The History of Us

by Jonathan Harvey

  Men, so often, are like dogs. When they turn vicious, chuck them a biscuit, it soon calms them down.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he says, ‘but I’ll think of something. In the meantime . . . write your column.’

  And he heads for the door, no doubt into the throbbing metropolis to gather his genius thoughts together and form a plan of action that will keep me talked about around water coolers up and down the country – and, more importantly, his mortgage paid.

  I actually wrote my column early this morning, but I hoick open my laptop to read through my musings and see if I can still stick by what I said.

  BABY ON BOARD? BABES I’M BORED!

  I know a lot of you will find this hard to believe, but I do actually take public transport quite a bit. And by that I’m not counting taxis. I was on the tube yesterday and I had just hunkered down in my seat to read someone else’s leftover newspaper – kindly wedged ’twixt cushions – when a woman got on at the next station with one of those ghastly BABY ON BOARD badges on. All our seats were taken, and she just stood there, eyeing us all shiftily till one of us, a man of course, did the chivalrous thing and stood up for her. And she sat. And the porcine (look it up) pregnant princess didn’t even say thank you. The cheek!

  Well excuse . . . me!

  She wasn’t even that pregnant. It was five o’clock. I bet she’d not put a full day’s work in like the guys I was sitting amongst. And yet, just because she had unprotected sex a few months ago, we’re in less need of a bally chair than she is?

  I’m sorry, but in my book the only people we should stand up for on tubes are the elderly or infirm. And being pregnant is not an illness. It’s not an affliction. It just makes you selfish.

  Stand up.

  And keep your legs together next time, lady! I got me some serious sitting to do!

  Toodle pip!

  Jocelyn x

  I sigh, admiring my own daring. This will be LOATHED. And then I attach it to an email and ping it over to Ross with the subject line: QUITE PLEASED WITH THIS.

  Five minutes later he replies:

  I love you Queen Genius. Xx

  That’ll do for now.

  I take a stroll down to Portobello. With my shades on and my hair hidden away in a dayglo headscarf, I feel like an extra in an Almodóvar movie. I also know I won’t get recognized. I go to a little cafe I’ve been going to for years, which is tucked away on a side street, overlooked by the fancier parts of the market, almost hidden in its skirts. It is a kooky little place run by a wizened old Polish woman called Eva, who, no matter what time of the day or night, greets her regulars with a snifter of vodka. Even if you were in AA, she would be offended if you turned her offer down. Friends old and new have to take a shot of her vodka before ordering anything else.

  Today is no different. As I whip off my sunglasses and beam a smile at her, she’s already unscrewing the lid of the bottle.

  ‘She is here, Alfred. Your girlfriend, she is here.’

  I turn to see a smiley old man in the corner.

  ‘Hi Alfred!’ I call, and he smiles some more.

  I hear a shot glass hit the counter and turn to see Eva indicating that I should drink it. I oblige, and feel a shoot of heat travelling rapidly down my chest. I return the empty glass to the counter and order a coffee.

  ‘You go sit with Alfred. The coffee I will bring over.’

  I am never sure if Alfred is his real name – he’s a Polish man, and Alfred doesn’t strike me as terribly Polish. I guess he’s one of those earlier immigrants whose names sounded odd to parochial English ears and so they anglicized them. All I know is, Alfred is in his early nineties and came over to this country as a result of the Second World War. He worked as a miner in Nottinghamshire till the pit closed, and when his daughter moved to London he moved too, to be nearer her. But she then moved to Australia, and Alfred found himself marooned in West London with very few friends to his name. Which was when he discovered Eva’s cafe, and he built himself a group of friends from her regulars.

  The others joke that I am his girlfriend and that he has a twinkle in his eye for me, but really I look upon him as the granddad I never had. I have no contact whatsoever with my own family, and Alfred has taken their place. He is a man of few words, though he is as sharp as a tack. When I sit, we always play a kind of ‘I Spy’ game where he picks a letter and I have to guess the word he is contemplating today. It kills the first five minutes and he enjoys the fact that I pick the most ridiculous words. Eventually he will crack and say, ‘No, you are incorrect. The word I am contemplating today that begins with C is contradiction.’

