pro bono. To take the cases no-one else dares to take on. For why? Because he’s one of the good guys and some days a fuckin’ saint? Well, yeah. Yes. He actually is. I guess. But also because he’s decided that the whole wide American world, and its fouled up Dream, the one his parents thought he’d made his own, makes him, in fact, sick with its lies, its corruption, its wickedness, its greed. Sick to death maybe. Certainly sick to the point of madness. He thinks the apocalypse is coming. The revolution alone can stop it. Maybe before this decade is done. So, no time for sympathy, Burrn-aard. No time for fellow-feeling. No time for love. No time for me. Or anyone else.”
Bernard Jenkins sensed a button was being pushed. No, he knew it, positively. It was his button. He felt sure of it. He took another step towards Rachel Kellerman. He reached out for her. But he was wrong, about her push if not about his button. Not unkindly, she laughed softly and pushed his hands away. It was a halt in proceedings.
“Hey, Burrn-aard, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…you know. We’re not in the movies here, Ok? I only thought you needed to see for yourself what’s going on, in him, from down here to up there, in his head. What’s happening with Saul is big. Bigger than you, or Mary Ellen, or, from these days on, even me. See, I’m not going back with him. I haven’t said it yet, but he knows. This is what it’s all about today. And tomorrow he’ll know, again, in his heart that he’s right, that the rest of us, me included, are in the wrong. You disappointed him, is all. He’ll be being nice old Saul to your girl right now, and when he comes back in, he’ll be fine with you. You’re right, he does care.”
“She’s not my girl,” said Bernard Jenkins. Rachel Kellerman sighed. She picked up her glass, and drained it. She walked back up the stairs to the living room of their open plan house. Saul Kellerman and Mary Ellen were sat on the buttercup-yellow sofa. He said that Mary Ellen would like to go home, and he said sorry to Bernard if he’d been a bit rough on him. He assured his wife that he was okay to drive. It wasn’t far. Light traffic on the road at this time. If they hurried they could catch the 5.55 train to the city.
* * * * *
Dr Bernard Jenkins, sixty year old CEO Europe of Tunnel Fabrication Worldwide, sat reading his up-market tabloid newspaper on his daily train commute. He chose the tabloid format so he could turn the pages even when hemmed in on all sides by sitting and standing rail passengers. He had done the journey for the last ten years, after his transfer from Geneva and promotion to CEO Europe. Fifteen minutes by car, from his detached, sprawling Tudor farmhouse conversion, to park at the station and catch the train. Forty minutes on the train to London. Then twenty minutes, max, if the traffic was light, by black cab to his office. Clockwork if everything was on time, and with a seat at the train window time, too, to read the Monday paper.
He read it methodically, from front to back. Endless speculation about the feud between Blair and Brown in the dying days of New Labour. Leaks and counter-claims. Too many Christians in that cabinet, Bernard had said often enough to his wife. You watch, he’d said, self-righteous pomposity and self-justifying belief in being infallible will follow on. He took no satisfaction when it did. After over three decades dealing with governments and their officials across the globe, Bernard Jenkins, CEO, distrusted all moralising and hand-wringing from whichever political quarter it came. The central section of the paper was the sad narrative of military intervention without a social strategy, and then acting without any historical or cultural grasp. Bloody lawyers, Bernard thought. No business would act like that. Certainly not the ones he’d worked successfully for, often in fraught and delicate circumstances.
He reached the Sports pages, skipping the Register and Obit columns, with relief. He checked for the lower division Welsh club rugby results, followed at a distance but still more meaningful to him than the artificially constructed so-called “Regions” back home. More bone-headed lack of understanding, he’d informed his Surrey drinking cronies in the golf club he attended for the company, in both senses, not for the playing on the greens. He read the soccer match reports and the tedious player-profiles. He’d exhausted the paper after less than twenty minutes. He looked out of the window. He glanced at his fellow passengers and looked away in the same manner they did if eyes should meet. The English, he thought. What decent people. By and large. The English. What a furtive bunch. This lot anyway. Different elsewhere. He fiddled with the paper in his hands. He opened it again, to the obituary pages. Last thing left to read. Appropriately enough, he thought.
