by Tim Roux
Chrissie smiled slowly. “Yes, I think they just did.”
“What do we think about that?” I asked Chrissie.
“I think it is extraordinary.”
“I think we should stop the children watching it. We can’t have %^$*&*& [mouthed again] turning up in children’s programmes.”
“No, I agree,” replied Chrissie, “it distracts from all the wholesome violence.”
I conceded Chrissie’s point. “So what do we do?”
“I think that after the programme finishes we should sit both the children down and explain to them solemnly, and especially to Mark, that motherfucking is very wrong, and should certainly never take place in this home. It belongs to the realm of Greek tragedy, and has nothing to do with the rolling housing estates of Eastern Berkshire.”
“Do they know the story of Oedipus?”
“No, I don’t believe that it has ever been illustrated as a children’s story. Somebody is missing a trick there. Perhaps we should write to the producers of Transformers. They could work the plot into one of their episodes. They could even introduce a character called Oedipus Rex. He could be Optimus Prime’s best, if sexually confused, buddy. He could transform into a camper van, or something.”
“What are you two talking about?” Ella broke in.
“We are developing a plot line for a new Transformers episode, Ella,” Chrissie informed her, “maybe even for a whole series.”
“Cool,” Ella came back. “I don’t really like Transfomers that much, but it would be cool to tell all my friends that you wrote an episode.”
How unlike Tommy’s world. I doubted that any character in Bob the Builder would be likely to use the word ‘motherfucker’, not even Spud on his best and most devious Ken Livingstone form. There was no corrupting influence to fear from the TV set, which was perhaps why Tommy was only attending to it distractedly.
Kathy and Fran were waiting for me in the kitchen. It was a shock to catch them in the same room at the same time at all, and even more so to realise that they had been conversing quite amiably.
“Well,” said Kathy, “how did it go?”
“Yes, we think we can probably do something together.”
“What exactly?” Fran asked me.
I glanced at Kathy, trying to fathom what Fran already knew, but Kathy refused to meet my eyes.
“What do you know so far?” I quizzed Fran.
“I know that you have a plan, and that Kathy claims that it will probably transform our lives.”
“Yes,” I reply, “it may well.”
“So what is it?”
“I would prefer it that you and Tommy didn’t know. The less you know, the better.”
“Except Kathy.” The peevishness, and possibly jealousy, had returned.
“We need Kathy to execute the plan.”
“You do?” Kathy fired back.
“Almost certainly,” I replied.
“So I am the one who gets to do the snatching,” Kathy observed.
“It would make sense.”
“Snatching what?” Fran asked.
“Grabbing the things that we want,” I deflected her.
“No way!” Kathy declared.
“You are not critical, Kathy, but your participation would undoubtedly help make the plan run more smoothly.”
“You are asking a lot, Harry. Taking liberties with me.” A crooked smile appeared on her face which Fran noticed with a sense of shock.
“As I say, Kathy, it is up to you. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Mike and I can handle it if necessary.”
“It sounds very dodgy to me,” Fran commented.
“It is a lot dodgier than that,” Kathy added wryly. “You wait.”
“I am not sure that I want to.”
“Don’t worry,” I pacified her. “It will work out fine. And, if it goes wrong, this way you are not implicated.”
“Not implicated?” Fran sneered. “How does your going to prison again not implicate me? You think that the cops won’t be pumping me for information for hours, do you? You think that Tommy won’t be hurt, devastated to have lost his dad again? Think again, Harry. Whatever you are doing, it had better work. I don’t mind it being illegal, so long as no-one really gets hurt, but I do mind a lot if you get caught. I am not standing by you again if that happens. I am going to take Tommy off and find him a better father, one who is actually there for him every now and again.”