  The other thing to know about Alfred is that he is blind. I don’t know how long he has been blind – presumably he wasn’t blind when he was down the pits – but he certainly is now, and one of the joys of this is that, although he is quite up to speed with modern culture, he does not recognize me as a vitriolic tabloid queen. He just knows me as the nice lady who comes into the cafe most days. And the freedom to leave the professional Jocelyn at the door is a truly welcome and wonderful thing.

  He asks what I have been doing today and what my plans are for the rest of the day, and I enjoy the lies I weave as I create the persona of a wholesome girl who does her vegetable shopping at the market and then goes home and cooks it fresh, and has an early night listening to Radio 4.

  I never stay long with Alfred. After fifteen minutes he always says, ‘Go. I must be boring you. I am old man.’ And I argue and say he could never bore me. But after twenty minutes I always leave, pay for his coffee, and slip away. When I stand outside the cafe I look back. And even though he can’t see me, he is always giving me a little wave.

  That bit gets me. It makes me quite emotional. A man, with no sight, trying to place me and send me on my way. Thinking he might be seen, even though he cannot see. I turn, trying not to let a single tear fall behind my newly reinstated shades, and walk off into the market. All I need is a white stick and I’d look more blind than Alfred.

  When I am in London, I always try to see Alfred if I can. If I don’t get to see him I can feel quite rudderless and distracted, even if I don’t have deep, meaningful discussions with him. I guess he is an escape from all the crap.

  And there’s plenty of that when I get back to the flat.

  ‘I got rid of Finty coz my new idea’s quite . . . sensitive.’

  He’s been watching Loose Women. Sherrie Hewson is laughing so hard she looks like she might keel over. She is clutching the woman next to her and squealing. Ross switches it off and Sherrie vanishes from the corner of the room.

  ‘We’re going to reunite you with the son you gave up for adoption.’

  I want to see Sherrie Hewson again. I want to see anything other than have to listen to him.

  ‘I didn’t give anyone up for adoption, Ross.’

  Why? Why did I think it was a good idea to tell him? He who would sell his own mother if he thought it’d buy him a new towel rail for his en-suite.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I had a baby, and my mum passed him off as her own. That’s not the same.’

  ‘Exactly – you had less of a say in it.’

  ‘This isn’t fair, Ross.’

  ‘It’s genius. You could probably get a book deal. Everyone will want to interview you. Look how big those Long Lost Family shows are. Everyone loves an abandoned child. And you were a child at the time. Folks are gonna go batshit crazy for it.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘It’ll just be another excuse for people to hate me.’

  ‘They won’t hate you, they’ll feel sorry for you!’

  ‘Even worse!’

  ‘And then of course there’s the pièce de résistance.’

  ‘Don’t even go there.’

  ‘The dad.’

  ‘Ross, don’t.’

  ‘Everyone knows who Mark Reynolds is these days.’

  ‘Yes, a gobby Scouser who th
inks he knows about politics.’

  ‘Left-wing rent-a-gob to mirror your right-wing one.’

  ‘I don’t want him involved.’

  ‘We’ll get acres of press.’

  ‘I don’t want him involved, Ross.’

  ‘Imagine the articles about your cruel mother taking the baby from you. How you had to run away to London coz you couldn’t face the pain. Then we get Mark’s reaction when he finds out he’s a father. The reunion of father and son. The reunion of mother and son. The possibilities are endless!’

  ‘Ross, I think you’re forgetting something.’

  ‘Kerching!’

  ‘What about bloody Billy?’

  ‘Billy?’

  ‘Exactly. You don’t know anything.’

  ‘Ah. Billy’s your son.’

  I falter. ‘He . . . he doesn’t know any of this.’

  OK, so that’s a lie, but Ross isn’t to know that.

  ‘Well, it’s about time he found out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Because you have a mortgage to pay?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘That how it works, is it? When you turn someone’s life upside down.’

  ‘You don’t think he deserves to know?’

  ‘I don’t want to be his mother. It’s too late. This is doing it all arse about face. Why the fuck did I tell you?’

