by James Hawes
— Oh. Oh, well then.
—But will you find that in any Hollywood costume drama? Not bloody likely.
—Yes, the Yanks don’t give a damn about truth, do they? It’s all myths with them. I mean, take those pistols, that kind Hollywood is obsessed with. What are they called? You know, John, those big black pistols that obviously make Tarantino’s knickers catch fire?
—Magnums?
—No, that’s that ice cream they market as if it were a blow job.
— Oh yes. Talk about the sexualisation of advertising! All those airbrushed models with fuck-me eyes and red lips, dribbling chocolate. Outrageous!
(Momentary contemplative silence, with beer.)
—Absolutely, John. Anyway, the thing is, I just don’t believe that if you get shot with one of those pistols you fly backwards. It can’t be possible.
—God knows.
—Well, it can’t be. You know, Newton’s first law, or whichever it is.
—Second, I think. But yes, it’s all balls. Why we allow the Yanks to inflict their gun culture on us is beyond me. And the rest of their so-called culture! For God’s sake, we had the Men of the West speech in Lord of the Rings, then Troy, then 300, and now Beowulf. Aryan bloody myths, all of them, all stuff Hitler would have loved! What’s Hollywood going to give us next, eh? Russell Crowe as Siegfried, wiping out dark-skinned baddies from east of the Danube? The implications for our children’s world scare me, they really do. Same again?
—Mmm, please, John.
—Two more, please. I mean, look at the French. They have masses of state support for their own culture, and it’s real culture. We must all be mad, staying in this half-American dump when we could be living in bloody great farmhouses in France with no mortgages! Brownings?
That was how much I knew about guns.
And no doubt I would never have learned anything more about them if I hadn’t found myself, at forty-five, not having been single since before the Berlin Wall came down, alone for a whole week, out all by myself in the cold and the wet and the big, dark south-London night.
2: The Very Important Paper
I was not supposed to be doing anything at all with plum trees, let alone at night. I was supposed to be working away, safe and warm, at my laptop, in my cleverly arranged little study area under the stairs.
Sarah, my beloved wife, had taken our ten-year-old twins, Will and Jack, and Mariana, our unplanned little late-come darling, away that very evening, for a whole week, after surprisingly little negotiation, so that I could finish and then give my Very Important Paper (as it had become known in the family) to the upcoming national peer-group conference. She had not done all this just so I could mess about, quite unnecessarily, with small fruit trees in the dark and the rain!
—Bye, darlings! I had called, reminding myself too late that I really must stop myself doing that ridiculous English thing of addressing my children as though they come from several decades ago and several notches up the social ladder. —So sorry I can’t come too, but well, you know, I’ve got to get the Very Important Paper done, to make things better for us all. Daddy’s Work again, eh? Still, it’s already got us to London, hasn’t it? What’s that, Jack? Well, no, that’s true, we didn’t actually ask you if you wanted to move to London, but sometimes there are things that adults just, anyway, look, hey you loved the Science Museum the other day, right? Sorry, darling, sorry, I was just trying to be, you know, anyway, hey, boys: a week off school! In Spain! Lu-cky! Now, you be good for Mum, right? And for Granny and Grandad. And don’t poke those guns in people’s faces, please. No, Mariana is a person as well. What? No, you can’t be ‘a people’ Jack, it’s ‘a person’. Sorry? Well, yes, OK, that’s true, Will, very good, yes, ‘a people’ is grammatically possible, you’re right. No, Jack, Will’s not being geeky, and that’s not a word we use in this family, he’s just right, in certain cases, yes, you can say ‘a people’, though I’m not sure generalisations like that are usually very wise and … yes, yes, of course, sorry, darling, I was just, look, Jack, Will, just shut up for a minute, stop answering back and do what you’re told or Mum’ll take those bloody stupid guns away from you and chuck them in the bin! What? Well, sorry, darling, but I thought you wanted me to, sorry, yes, of course, I was just, oh, Mariana, don’t cry, Daddy’ll see you soon, he’ll be … Well I didn’t know she’d dropped her toy, did I? Right. Yes. Bye, darling, drive safely. This will be worth it. I promise!
