Stories We Could Tell

by Tony Parsons

  What he remembered most was the physical sensation of the riot, the way he experienced it in his blood and bones. His legs turning to water with terror as the air filled with missiles and the police spurred their horses into the crowd, his heart pumping at the sight of the loathing on the faces of the marchers, and the raging anger he felt at the sight of these bigots parading their racist views through a neighbourhood where almost everyone was black.

  He had never felt so scared in his life. And yet there was never a place where he was so glad to be.

  It mattered. It mattered more than anything. Leon Peck, child of peace and prosperity, had spent his Saturday afternoon doing what his father had done in Italy during the war, in Sicily and Monte Cassino and the march on Rome. Fighting Nazis.

  Leon didn’t kid himself. Lewisham had been one Saturday out of his life. It couldn’t compare to what the old man had done in World War Two. But the experience had been like nothing he had ever known.

  When he was younger than today, Leon had been involved in student politics at school and at university. But this was some thing else. The Pakistani shopkeeper at the end of the road where Leon was squatting had had his face opened up by a racist with a Stanley knife. The Nazis were coming back. It was really happening. And you either did something about it, or you went to see Aerosmith at Reading.

  Later that sunny Saturday, just when the riot was starting to feel like one of those visions he’d had when he was dropping acid in the lecture halls of the London School of Economics, Leon had stopped outside an electrical shop on Oxford Street and watched the news on a dozen different TV sets. The riot was the first story. The only story. A quarter of the Metropolitan Police Force had been there, and they couldn’t stop it.

  Leon wondered if any of the readers of The Paper had gone to Lewisham because of his few measly paragraphs. He wondered if he had done any good. He wondered if soon the – he had to consult his own article here – the ALCARAF would be the name on everyone’s lips. But then he turned the page and the classified ads brought him back to reality. This was what their readers were interested in.

  LOOK SCANDINAVIAN! Scandinavian-style clogs – £5.50…Cheesecloth shirts for £2.70 plus 20p postage and packing…Cotton Drill Loons. ‘A good quality cotton drill in the original hip-fitting loons.’ Still only £2.60.

  Leon’s thoughts turned reluctantly to fashion, and he wondered, Who wears this crap? Leon himself looked like a shorthaired Ramone – a London spin on a New York archetype. A style that said – I am making an effort, but not much of one.

  Leon’s face and body had not quite caught up with the greasy machismo of his clothes. At twenty he was still whiplash thin, frail and boyish, looking as though he only had to shave about once a week.

  His Lewis Leather biker’s jacket sported a plastic badge on the lapel featuring the Jimmy Hill-like profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He wore drainpipe Levi’s, a threadbare Thin Lizzy T-shirt and white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes down the side. Pretty much the standard uniform for the enlightened urban male in the summer of 1977, although Leon had topped off his look with a trilby hat from a charity shop. Funnily enough, you couldn’t buy that look in the back of The Paper, where they were still packaging what was left of the spirit of the Sixties.

  Cannabis leaf jewellery. Solid silver leaf pendant on real silver chain - £7.

  Leon closed The Paper, shaking his head. He adjusted his trilby. It was as if nothing had changed. It was as if there wasn’t a war on.

  It seemed to Leon that everyone he knew was living in some old Sixties dream. The people he worked with at The Paper, all of the readers, his father – especially his father, a man who had belonged to CND for a few years but who now belonged to a golf club.

  What was wrong with them? Didn’t they realise it was time to take a stand? What did they think the National Front was doing marching in South London? He touched the bruise on his cheek again, and wished it could stay there for ever.

  This wasn’t about some little style option – the choice between long hair or spiky, flared trousers or straight, Elvis or Johnny Rotten. It was about a more fundamental choice – not between the NF and the SWP, who were daubing their rival slogans all over the city, like the Sharks and Jets of political extremism – but the choice between evil, hatred, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and everything that was their opposite.

