by Anne Fine
‘Checked!’ I held the phone down close to the generator and kicked its tin side so hard I must have deafened him.
‘Raise yokes!’ I yelled again. ‘Disengage!’
‘Disengaged!’
‘Yokes up!’
I brought the phone back to my ear. ‘Sorry, Geoff. Got to go. These bloody rack and pinion gears are playing up again.’
I couldn’t even tell if we’d impressed him. I’d rung off.
10
BACK TO SQUARE one, and Sol’s plan to get Geoffrey on his feet again before planting the boot on his backside. I started nagging Sol to look at Print-It! The first I heard that he was actually getting on with it was when Geoff told me Doris had begun complaining about some old geezer who sat for hours on the window ledge, claiming it was where he’d arranged to ‘meet his wife’. Doris was outraged that he’d even asked to use the lavatory, and, on his way out, stumbled through not just both storerooms, but also the little kitchen overlooking the back yard.
‘She calls you an old geezer,’ I told Sol next time we spoke.
Mightily put out, he said, ‘That isn’t me. I haven’t time to prowl around failing businesses. That’s Mr Stassinopolous, looking for a berth for his son.’
‘What does he think?’
‘Same as me. Prime site. One could make something of it. Have you spoken to Geoff?’
‘He’s banking on you.’
Clearly Sol and this Mr Stassinopolous had been discussing the terms. ‘A clear-cut take-over of the lease? A token payment for the stuff in the storerooms and simple transfer of all the equipment guarantees and rentals?’
‘He’s over a barrel, Sol. Now it’s all over, Geoff just wants to get out.’
And out he was. Within a couple of months, the deal was struck. Geoff handed over to the Stassinopolous boy, and came home pleased as punch, as if the deal had been a masterstroke of business acumen and not the end of his financial hopes. ‘He is a nice young man. Very pleasant, with a most charming wife.’ He was nodding in self-important fashion, as if to stress his feelings of satisfaction. ‘Naturally I asked him, as a favour to me, to keep Mrs Mackie and Doris on the books.’
I looked up from my estimations of fixed load. ‘Refresh my memory, Geoff. Why would the Stassinopolous boy owe you a favour?’
Geoff looked a bit put out. ‘Well, he has done rather well for himself, hasn’t he, getting Print-It!’
‘Thanks to his father.’
Geoff turned his back. ‘No need to be unpleasant, Tilly. I’ve left things ship-shape. He’s a fortunate boy. I reckon he owes me a favour and I think he knows it.’
‘Oh, yes? Watch this space.’
Indeed, within a month, both women were gone. George Stassinopolous paid them cash for a week or two while he was picking their brains, then waved them goodbye. Next time I glanced in the shop, it seemed to be staffed with students, the window was plastered with special offers, and, for the first time ever, the place appeared to be humming.
Meanwhile, Geoff took his time, looking for work. Every few days, when I prompted, he’d say in lordly fashion, ‘I’m just asking around a bit,’ as if he’d spent his life hobnobbing with useful business contacts instead of being a rather stay-at-home bloke, happy to go for days on end speaking mostly to food-shop assistants and to his own employees.
‘Why don’t you phone that firm who used to drop off your paper and stuff?’ I suggested one morning.
‘Stationery Supplies?’ Geoff looked quite pleased. ‘Excellent idea, Til. I should have thought of that myself.’
I made the mistake of warming to the notion. ‘As I recall, you were forever going on about how hard it was for them to find a reliable driver.’
‘Driver?’
His beady look annoyed me. ‘Well, what did you think? That, with your track record, they’d invite you to sit on the board?’
He turned back to his paper. ‘I’m sure you don’t mean to be horrid, Til.’
Don’t say a word, I told myself. It’s not your problem. There’s no need to rise to the bait. You can get through this without pointing out that you’re right and he’s wrong. And Geoff is bound to find a job. Employers are supposed to spend their waking hours scouring the land for clean and literate people.
That gave me another idea. ‘Have you tried going down the Job Centre?’
If I’d said ‘Have you tried selling your sperm?’ he couldn’t have acted more startled. ‘Sorry, Til?’