  ‘Because deep down, I don’t think you really mean that.’

  ‘Mean what?’

  ‘That you don’t want to be his mother.’

  ‘What?! You think I look like the maternal type?!’

  ‘I think you’ve closed yourself off over the years, to the point where you’re too scared to even think about being his mum.’

  ‘This conversation finishes right here, right now.’

  ‘You heard what I said, though. Acres of press, Jocelyn. Acres.’

  ‘Well, maybe I don’t want acres of press.’

  ‘That’s like saying none of us needs oxygen.’

  ‘Well, maybe I don’t want acres of press about this.’

  ‘Think about it though, babe. Mark Reynolds. Yeah, you and me might think he’s a bit of a tosser. But he’s a left-wing pin-up. Girls fancy the pants off of him.’

  ‘Girls? He’s forty-five! More, probably!’

  ‘You know what I mean. He’s a cheeky chappy. He’s seen as really cool. He goes on Mock The Week.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, this could be really good for you. As if she couldn’t surprise us any more – we go and find out she shagged Mark Reynolds, and they had a bloody KID.’

  ‘Yes. I get the picture. I just won’t let it happen, so you better start coming up with some other clever ideas. Preferably ones that don’t involve my family, or Tony Benn wannabes.’

  ‘But it could make you millions.’

  ‘The day you sell that story, Ross, we’ll see a litter of pigs flying across Trellick Tower.’

  ‘But . . .’ He was sounding desperate now.

  ‘No buts, Ross! It ain’t gonna happen!’

  And with that I flounced into the bedroom and threw myself on the bed, kicking the door shut.

  To be honest I was amazed the floor was still supporting the bed. Thinking about the past, and Billy, and what happened back then on Alderson Road, he’s right, Ross is right. I do try to wipe it out and usually I can do that but when he confronts me with it, like now, well. It’s like someone has very quickly pulled the floor out from this flat and I fall, spinning out of control, to the ground at a speed of about a hundred miles an hour. Freefall, I go into freefall. And when you hurtle towards the ground that fast, you’re going to get hurt. I imagine falling and as I hit the ground the pain is like an actual kick in the guts. I double over, on my side, in agony, gasping silent cries into the duvet.

  I can’t do this. I can’t be under the same roof as Ross. He might come into the bedroom intent on continuing the conversation, and I don’t want to think about it now. I don’t want to think about it ever. But his words seem stuck to the walls in here and they bounce off and I hear them over and over again until I want to scream.

  I scramble up off the bed. I run from the flat. I have to get out. I have to get away from Ross and the words on the walls.

  I’m not completely stupid. I fear that tears may be imminent and though I don’t take anything substantial with me, I do think to take my headscarf and sunglasses.

  The lift doesn’t descend as quickly as I’d like it to, and although it goes quite slowly I throw myself to one of its walls and hold on for dear life, as if I’m getting G-force, as if I am just dropping down a hole.

  Once outside, I run.

  I run and run with no thought to where I’m going or where I want to be; I just want to be away from Ross and the thoughts. But, like the route is blueprinted into my DNA, I find that within ten minutes or so I am getting my breath back just round the corner from the Polish cafe.

  As I stand there gasping for air I see Alfred turning onto Portobello Road, arms linked with a portly woman with a red face, who is wittering on incessantly. I immediately feel for him – he seems to hate small talk. I imagine he has seen so much in his life, and so much in the war, that the banal chit-chat of this kindly woman is of little interest to him. He’s probably seen people in concentration camps, people hanging from trees, and what is this woman bleating on about now? Her bunions? For the lack of anything better to do, I follow them. They walk slowly, but that’s fine for me right now. I have nowhere else to go, nothing else to pass my time. Along the market the woman stops, and seems to be describing things to Alfred. Oh well, at least she’s making the journey reasonably interesting for him.

  For all I know, this could be a new girlfriend of his. Although he’s only ever mentioned a deceased wife, that’s not to say that he’s kept this woman from me. I’ve kept plenty from him, why shouldn’t he keep something from me? She has an intimacy with him I’ve never seen anyone have before, but then, my encounters with him have been limited to the corner table of the cafe. I can’t say, hand on heart, I’ve ever even seen him stand before. But this could just be the intimacy of the carer.