  The memory of Lewisham still made him shake with fear. The rocks showering down on the marchers. The faces twisted with hatred. The police lashing out with truncheon, boot or knee. The sudden eruption of hand-to-hand fighting as marcher or demonstrator broke through the police lines, fists and feet flying. And the horses, shitting themselves with terror as they were driven into the protesters. Leon knew how those horses felt. Lewisham had been the first violence that he had been involved in since a fight in the playground at junior school. And he had lost that one.

  Mind you, Leon thought, she was a very big girl for nine.

  He thumbed through the singles until he found something worth playing. ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record, and pulled the arm back for repeat play. Then, as the stuttering guitar riff came pouring out of the speakers, he set about destroying the rest of the singles. The Jacksons, Donna Summer, Hot Chocolate, Carly Simon and the Brotherhood of Man – all of them were thrown to their doom across the review room, all of them perished in a dramatic explosion of vinyl.

  Leon was about to launch Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’ when the door to the review room opened and standing there was an elderly black cleaner with a Hoover in his hands, staring open-mouthed at the destroyed vinyl that littered the carpet.

  ‘What the goodness you doing in here, man?’ the cleaner said.

  ‘I’m doing the singles,’ Leon said, his face burning with embarrassment. ‘I was just about to clear all this up.’

  Watched by the cleaner, Leon got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the smashed records, his mouth fixed in a smile that he hoped showed solidarity, and some sort of apology.

  ‘I hope you like curry,’ Terry’s mum said to Misty.

  ‘I love curry,’ Misty said. ‘In fact, my father was born in India.’

  Terry shot her a look. He didn’t know that Misty’s dad had been born in India. It seemed there were a lot of things he didn’t know about her, despite being together since Christmas.

  Misty and Terry and his parents crowded awkwardly in the tiny hallway. Misty was making some rapturous speech about the glories of the Raj and something Kipling had written about the correct way to cook chicken tikka masala. Terry’s parents smiled politely as she babbled on. His father took her photographers bag. Terry noticed that she had unclipped her pink fake mink handcuffs, and stuffed them in the bag. It was her first visit to his home and everyone was making an effort. Misty had turned the charm up to ten and Terry’s dad had put his shirt on. Terry’s mum had prepared a special menu and Terry hadn’t brought any of his laundry home.

  They entered the front room where an old film was blaring from the telly in the corner. For a moment it commanded all their attention. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were runaways from a chain gang, a white racist and a proud black man, still handcuffed together.

  ‘The Defiant Ones,’ said Terry’s mum. ‘He was lovely, Tony Curtis.’

  ‘I’ll turn that thing off,’ said Terry’s dad. That was a sure sign that royalty was visiting. They never turned the TV off until it told them to go to bed.

  ‘What was it that Truffaut said about life before television?’ Misty said, her lovely face frowning with concentration.

  ‘I don’t quite recall, dear,’ said Terry’s mum, as if she had been asked the name of Des O’Connor’s last single, and it was on the tip of her tongue.

  ‘Truffaut said that before television was invented, people stared at the fire.’ Misty looked very serious, as she always did when relating the thoughts of one of her heroes. ‘He said that there
has always been this need for moving pictures.’

  They all thought about it for a while.

  ‘Cocktail sausage?’ said Terry’s mum, holding out a plate of shrivelled chipolatas bristling with little sticks. ‘Take two, love. They’re only small.’

  Terry thought it was so strange to see Misty parked on the brown three-piece suite in the front room of the pebbledash semi where he had grown up. When Terry was small, his father had worked at three jobs to get them out of rented accommodation above the butcher’s shop and into a place of their own, but he knew that what was a dream home to his mum and dad must have seemed very modest to a girl like Misty.

  There was flock wallpaper and an upright piano in the corner and a wall-to-wall orange carpet that looked like the aftermath of some terrible car crash. There were matching pouffes for them to put their feet up on while they were reading Reveille (Mum) and Reader’s Digest (Dad). Misty perched on the middle cushion of what they called the settee in what they called the front room about to eat what they called their tea.

  Strange for all of them. Front room, settee, tea – it even felt like his parents spoke a different language to Misty.