‘The Job Centre,’ I repeated. ‘Have you been down there? Have you signed on and given them your details?’
‘No, I haven’t!’
He was quite short with me. I left the room, thinking I’d give him a couple more days. Surely the idea would sink in that he was going to have to junk his lofty so-called ‘management skills’, and get a real job. Failing that, I planned to put Sol’s plan in mothballs and kick him out anyway, pitiless as it might appear to him and to others. I was halfway up the stairs when the phone rang. Hoping it might be some stab at employment in the offing, I stayed on the landing to listen. It was a little hard to make out what was going on at the other end. All I could hear from Geoff were broken-off phrases: ‘No, Harry—’ ‘Slow down. I can’t follow—’ ‘Start again, Harry.’ ‘How can—?’ ‘Please, Harry! Stop!’
It sounded so desperate that I leaned over the banister. Spotting me standing there, Geoff frantically signalled me through to the bedroom to pick up the extension. He was still trying to calm his son: ‘Take it easy, Harry. Try to expl—’ ‘Harry, I can’t make sense of—’
I picked up the phone. If Geoff hadn’t made it clear that it was Harry, I’m not sure I’d have guessed. The voice was strung out and hysterical. The words were spat out at machine-gun speed. The venom in the voice was horrible. It was a hate call and the object of the hate was me.
‘See, Dad? Did you hear that click? She’s picked up one of the phones. She’s listening! She listens to everything, Tilly does. She—’
‘Harry, this is ridic—’
‘You don’t know what she’s like. You think she’s nice, but she’s not. She’s actually dangerous. She can send voices into people’s brains to stop them thinking their own thoughts. She can—’
I put the phone down. Bloody, bloody drugs! Wouldn’t you know it? Just as the moment arrives to make a break for it, here comes the son to join the needy father. I flung the wardrobe doors wide. There were my trusty matching carry bags. There were my clothes. My toiletries were standing in a row, just waiting to be tipped into their daisy-lined holder. Just make a run for it, I told myself. Leave Geoff in this stupid house for now. Let him get on with it, and pay a solicitor to winkle him out later. Anything – anything – rather than have more of your life chewed up by these endless delays and your own indecision. Quick! Take your chance, Til. Bugger off. Then you can live alone.
Alone! Even the word sounded magical. To think and feel only as I chose. Be answerable to no one, feel guilty about nothing, live my own life and feel time my own again. It would be like a gift. Manna from heaven. But even as I was hurling the first clothes into the bag, there came a swipe of real shame. There you go, whispered the part of me that wasn’t quite tough enough. There you go, drizzling your petty discontents over everything, and putting your grievances above the problems of a damaged boy. For a moment I froze, my folded jeans in my hand. But then I tossed them into one of the bags as planned. After all, who had let this problem arise in the first place? Who was it who had allowed his son – against clearly stated advice – to spend the most testing week of his young life in a flat with a druggie? What had Geoff thought would happen, for Christ’s sake? Did he assume that Tod would sit on his bean-bag, puffing away on prime spliffs, and good old Harry would be waving away each offer of blissful oblivion with some namby-pamby, wholesome ‘No, thanks. I think I’ll have a cup of tea’? The stupid, stupid man, forever allowing his problems to breed out of sheer bloody idleness.
Furious again, I hurled the thin
gs I couldn’t do without, one after another, into the bags on the bed. Geoff was a lazy shit. He was a selfish bastard. I’d warned him again and again. Now let him reap what he himself had sown. Was it my job to stick around to help him pick up the pieces? For heaven’s sake! It wasn’t as if I’d been put on the planet to sort out things for Geoffrey Anderson. It was time he learned to clear up his own messes. They were his children, after all, not mine. In went the clock and the toiletries. In went the things I needed from my top drawer. Was it my fault that, when the letter came from my solicitor asking him to leave, he wouldn’t even have a home to offer his son and his daughter? No, it was not. It was because he hadn’t ever made the effort to learn the very first thing about himself, and coming to terms with all your own limitations is the most basic part of growing up. If tens of thousands of little girls can face the fact they’ll never be ballerinas, never have a horse of their own to adore, never strut down a catwalk to a chorus of gasps, what is so wrong with one man coming to realize he doesn’t have the skills to run a shop? You can’t forever be throwing things away, then piteously looking round for someone else to bail you out. Was it my fault he’d tossed half his savings down the drain to help a woman waste money on crystals and weird therapies and a whole host of other crap peddled to people so scared of dying they’ve taken leave of their senses? Bad enough that he hadn’t dared tell me. But surely even Geoffrey could have summoned the guts to try to stop Frances. Terence had tried. He’d even written a letter to try to get Geoff to support him. Perhaps if the two of them had managed to hold firm then, come the end of June, Harry and Minna might still have had a roof of their own over their heads instead of becoming even more dependent on mine.
