So when Cliff Watson was habitually likened to Mr Bun the Baker on washday, baking day, ironing day, brass polishing day or whatever day of the week it might have been, I was able to reduce both mother and grandmother to weeping paroxysms of laughter by doing my perfected impersonation. And, given this lead, others followed. Learning how to do Johnny Squibb, George Jones and Pedro the Mayor, however, proved more difficult than the ones I perfected in childhood. But then, in this, my later life, my efforts could be helped by blaming the quality of my reproduction on the poor mobile phone coverage in the area.
Trust, you see, is a precious commodity. It’s not to be invested anywhere. It should only be placed where one knows it is safe, because without it families are rarely happy. Equally, if it is misplaced, taken for granted or, worse, abused, then conflict usually ensues. In my book, this is to be avoided. And, if for whatever reason, trust has broken down, the only way to resurrect it is to put it to some test, a trial by ordeal to see if it can endure. Assisting me in this task was the list of contact details from the second sheet I had photographed that evening in Paradise.
There were technical considerations, as ever, and those had to be confronted first. There would be no ‘what’ if the ‘how’ could not deliver. Again my beloved internet came to the rescue. You don’t have to be an ape capable of typing Shakespeare to realise that impersonating someone over the telephone requires a phone call. In the old days, you could do that from anywhere. You could even use a public telephone. Nowadays, you can’t even find one! And nowadays, recipients recognise familiar numbers. Their phones register the contacts they receive, their bills itemise them. If you call via the internet, however, no number is displayed. You can, if you wish, have a few minutes of anonymity and, unless the recipient traces you immediately, there’s little chance of revealing who or where you are. Now I won’t claim to have planned this well in advance, but I had taken the trouble to install software that would record the calls. So, with Suzie safely installed in The Castle for her evening shift, I brought my laptop to life and loaded the software we had bought to call Dulcie, a facility that had only been used once, and that abortively. I donned my headset, and from my user area accessed the document I had photographed, the one with all the contact details.
Now Mick Watson was always going to be the easiest to impersonate, so I started with him. I shouldn’t have. I rang Johnny, fully expecting him to answer, and answer he did, but only after I spoke.
“Hello, Johnny.”
“Hi, Mick. How’s things?” The voice was the same squeak I had expected, but its delivery was fluent and without pause, with only a suggestion of the stall he imposed on his more public words.
“Fine, thanks.” I should have waited. I was too impatient. “It’s about the planning application you left here the other day. I just wanted to know if there had been any new developments. Any new kids on the block?” I knew instantly I had transgressed. There was a silence I had not expected.
“Sorry, Mick, you’re not in the loop on this one. It’s all over. You know the system. It’s called need to know, and now you have no need. We’ve had some good years, but there comes a time...”
I decided to leave the silence hanging. It wasn’t a ploy. I couldn’t think of what I might say. I was clearly supposed to know this already. Luckily, he continued.
“Was it Olga who...?”
I tried to think quickly. I was on the spot. “She mentioned something...” I deliberately left the ellipsis hanging as bait, praying he would bite. Something, somewhere, answered my prayers.
“Look, Mick, I am a man of my word and, so, I hope, are you. Let me re-state what we agreed. It’s only been a few days and I fully understand if it has not yet sunk in. You are to stay away from the office. Better still, stay away from Paradise. Don’t even drink at the bar. Stay at home. Go to The Castle, but Paradise is now off limits. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“So back to your question. It seems you have been nosing around in the office. Or maybe you have been doing your fatherly thing again with your poor and vulnerable little girl. If it’s the former, Mick, I have to say that this is a last warning. Paradise is off limits. Don’t go there. If you do, we will have to come to some arrangement. If it’s Olga that’s been blubbing in your ear, then...
“Olga hasn’t ... didn’t...” I was desperately trying to dig my way out of the hole I was now threatening to pull another into.
“Stay out of this, Mick. Understand?”
I nodded. The telephone must have transmitted it, because it was clearly registered at the other end. There was a click as the call ended. I had expected a working relationship between Mick and Johnny and learned only of a dismissal. I was confused.
