by Helen Walsh
That would make him think twice before he came barging into his bedroom, wanting to catch him out, always thinking the worst of him. But it was his mother Vincent most wanted to shake. She seemed unwilling or incapable of recognising her own worth in the relationship. She was the one who cooked and cleaned and helped them with their homework and got them ready for school and went to parents’ evenings when Dad cried off with some last-minute excuse. She did the shopping and dealt with the bills and prepared their packed lunch and looked after the garden and bathed Ellie and read her bedtime story. All their father contributed was a sullen attitude, a brooding, resentful presence and a brown envelope at the end of the week. Vincent was beginning to despise him. Mum was the heart of the household and her blood fuelled all of them, not least their father. Sheila was his iron lung, and without her Robbie would crumble. Without him, she’d survive. It was as simple as that. He’d looked at his mother’s anguished face that morning and he wondered how they’d all be without Dad. Happy. Happier.
When Vincent got in that evening there was an envelope waiting for him on the kitchen table. He snatched it up, made straight into the living room and slowly prised it open. He could hear Ellie behind the sofa, the fat snooping syllables of her breath, imagining herself invisible. He ignored her and slipped the letter out of the envelope. It was something official, something formal. He digested the ordered typescript and speed-read the print, barely taking it in at first. Sentence by sentence his pulse lurched with an exultant bang as he began to comprehend the detail. This was no mailshot; it was an entry form for a young persons’ writing competition. It was being channelled through the Libraries Commission. The prize was fifty pounds of WH Smith book vouchers and the winning piece would be published in an anthology. The deadline was the 10th of December and there was a hand-scrawled note from Matt asking him not to do anything or send anything off until they’d met up to plan it through.
Vincent perched on the window sill and read through the letter again and again, drinking in the magic and the majesty of every word. Deep in his subconscious, a delicious and jittering excitement was brewing. It was nameless and formless right now, impossible to marshal into words, but it shot through him, electrifying him to the core. And the more excited he became, the more he sensed that this could be it. This was the start of it all – the beginning of his way out of this shallow travesty of a town. There was nothing that mattered more than winning this competition right now. He just had to win.
Sixteen
Vincent devoted himself, body and soul. When he wasn’t writing he was down at the library, flicking through their meaty thesaurus in search of new words. He floated sentences in the back of his jotter. ‘The night was callow.’ ‘The wind seethed.’ ‘The stars were sozzled.’ He shared his ideas with Matt and, under his patient aegis, bit by bit he let go of the unicorn story he’d started.
‘I just don’t feel this is you, mate. Just – don’t force it, yeah? It’ll come. I promise you, Vin. It’ll come …’
But the first week in December wore on without his story even getting beyond the planning stage. Each time he made headway with an idea, Matt would open his eyes to its weaknesses. He wouldn’t help him out, either. He just kept patting him on the shoulder and telling him to wait for the Voice. His head whirred, but his fountain pen lay dormant in the groove of his bedroom desk. Vincent began to despair, and came close to tearing up the entry form more than once. And then the unthinkable happened.
Robbie came home drunk one evening, well after midnight, to find the light seeping out from under his son’s bedroom door. Angry in his drink, and imagining his profligate, disappointing son had fallen asleep, uncaring of how much electricity he wasted, he barged into the room, ready to snap off the lights, hoping to wake him in the process, maybe scare some remorse into the drip. But Vincent was very much awake, hunched over his desk, pen poised, the tip of his tongue protruding as he wrote. He had his earphones on, head nodding gently to his latest love, John Foxx.
Robbie stood and watched, taken aback by the sudden and enormous jolt of love that shot through him. Vincent ducked down so his ear was almost touching the paper as he scribbled. He sat back, swooped up the sheet of paper and analysed his prose, reading it back to himself. He hissed and shook his head and screwed the paper up into a ball. Robbie watched him do this, and he was overcome with a rare stab of pride for his son. He knew the signs here, recognised the symptoms oh so well. He’d been there a thousand times before, himself. He went over as casually as he was able, sat down on the bed next to him.