Grim thought. I forced the last of my computer stuff into the bag. The phone call with Harry couldn’t last for ever, however loopy the lad had become. Geoff would be up the stairs soon, to report. I wanted to slide out before the tears, before the argument. I simply wanted to be gone. I knew what everyone else would think. I didn’t have to wonder for a moment what my brother would say when I told him I’d scarpered. ‘Oh, come on, Til. So Geoff let a few things slide. Give the poor man a break. It’s only because he’s so taken up with spoiling you that he never bothers with other things. As for his secrets, don’t forget he hides the truth just as much from himself. Let the poor sod off the hook, Til. You’re no picnic to live with either. So go back home.’
No, I thought. Not this time. No one will persuade me back. Not Ed. Not Donald. Not even the blokes in the office or on the rig. I’ll have no more of men sticking together to support their own crappy standards. Ed had been quick enough to make it clear he didn’t want to risk his own share of my mother’s money or easy way of life. What had he said? ‘No worries, Til. He won’t get a bean out of me. I’ll be as hard as nails.’ So now, his shade could not cajole me into some softer path to take myself. No, I was off. And slinging the computer case over my shoulder, I reached down for the travel bags.
And felt the whole house shake. Downstairs, the front door slammed. I could hear footsteps hurrying down the path and I crossed to the window. My car was blocking Geoff’s, and, without even glancing up, he started sorting through his bunch of keys to find my spare. I struggled with the window latch as I banged on the glass. ‘Hey! Take your own car! I need mine. Hang on a moment till—’
But even before I’d managed to make myself heard, Geoffrey had thrown himself into the driving seat, slammed shut the car door and sped away.
Leaving me with a twelve-year-old hatchback with a rusty floor, a boot that won’t open and a temperamental starter. I sank down on the bed. How many times in a row could my determination to get away be derailed by this family? Come on, I urged myself. Make a break for it. A car counts for nothing. Take a taxi if you must. Or, just for now, drive off in his bloody heap.
But just the fact that I’d been left with a car I couldn’t depend on drained a lot of my fury away. After all, whose fault was that? Mine. Mine alone. I’d promised to fix the sodding starter motor weeks ago, and never bothered. Geoff, on the other hand, would never have put off doing that sort of favour for me. He was a generous-spirited soul who held me so dear that things he could do for me always came top of his list. At heart, let’s face it, how you judge a man depends on what you value and what you want. If what I wanted was love, Geoff offered it in spades.
He always had.
And me? A different story. Here came the moment when he’d lost his children’s mother, his savings, even his job. To cap it all, his grieving son had stuffed enough drugs down his neck to float full-blown psychosis. And what was I doing? After years and years of eating the meals he’d cooked, driving the car he’d washed and sleeping in beds he’d changed, I was lifting my travel bags, to get away.
I put my head in my hands, defeated yet again. This man was dashing out into the night because he loved his son. Maybe it was a stupid way to spend his energies, slamming stable doors after horses had bolted. But that was Geoff. And everyone else loved him all the more dearly for it. The mother of his children accepted his well-meant help right to the end. His daughter’s eyes filled with tears at the mere thought of him. Even his son’s first concern in paranoia appeared to be the safety of his father.
They were all round me now, shaking their fingers. I could see them. Harry and Minna. Ed and my mother. Donald and guys from the rigs. I could as good as hear their voices, stern and implacable. And every one of them was saying the same thing. ‘Shame on you, Tilly Foster. Shame on you. Unpack that bag at once.’