* * *
Funnily enough, Chrissie and I had had a similar conversation only a few weeks previously – similar but in many ways opposite. Chrissie was concerned by how little she saw of our children. Top solicitors often work upwards of sixteen hours a day, and over weekends, partly because they have to, and partly because they love their jobs which present them with a continuous supply of enticing riddles they are handsomely paid to solve. As a top solicitor, you are paid to have fun, but if you look at most of their physiques you will realise that the relentless excitement inexorably grinds them down or, more accurately, puffs them up.
I have never resented the hours Chrissie works. I am far too aware of her extraordinary achievement in getting herself into that position in the first place and, after all, I have chosen a parallel, if less steep, path.
However, even I feel neglected by her sometimes. I begin to suspect that I as a husband, and we as a family, do not matter to her as much as we should. I am a grown-up, and have at least some resources developed by experience to cope with this situation, so what must the children, who are relatively new to the world, vulnerable and needy, be feeling? This restrictive contact with Chrissie is enough to remind us of how much we love her, but the sprinkling of time she feels able to spare us is nothing like enough to quench the thirst we have of her.
Typically, Mark has engineered his own bust-through solution. He phones Chrissie at the office, even in the middle of business meetings. Initially, Chrissie tried to discourage him, but he simply persisted until she had no option but to accommodate him. Now she refers to him as “my Prince”, so that most of her clients assume that he is some Middle-Eastern potentate and willingly cede the floor to him. Even the most demanding client accepts that loaded oil sheiks must take precedence over ordinary international business people. The connection might prove commercially useful one day, although nobody has yet called in Chrissie’s bluff. Little do they guess that the potentate on the other end of the line is a seven year old boy desperate to hear his mummy’s voice, not having seen her for five days straight.
Ella, on the other hand, is visibly suffering, all the while protesting that she has everything under control. She doesn’t want to be any trouble to us, and so she refuses to complain, and she equally declines to copy Mark’s ruse; indeed she denounces it as dishonest, intrusive, selfish and damaging to Mummy’s professional reputation. With Ella, Agnes and I have to fill in as best we can, while keeping a vigilant eye on the situation. Agnes’ soft shoulder is proving infinitely preferable to my bony, male one. Try as we might, we men are not women; and we fathers are not mothers.
Most days it is I who get the children up and take them to school, because Chrissie usually has to leave the house before seven to beat the commuter rush. She cannot bear being crushed up against people’s smelly armpits or ‘flu-infectious noses. As far as my office is concerned, I ‘work’ at home each day until ten, and get in shortly after eleven. If this troubles anybody, they have yet to confront me with my laxity. Agnes picks up the children from school, feeds them and provides background security, in all its senses, until either Chrissie or I get home. Again, most days I am back first, but rarely before seven o’clock. Chrissie often staggers in between ten and eleven.
Chrissie is as unhappy with this arrangement as am I. This is not the ideal happy family package we had dreamed about and planned for so long, but what are we to do about it? We must live, and we prefer to live well. The children certainly like the good things in life: the toys, the holidays, the treats, the fact that virtua
lly nothing is denied them. That all costs, and what it costs them is us. Only time will tell whether the price was too high to pay.
I sat there staring at Fran and Kathy, mulling these thoughts, as Mike the Hammer would say, and wondering whether the routine at home had changed in my absence, if indeed I was noticeably absent. It was a chilling thought that the situation for Ella and Mark might have deteriorated further, and an even more chilling one that nothing might have changed at all, and that they had not even realised that I was no longer there..
* * *
Chapter 10
I decided to take Tommy out for a walk for a guided tour of Hull. At first he wasn’t that interested, and I had to coax him away from his heart-breakingly few toys with the promise of a new toy which I couldn’t afford to buy. Fran was livid when I asked her for the money to fulfill my commitment, but agreed that it would be good for Tommy to be outside for a few hours, even on the streets of Hull, and coughed up five pounds. I could see it in her face that she was calculating how to feed us for the rest of the week off our dole money. I could also see her consoling herself with the faint hope that I would manage to attract some more funds with whatever petty fraud I was planning.
