‘Fine.’
He regarded the car park for a long moment. I can’t say where his thoughts went. ‘Think she’s forgotten about that ashtray. Can you grab one from another table?’
I slid out of our booth and checked the one behind us. There was a glass dish on the counter, full of dog-ends. I emptied it onto a plate of leftovers and brought it to my father. ‘Good lad,’ he said, weighing the heft of it, smiling at the franchise logo printed on the base. ‘There’s the little man himself. What’s he looking so cheery about, eh? His bank balance, most likely. I might just have to keep this as a souvenir.’ He set it down and dumped a scab of ash upon it. ‘Unless we both get food poisoning.’
‘If you hate this place so much,’ I said, ‘why did we stop?’
He snorted out more smoke, eyeing the window. ‘When you get older, Dan, you’re going to learn that there are two kinds of women: ones you love enough to marry, and ones who happen to be standing there when you’re in the mood for something sweet. It’s the same with restaurants.’ A car was parking in the bay next to the Volvo, foregoing all the other empty spaces. He grinned at me. ‘Plus, I knew they’d have a payphone.’
‘Oh yeah, we need to call Mum.’
‘Right,’ he said, dragging. ‘Well, don’t feel bad. You were busy with the map.’
‘Should I do it now?’
‘Nah, it can wait until you’ve eaten. Just don’t tell her what I’m feeding you.’
The waitress arrived with our drinks. As she set the coffee cup down before my father, she noticed the ashtray and apologised to him. ‘Head’s like a sieve today,’ she said—a phrase I’d never heard before, and which I now associate with her bony, tattooed hand upon his saucer. Her thumb was missing a fake nail.
‘Not to worry,’ my father said. ‘I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty good ashtray—nice and wide, not too shallow. I was thinking I might steal it. Don’t suppose that sort of thing would be encouraged in such a high-class establishment as this, though.’
She laughed a little uncertainly, then said: ‘You’d be surprised.’
‘I bet I would, Kelly,’ came his response. He must’ve clocked her name badge. ‘I’ll bet you’ve got at least five of these beauties at home.’
She pursed her lips. ‘That’d be telling.’ My glass of milk was still waiting on her tray, and she finally acknowledged it, spilling a drop as she lowered it down. ‘Whoops.’ She dabbed the paper mat with a tea towel. ‘So where are you lads on your way to, then—anywhere special?’
My father was watching her through slatted eyelids. ‘That depends on your point of view,’ he said. ‘I’m taking him to see the place I work.’
‘And where’s that?’
‘It’s up in Leeds. The TV studios.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at me. ‘Exciting.’
I couldn’t sit there waiting for him to tell her, as though it were nothing. ‘He works on The Artifex.’
‘Not everyone finds that as fascinating as you, Danno,’ my father said. He stabbed out his Wintermans and peered up at her. ‘It’s a kid’s show. Not like Rainbow or Blue Peter. A proper drama series.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it—haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard of it.’
‘You got kids? They probably watch it. Or they’ve read the book.’
‘No. I think my nieces like it, though.’
‘It’s quite sophisticated for a kid’s show. A little bit scary. But they keep letting us make more, so I suppose they must enjoy it. This one likes it, anyway.’ He bobbed his head at me.
‘It’s amazing,’ I said. ‘Everyone says so.’
There was a ding from the kitchen.
‘That’ll be your pancakes,’ said the waitress. ‘I should fetch them.’
‘You do that. We can entertain ourselves.’ He plucked a pack of sugar from the stand and shook it. As she walked towards the kitchen pass, he held his gaze on her. ‘What d’you think of her?’ he said. ‘Seems like a decent person.’
I drank my milk. Its coldness helped my tongue. ‘I don’t like her nails.’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They’re all glued on.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You can’t tell anything about a woman from her nails, believe me.’
‘She’s a waitress.’
‘So what? Nothing wrong with that. Your mother was a waitress when I met her.’ He stirred his coffee. ‘A job’s a job. I don’t want you getting that superior attitude.’
‘Mum wasn’t a waitress.’