And so I did.
I was still in the most chastened of moods when, early next morning, Minna came round from the other house. ‘Where is Dad?’
Unable to face the fuss I knew would follow if I admitted he was at the hospital, talking to doctors, I stalled. ‘Oh, just off out.’
I thought at first she might have come to look for her brother. But clearly his absence overnight was nothing to remark on – at least not to me – because she made herself a cup of herbal tea and spent a good couple of minutes fiddling with pieces of starter motor laid out on the table before taking a deep breath and saying, ‘Tilly, I’m pregnant. I just did one of those tests and the blue line came up at once. What shall I do?’
I felt too weak after a sleepless night to offer anything much. ‘What do you feel like doing?’
Unthinkingly, she slid her arms around her belly, making the answer pretty obvious, and so I said, ‘If you’re in doubt, Minna, you should certainly think about keeping it.’
This clearly wasn’t what she was expecting from me. ‘Really? Is that what you’d do?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘But you think I should?’
‘I can’t say, can I, sweetheart? It’s your decision. You’re eighteen.’
‘Nineteen. But what about Dad?’
I shrugged. ‘This is a matter between you and Josh.’
She made a face. ‘Josh says he wants to get married. He says he’s wanted to get married right along.’ She sighed. ‘But I’m not sure. I mean, what happens when he tells his mum? She’s going to kill us.’
It must be odd to be so young that you can let such huge decisions spin on such foolish things. Maybe it was because her brother had insisted I was ‘dangerous’ that I was determined not to let a single destructive comment escape my lips. ‘His mum will do the same as every other mother – give him a right royal bollocking, scowl at the two of you for several months, then fall in love with the baby.’
Minna looked thrilled. ‘You think so?’
‘I do.’ I had another poke around the part of the motor that was proving most tricky. ‘And look at it this way, if she doesn’t soften, you can always console yourself that she wouldn’t have been any great loss to your new family.’
‘New family …’ Yet again, the tell-tale arms slid round her stomach. ‘Weird idea!’
‘Well,’ I warned, ‘don’t get too taken up with it before giving a tiny bit of thought
to the other.’
‘The other?’
‘Getting rid of it.’
‘Oh, no! I couldn’t.’ She appeared quite shocked.
So that was that. The baby’s fate was settled in the length of time it takes a girl to drink one Apple Passion. Minna went straight to the hospital to tell her father. (‘He cried, Til. He burst into tears and said, if we were pleased, then he’d be mad not to be pleased for us.’) Next day, she went again, to visit her brother. (‘It’s awful, Tilly. He’s laid out like a zombie with his face all stiff. And he smells funny.’) Then she was gone, down with the marriage-minded Josh to face his family in Cornwall. No worries there, it seemed. They took to her right from the start. Grandma Elise in particular, Josh reported when they came back, was taken with her sweet nature and let it be known that there would always be a home for the young family in one of the ‘barns’ that stood on her ancient farm. Brushing the compliment aside, Minna took up the story. ‘You should see it, Tilly. Call it a barn? It’s fabulous. It has these great black beams, and pretty rooms with tiny pointy windows, and you can see the sea. Oh, and the kitchen’s a huge wide space with lovely blue tiling and a massive old cooking range that Elise moved from the big house. And in the garden there are apple trees and dog roses all over. And—’
I watched Geoff’s face as it fell, and took it upon myself to interrupt Minna’s parade of bliss. ‘So you are tempted, then?’
She suddenly realized how it must have sounded. ‘We-ell,’ she said with a shy glance at Josh, ‘not while poor Harry’s so ill. I wouldn’t like to be so far away from him that I couldn’t visit.’
But that didn’t last for long. And fair enough. After all, sitting for hours with a brother who barely speaks to you can swiftly pall. ‘I can’t keep going there, Dad. Not if he’s going to smoke at me all the time.’
‘He’s not smoking at you, sweetie. It’s just that smoking’s all that any of them in there can do to pass the time, and so they do it.’
‘He could read. Or play his guitar, or something.’