I waved a last goodbye, turned back to the house, went in, shut the front door, knelt beside the little antique table under the stairs, unfolded the small leaf of the table, swung the miniature gateleg out beneath it, patted the early nineteenth-century mahogany with satisfaction, stood up carefully so as to avoid banging my head on the underneath of the staircase, pulled my laptop forward, opened it, turned it on, went the few steps into the living room to draw over my rather nice Edwardian captain’s chair and sat down to work.
For several minutes, I stared at the Very Important Paper.
My week had seemed barely enough to finish it, in all honesty. Hardly adequate at all really, when you thought about it. Negligible, to be brutally frank, when compared to the vast swathes of outside-office work time available to so many of my rivals in this vital forty-something leg of the career marathon. Men married to women who did not expect help with the kids. Men unlikely ever to be encumbered with kids. Men who could afford nannies. It was, well, yes, actually, there was no way round it, to be quite honest it was almost unfair, when you thought about it, to expect me to keep up with these so-called colleagues just by having one little week of pure work.
But now, those same seven, no eight nights suddenly felt like rather a long time.
—Ridiculous, I laughed aloud at myself. Of course a family home seems a little funny when there is no family there. To it, then, and no more nonsense.
The organisers had given the Very Important Paper one of the plenary sessions, no less. I had hardly believed it when I got the call. Plenary! The very word set off, as it always did, a cocktail of fear and ambition that started my guts bubbling softly. My field is pretty specialised, you see. It would only take a dozen of my rivals to drop dead for me to be a made man. And all of them would be sitting there, watching and listening: every hirer, firer and decider of lives. If I brought it off! The strong applause, the looks of approval from the frontmost rows, as mysterious but vital as in some meeting chaired by Stalin. In the coffee break one of the real Big Beasts awards you a whole minute of his full attention (your peers instinctively back off a scarcely measurable fraction, the bastards, making a tiny but unmistakable clearing for this drama of gracious condescension). Suddenly you’re right in the mix, on everybody’s longlist: him, you know, still young really, recently moved to London, you know, the one who gave that plenary paper at the conference? Oh yes, of course, him …
There was something missing from the VIP, though, and I knew it. What was it? Come on, this was a technical problem, no more. Exposition, presentation, communication. I scrolled up and down through the document. Now and then I felt I almost saw what needed fixing, a shadow between my lines, but it kept flitting away again, like a fish in dark water. I cleaned my new, frameless designer spectacles for a while (they had been expressly purchased for the giving of the VIP). Then I decided that before settling down properly, I might as well do a bit of admin and check my emails. I’d have to do it sometime this week, after all, so why not get it out of the way right now?
I logged on with the usual distant glisten of hope that today the email might be waiting for me. You know, the email, the one that somehow makes the offer out of the blue or opens the door at last after all your knocking.
For a fraction of a second my heart leapt as I saw that one message was from the assistant to the PA of the acting European editor of The Paper, in reply to my jolly invitation to come and hear the VIP. But it was only an automatic allegedly out-of-office reply, the stuck-up Islington shits.
I mean,
for God’s sake, I had appeared, and only back in 1990, for very nearly a whole minute of total screen time, on a BBC Newsnight special devoted to the reunification of Germany! What did I have to do for The bloody Paper to look twice at me?
The rest of my mail was largely from my third-year students, who had, it seemed, banded together to swamp my inbox with complaints that the books I had done for my A levels in 1981 were ‘a bit heavy’ for today’s finalists. The faculty’s Teaching Quality Assessment Guidelines obliged me to reply to each of these whingeing messages personally, in some way at least, within seventy-two hours. There were also three messages from the Teaching Enhancement Unit demanding to know why I had still not filed my own New Appointees’ Mission Statement, my Annual Personal Development Plan, my Course Aims for each module and a Personal Student Goals Statement for each of my students on each of these modules. Not now. Nor did I, naturally, bother answering yet another plea to sign an e-petition against (!) my own union’s recently declared policy of boycotting all academic visits and exchanges with Israel.