  They stop at a cashpoint. He gets a card from his wallet and she goes into mother mode, taking it from him and . . . well, I can’t hear what she’s saying as I pretend to admire the guava fruit on one of the street stalls . . . I can tell by her body language that she knows best, and he better leave it up to her. He looks resigned as she inserts the card into the machine and taps in the number she already knows. I see she is laughing. Nervously? Eventually a pile of cash comes out. She places some of it in his wallet, which she returns to him. As he is placing that carefully in his inside pocket, she is sticking the rest of the money into her handbag.

  Does he know she is doing that?

  I want to run up and intervene.

  But maybe she is his carer, and if she is, maybe she needs paying.

  I should not be so suspicious.

  They walk off down the street and I can’t help but feel that she now, suddenly, seems to be in a very good mood.

  I don’t know if I’ve just witnessed a crime.

  Surely I haven’t. Surely people aren’t that cruel.

  But then, my columns are cruel. I am the mistress of cruel.

  No. No, I couldn’t possibly have just witnessed something bad happening. Not to him, not to Alfred.

  They eventually turn off down a side street, and I instinctively know where they’re heading. All the houses round here are inordinately expensive. It costs about a million pounds to buy a garage, if you’ll believe the Daily Mail, but peppered around the area, usually where the gorgeous white stuccoed houses were bombed in the war, you’ll find little blocks of council housing. And I am convinced that’s where Alfred and his fat lady are heading. So confident am I that I quicken my pace and walk past them. I become quite paranoid as I pass them, as I suddenly fear Alfred might have a finely tuned sense of smell due to hi
s inability to see, and that he’ll smell my Michael Kors perfume and cry out ‘Jocelyn? Is that you?’ and my cover will be blown. But then, even if that was to happen, does it really matter? There’s no law about walking down the same street as someone you drink coffee with. Though admittedly there is something intrinsically weird about following someone around without their knowing.

  Someone recently posted a video of me online. It was silent footage, taken on a phone. In it I leave the flats, walk to the shops, return home with a bag of shopping. All the time, the person filming it was about ten paces behind me. And I had no idea. It completely unnerved me. And I am reminded of it now. I’m doing a version of the same, and yet when it was done to me I felt violated. Me, who is happy to pawn off or sell anything about myself . . . come, look, make the most of me and react . . . unhappy that someone had documented a single, silent trip to the shops without my knowledge or consent.

  But what if it was Darius D’Eath?

  I try to push that thought from my head.

  I stop at a corner, as I know they will not make it this far. I look back and see that yes, they’re heading into the low-rise council block. I stand and watch. I don’t know why I am doing this, but something about the mental exercise or the concentration is appealing; it distracts, it completely takes my mind off anything else I could be thinking about. A minute or so later I see Alfred and his friend walking along a walkway on the first floor – clearly they took a lift, as Alfred couldn’t have walked up that quickly. The friend waits patiently while Alfred fiddles about in his pocket for a key, then slowly slips it into the lock on one of the front doors. I hear her cackle quite loudly, a vulgar, cracking laugh. And then he heads into his flat and she walks away, instantly making a call on her phone.

  I instinctively feel she’s ordering some drugs, to be paid for by the money she stole from Alfred.

  Of course, I could be wrong.

  Mind you, can drug addicts really be that fat?

  Now that I’m not being distracted by Alfred – now that I can no longer see the money-grabbing porky piece – I am alone with my feelings, my memories, and I don’t like it. I feel a rising panic. I see a phone box, and instinctively run to it and go inside. I haven’t been in one for years; they seem so redundant. It smells, as they always did, of urine. Clearly they’re still being used as public toilets, and with the rising cost of using a loo in London – fifty pence at Victoria Station, thank you – I can’t say I’m surprised. A few panes of glass are missing, but I still feel protected from the world. I pull out my mobile and stare at it, trying to control my breath. As I do, I mentally file away the state of the phone box and the cost of public lavatories for a future column.