Quite Honestly
Page 4
‘Do sit down, Mr Keegan. That’s really the best chair, near the window, if it’s not too draughty for you. Darling, wouldn’t Mr Keegan like a biscuit with his coffee?’
‘Or something a little stronger than coffee?’ Mum was looking longingly at the trolley with the gin bottle on it.
‘Too early.’ Robert was unusually decisive. ‘Far too early for anything of that nature, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Keegan?’
‘He answers to the name of Terry,’ I told them.
‘Terry. Yes, of course, Terry. Coffee all right for you, is it, Terry?’ Here Robert stood up to offer Terry a biscuit, which he took in silence. This silence continued while Dad resumed his seat and went on in the friendliest way possible.
‘Well then, Terry. Lucy’s told us you’re just out of bird?’
‘Out of what?’ Terry seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘Porridge. The nick. The cooler. Chokey. Whatever you call it.’
‘I call it prison.’ Terry wasn’t giving my father any marks for trying.
‘Ah yes, prison - of course. Well, Lucy tells us you’re just out of prison.’
‘Yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘I got out yesterday.’
‘Well, that must have come as a great relief to you. I’m only sorry you didn’t have better weather for it.’ My heart went out to Dad, who was clearly growing desperate.
‘I don’t care about the weather,’ Terry told him.
‘No, I don’t suppose you saw much of it in prison, did you?’
‘Not a lot, no.’ For the first time, Terry allowed himself to smile, and I was, perhaps unnecessarily, grateful to him.
‘Not a lot, as you say, Terry. So amusingly.’ Dad smiled back. ‘And what exactly were you in prison for, if it’s not a rude question? Lost your temper, did you? Had a moment of blind rage and stabbed someone? I had a curate when I was a vicar in Deptford. He just went berserk one night and stabbed a really lovely woman who was training to become a priest.’
‘I’ve got no violence on my record.’
‘Well done, Terry! Terribly well done. They sent my curate to Broadmoor, I remember. That’s not really prison, is it?’
‘No, it’s where they put the loonies.’
‘And you’re not one of those, are you, Terry? You certainly are not. So what was it? Drugs? They seem to be the usual thing nowadays.’
‘I never done drugs. Can’t understand what’s the attraction. Those that do it, I’d lock them up and throw away the key.’
‘Oh, I’m not so sure about that.’ Dad seemed shocked at Terry’s intolerance of crime. ‘People commit far worse crimes under the influence of drink, so I’m given to understand.’ Here he kept a steady eye on Mum and the gin bottle. ‘Was it perhaps sex with someone under the age of consent?’
‘That’s disgusting!’ Terry seemed in real danger of losing his temper. But Dad continued to smile.
‘So what was it that got you into trouble - what was your specialité de la maison?’
‘My what?’
‘What particular brand of expertise landed you in chokey?’
I saw no particular future in this conversation, so I supplied the answer. ‘Terry’s specialité, if you have to call it that, was breaking into houses at night and stealing stuff. Terry was a thief.’
‘Ah,’ Dad nodded, still smiling, ‘a blagger. Now I understand. That’s good.’
‘You don’t mean that, do you?’ Terry seemed profoundly shocked.
‘What?’ Dad looked puzzled.
‘You don’t mean that it’s good at all, you think it’s very bad, don’t you? It’s what they teach you in church. If you do it, you’ll go down to hell.’
‘Hell?’ Dad looked puzzled again, as though Terry were speaking a foreign language, or at least referring to matters with which he was no longer familiar. ‘What do you mean by that exactly?’
‘You know.’ Terry looked surprised at my father’s ignorance, but patient with it. ‘Hell, the place you go to after you’re dead. Lots of big fires and devils there with red-hot forks to torment you.’
‘Oh dear me.’ My father was trying hard to stop himself laughing. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘Friend of mine in Feltham Young Offenders. His father knew about it from someone in the Salvation Army.’
‘Well, I’m afraid your friend from Feltham Young Offenders and his father and the Salvation Army are seriously out of date. We don’t believe in devils with red-hot toasting forks any more.’
