‘I don’t need all this.’ Charlie thrusts the banknotes back at Joseph again.
‘Keep it,’ says Joseph, thinking: that word ‘all’ is excellent! Because it means he’s going to get the kit for him, doesn’t it?
‘This is too much.’
‘Come on, I’m asking a favour getting you to sort the kit for me; the least I can do is pay.’
When the twins were born Libby nearly died from preeclampsia and the doctors kept her in hospital for two weeks. The woman in the next bed had given birth to a dead baby and couldn’t stop crying. Charlie wouldn’t let him pay for a private room, even then. But this is different: he’s asking a favour. Joseph pushes Charlie’s hand back through the window and turns away.
‘I’m worried about you, Joe.’
‘No need. Just sort me the stuff, please.’
‘I’ll get it, I’ll get it, but—’
‘Thank you.’
They look at one another, but it’s painful, easier not to. Focus on that big bird flapping sideways out of the stand of trees over there instead. The wind has got up. Yet that’s the sound of Charlie turning the key in the ignition. The car pulls off. Joseph watches it go. Ah, Charlie, he thinks. I love you. It’s only as the Vauxhall turns out of sight that nervousness undermines the warm glow.
He’s highly visible – fluorescent – here amongst the deer.
Better make tracks.
He sets off south, out, out of the park, and down an arterial road flanked by suburban villains.
Villas.
Ha.
Ha ha.
That’s actually a funny one.
But Christ, what he’d give for it to stop.
21
If – no – when Charlie orders the stuff it will still take a day or two to turn up, meaning Joseph needs to lie low somewhere until then. In Kingston he passes a Travelodge. That’ll do. Bland being the word here, he takes off his bright coat, turns it inside out, and tucks it under his arm before entering. The man behind the desk has a very high forehead. He makes Joseph think of battle re-enactments.
There’s something strange about the room Joseph ends up in. What is it? The chequered bedspread! It’s exactly the same as the one Naomi bought for spare bedroom number three. Ah, spare room three. Joseph did his time in there before he left. The attempts to make up, also featuring the counterpane, plus I-still-love-you sex, the chequers rumpled on the floor. And straightening the room afterwards, pulling the throw tight over the duvet together. Two people working together can make a bed much faster than one person. Joseph runs his hand over the plum-coloured squares. To make a bed with someone you love is as intimate, in its own way, as anything that you might have done together in it the night before. Something twists inside him. This is like their spare bedspread, but it’s not theirs. Travelodge is a massive chain. How many more just like it are spread over cheap mattresses up and down the country?
Joseph takes a scalding shower and lies back on the bed, steaming. He blinks at the ceiling for a while, resisting the temptation to check the TV news. Instead, he opens the drawer in the bedside cabinet. Yes, a plastic-covered Gideon Bible, stiff-spined, never read. He cracks it at random.
PROVERBS 13
A wise son heareth his father’s instructions: but a scorner heareth not rebuke.
2 A man shall eat good by the fruit of his mouth: but the soul of transgressors shall eat violence.
3 Those who guard their lips preserve their lives: but those who speak rashly will come to ruin.
4 The soul of the sluggard desireth and hath nothing: but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat.
5 A righteous man hateth lying: but the wicked man is loathsome and cometh to shame.
6 Righteousness keepeth him that is upright in the way: but the wickednesses overthrow the sinner.
7 There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing: there is that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches.
8 The ransom of a man’s life are his riches: but the poor heareth not rebuke.
Didn’t have to read for long to hit something relevant, did he? And yet the certainty of these verses is a bit off-putting. Reminds him of Square Mile chutzpah. Say it confidently enough and others will believe. Because bullshit baffles brains. Which kind of puts a damper on verse three. Also: ‘the wicked man is loathsome and cometh to shame’: bollocks does he! Joseph rereads verse seven a couple of times, smiling to himself: ‘rich, yet hath nothing … poor, yet hath great riches.’ It doesn’t really feel that way, not lying naked on a Travelodge counterpane, but if you say so.