‘She did catering. Same thing. Just because your grandpa didn’t pay her for it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’
I couldn’t understand why he wanted me to appreciate the lady. She was serving us breakfast at a roadside restaurant on the verges of a town we’d never return to—her life story was none of my concern. But I can see now that he was trying to bestow some of his better values unto me, or at least make me aware that he possessed them. ‘Seriously,’ he went on, ‘you shouldn’t just dismiss people because of what they do. Sometimes, what you see is what you get, and that’s okay: not everyone has a dream to go chasing after. But most of the time—and I’ll bet you that waitress is a classic case—there’s plenty more to them than first appears. Like with me. When I was decorating, I wasn’t just a decorator, was I?’
I shook my head.
‘Right then, here we are.’ Kelly appeared with our food. ‘Who had the raisin pancakes?’ She put them down in front of me. As she deposited the last dish before my father, he touched her hand. ‘Is that a snowflake or a web?’
She blinked at him, took a slight step back. ‘Oh that. I sort of regret it.’
‘What’s to regret?’
‘You know, I was young and stupid. A boy dared me. Sad, really.’
‘Not at all. I like it.’
She squinted at her hand. ‘Well, either way, I’m stuck with it for good.’ Folding the empty tray under her armpit, she set her eyes on me. ‘Would you like another glass of milk, love?’
I shook my head.
‘You can bring me some more coffee,’ my father said.
She backed away, nodding. ‘No problem.’ And she smiled at him in the way I had seen other women smile at him before—that fleeting constriction of the mouth, a flinch to gauge his reaction. He flinched straight back at her. Then he turned to me and picked up our conversation: ‘See, on the show, we just assume that Cryck is a weird creature to begin with, don’t we? And then we find out she’s a lot more complicated. Point is, no one writes her off.’ He stripped the napkin jacket from his cutlery and started cutting up his pancakes. ‘I mean, how d’you know that waitress doesn’t have some secret of her own? Look at that tattoo she’s got—could be a whatsit . . . an indograf. You never know.’ A slick of ice cream dripped off his fork. ‘Hey, these aren’t bad. Eat up.’
I had a few bites, but it hurt to chew.
‘I’m not saying she’s from another planet or anything,’ he said, ‘but you can’t just take one look at her false nails and think you’ve got her sussed.’ He noticed, then, that I had barely touched my pancakes. ‘Your tongue still giving you gyp, or what?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just eat the ice cream.’
‘It’s making me feel a bit sick.’
‘All that milk, probably.’ He wiped his mouth. ‘Okay, leave it, then.’
‘Can I go to the toilet now?’
‘Thought you’d never ask. Go on, hurry up.’ As I slid out the booth and headed off, he called: ‘Make sure you get it all out!’
I’ve always viewed men’s toilets as sites of casual depravity—that pervading uric stench and dour strip-lighting, the silent strangers who come and go from the urinals without washing their hands—but I think the Little Chef’s facilities were likely where this attitude became ingrained. I couldn’t get the piss out of me quick enough. Standing at the hand dryer, I noticed a beaded trail of syrup on the front of my sweatshirt. I tried to smear it in, bu
t that just made it worse. So I splashed the stain with water and spent a while blasting it dry.
My father wasn’t at our table when I came back out. He’d abandoned his breakfast, left his tin of Wintermans on his place mat, the knife and fork across his plate. I could see his saucer but no coffee cup. ‘He’s over there, love,’ came a voice from behind me. It was Kelly, the waitress. She was taking an order at a neighbouring table. There was something new about her: a chalkiness about her face, as though she’d dusted it with different make-up. If she really was a delegate from another planet, I supposed a dismal restaurant on the shoulder of an A-road was a clever place to hide. ‘Over there,’ she said, pointing.
Fran Hardesty was inclined between the magazine stand and the Coke machine in the lobby. He had the shiny brown receiver of the payphone clasped against his ear. A coffee cup was in his other hand and he was taking gulps from it as he talked. I assumed that he was speaking to my mother. ‘That’s totally ridiculous, that can’t be right,’ he was saying as I approached, ‘two weeks is what he told me. Have they even asked her yet? Have they even bothered? . . . Come on, QC, you know I didn’t. You were with me the whole day. Don’t fucking start all that again. I’ve had it with all that . . .’