‘So you think it’s all right then?’
‘I think what’s all right?’
‘Thieving. And that.’
‘No, no.’ My father was now laughing openly. ‘Of course it’s not all right. But we must always try to understand.’
‘Understand why people nick things?’ I was pleased, in a way, that Terry and Dad seemed to have struck up a conversation which at least caused Terry to say more to him than he ever had to me. I was only a little worried because Terry, as he spoke, was looking with particular interest at the silver loving cup on the mantelpiece which had been presented to Dad when he left his London parish.
‘I suppose,’ my father said, ‘it all comes down to poverty. Poverty makes you steal.’
‘We didn’t have poverty.’ Terry seemed rather offended by the suggestion.
‘Did you not? How curious.’
‘My Uncle Arthur brought home a pretty good wage, when he was in business. Not when he was away, of course. And Aunt Dot went up the West End, charring for a smart set of people, until she passed over.’
‘How extremely interesting.’ It was Dad’s great talent to appear interested in the most unlikely conversations that had, I thought, led to his promotion in the Church. ‘And what was your Uncle Arthur’s job exactly?’
‘Job? Jobs. He did banks, building societies. All sorts of offices.’
‘You mean he worked in them?’
For the first time since I’d known him, Terry laughed. Dad, with his remarkable talent for getting on with people, had actually amused him. ‘No. I mean breaking into them. Not always successful, Uncle Arthur. That’s why he was away a good deal.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Dad seemed to be getting out of his depth. ‘Of course he would have been.’
‘However many times he was away,’ Terry assured him, ‘he looked after us, Aunt Dot and me.’
‘Well, that must have been a great consolation to him.’ Dad retreated into clerical solemnity. ‘Well, we must have a long talk about all that sort of thing. Remember, my door is always open. Now, down to business. Lucy tells us you’ve been sleeping on Euston Station.’
‘That was only temporary,’ Terry said, as though we might have expected him to stay there for the rest of his life. He was behaving quite well with Dad, I have to admit, but showing himself a bit slow on the uptake.
‘I’ve got a chaplain. Tim Rideout. Everyone calls him Timbo.’
‘That’s not very fair, is it?’ Terry seemed concerned at all sorts of injustice, something I rather liked in him.
‘Oh, he’s proud of his nickname,’ Dad reassured Terry. ‘He’ll expect you to call him Timbo too. Anyway, here’s the point. Timbo’s dead keen on all sorts of sport. I expect you are too, aren’t you, Terry?’
‘I haven’t had much to do with it. Not for the last three years.’
‘I suppose not. But what about boxing? Timbo got a boxing belt when he was up at Keble. Didn’t you do a bit of boxing, Terry, before you went away?’ my father asked hopefully.
‘Not really. A boyfriend of my mum’s tried to teach me once. It hurt. That’s one of the reasons I left home.’ Terry was silent for a minute and then he repeated quietly, ‘One of the reasons.’
Dad broke into this moment of clearly unpleasant memory with a cheerful announcement. ‘The point is, Timbo has a sizeable flat in the High Street. Church property, of course. He’s unmarried and happens to have quite a good-sized spare bedroom.’
‘And Lucy’s going to look round for a job for you,’ Dad said. He was full of confidence, even though I had no idea what sort of job it was going to be.
We all of us, including Mum, sat smiling at Terry hopefully at that moment. I’m sure if he’d turned us down and been his usual impossible self I’d have given up being a praeceptor for good.
Terry looked thoughtful and then astounded me by saying, ‘Well, thank you very much. I’m extremely grateful.’
You know what about the praeceptor business? I clearly had a talent for it. Something I’d said or done had got through to Terry. It was then that Mum, who came from a nautical family, said, ‘The sun’s over the yardarm. Who’s for a little G&T?’
Terry looked confused so I explained that Mum meant a gin and tonic. He then asked if he could have it without the gin. Mum said, ‘I suppose you could. But I don’t think there’d be very much point in it.’ Dad said nothing but handed round the cheesy biscuits in a resigned sort of way.