  Terry’s dad stared bleary-eyed at the dead TV, a cocktail sausage on a stick forgotten in his hand. He had just woken up, and was getting ready for another night shift at Smithfield meat market. Even if he had been more awake, small talk wasn’t really his thing, unless he was around people he had known for years, like the men at the market. But Terry’s mum could have small talked for England. She busied herself in the kitchen, conversing with Misty through the serving hatch, like a sailor peering through a porthole.

  ‘I do like your frock,’ Terry’s mum said, her eyes running over the white dress and down to Misty’s biker boots. ‘It’s a lovely frock.’ She passed no comment on the biker’s boots. ‘Would you like chicken or beef curry, love?’

  Misty almost squealed with delight. ‘I can’t believe that you’ve gone to all this trouble!’

  But Terry knew that the curry was no trouble at all. His mum would just drop the bag of Birds Eye curry in boiling water for fifteen minutes. He knew that wasn’t the kind of curry that his girlfriend was expecting. He knew she was used to real Indian take-aways.

  Waiting for tea, Terry had the same sinking feeling, that preparation for humiliation, that he had once felt after PE in the junior school when Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers. Unable to locate his missing pair of grey shorts that were stuffed behind the urinal (thanks, Hairy) Terry had made the long walk into the classroom, fully dressed apart from his trousers.

  ‘Please, miss…’

  The rest had been drowned out by the mocking laughter of thirty eight-year-old children. That’s how he felt waiting for his mother to serve them their curry. Like Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers in the toilets all over again.

  And the funny thing was his mum was a good cook.

  When Terry had been living at home, tea (Misty would have called it dinner) and Sunday dinner (Misty would have called it lunch) was always meat and two veg, with a nice roast on the Sabbath.

  Apart from Sundays, the meal was always consumed in their favourite chairs, the toad in the hole or shepherd’s pie or pork chops and their attendant soggy vegetables wolfed down in front of Are You Being Served? or The World at War or Fawlty Towers or Nationwide or The Generation Game.

  ‘Nice to see you, to see you – nice!’

  But something had happened since Terry had left home. Now it was all convenience food – Vesta chicken supreme and rice, Birds Eye Taste of India, ‘For mash get Smash’ – spaceman food, dark powders or a solidified brown mass that required either the addition of or immersion in boiling water.

  When Terry was a boy, his mum had baked bread, and it was the most wonderful taste in the world. The smell of a freshly baked loaf or rolls had made little Terry swoon. Now his mum no longer had time for all that business. Terry’s dad blamed women’s lib and Captain Birds Eye.

  But his mum had pushed the boat out tonight, or at least as far as the boat would go in these modern times, and Terry loved her for it, even though it seemed he never had much of an appetite these days.

  They sat themselves at the table that was usually reserved for Sundays and Christmas, paper napkins, folded into neat triangles, by best plates, the prawn cocktails in place. A bottle of Lambrusco had already been unscrewed.

  ‘So you work at night,’ Misty said to Terry’s father. ‘Just like us.’

  Terry’s dad shifted awkwardly in his seat, considering the prawn drowning in pink sauce on the end of his teaspoon.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Night work. Working at night. Yes.’

  ‘You hate it, don’t you, the night work?’ Terry’s mum said, prompting him. ‘He hates the night work,’ she told Misty in a stage whisper.

  ‘Why’s that then, Dad?’ Terry said, rearranging his prawn cocktail with his teaspoon. His father had been working night shifts for as long as Terry could remember. It had never occurred to him that he would have preferred working during the day. ‘Why do you hate working nights, Dad?’

  The old man snorted. If you stirred him from his silence, he could be brutally frank. ‘Because you’re working when everyone else is asleep. And you’re asleep when everyone else is awake. And then you get up when the day’s gone, and you don’t get cornflakes or a nice fry-up for your breakfast, you get prawns.’

  He smiled at his wife with a mouthful of prawns, to draw the sting from his words and show her that he was grateful for her efforts. Misty smiled and nodded as if everything was wonderful.