I decided that I would go out into the garden and de-pot the three small plum trees we had bought two weeks before. Good idea, yes. A nice bit of light, future-oriented and family-centred exercise, then a clean start, clear up the pathetic admin and then straight into it at dawn tomorrow. Exactly. I had plenty of time, for God’s sake, a whole seven days and nights. No, eight.
Outside, the rain had just stopped, the air was fresh and clean. Some unusual combination of the elements had allowed a real winter night sky to replace, for once, the muggy orange sodium-lamp haze that normally passes for darkness in London. Venus was already riding high and although the moon was still below the horizon, its light put silver tints into the ozone-eating vapour trails. Pretty nice. And what better picture of trust in the future than a man planting young plum trees for his children under this picture-book sky?
Soon I was working away, my spirits high and rising. In the limitless places behind my eyes, as I dug and planted and trod down, I was breasting a rainbow-crowned hill after a stiff climb, knowing that beyond it would lie, spread out beneath and before me, a wide-screen vision of glorious summer uplands. I hoofed the spade in yet again, and heard vast chords lurking at the edge of my mind, like pre-echos on old vinyl, ready to be unleashed in a triumphal soundtrack of spiritual homecoming:
London, at last!
3: London, at Last!
The only place to be in England, the natural capital of Northern Europe!
I had got us here, as I had always promised I would. True, it had taken a decade or so longer than I had expected, and had also required a stroke of luck (the first-choice candidate for my new job had dropped suddenly out). But after all, everyone needs a break and, one way or another, we were here at last.
And well, really, I ask you: what city can compare?
Where else for a career to burgeon, a family to thrive? Our twin boys would not grow up as beer-swilling teenage bumpkins hanging around the desolate malls of some godforsaken regional so-called centre till the last bus left for their muffled home in the arse-end of nowhere. No, no, not that, not for them! Jack and Will would be cool Young Londoners, travelcard-carrying junior-sophisticate citizens of a perfectly hyper-diverse, postmodern world. Our baby daughter would become no daydreaming backwoods hayseed, lined up for seduction by the first drawling, trust-funded bastard who coolly offered to show her the big world from Mummy’s Spare Flat in London. No, no, not that, not she! Mariana would blossom into a laughing metropolitan princess of the puh-lease put-down, as blithely familiar with great museums and legendary stages as with multicultural street markets and colourful slang, a fine girl swimming free but unavailable in the infinite variety of London life.
And for Sarah and me, ourselves now in the perhaps slightly tardy flower of our days? Oh, thank God, no more worthy little galleries laughably proud of their few second-division Impressionists! Never again some condescendingly stripped-back and down-casted travelling production of last year‘s alleged West End hit! From now on it would be the real things, the things we had always known were there to be ours. If not here, where? If not now, before we got really and truly middle-aged, when?
Stop now? Give up? Down tools? Not I!
In I struck with the spade again, panting lightly but positively basking in my manly aches. Beside me by now stood, stoutly pruned, straight and true, soundly trodden down, two new-planted plum trees, each some seven feet tall. The third young Prunus nigra was waiting, ready to complete the careful line across the lawn. A tree for each of my children. Soon, very soon, I would be quaffing that bottle of Olde English organic ale. And smoking a single cigarette from the new pack, which was meant to, and which certainly would, last me for the whole week. Around my canines my gums itched and watered, primed for the good old twentieth-century bite of bitter beer and smoke. I rammed my spade decisively, one-handed, down into the earth beside the hole. And that, said Jack, was that, surely?
I moved over to the last treelet, firmly placed my wellington-booted feet on either side of the black plastic tub, gripped it hard between my ankles, bent to grasp the slim trunk low down and heaved carefully upwards. My back gave polite though firm notice that it could no longer be taken for granted, but the mass of soil and roots, somewhat dried out and shrunken by neglect over the past few busy weeks, slid easily from its pot. I lowered the root ball carefully but confidently into the hole.
Shit.