Later, Dad rang Mr Markby, Terry’s probation officer, who approved of our scheme, provided Terry reported to him regularly. ‘At times being a bishop comes in useful,’ was what my Dad said when he’d put the phone down.
On our way to inspect his new quarters, Terry said, ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit dangerous of your dad?’
‘What, finding you somewhere to live?’
‘No, keeping his door always open. Don’t you remember, that’s what he said?’
What I did remember was Terry’s long look at Dad’s silver loving cup. ‘Don’t think about it, Terry,’ I said in what I hoped was an impressively warning tone of voice. ‘Don’t even give it a thought.’
6
‘At least we learnt the difference between right and wrong in the Youth Offenders wing.’
Believe it or not, I was sitting with Lucy in the bar of the Intimate Bistro somewhere in Aldershot. I had a Becks beer, my praeceptor had ordered a Pernod with ice and water. The drinks were on her.
‘Who taught you that? The chaplain?’
‘No! It was the other inmates. They had a code, the inmates did.’
‘They taught you morality?’
‘They had their morals, yes.’
‘What were they exactly?’
‘Anything you did wrong to children you got pushed in the scalding shower. No doubt about it.’
‘Anything else?’
‘You couldn’t rob from poor people, like hurt them. There was one big offender there called Jim. He’d set fire to an old tramp asleep on a park bench. He got enough cocoa poured on his head to float a ship.’
‘So what could you do then?’
‘Rob from building societies. Places where they had more money than they knew what to do with. Sort of jobs my Uncle Arthur did but he wasn’t all that good at it, half the time.’
‘What about breaking into houses by night?’
‘Like I said, that was all right. If you stuck to rich people.’
‘Lot of Robin Hoods then in the Young Offenders. Stole from the rich. Did they give to the poor?’
‘Not often,’ I had to admit. ‘But your dad, he said it was all right. All of it. I mean, he’s a vicar and never heard of hell.’
‘You’re such an old-fashioned boy.’ She seemed to be laughing at me. ‘Hell disappeared years ago.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘What a nice old-fashioned boy you are!’ she said again.
‘That’s all right! That’s what he said about breaking and entering.’
‘I think Robert goes more for understanding than passing judgement.’
‘Who’s Robert?’
‘My dad. Whenever I remember to call him that.’
I looked at her. She had her fair hair parted at the side so it fell across her forehead. Her trousers stopped way before her T-shirt started, leaving her bellybutton open to the world. Her beaten-up old leather jacket was on the seat beside her. She hadn’t dressed up at all to visit her mum and dad. Not a bit of it.
Anyway, I’ve got myself too far ahead, telling you about us sitting at the bar of the Intimate Bistro in Aldershot, waiting for the arrival of its owner, Robin Thirkell, about whom I’ll have quite a bit to tell you later.
I suppose I’ve had low times, like when I stood up in the dock at the Old Bailey and the red-faced judge, with his black cloak and dirty grey wig, who’d been against me from the start, said, ‘Keegan, you’ve clearly grown up to be a habitual criminal. The least sentence I can pass upon you, in the interest of the public, is four years’ imprisonment.’ But oddly enough, the lowest of all my moments was when I woke up beside a pile of sick in Euston Station. I had no Aunt Dot, no cash and no bed for the night unless I gave into Mr Bloody Markby’s hostel. It was then I decided I needed the help of Lucinda (call me Lucy) Purefoy. No question about it.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, I did find her mum and dad a bit strange. He wore this red shirt with a great big wooden cross hanging over it. But he didn’t seem to believe in religion, anyway not as we learnt about it from a teacher at my primary school, who made it pretty obvious that in her view heaven was up there and very pleasant and hell was down below and extremely hot. She also wanted us to be ‘born again’, which was something I didn’t think I could manage, so I didn’t pay much attention to her after that. All the same, I didn’t think Lucy’s dad, the bishop, knew all that much about religion either. And her mother seemed very anxious to get on the sauce, which in her case was gin mixed in with tonic, which was not a drink I could ever stomach at all.