This was the first time I heard those initials—QC.
‘No, the problem is—will you just listen? . . . How was I supposed to know that, mate? She’s gone way too far with all this. I’m telling you, it’s out and out humiliation that she’s after, and there’s no way I’m—’ As soon as he noticed me, he lowered his voice; his tone became conciliatory. ‘Look, I’ve got to go, okay. My lad’s showed up. But I’m gonna ring you back . . . An hour. You’d better be around . . . All right, good. But, look—you need to help me out here, it isn’t right, all this. I’m trying to stay calm here, but . . . Okay. Later.’ He hung up, necked his coffee, left the cup beside the cash register.
‘Who’s QC?’ I asked.
‘A mate of mine. Don’t worry.’ He ghosted by me. ‘We should probably get moving.’
‘Is everything okay?’
‘I told you: don’t worry.’
‘You sounded upset, though.’
‘Nah. QC can be difficult sometimes. It’s fine.’
‘Well, can I borrow 10p?’
‘What for?’
‘I need to call Mum.’
He surveyed the restaurant. ‘You know what? I just tried her. No answer.’
‘Oh.’ The clock in the lobby said 9:48. She usually left for work around eight, but I knew that she’d booked the whole morning off as a contingency. ‘Maybe she was in the bath. We’d better try again.’
My father pondered this for what seemed like an age. He reached into his pocket, spread out the change he had across his palm, and picked out a couple of tens. ‘All right, if you need the brownie points that much, let’s try her.’ His bounding strides towards the phone were strangely rushed. He dialled the number and waited. ‘Getting an engaged tone now,’ he said. ‘Listen.’ The receiver was pressed to my ear as validation.
‘One more time,’ I said, before he’d got the phone back on its hook. ‘Please. I promised her.’
‘We can’t hang around here all day, you know.’ He shrugged and dialled again to placate me. When my mother answered, he dropped two coins in the slot and passed me the phone. ‘Be quick,’ he mouthed, and went back to our table.
My mother was glad to know I was safe. I could hear the relief wrinkling her voice. ‘And where are you now?’ she said, after I told her about my role as navigator. ‘What are your co-ordinates?’
‘Just a service station,’ I said. ‘Lincolnshire.’
‘Not a McDonald’s, I hope.’
‘No. We just had the sandwiches you made.’
‘I bet you picked out all the cucumber.’
‘No, I ate it,’ I said. ‘Honest.’
‘Sure, I believe you.’
‘I was thinking—’
‘About what?’ she said.
‘I wish you could’ve come with us.’
‘Well, this is your father’s thing.’
‘Yeah, I know, but . . .’
Her hand rustled the mouthpiece. ‘Look, as soon as you meet Maxine whatshername you won’t even remember me. Next to Maxine whatshername, I’m dog food.’
‘Laidlaw.’
‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
She made this joke so often that I found it tiresome—I didn’t understand that this was her intention, to irritate a smile out of me. ‘I think my money’s going to run out soon, Mum.’
‘Okay. Just phone me next time you stop. Is your dad behaving?’
‘Yeah. He’s being nice. We’re having fun.’ On the far side of the restaurant, he was passing a small plateful of cash to our waitress. As she accepted it, she almost bowed: a dip of her knees and a swash of her hair. He touched her bare forearm as he went by her, whispered in her ear. Something was cupped against the inside of his wrist, a little souvenir half-tucked into his shirt sleeve. ‘He thinks that I still wet the bed. Who told him that?’
‘Not me,’ my mother said, ‘but it doesn’t surprise me. Ask him what size shoes you wear. Ask him if he knows your collar size.’
‘What is my collar size?’
‘Thirteen and a half,’ she said, ‘last time I checked. You’re going to have to catch him up, I suppose.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Be patient with him,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not easy.’ And then I lost her to the blips.