There was a full page obituary notice for some distinguished Second World War soldier who had later retired as a Brigadier General to farm in Rhodesia, and then home to Scotland to hold non-executive posts in public utilities, and stand, without success, for Parliament. He read every word and looked at the full-length oil portrait which had been used of a young man in tartan-trousered uniform instead of any later photograph. Typical spin, Bernard thought as he turned the page. The second obituary had a photograph but only half a page’s summation of the life. The photograph was also not particularly recent. It was of the upper body, head and shoulders, of someone walking away, fast down the street, but turning back to shout something at the newspaper cameraman. It was, for Bernard, recognisably an older Saul Kellerman, and the headline merely confirmed it:
Saul Kellerman. American radical lawyer and Civil Rights Activist.
The piece was more factual than considered. The facts and nothing but the facts. As if, thought Bernard Jenkins.
Saul Kellerman had been found dead by a neighbour in his walk-up, cold water apartment in the Bronx, New York City. A suspected heart attack. He was in his seventy ninth year. He lived alone. Divorced from his only wife, Rachel, nee Weiss, Kellerman in 1972. She survived him. There had been no children. Rachel Kellerman, contacted in a retirement home in Florida, said, “Saul had always had a big, big heart. It was never broken by anything, or anybody. It just stopped, I guess.”
The rest of the mini-essay was a bare bones account of his career. How a well-respected and well-heeled attorney had left his practice to plead the cases of Freedom Riders in the racially segregated Deep South in the early 1960s. How he’d rapidly became the lawyer of, the advocate for, any and every dissident voice which was raised against established forces in that riven America of the 1960s. He defended those others, even those perceived to be terrorists and traitors. He sided with the disaffected and the dangerous, from the Black Panthers to the Weathermen, and in 1968 he was in Chicago with the anti-war protesters and in jail with Mailer. In the law courts of the land he was as forensic as he was fearless, more and more challenging of the legal right to try his clients, for their alleged crimes, at all. For some he had morphed into an egotistical, publicity seeking monster. The obituary notice quoted one academic jurist, by no means the most unkind of his critics, as labelling Kellerman, ‘The man who forsook American Altruism for Un-American Ultraism’.
Saul Kellerman had never retreated from his self-declared war on American power. If the state accused, Kellerman defended. Anti-war rioters. Bomb-makers. Mobsters. Confessed killers. Saul Kellerman had proclaimed that in the spider-webbery of corporate greed and imperial dominion there was no justifiably assignable guilt for those who had, necessarily, to stand up or be crushed, to devour or be devoured. The obituary said that, even after some years of relative quiescence in his old age, Kellerman had remained a lightning rod for divisive opinion in America. To his admirers he was a Patriot. In the eyes of his enemies he was a Demagogue-run-amok.
Bernard Jenkins closed his newspaper. In his memory, from what he knew, Saul Kellerman was neither of those things. Or not completely so. Or, if both, then, he thought, like Saul’s admired Huey Long, the one thing as necessary to be the desired other. The train entered a tunnel. He looked at his reflection, suddenly there b
efore him within the darkened window pane of the train. He grimaced at his rounded-out face. At his wispy hair. Grey and white, he knew, and thinning on top. He thought now, of course, of Mary Ellen Robinson who had written to him for a while after she’d gone back to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to work in a pro-bono law firm as a junior partner. She’d married another law partner, older than her, from within the firm. He’d written to Bernard, five years into their marriage and after she’d died in a car crash on her way to plead a case in New Orleans against the arraignment of a black teenager for robbery. He thought of Rachel Kellerman, who’d never been in the movies. And he thought, as he had many times over the years that had since passed, of Saul Kellerman who had remained the most disturbing, the largest man, in every sense, he had ever met. He re-played in his mind the dispute they had had at Thanksgiving in 1966, and he wondered if Saul Kellerman had ever puzzled over the nub of it, had ever considered the real cause of it, of Bernard’s outburst. His dissent. His shame. He stared at himself in the blackened window until the train came out of the tunnel, and the reflection abruptly vanished though his self-reflexive mood remained.