But who am I to criticize after my experience of mothers? In a way I’m sorry for ‘call me Lucy’ if she hasn’t got someone like my Aunt Dot, who was always good to me and kept off the gin. But what did become clear when I was in the palace (so called!) was that they had fixed up somewhere for me to sleep nights and even discussed the situation with the probation officer who delayed my parole.
So I got it clear in my head what I should do. I was going to play along with them as I had with Enhanced Thinking Studies. That way at least I’d get a bed for the night and hopefully a bit of loose change in my pocket and, when that was accomplished, I could walk free of them, just as I’d walked free of prison.
In the end, to help myself towards freedom, I told the dad that I was extremely grateful. When I said that, ‘call me Lucy’ looked as though Christmas had come and she’d struck lucky with her first offender, who was now well on the way to reform.
All the same, she wasn’t so sure of me when we set out to inspect the accommodation at the flat of the person they called Timbo, who seemed to be another sort of chaplain. When I happened to remark that it was a bit unusual of Lucy’s dad never to lock a door, she gave me a suspicious look. ‘Don’t think about it, Terry,’ she said. The truth was no decent fence would offer you anything much for a large wooden cross to hang around the neck or even the one small silver cup on the mantelpiece, so I wasn’t that interested.
Timbo’s flat, however, was absolutely stuffed with silver cups. Sorry. His name was the Rev. Timothy Rideout. It seemed only the bishop called him Timbo and ‘call me Lucy’ said I was always to say Mr Rideout. Whatever you called him, he was not very tall, with broad shoulders, bright little eyes and hair cropped so short it was almost a number two. He had a sort of soft voice and a funny way of speaking so that the r’s came out a bit like w’s. All the same, I reckon he must have been strong, because he’d won all these cups for cricket and football and the walls were covered with pictures of the Rev. Timbo holding a bat or a ball in the middle of a team of men who looked much taller than him.
He showed me my room. There was an iron bed and a cross, this time with Jesus on it, hanging beside another photograph of the Rev. Timbo, this time wearing shorts and boxing gloves. I didn’t like to say this, but I thought the p
lace looked rather creepy.
‘Suit you well, will it?’ Timbo looked round at what seemed a bit like a cell without the toilet. ‘Better than Wormwood Scrubs anyway.’
‘Oh yes,’ I told him, my idea being to keep everyone happy till I could plan my escape. ‘A whole lot better.’
‘Good! Jolly good! Now I’ll get the kettle on. I expect you’d like a cup of char?’
Lucy seemed to know that he meant tea. She refused in favour of a cigarette, but I thought I ought to be polite and said I’d have it with milk and sugar. As we sat round in his lounge room with all those teams staring down on us, Timbo looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘What’s your usual position?’
‘I’m afraid my usual position for the last three years has been in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.’
‘Mr Rideout knows that.’ Lucy looked at me as though I’d been particularly slow on the uptake.
‘What I meant,’ Timbo was smiling as though he could just about tolerate me, ‘was your position on the field. Is it in the slips? Silly mid on? Or perhaps you were out at third man?’
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr Rideout. I’m not quite sure what you mean.’
‘My dear fellow, have you never played cwicket?’
‘Never.’
‘Absolutely never?’
‘Never at all. We never had a teacher to tell us about it at school.’
‘Not wugby? I’m sure you must have played wugby.’
I had to admit that, whatever it was, I hadn’t played it.
‘Footie then.’ Footie seemed to come as the last resort. ‘I’m sure you enjoy your footie.’
‘Oh yes.’ I tried to sound enthusiastic. All I could remember was kicking a ball round the estate with Tiny McGrath and even that usually ended in a fight.
‘Sport!’ Timbo told us while he poured out mugs of tea. ‘That’s what’ll keep you out of cwime. Cultivate your cwicket. Concentrate on your wugby and you won’t go far wrong. Haven’t you found that, Lucy, in your life dealing with those who have strayed from the straight and narrow?’