Not quite deep enough. Another three or four inches. Fine. Christ, I was going to murder that beer. Then, for once, a really long bath and a great, early, baby-free night. Excellent. Up early tomorrow and straight down to work, work, uninterrupted, wonderful, career-cracking work at last!
Lay down the tree, then, gently does it. Boot the spade in again. Never mind the blisters. The cold, the wet, so what? Enough of my back, already. Next summer we would all have plums, from our own garden. Our London garden. Mariana would be almost three next summer; she would be charging around the lawn in little red shoes, talking gorgeous half-nonsense.
Jack and Will would lift her up to pick her very first, very own plums with her little hands. Sarah would smile. I would have delivered happiness, at last.
Dig, dig, dig.
If the VIP went well, who knew? In a couple of years, I might be earning enough to service the mortgage by myself. Sarah would not have to work just to keep her career going and bring in the, to be honest, ridiculously small (yet, to be even more honest, very necessary) net difference between her taxed wage and the child-minding bills. She would not have to be exhausted or feel guilty about not seeing enough of Mariana. The plums would be sweet. We might even have enough money to move to north London …
— Ow, shit! I cried, for in the midst of this heady thought, my spade butted squarely on to something under the ground and jarred to a sudden, total halt.
I was caught flat, mid-rhythm. My ankle shot painfully outwards, twisting my knee and thigh after it. I pitched helplessly forward, let go of the spade with both hands and with a desperate lurch managed to get my digging foot freed up just in time to make earthfall on the far side of the hole. My trailing left foot, though, caught the lip of the pit. This sneaky little trip-tackle took out my whole leg, and my momentum flung me bodily earthwards. I felt a whack and a burn as my right shin smacked into the iron blade, but before any actual pain could register my nervous system was swamped by a depth charge of agony as the stout spade handle flew upwards and walloped me full in the balls.
I had not been seriously thumped anywhere by anything for several decades, let alone by a solid lump of wood right in the testicles. Volts of icy heat flashed down the insides of my thighs, leaving me lying there, retching, fighting for breath and with a deeply unpleasant hallucination that I was back in the playground of my vicious seventies Devon comprehensive, rolling on the pitiless tarmac, clutching yet again my bruised taters.
—Christ, you fucking little bastard! I gasped, once the power of speech returne
d. Disentangling my legs, I scrambled growling to my feet, stuck my glasses back on my nose, swung the spade up high with my right hand alone, snatched the steel shaft neatly with my left hand, mid-air, as it fell back (ha!) and glared back down into the pit, ready to decapitate whatever had dared to cross me.
Empty, dark and dumb, the hole simply waited.
4: Into the Hole
— Oh for God’s sake, I sighed.
Digging and filling and treading down the previous two holes had warmed me up, even before that smack in the balls sent blood flying around my system. Now the sweat was cooling my skin in the wintry night. My brow had the slabby sheen of cold wax. My specs slid on my nose. My chest seemed to have been rubbed with fridgy lard. My damp shirt back clung clammily on the hated pads of flab astride my kidneys.
At forty-five, I was by no means terminally unfit as such. I could still swim a twenty-five-metre length underwater, though these days I burst gasping to the surface, ripe with carbon dioxide, scrabbling for a hold on the slippery tiles, the blood thudding hard behind my eyes. But I had a sort of superstitious awe of cold, hard, dirty labour. I would never remotely have considered driving my kids on a motorway with wheels I had bolted in place myself. Married and a multiple father, at forty-five I watched young tattooed men blithely flipping cast-iron manhole covers to check my drains, or insouciantly manoeuvring washing-machines single-handedly for me, and felt as though I were paying not to have work done, but for the right to watch these circus feats of unthinking grace and strength.
I peered down, then made several vengeful prods into the soil at the bottom of the hole. Whatever the thing down there was, it was large, solid and curiously semi-hard. Not so much flexible as almost bouncy. Something man-made, for certain. A door off an old fridge, for example? An ancient tyre? Whatever, it was bloody certain to be large and heavy and hard and awkward and sharp and dirty and wet and cold and scrabbly. It would be very unpleasant, if not actually impossible, for me, alone and without even gloves, to lever and haul from the earth.