  ‘Salad, anyone?’ said Terry’s mum.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Terry.

  ‘I’ll have a bit of salad,’ said Terry’s dad.

  ‘He likes his salad,’ said Terry’s mum.

  Terry knew it wasn’t real salad – he knew that what his parents called salad was really just tomatoes and cucumber and lettuce, with a radish or two chucked on top for special occasions, such as today. He knew that Misty would expect a salad to come with some sort of dressing. Vinaigrette or thousand island or olive oil or something. He knew this because joining The Paper had been a crash course in food and restaurant lore, as every press officer on every record label in Soho Square had rushed to buy the new boy lunch on their expense account, until they realised that he was going to slag off their rotten acts anyway.

  But here was another thing he was learning about Misty. Salad dressing didn’t matter as much to her as making his mum feel appreciated, and that touched his heart. By the time his girlfriend had pronounced his mother’s boil-in-a-bag beef curry to be delicious, Terry was more deeply in love with her than ever, if that was possible.

  ‘So how did you like Berlin, Tel?’ his mum said, sinking a bread knife into a Black Forest gateau. If she had noticed that her son was only force-feeding himself enough to be polite, she gave no sign.

  ‘It was incredible,’ Terry said.

  His mum waved the bread knife expansively. ‘Lovely to go travelling all over the world and get paid for it. You were in Germany, weren’t you?’ she said to his dad. Terry realised that many of his mum’s observations ended with a question to his dad, as if she was afraid the old man’s natural reticence might mean he was left out of the conversation.

  ‘Bit different in my day,’ said Terry’s dad.

  ‘Why’s that, Mr Warboys?’ Misty asked.

  Terry’s dad grinned ruefully. ‘Because some bugger was always shooting at me.’

  Misty shook her head with wonder. ‘You’ve had such an interesting life,’ she said. She touched the hand of Terry’s mum, the hand where she wore her engagement ring, her wedding ring and the eternity ring she had got last birthday. ‘You both have. Depression…war…it’s like you’ve lived through history.’ She looked at Terry. ‘What has our generation ever seen or done?’

  Terry’s parents stared at her. World war, global economic collapse – they thought that was all normal.

  ‘Lump
of gateau?’ said Terry’s mum.

  They took their Black Forest gateau to the settee, and Misty perched herself on the piano stool, lifting the lid on the old upright.

  ‘I had lessons for ten years,’ she said. ‘Five to fifteen. My mother was very keen for me to play.’

  Terry smiled proudly. He had no idea she played piano. His smile began to fade as it became clear that she didn’t, not really. Misty picked out the worst version of ‘Chopsticks’ that he had ever heard.

  ‘Ten years?’ Terry’s dad chuckled with genuine amusement. ‘I reckon you want your money back, love!’

  ‘I’m a bit rusty, it’s true,’ Misty smiled, seeing the funny side.

  ‘Don’t listen to him, darling,’ said Terry’s mum, and she sat next to Misty. ‘Shove up a bit. Let me have a go.’

  The piano had belonged to Terry’s grandmother – his mum’s mum, back in the days before television when every sprawling East End family had their own upright in the corner and a chicken run out back. You made your own entertainment and your own eggs. There wasn’t really room for a piano in that little front room, but Terry’s mum refused to get rid of it, especially now that Terry’s nan was no longer around.

  His mum cracked the bones in her fingers, smiling shyly, then began to play one of the old songs, about seeing your loved one’s faults but staying with them anyway. She had the easy grace of the self-taught and she started singing in a soft, halting voice that made them all very still and quiet, although Terry’s dad wore a knowing grin on his face.

  ‘You may not be an angel

  Angels are so few…’

  Terry’s mum paused, but kept playing, and Terry’s dad guffawed with delight.

  ‘She’s forgotten the words,’ he said, embarrassed at his fierce pride in his wife and her gift. But she hadn’t forgotten the words.

  ‘But until the day that one comes along…’

  And here she gave a rueful look at Terry’s dad.