Our children back in Wokingham have two roomfuls of toys, stacked up the walls, stuffed into cupboards, strewn around the floor, traipsing into the bedrooms (including our own), the sitting room, the dining room, both bathrooms and even the kitchen. Every fad there has ever been has delivered another collection of branded toys to our home. Nothing has ever been refused, although Chrissie and I both nag the children to clear up after themselves, which Ella reluctantly does and Mark evasively doesn’t. It is usually left to me to swear that one day I will throw into the bin everything I judge to be out of its proper place. There are only two flaws in my argument. Firstly, nothing has its proper place. Secondly, I have threatened these reprisals so often, without the remotest attempt at a follow-through, that it would be brutal for me to be as good as my word.
Tommy, on the other hand, had a pad of paper, a depleted pack of coloured crayons, a stuffed rabbit and a balding, one-eyed bear, Bob the Builder himself, Postman Pat, his cat and his Post Office van (useful, if old-fashioned), a Thomas the Tank Engine, and that was about it apart from McDonalds flotsam and jetsam. I could have wept for him. Holding up Postman Pat as your favourite toy at the age of seven for want of owning anything more inspiring should be an outright indication of living beneath the child poverty line.
So, having five pounds to spend on a new toy was tantamount to a trip to the moon so far as Tommy was concerned, it was so exciting. I vowed there and then to gain the means to buy this boy armfuls of Power Rangers, Transformers, Pokémons and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, much as I despised them at home.
Tommy led me left and right until we reached the Hessle Road, where we turned left towards the City Centre and, more importantly, towards Toys-R-Us. The Hessle Road used to be the thriving hub of the fishing community, and vestiges of that energy remain embedded in the tarmac and the bricks, even if the shops are somewhat cheap and forlorn. This is evidently not the commercial heart of the City of Hull any more, until you encounter the towering presence of Smith+Nephew, surrounded by a cluster of other offices representing companies evidently famous in their own neighbourhood if not in mine. Tommy’s pace quickened appreciably at this point as he detected the imminence of Toys-R-Us. He wanted the money irretrievably spent to ensure that it was all his. I gave him a short facile lecture about his resisting the temptation to spend all of his five pounds at once, but he only eyed me uncomprehendingly and probably resentfully. When was the last time anyone said to a child in England “Five pounds is a lot of money. Don’t spend it all at once”? Tommy must already have been fully aware that he had an irritating fool for a father, and my pomposity certainly went no distance to persuading him otherwise.
Inside the architecturally doleful shed which is Toys-R-Us, Tommy dashed around like a cat in a field of cat mint. He even forgot whom he was dealing with and magnanimously sought to enthuse me with his excitement. Of course, he wanted the whole shop, but I would bet that that five pounds gave him one of the best eighty minutes of his life. In the end he didn’t even spend it. “Mummy needs it for food,” he counselled me wisely, but the mere impetus of the possibility of spending it had brought him irrepressibly alive. Awed by the maturity of his decision, I renewed my vow of providing abundance to this brave, even heroic, little boy.
As we came out of the shop, I asked him where we could find the “King Billy” statue, the one where the king dismounted his horse and proceeded to parade around the square at midnight. Tommy looked bewildered, recovering to say “Don’t tease, Dad, it is over there.”
“Let’s go there,” I suggested.
“But there is nothing there.”
“I just want to see it,” I insisted.
So we walked the five minutes or so between St. Andrew’s Quay to the Market Place, and there indeed was King William III, gleaming with gold, or more likely bronze, and currently immobile.
“What did you want to see him for?” Tommy asked.
“Just because he is here,” I replied.
“Well, well, well,” a voice boomed behind me. “Guess who it isn’t. If it isn’t old ‘arry Walker, taking a walk with ‘is pet. Yer’ve become a bit of a culture vulture ‘ave yer, ‘arry?”
There were three men who had every intention of crowding me. One had seized Tommy’s arm and was hurting him.