He’s tired.
Bugger the news for now.
He shuts his eyes.
22
Seven times a week for twelve straight years.
God in metronomic doses.
Why?
Just because.
Joseph thinks of vitamins, cod liver oil, and times tables. It was necessary. Not at home, no, apart from the odd carol service in the Christmas holidays, for Mum’s sake, but at school, where it was part of the … what’s the new word? … yes: ethos.
Formative years.
Top them all up with a daily shot of God.
Ha.
Formative? Well, yes, in theory. Joseph was as ripe for indoctrination as any eight-, eleven-, fourteen-year-old. And like the rest of them, he sat through a service a day for all those years. Making the sheer toothlessness of the regime all the more remarkable. Let’s face it, beyond a propensity, when running away, scared half to death of himself, to marvel at the complimentary Bible, all those thousands of hours spent listening and singing and kneeling and praying seem to have slipped from him as completely as honey off a hot spoon.
Our father, who –
I vow to thee –
God be with –
And did those feet in ancient –
Marching on to war –
The school chaplain had a pink face and fine blonde hair. He was young, despite the ageless Sunday flowing robes. What else? Well, he sang in a loud voice and spoke with a soft one, which seemed a ploy, disingenuous.
After the incident with the stolen books Joseph was given an appointment to see him. This was called pastoral care. There was a page on it in the school prospectus. Phoney and cloying! But the chaplain, it seemed, as he opened the stippled-glass front door and ushered Joseph into his study, was in earnest, for he’d put out tea and biscuits on a spindly modern coffee table, and now set off to fetch a jug of milk. Joseph took in the book-lined walls. Heavyweight tomes on practical ethics and comparative religion above the desk, but also big books on photography and art on that shelf there, Robert Mapplethorpe next to the Marquis de Sade, and that wall to the right seemed full of modern fiction. Was that an actual copy of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole on the desk? Ha, it was, and the chaplain caught Joseph looking at it on his return.
‘Just doing my homework,’ he said with a smile.
Joseph felt himself redden.
‘So,’ said the chaplain, waving away the remark with one hand and pouring the tea with the other, ‘what’s all this about, then?’
Joseph took a breath to answer, but the chaplain cut him off.
‘Actually, scratch that. I can guess. You were showing off. But you actually wanted the books too. Right?’
‘I suppose.’
‘And it’s not some cry for help?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ He offered Joseph a biscuit and went on. ‘I was arrested once, you know, for public disorder. I chained myself to a railing at university. There was a point to it, I think.’
Joseph nodded. ‘I’m not going to do it again. You don’t need to tell me—’
‘I wasn’t going to. But thanks for reminding me. Don’t! What I was going to say is that you are free to borrow my books. Here.’ He leaned forward in his Scandinavian armchair and handed Joseph a copy George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. ‘If you liked Nineteen Eighty-Four I imagine you’ve already read Animal Farm, and this is his n
ext most important work.’
Joseph studied the cover. A fingerless glove. A cup of tea. Something rose up inside him, making it hard to speak. The chaplain’s sharp-creased trousers had risen up, too, revealing turquoise socks. He crossed and uncrossed his ankles and told Joseph he’d look forward to hearing his thoughts on the book.
And fifteen months later, when Mum suggested Joseph get confirmed – for form’s sake, and weakly, as Dad didn’t agree – he sat in the same room and drank tea from the same china tea service while the chaplain, in orange socks this time, made space for him to confess that he didn’t think he really believed in God.
‘I know what you mean,’ the chaplain said.
‘Really?’
‘Best to wait, if that’s the case.’
For what, he didn’t say.
But, before Joseph left, he did lend him a copy of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, together with a book of poems by somebody called the Earl of Rochester, neither of which Joseph read.
23
For forty-eight hours Joseph stays put in his Travelodge room, listening to his beard grow. It’s itchy. What he’d give for those books now, the Bible being a bit, well, biblical, after a while.