It took me several minutes to decide what to do next. It wasn’t easy. I had a fraction of a story, a story whose plot was as unacceptable as it could possibly be. It was a piece of a jigsaw that fit with nothing else I had ever seen, nothing that I had hitherto taken for granted. I decided to play safe. I became Mick again. I called Olga. I had to call her now in case Johnny contacted her to accuse her of telling Mick about the proposed redevelopment of The Castle. Again, it was a mistake.
“Olga...” I never even finished her name.
“What the ustulation do you want? Stay away from me, you dirty jetsam. And that hageen of a woman has been nosing around upstairs again. Will you tell her to stay on the bottom floor where she belongs? She comes to clean my place, not sodalistically live in it! I don’t want her nosing around up here. OK? Business is business. It doesn’t mean we have to be friends. And where the quoin are you? You know you are not to go into Paradise. Are you there? If you are, get the ecchymosis out before Johnny finds out.”
The call ended. I had not completed a single word. It was possible to conclude that Mick Watson was not in Olga’s good books. And who was the cleaner nosing around - and thus resented? Was it Maureen? It couldn’t be, because she was usually at The Castle nowadays. Karen Matthews? No, surely she was too big a fish to be just a cleaner, surely...
I wandered around Rosie’s interior for some time. It’s not extensive, so I probably did a couple of dozen circuits. I went out and took a stroll through the site, noted who was in and who was out along our row. It’s a habit now. Call me nosey, call me interested in life. I smelt, for instance, who was having fish for dinner, and who was having a ready meal in the microwave, the ping at the end of cooking time resonating like a siren across our tranquil camp. I was trying to buy time, but not because I was waiting for something. I was merely confused.
Back in the van I powered up the laptop again. This time I ran all the high memory usage software I could dig up, started up the radio player on audio, and tried, at the same time, to display the mid-week English football on internet television, placing both broadcasts on mute, but still running. The last thing I wanted was pristine, high bandwidth transmission. For this task, I needed the poorest, most broken transmission I could manage, because this voice was going to be a tough challenge. I did, as usual, make sure I had the recording software running. Again I called Olga.
“Olga,” I said.
“Pedro,” she answered. Immediately there was a lilt, a lift in her voice, but it also spoke of arrangement rather than willingness, accommodation not excitement.”¿Cómo estás?”
“Bien,” I said, pausing. It was a lucky move.
“Er... Lo has hecho? Has hecho que lo que hemos pedido?” I wanted to answer, but I had no idea what she had said. I could hear no trace of Russian accent in their words. “Pedro, cariño, is that you? ¿Dónde estas?”
I thought quickly. I risked English on the assumption that it was the most appropriate language in which to express depravity. “Olga, little Olga, prod, prod...” I had overheard him say that just once when I stood on the Paradise landing outside his treatment room, just after Olga had loosened his ga
g. I hoped it might loosen the tension.
“Mira, amigo,” she said, “no more sweeties for you if you no deliver. ¿Entiendes? No more sweeties. We say Thursday, jueves. ¿Entiendes? Pedro do his job. Then more sweeties. OK?”
I offered silence.
“Then Olga give sweetie, pequeño bonbon, si?
“Si.” I ended the call. I had never realised that my Olga, my personal goal, my Eastern European cutie, would speak such unaccented Spanish.
Now the next one was obvious. In for a penny, in for a pound. When you are up to your neck in proverbial, start swimming and be sure to swallow as much as you can. I called Mick.
“Good evening, Mick,” I said, placing a pin stripe through my voice.
“George!” The relief was palpable. “You have reconsidered?”
“Well...”
“George, I can still do anything you ask. I can still be useful. I can still deliver. Without me you wouldn’t have half the options. I made some of them happen. Please do accept that. I set all of this up. It’s my baby. I’m your baby now, your baby now, your baby now...”
The singing faded, jaded. “Mick...”
“Look, I know I was wrong. I’ll undo it. I never expected she’d make a success of the deleterious place! The idea was that it would fail all the quicker. I’ll arrange something. Leave it to me. Can I go ahead? George, please let me try...”
“We were thinking...”