It had been a long time since he had thought, as he now did, of his father. A quiet, resolute man who had worked from the age of fourteen, throughout the Depression years in the coalfield, in the village’s co-operative wholesale store. He worked there until his death, at sixty-five, soon after his retirement, and only five years after Bernard had returned from America. He had risen in the co-op from floor-sweeper and grocery-boy to run the Gents’ haberdashery floor where he measured the inside-legs of colliers and tugged the Sunday-best suit jackets of miners tight at their muscled backs. He had married late so he was in his forties and his wife, a spinster until then, in her mid-thirties when Bernard was born. They had met in and were married from Moriah Baptist Chapel. He had saved his wages to buy, freehold, a small terraced house where the couple went to live. Life for them was patterned by the security of routine. The same meals, rotated around the same weekdays and with the ritual of cooked dinners on Sundays, marked out all their lives as regularly as the tick of their kitchen clock. His father potched about in his garden shed. His father worked an allotment in a waistcoat with his shirt-sleeves rolled up. His father was moderate and friendly on Saturday nights in the British Legion club. His father kept his opinions, on politics and on religion, discreetly to himself. Where he could not be honest and open, he chose to be silent. Bernard knew that his father loved both him, and his mother Crid, more deeply than he could ever express, beyond a hug. He knew that they literally adored him, and that his father’s pride in his son’s accomplished success in the world was boundless. He knew that his father would have forgiven him his lapse, and he also knew that he, Bernard Jenkins, was right to feel ashamed throughout his life.
With his train slowing down to pull into Waterloo, Bernard was silently repeating to himself the last words which Saul Kellerman had shouted out to him as that other commuter train, of almost forty years before, had departed Mamaroneck, Westchester County for Manhattan and his future life.
“Take a chance, kid” he had yelled, so loudly that others on the platform had turned around to look at him, their surprised attention pulled towards him by his urgency, his fervour, his being, in every way larger-than-themselves.
“Take that chance, Bernard,” he’d shouted. “It only comes the once. Don’t ever forget. Here and now is always forever. Take that chance.”
He hadn’t though, he thought. Taken the chance. Whatever it might have been. Bernard knew he had settled for something else. He was still not sure, in the here and now, if it was the lesser thing for which he had plumped. Only that it was different, and certainly not what Saul Kellerman had envisioned. For himself. For Bernard. For everyone. But there again Bernard reflected, as he walked swiftly through the station’s Terminus, when that other commuter train had pulled away, leaving Saul Kellerman in its wake, it had not yet been 1968. It was certainly not 1968 now, he acknowledged to himself, as he hailed a taxi at the one right spot on the road outside where he knew to go to avoid queuing in the station with all the other commuters. Perhaps it had never been 1968. Not for Bernard Jenkins anyway.
Inter Nationals
Inside the painted lines. Red and white lines. Marking the boundaries of touch. Out of touch. In touch. In play. Trainers squeaking on the scuffed gymnasium floor of the university sports centre. Not leisure. Pain more like. For Gavin anyway. The youngest and the softest. Out of school and unchained from the desk of a scholarship boy. Liberated by pain. By exercise. “Mens sana in corpore sano”, the Latin scholar intoned to himself as he was urged to run and run. “Come on you fat bastard. Run. Come on!” Just to get into position. Just to touch the ball. Momentarily. To lose the ball. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Gav!” To stop. Panting. As the ball is thumped past him. Again. Into the centre circle. To their player. Big bloke, hefty, making to control the bounce. Too late. Jimmy takes the ball off the big bloke’s toe. His body swerves away from an incoming tackle. He spurts down the centre. Towards the goal. He shimmies to the left. He shifts his balance to the right. He shoots. Hard and scuddingly low. And, goal! Gavin hadn’t moved. The other three clap Jimmy on the back. Their star player. He grins at Gavin who grins back, still panting. Elated. Friday night. With lager and curry to come. Five-a-side football.
And, shit, they were off again. Gavin once more by-passed by pace and skill. But still running. Content to be with them. Happy, in fact, to be one of them. Tolerated. No, accepted. Encouraged. Clumsiness irrelevant here. Only five-a-side after all. Bit of a kick-about. Students. Gavin, just up from home, at eighteen, to read Classics to his parents’ uncomprehending consternation. Big Mac from Belfast, graduating in Civil Engineering at the end of the year. Ed, the Yank, a PhD in Tudor Parliamentary History, on the wing. Selçuk, from Ankara, a second degree in Management and Business, buzzing around in mid-field. And Jimmy of course. Jimmy, the mature age student, at thirty-six too old for the full game but made for five-a-side. Jimmy, redundant steel worker, from the blast furnaces. A nugget of a man. Gavin’s idol. Gavin’s friend. The one who’d brought him in – “Us Taffs got to stick together up ’ere, butt!” – just to make up the numbers. He’d hesitated. He’d never played. All that heads-down, exam upon exam, “O” to “A”, and his pudgy fingers dented by holding a pen for scribbling hours on end, and his body, soft and cosseted, just an appendage of his force-fed mind. “Mens” stretched and exercised to a fierce sharpness. “Corpus” left behind as a mere foil to that edged weapon. Still, only five-a-side, and companionship – so, Gavin had said he’d “give it a go”.