You need to be aware the show was not just entertainment but communion with my father. It was as though, when I switched on at five p.m. each Wednesday, our minds were connected by a cathode ray tube. I’d kneel before the television without moving—twenty-five minutes of intense concentration. I’d shut out the clatter of my mother in the kitchen and the waning music of the birds, forget the dust that dimmed the screen, ignore the niggling thoughts of homework. When the last scene faded to black, I’d wobble closer to the set so I could watch the end credits, pins and needles in my legs, hoping that I’d see his name scroll up with all the others. But it never did. ‘I’m just a carpenter on set, Danno. You really think they’re going to write my name in fancy letters? It doesn’t work like that in television.’ Strange, the things we celebrate. He wasn’t credited for any of his work until his crimes made national news. And now you only have to type The Artifex into a search bar and it flushes out a hundred archived newspaper reports bearing my father’s name, downplaying his connection to the programme. Like this one from the Telegraph: ‘Hardesty, 36, was engaged as a freelance carpenter on the ITV co-production, a spokesman for the show confirmed. It is understood that Hardesty, who previously had worked as a painter-decorator and stage carpenter in regional theatre, had little to no contact with the programme’s cast or senior production staff.’
How my father came to be involved in the show’s making is a story in itself. Given his mendacity, it’s not easy to assemble a picture of his working life from the scant puzzle pieces I am left with: half-remembered conversations with him and my mother, letters he once sent to her and those she sent to him, small details he shared with others (friends and acquaintances, my grandparents), scraps of paperwork found with his possessions, contracts and invoices for jobs, outstanding bills, home videos, my mother’s teenage diary.
What I know for sure is that he grew up in the Lake District, on a sheep farm at Wasdale Head, and was expected to raise Herdwicks with his father until he got old enough to inherit the land and its livestock. But he used to say the shepherd’s calling was ‘bred out’ of him; he realised he wasn’t built for it when he was very young. ‘Men are born into that life,’ he once wrote to my mother. ‘If you don’t feel it in the marrow of your bones your [sic] better off away from it.’
Strangely for a boy in his community, he enjoyed school (his Maths, English, and Science grades were good) and preferred the indoor life. ‘The fells are great if you like the stink of sheep-sh
it and a lot of rain. I’d rather chase a pretty girl in the pub than a load of dumb animals in the mud. Who in his right mind wouldn’t?’ He left school with decent qualifications, was the first Hardesty to go to university. He wanted to be a town planner, and was accepted into an Architectural Design programme at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. One of his leftover drawings from that time is quite spectacular—a sprawling bird’s eye view of an imagined city, sketched on tracing paper—and indicates his wasted talent. In the summers, afraid of going home, he worked picking tomatoes, shared caravans with foreign students. He seemed to like this period of his life: ‘They’re all training to be doctors. Bulgarians mostly,’ he wrote to my grandma. ‘They come over every year and get up to their elbows in tomato sap and bee stings. The wages are great if you pick fast enough. We’re paid by the weight of each basket. The foreigners work so hard they can earn a year’s tuition back home in a single season. You spend all summer with them, get to know them a bit, and then they’re gone. I think it’s kind of a shame.’
He dropped out of university at the age of nineteen, for reasons that elude me—his transcript shows all lower-second grades, and I expect he viewed this as a failure of some kind, an indictment of his potential. If you ever watched my father hanging wallpaper, you’d understand the great meticulousness he brought to his work—he tried to be the best at what he did, but people seemed to favour quickness over quality, and I suspect this wore him down after a while. If skill goes unrecognised for long enough, it suffocates. He laboured on building sites around the Midlands for modest wages until he turned twenty-one.
At this point, an older man he’d been working with—a joiner called Eric Flagg—started his own company in Maidenhead, refurbishing and partitioning offices. My father took a job with him, learning the joiner’s trade, renting a box room in a house-share. He got close to Eric and his wife, a dental receptionist who ran the local amateur dramatic society. One weekend, they conscripted him to help out with the set construction for an Ayckbourn farce they were staging at the community centre—the set designer had injured his wrist and Eric couldn’t manage building all the flats and furniture on his own. I’m not entirely sure if this was my father’s first encounter with the theatre (he rarely spoke about productions he’d worked on, or seen, or been inspired by), but this episode with Eric must’ve catalysed his interest somehow. I can only guess that the collaboration was an unexpected thrill for him, that taking the designer’s plans and giving them shape, solidity, afforded him some satisfaction. Maybe he believed his talent and meticulousness would be valued in the theatre, if nowhere else.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 4