“Leave Tommy alone!” I commanded the scruffy bearded thug who was manhandling him. They ignored me, and Tommy yelped.
“This isn’t yer part of town,” a second one advised me censoriously. “This is our patch ‘ere. Ye’re trespassing. We shoot trespassers ….”
“…… when no-one is looking,” added the third.
“And sometimes even when they are,” the second corrected him. The thuggiest one stamped hard on Tommy’s toes, making him cry loudly. He put a hand over his mouth. “’e’s about as much guts as his dad, I see,” he observed.
“It must take a hell of a lot of guts to do what you are doing,” I retorted. “A twenty stone man smashing up a four stone child.”
“I’ve gone metric,” the thug riposted, “so I ‘aven’t the foggiest what ye’re saying,” at which point he laughed.
“Anyway, ‘arry,” concluded the second man, “I don’t suppose that yer’ll be breathing fresh air for much longer, if the rumour I’ve ‘eard is true.”
Suddenly I guessed who this man was. “That’s a shame, Planty,” I said. “I was going to propose a merger.”
The man scoffed. “A merger? Between five runts and a dozy dwarf like yer and the majestic might of the Inbies? I don’t think so, but yer’ve made me laugh, ‘arry. In fact ye’re so funny that I will overlook yer referring to me as Planty, this time anyway. Go on Big John, let go of the tiddler and let Little and even Littler pitter-patter their way ‘ome. Being see yer, ‘arry. And yer, Tommy, I suggest that yer keep as far away from yer dad and ‘is sperm bag of a sister as yer possibly can. Yer mummy’s okay, though. She’ld be good for five minutes if I got bored one day.”
* * *
I was reminded of the time when Ella nearly sawed Mark’s hand off. She must have been eight, and Mark three or four, and for some reason she decided to play doctors and nurses with a fret saw. She was obviously never really going to hack all the way through Mark’s wrist, however matchstick it was in those days, but she drew so much blood that we feared she might have severed either an artery or a vein. It was one of those Sundays when both of us were actually about, reading the papers in the sitting room while the children played, waiting for the inevitable scream from Mark. Ella always managed to hurt him one way or another, it was only a question of how much resolute peace we could pack into the gap between their dashing off to play and our rushing upstairs or into the garden, summoned by howls denoting a degree of urgency lying between anguish and trauma. This time it was definitely off the
scale of trauma. More decisive than usual, I tourniqueted Mark’s wrist and held it tight while we ushered them both frantically into the car, pausing only to register the fact that we were probably both too drunk to drive. That, of course, is irrelevant when one of your children’s lives is in danger, which it manifestly wasn’t, but we could probably have persuaded a policeman that we believed that it was if we had needed to.
We hit Accident & Emergency at the Royal Berks with quite a flurry and, to give them due credit, they dealt with Mark’s injury straightaway, impelled by his breath-stopping distress.
We watched as they sewed four stitches into his wrist, after administering a local injection, and before adding a tetanus jab. Ella was horror-struck, and needed even more consolation than Mark.
All of which is to observe that watching your child having been accidentally injured by an innocent experimenter is excruciating enough, but witnessing him being tortured by a pot-bellied, smelly-bearded thug requires exemplary revenge.
* * *
When we got back to the house, Tommy worked himself up into a frenzy again and rushed inside to tell his mother all about it in rasping phrases.
Fran was in the kitchen chatting to probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life: dark hair, tall, slim legs, sloe-green eyes, a sensuous mouth I could imagine brushing my lips against the second I saw her.
She was not pleased to see me, and blatantly didn’t have the slightest intention of positioning her lips anywhere near mine.
“What on earth have you done to Tommy, Harry?” Fran demanded.
“I haven’t done anything. We bumped into Trevor Plant and his gang.”
“Where?”
“In the Market Place.”
“You what? For Christ sake, what were you doing there? You know that is their territory. You were asking for trouble.”