Vincent yanked off his headphones, his whole body tensing in anticipation of the telling-off he expected to follow. But his father surprised him. His face was mellow, twinkling.
‘We’ll have no forests left at that rate, son. Here …’ He took the headphones from him, and laid them gently to one side. ‘What is it you’re trying to say?’
Vincent, caught out, sat there in dread. If he told his father, he’d only bring the giddy vim of all his thoughts and dreams crashing back down to earth. All his father would have to do was stress one single word in a certain way: writing competition? He wouldn’t even have to wrinkle his nose – he’d wring all the disgust he could muster out of that one word. Instinctively, Vincent shoved the entry form behind his back.
Robbie tried a sympathetic grin on him. ‘Come on, son! Fucksake – I’ve wrote lyrics all my life, lad! I know …’
Reluctantly, Vincent handed his dad the entry form.
He sank back onto the bed, trying to focus on the application details, before handing it back to Vincent. ‘Bit pissed, son. You read it?’
In a heady rush of truth it dawned on Vincent, there and then, that his father couldn’t read. He was entering a new writing competition – no, worse – he had aspirations of becoming a novelist, a writer, a story composer, and his own father couldn’t read! But far from feeling crushed by the revelation, Vincent was energised. For the first time in a long, long time, he felt something other than fear and contempt for his dad. He read the terms and conditions out to him. Robbie lay back, chewing all this over. He sat up, gave him a squiffy look, and pronounced: ‘Thing is, son – don’t really matter what you write. Yeah?’
Vincent nodded, unsure where this was going. Robbie continued, his face set straight.
‘Whatever you write, you got to write it from here.’ He slapped his heart passionately to emphasise his point but only looked comical, almost disintegrating the value of his words. He drew himself up for the climax. ‘If it ain’t got heart it ain’t got soul and if it ain’t got soul then it ain’t got nothing.’ He dispensed this with something approaching a country and western twang. He got up and placed his hand on Vincent’s shoulder. ‘I’m proud of what you’re doing here, son. Just … write, hey? Write. Write what you know. That way, it’ll ring true.’ He smiled wistfully, loitered a second then turned and walked out of the room. The stink of booze and smoke lingered long after he’d gone.
Write from the heart, write what you know. The more Vincent thought about it, the more it made sense. The boozy spore his father left behind was real to him, too. All of a sudden, in a tumbling, torrential freefall out of nowhere, the idea came to him. And though he was weary to the marrow of his bones from the fretting and the relentless setting up and setting back down of new and better stories, he sat up straight and wrote his story in one seamless draft.
Seventeen
Robbie woke, instinctively groping for an alarm clock that wasn’t ringing. He hauled himself up into a sitting position, disorientated but vaguely aware that things were not as they should be. There was no Ellie charging across the landing, shouting and shrieking and imitating her He-Man action heroes; no pipes keening as Vincent ran another hot bath; and what nagged at him with a quickly intensifying anguish was the lack of clatter of pans and dishes from the kitchen below – no signs of Sheila preparing breakfast. The familiar weekend hum of related lives busy on their separate tracks was absent. All
he could sense out there beyond their bedroom door was the doleful still of an empty house – the metronomic beat of the clock on the landing, the low burr of the fridge. Outside, the sound of a car’s wet tyres hissing along the main road obeying the new speed limit only accentuated the emptiness of the house. Where was everybody? Cross and confused, Robbie stumbled downstairs.
Vincent was curled up in a blanket on the sofa, head bent to a book. Making no reference to last night’s paternal tête-à-tête Robbie stood over him and asked, ‘Where’s Ellie and your mum gone?’
As though sensing the underlying irritation in his father’s voice, Vincent didn’t look up from his page. ‘A picnic with Liza.’
‘A picnic? It’s the middle of frigging winter.’
Vincent shrugged his shoulders, giving away nothing.