There’s the cheap television screen in the corner, with the little remote control here on the bedside table, and yet he’s determined to abstain from them. That way he wins. Because, so what if Lancaster’s contained the story? The reporting of it is irrelevant, as compared with the deed itself.
The bank is a shot elephant. Sooner or later, come what may, it will go mad in the bush, trampling guarantors and investors and insurers underfoot, while the deserving multitude bless their anonymous luck. Focus on that, on them.
On day three, after he’s spent another forty minutes staring at the picture of the cows on the wall, noting again the painter’s cheap trick of underscoring shadows with a dusky pink edge, he hears the hotel cleaner tap solicitously on the door and ask whether now might be a convenient time for her to give the room a once-over. It occurs to Joseph that staying put any longer might arouse its own suspicion. Since nobody else has come knocking yet it might be fair to assume that he’s in the clear for now, making it tempting and in fact sensible to take a walk, before he goes entirely nuts.
He heads out.
To church!
Not, he thinks, on purpose, but after wandering Kingston’s dormitory side streets for half an hour, time spent with his collar up and his head down, glancing over his shoulder every two hundred yards, every twenty, every two, he decides he’s had enough and, when a church presents itself to him, its studded oak front door ajar, he ducks through the latch gate, makes his way along the brick path, and slips inside.
Look at these flowers in the entrance, tall displays of something purple spiked with pampas grass. Somebody must have got married here at the weekend. Which was when? He’s lost track of the days. At Charlie’s wedding Joseph was an usher. For half an hour before the service he stood next to a similar man-sized flower display, itself artfully placed in front of a space heater. It was a cold day. Joseph was charged with the job of distributing flyers to the blue-skinned guests, whereas Charlie had chosen that Patrick bloke, his old friend from school, as his best man. Didn’t mind at the time, but somehow it stings now, what with the smell of disappointment coming from yesterday’s flower display.
The church is silent, and nobody else is inside it, not that Joseph can see, at least. He waits for a moment in the quiet, then pulls the big door shut and takes a seat to one side of a stone pillar. Good view of the entrance from here. He shuts his eyes all the same. As a sanctuary, a refuge, the church feels almost as good as his Travelodge. It’s more public, but the two places share something of the same anonymity.
Welcome, one and all.
The stained glass is modern. Replaced after the war, possibly. Gone are the dark reds, blues and greens of the school chapel; here they favour big panes of less dramatic, pastel colours, which sadly give the church a watery vibe. This is a C of E set-up, for sure. No need to confess, just take a seat, we’re brimstone-free.
What would he do if a confession was on offer today? It would be tempting to reveal all, here, wouldn’t it. But why? Something to do with a rich man trying to get through the eye of a needle. On a camel. That, and feeding the five thousand. Giving away the bank’s money is a pretty goddamn Christian act when you think about it. So confessing to it would be more like boasting than saying sorry. Forgive me, Father, for I’m a bit like Jesus. You can’t say that! But think about it, there are similarities. What with the plan and so forth. Off into the wilderness. Doubt Jesus had a sleeping bag, though. Will there be locusts to eat?
Just: no, no, no.
Because the fact is, there’s enough other stuff to confess, but really it’s Naomi and the kids he needs forgiveness from, not a stranger in a booth.
He leans back against the wooden pew, which creaks. Lifting his face to the vaulted ceiling he shuts his eyes again, and … old habits being hard to break … falls asleep.
When he awakes there’s somebody else in the church. A woman, wearing a pink parka with the hood up. He almost bolts when he sees her. But she’s paying Joseph no attention at all, just walking to the front of the church with a lumpy carrier bag hanging from each arm. Those bags look heavy. She sort of waddles up the aisle with them and does a little curtsy, then dog-legs off to one side. Joseph cranes forward to see her take tins from the bags and set them on the side table. Vegetables follow. Now she’s coming back down the aisle. He notices that she’s wearing odd sandals. There’s something sincere about the whole ensemble, the whole act. She walks past him to the rear of the church and he hears her sit down. This is his clue to leave.
Cue.
He stands up.
A strange urge propels him.