To buy: black football shorts, white T-shirts, red-and-green striped trainers. Under Jimmy’s cajoling the drench of sweat – the ache of calf muscles for the first time – tensing, strengthening – more pliable – feeling his body – able to run, if not to play. Pleased for any praise – especially from Jimmy. Simplicity. Support. Words to take to sleep – “Eh, well played, butt” – to dream of the game. The one which had gone. The one yet to come. Waiting through the week for Friday. And the Friday after that – through the autumn – into the winter. The easiness, for him, of lectures and essays now counterpointed, for him, by the challenge of the university sports centre on Friday nights. His unspoken objective to be played out between two white goalposted nets, sawn off and yellow meshed, at either end of the gym – frantic – exhausting – demanding. His objective, unspoken, was to score – one day. A goal. To score. For himself. For the team. For Jimmy.
There was a rhythm to it. He had begun to feel it. It was not intuitive with him. More a work of detection. Not his to share, but his now to appreciate, to sense as a possibility. It unfolded. Each time, a repetition. Each time, a different emphasis. The ball rolled out along the floor from the back. Mac to Ed’s left foot on the right wing. Ed taps it sideways to Selçuk, and moves on, past half way. Selçuk looks up, doesn’t risk a one-two with Gav on his left. Instead, he twists out of a tackle. Squa
res the ball, but jerkily, to Jimmy. And then, Gavin could see, everything stops, and somehow everything starts up again – in an instant. The stuttering syncopation of pass-and-go is halted by Jimmy’s pause. It is an actual stop, a stand still, foot-on-the-ball moment. All the players seem transfixed, frozen. Jimmy walks the ball, just a pace or two, in front of him. Then the mood he employs is, without warning, percussive. He seems attached to the ball, and man and object accelerate as one. Jimmy is stocky, low slung and crouching, his speed and his body mass combine to shield the ball, to whip it away by inches from desperate tackles. Despairing lunges. On the edge of the penalty area. Makes to shoot. Only the goalie to beat. And Jimmy shouts, “Eh, Gav, d’you want this one? Wanna score it?”, and stops to glance to the left of the area where Gavin has run, and waits. For the pass. For the goal. To score. Against the goalie who has shuttled his feet to the right, in anticipation, mistaken anticipation, as Jimmy sidefoots the ball into the net. Laughing. The goalie splay-footed, beaten by the ruse. Gav looks shamefaced. Gav looks delighted. Jimmy had said, “Well done, Gav. You made that goal, butt, you made it.”
Afterwards. Over the pints. That was the theme tune. They played it over and over. Gav the Dummy Runner. Gav the Decoy. Gav the Blindside. Gav and the Game Plan. Gav the False No. 9. Jimmy had to explain that one to Ed. Gav thought he was Gav the Lucky Bugger. All this from that chance meeting over coffee in the student refectory when Jimmy had heard his accent. Not Jimmy’s Swansea scattergun of liquid vowels and slurred end-consonants, but linked enough despite Gavin’s educated and parentally guided vocal removal from the sound of the streets all around. Gavin had never met anyone like Jimmy. The same city, but suburban semi-det to terraced three-up-three-down. Might as well have been closed off from each other by unbreakable, immoveable, partitions of plate glass. Jimmy, though, was complete. For Gavin this made him a source of freedom, something as yet over the horizon, beyond his experience and, until now, his aspiration. Jimmy was senior. Jimmy was mentor. Jimmy was married. Jimmy was playing away. Jimmy was liberation-on-legs. Jimmy teased and tantalised. About girls. About drinking. About life. Gavin took it all in and vowed to play catch up, one day soon. It was enough that Jimmy knew how. “I’m old enough to be your father, butt”, Jimmy told him, and “Tell me again, what’s your mother’s maiden name? … Never! Well, then I could be, after all, see Gav!” And, with the others listening, Gavin laughed, too, just at the thought of it.
All That Lies Beneath Page 4