Robbie advanced into the kitchen. It was rank with the stink of freshly baked spices, ineptly buried under the tang of air freshener. She’d left a window wide open in another lame attempt at covering her tracks, but Robbie was starting to get the picture. He leant across the sink and slammed it shut, cursing his wife as he did so. What was she playing at? She knew what he thought about cooking that shit in this kitchen! Her cooking smells would be stinking out the whole street by now. He made himself a cup of tea but, convinced some malignant spice had contaminated the milk, chucked it back down the sink after one sip.
His stomach clenched tighter and tighter. Wallowing in the righteous bitterness of victimisation, he returned over and again to her name – that sly, calculating bitch who’d insinuated her way into their lives. That … toff. Sheila would jump into a furnace for her if she crooked her finger. And it was clear from his wife’s decision not to run this picnic by him first that she was trying it on here. She hadn’t so much as even hinted that she might have plans – of course she hadn’t! She knew full well what the answer would’ve been. If Sheila had had the grace to sit him down and put it to him that she fancied a day out with Liza – and that she planned to take Ellie with her too … well, there’d be no way, end of story. It just wasn’t on, splitting up a father from his kids of a weekend. He’d have had to look her in the eye and tell her sorry, love – no way. So she’d just gone ahead and done it anyway, come what may.
He jerked the fridge open, immediately confronted by the ingredients of his breakfast – Manx kippers wrapped in cling film on a plate. Here was further evidence of her calumny. She had gone so far as to unpack the fish from its packaging before voting against it – and against him. He stared at the fleshy pungent fish. She must have taken the food out, got it all ready when the call came through from her. Little miss pert tits, the wide-eyed, do-gooder blonde princess! How fucking dare she turn Sheila’s head away from her family? How dare she interfere with their plans, their system, their fucking happiness! And he could strangle bloody Sheila for being too weak to say no to her. He could see her stupid, grinning face now, all pleased at being asked out, all too willing to drop everything and cook up an ‘ethnic’ feast for that slim-hipped, smiling supermum. No – instead of finishing off her work and getting the family breakfast sorted, she’d packed it back into the fridge and jumped to the task of rustling up whatever filth that Cohen one had demanded of her. Curry. Samosas. All of that. Robbie unwrapped the fish and deposited it into the bin. There! Martyred and self-conscious now, and beginning to feel a little foolish, he took his tobacco pouch from his coat pocket and perched on the lounge window sill, seething, thinking it all through. Vincent, all too aware of his anger, must have taken himself out of the firing line and up to his bedroom.
The grim futility of the situation terrified Robbie. As he looked out into his empty living room he felt horribly estranged from the trappings of family life: the framed pictures lining the mantelpiece; the carefully centred doily on the genuine reproduction mahogany coffee table; the leatherette settee. None of it had done the trick. At one time or another, these were items they’d conned each other into believing they wanted, badly – that they would bring some elusive quality to their domestic lives. But they hadn’t done, not for Robbie, at least. None of it had made him happier.
He sighed hard, smoke billowing from his mouth in reckless plumes. He’d be seeing Jodie tonight, at the gig – and she made him happier. Up there on the stage he could put on a show and let her see at first hand how magical a muse she was, how fortunate she was to have him. But it’d be over in a flash and all the rebuffed advances and the scribbled and screwed-up phone numbers of others would be replaced by the harsh reality of her musty caravan, or a quick one in the car. He was in love with Jodie, possibly – but where could it lead?
Then it came to him. If Sheila could make her own plans this weekend, then so could he. Tonight’s gig was in Lytham. So why, oh why, should he have to belt back down the M6 in the wee small hours to sleep next to, but not with, the woman who cared not a glimmer for him? Sold on his blamelessness, he dug under the cushions for an old Sunday Mirror and looked for guest houses in Blackpool. He felt not a jot of guilt.