“Great! You’ve been talking about what I suggested! I’ll set something up. Just give me a few days, maybe until this time next week. I’ll deliver. Don’t worry. Give me a few days.”
I could have spoken, but it was unnecessary. The gentle, barely audible grunt I offered was, in context, a clear signal of assent.
“Thanks, George,” said Mick before ending the call. I suddenly wished I was more confused than I was.
As I said at the start, I always was a dab hand at Happy Families. What I can’t cope with is unhappy ones. And, over the years, I have had my fair share of them. My origins, as any careful reader of my blog will already know, were close to bliss. My wonderful mother and father, bless them, were idyllic parents. In modern terms, he would have been condemned for subjecting me to passive smoking and my mother would have been castigated for never asserting her own woman’s identity and probably incarcerated for feeding me saturated fats. He, of course, succumbed to the smoke and left us early and she followed, heartbroken, within the year. They each have their little plaques next to the path by the rose garden in the grounds of the crematorium in Ribthwaite, at the other end of town from The Castle. It wasn’t their fault they were who they were.
If only my own family could have been as happy. I worship my wife, but she has always harboured an only-partially suppressed indifference towards me. She left me twice, only to return because I was the better long-term bet financially. I can’t be fooled. I have a difficult daughter who won’t speak to me, or to her mother. I do not need to be told when families are not happy. I do not need a bang on the head with a railway sleeper to identify a piece of wood, even when it’s made of concrete. And I know a happy family when I see one. Alternatively...
Thirty Five
What gods don’t like has been a subject of lifelong interest... - Don muses on contradictions of contemporary religiosity and recalls a school spelling test. Seeking his goal, he visits Paradise and finds out something interesting about Mick. He is prompted to recall this later, having been convinced that he has seen a ghost.
What gods don’t like has been a subject of lifelong interest for me. I can remember a little book, a Ladybird, I think, called The Miracles Of Jesus. It was one of those primary school readers, one of the first books I ever finished. It was Mrs Cartwheel, one of the early years teachers, who made me read it, said it would do me good. It did. Perhaps it even opened my eyes.
Unusually, it had text on the left-hand page, a symbolic fact if ever there was one, and a full page colour illustration on the right. And there you have it, political philosophy summed up at seven years of age: the left reads, whereas the right needs pictures! It’s unfortunate that I recall the layout as unusual...
Each story was just three or four paragraphs, large type, two or three sentences in each. I read about the five thousand banqueting on five barley loaves and two small fishes. Now there was no problem with knowledge here. I regularly fished. Loaves came from Ernie at the Coop and nearly all the fields that surrounded Kiddington Common were planted with barley. But I remember keenly the contradiction that arose.
It was not long afterwards that Mrs Cartwheel gave out an exercise on plurals. She wrote a list of words on the board in her meticulously printed, near-italic and you had to copy it down the left hand side of your slate under an underlined heading, Plurals. On the right, she told us, we should enter the correct word to use when we have more than one of the things on the left. It was a strange instruction for an eight-year-old, since one of the words was ‘heart’. It wasn’t intellectually challenging, perhaps, but, as I later learned in E339, Curriculum Methodology For The Mid-Year Middle-Ability Middle-Class Average Student (Seven To Eight-Year-Olds, Non-Dyslexic), it was an exercise that possessed at least face validity. It’s the sort of thing that children like. You learn how to do it and repeat. On the left it says ‘book’ and on the right you write ‘books’, carpet-carpets, clock-clocks, desk-desks, sheep-sheeps, cow-cows, polyhedron-polyhedra, chrysanthemum-chrysanthemums, fish-fishes. Like most of the class I saw the pattern quickly and, thinking that there might be the usual stars for swift and efficient completion, I slid off the bench I shared with my mate Geoff Watson and strode to the front with my chalkboard, eagerly seeking the early plaudits and thus the kudos that I might exploit throughout playtime.