Instead of going straight to the oak door, he’s drawn towards the little table on which the pink woman left her offering.
Why? To check what she put there, besides leeks and red cabbage?
Look: a can of minestrone soup, a four-pack of skipjack tuna tins, and two tubs of custard powder.
His hands seem to have a mind of their own.
They’re opening up his satchel.
Is he about to slip one of these tins inside?
No!
Quite the opposite, in fact.
He pulls out his cash-filled envelope, takes a few of the remaining notes from it, and puts them on the table.
Takes a step away, then thinks: no.
Reaches for the notes again and slips them into his pocket.
Stands the envelope – containing almost all he has left – between the tuna and the soup.
Breathes out – thinks: take that, Jesus! – and beats a retreat.
24
At the end of his first year at Cambridge, Joseph returned home for the university holidays and, on letting himself in through the back door with the key kept under the tomato pot in the greenhouse, discovered that the house wasn’t empty after all: his father was there, too, dead in his armchair.
His first thought was that the old man was asleep with his mouth open and his head canted to one side; he’d have a stiff neck when he woke up. Joseph hadn’t seen him look like that before, but that was one of the disease’s nasty clevernesses: it threw up new indignities with a cruel persistence. This slack-jawed slumping was probably one of them. There being no giveaway smell, no waxy pallor, no preternatural stillness in the room, Joseph coughed. When that didn’t work, he drew a breath to say something loud, but before whatever he would have said materialised he noticed the empty pill jars standing in a neat row on the coffee table to one side of his father’s armchair. They were ranked next to a framed photograph of Joseph, Charlie, Mum and Dad on a camping holiday in Norfolk. And what was that, between the pills and the photo? An envelope.
Joseph picked up the photograph. That was a windy week. An elm came down on top of a caravan in the next field, slicing off one tin-can wall. Luck
ily whoever the caravan belonged to wasn’t inside it at the time. You could see their pyjamas, still folded, on the floor. Normally this photo hung above the piano in the hall. The picture hook was still there, horribly naked. Joseph set the frame back in place on the wall and returned to his father’s side. He hadn’t moved. Of course he hadn’t. That obviousness didn’t make the fact he hadn’t any less shocking, though, did it? Joseph put his nose to his dad’s cheek and stayed put like that for a while. When he stood back up, he saw he’d wet the old man’s collar with his tears.
He took a step back. The envelope wasn’t addressed to anyone. It wasn’t sealed either. Joseph untucked the flap and slid the letter out and the first thing he noticed was that Dad’s handwriting, rakishly elegant for as long as he could remember, had taken on a stunted and clotted look, and somehow Joseph found himself resenting his father for the change. That wasn’t right! He shivered with shame as he read.
I have to keep a step ahead. This will, I know, be harder for you than it is for me. Please understand. I want to spare you. Spare myself. I’m so sorry. I love you ill. Arthur/Dad.
Ill?
No, no, no: an ill-formed ‘a’.
Damn, damn disease.
The words were all up at the top of the page and the acre of white space beneath them made Joseph sure his father had begun hoping he’d come up with something more to say. Not that he needed to. The dark blotch on his collar was already fading. This cramped handwriting was not Dad. Joseph folded the note back into the envelope and put it in his pocket. Then he gathered up the pill bottles and sunk them in the wheelie bin out by the car port beneath a jumble of empty food containers and last weekend’s newspapers. He stood there for a while. A blackbird was pecking for worms in the flowerbed. This fence running along the boundary line: he’d helped his father creosote it when he was what, twelve or thirteen? Before the diagnosis, at any rate. A lifetime – or a life sentence – ago: the wooden panels already needed treating again. Later that week Joseph would buy the stain and redo the job with Charlie, who was now thirteen himself. But the job in hand was to check on Dad again and, with the cordless phone pressed to one ear, explain to the family doctor that they’d like him to come to the house as soon as he could. In his chair, Joseph told him. And yes, it looked as if he had passed away peacefully.
Escape and Evasion Page 6