Between her feet, Sheila’s tartan shopping bag was stuffed with tupperware containers, packed tight with her curries and spicy fancies. She couldn’t help feeling bad about Robbie. She should have just come out with it – told him she was going to Walton Garden’s Winterwonderland and dealt with the consequences. She knew he’d be furious, come what may, and now it felt like no good could come of it.
The gentle throb of the bus wheels below, and the sensation of passing by these familiar front doors and shops and lives, led Sheila back along the route that brought her here. She could still recall the bus ride from her mother’s front door to the airport, the day she left home for good. The bus ran right past her school, a journey she’d lived for thirteen years of her life. And this time, in spite of its cloying familiarity, she’d devoured each and every pulse of the hurtling landscape with fresh eyes. She’d drunk in the endless stretch of hawkers’ stalls, already bustling with trade in the early rinsed-out light of morning; the new motorway flyover, almost built – as it had been for most of her life – and the small ghetto of tin houses accommodating the workforce in the cooling shadows beneath; the squat and blackened stumps of the durian trees, some of which had been hewn into rough effigies of Hindu gods. With a tearful nod, she’d passed the factory where Rasa had slogged through long hot nights to buy her plane ticket; and the deep, dank, rain-filled tin mines where her youngest brother, Jadi, had died swimming their black lagoon. The horror of it, the sheer, unrestrained agony and sadness of the sight of his slim lifeless body, carried back to the village. She’d closed her eyes and breathed deeply, living the last leg of the journey as the bus passed the mangrove swamps, whose glittering spores drifted in through the open windows and settled on her, stinking her clothes.
She’d committed that whole journey to memory because, even then, she sensed she may never be back to pass through it again. Those were the moments and that was the trail that led to this, her latest journey. As the bus toiled through the familiar, everyday beats of her life she was overcome with a similar, deep-seated certitude. Things were changing. She was changing. The world might not look the same, the next time she travelled this way.
Eighteen
As soon as they checked into their poky Blackpool B&B, they dragged each other down onto the bed, hungry and needy. Robbie plunged into her, giddily in love with her, and the freedom and the possibilities of all that lay ahead. With Jodie, he could cut loose.
A little later, he sat on the shelf of a window sill, knees tucked into his chin, smoking as he looked out onto the wild grey toss of the stormy Irish Sea. The famed promenade below was deserted, just a blur of wind-whipped neon and odd, struggling silhouettes, heads bent down against the gust, getting nowhere. He smiled at Jodie, asleep, only her face and lightly freckled shoulders visible. He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and let her know his love all over again. He kissed her awake, softly on the lips, handing her a rollie. ‘Come on, you.’ He smiled.
&nb
sp; And she knew. There was drinking to be done.
They took a tramway past the Pleasure Beach to Hardy’s, at the Lytham end of the prom. Hardy’s was a small, smoky drinkers’ joint Robbie knew from its former life as a cabaret lounge. Years and years ago he’d hitched up there to see Christy Moore play, before he was well known even on the Irish scene. Like all great bars, there was something about the layout, the people, the atmosphere – something indefinable that made it arcane and magical from the moment you stepped inside.
It was still the same in there, more or less. Not that busy out of season and on a night like this, but there was still the doughty band of regulars and one ribald hen party. It was hard to make out whether the manly buxom blonde on stage was the main attraction, or one of the party girls trying it on with a glib-faced suit, flashing his cash about. Robbie eyed up the sturdy thighs straining against a sequinned cabaret dress and nudged Jodie. ‘Looks like a butch mermaid!’
‘A mer-man!’
They checked no one had heard their little in-joke, and ordered pints and whiskey chasers. Jodie was keen to sit at the bar but Robbie ushered them into the furthest, darkest armpit of the room, where the tinny boom of the club’s PA couldn’t quite smother their talk.
‘Never fails that one, ay?’ said Jodie with a smile. She could look so feminine, in a certain light. So innocent and pretty and lovely, he just wanted to drink her up. He nodded, hearing her voice but not her words, and carried on smiling at her. She flicked her head up towards the ropey blonde, splintering the microphone with her anguished warbling.