Proudly, even confidently, I presented it to Mrs Cartwheel. She marked it in no more than five seconds, and then issued a good ten seconds of huffs, grunts and dismissive squeaks. I got about half of them right and then was told to go straight back to my desk, rub out the ones I had got wrong and correct them in red chalk. Fish, fish, I corrected, but then I recalled my Miracles Of Jesus book and concluded that Mrs Cartwheel had made a mistake of her own, marking it wrong when it should have been right. Fishes, I confidently re-entered, defiantly even. If Jesus had said it, how could it be wrong?
With anticipation that was at least eager, I rejoined the queue at the teacher’s desk. I was still one of the first five to finish and this time I would be right, which, we were told, was the best way to be. When I handed over my slate, she shouted at me and chalked right through that particular line. “Fish-fish,” she said, “like sheep-sheep.”
“Cow-cow,” I mimicked, following what my over-active intellect discerned immediately as a pattern. It was an unfortunate choice of word, and also wrong.
I remember Mrs Cartwheel looking at me with a very suspicious tone of voice. I felt the need to qualify.
“But Miss,” I pleaded, “Jesus said it. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me and it should be good enough for you.”
Now straws come in many sizes, even shapes, if you think about it. When considering specifically the drinking variety, whilst their functionality determines many of their fundamental characteristics, it’s the variation in their presentation that makes them objects of interest, even beauty. The breaktime one third of a pint of milk, one hundred and eighty-nine point three three recurring millilitres in systeme internationale, that washed down the aspirin, Yeastvite and cod-liver oil capsule the school provided, came with a straw. We boys tried to ignore it, since we considered it much more macho to drink straight from the bottle. When the teachers saw us, they told us off, which meant that often we put the straw in and then covered up the bottle neck with our hands as we supped the milk from around it. The straws, incidentally, were sometimes white, sometimes pink, though never green. They were never green in those days, becau
se something green was off, manky, rotten, like snot, or a gob glistening on a frosted pavement. Sometimes they were two-colour, either striped or, if you were lucky, spiralled. I used to like the spirals, because they made interesting patterns when you rolled them across the desk, especially when you collected a set and rolled a dozen of them side by side to mimic a multicoloured collection of adjacent barber’s shops.
Straws came in cardboard boxes, grey, with square cross-sections. You punched through a perforated flap in the top and then shook the box. The straws would magically stand up by themselves, protrude out of the hole and then stay there, jammed upright. They would slip back, of course, as soon as the box had been sufficiently denuded of its contents for there to be too few to fill the gap at the top. That meant you had to shake the box to find a straw. And we always thought it was unlucky to take the last one, because it was quite likely to be the one to break the camel’s back.
When I did my spelling, fish-fishes combined with cow-cow was not only the last straw, it also broke the cow’s back. I got the cane, right there, in front of the class, shorts dropped and the lot, bending over the teacher’s desk. All I did was use a plural that had been perfectly acceptable when employed as a description of a deed so momentous, so historic, that it was worthy of inclusion in a class reader. It was never my intention to liken Mrs Cartwheel to any kind of farmyard animal, but that was how it was heard. That day Mrs Cartwheel destroyed any faith in miracles I might potentially have harboured and it has never returned.
My reaction, however, was not as humble as the circumstances demanded. I can remember, amidst the tears and in front of the whole class, taking it out on Jesus. At the top of my voice, I cited my granddad on the subject of raising Lazarus from the dead. The centurion’s daughter got roughly the same treatment. And she was a girl! I can remember her from the illustration in the book. She was a pretty blonde, a blue-eyed beauty in ancient Palestine, slender and inviting, though not in that way for an eight-year-old. Her father watched, looking like a southern English middle-class accountant dressed up as a Roman soldier. He looked like Gregory Peck, who was big at the time. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Gregory Peck was on at the flix. He wore an expression of almost detached concern, a look you’d expect if his shares had just gone down, as Jesus sat beside the girl on her bed. He held her limp wrist, and was probably saying something about fishes! She was just starting to stir. Mother, in the far background, presumably in the kitchen, was being useful by weeping on a servant’s shoulder. Both of them had towels on their heads and had probably been making unleavened bread, which wasn’t, Mrs Cartwheel regularly told us, anything like Mother’s Pride. Except that there was a mother’s pride in the picture.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 39
