Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  The thin brown carpet was covered with dozens of bootprints and the air was rank: the smell of cigarettes was the strongest element, and then a whiff that was reminiscent of football changing rooms; cement or plaster was in the mix as well, plus white spirit and the aroma of baked beans. A small and misshapen saucepan, caked with tomato sauce, rested on the tiny cooker opposite the door. To the right was what I assumed to be a shower cubicle. To the left was a narrow bed, with sheets and pillows and quilt all stirred in together, and a second bed, which was doing service as a sofa. A table had been slotted between the beds; it had a TV on it, plus a six-pack of beer with one can missing, and a burger carton. A folding plastic chair, heaped with clothes, was tucked under the table. Carrier bags – some empty, others not – occupied much of the sofa-bed; in the centre of the vacant patch there was a videogame console, which Sam threw onto the carriers to make a space for me to sit.

  He filled the kettle from a flagon of water that he took from under the sink. ‘So, how you doing?’ he asked. He was in a bright mood, and appeared to have made an effort to smarten himself up: his jeans were clean, the red Adidas sweatshirt was spotless.

  ‘Fine,’ I answered. I asked him how things were going in Highgate.

  ‘It’s good. It’s good,’ he replied, thoughtfully, spooning coffee into mugs; the tone said that some aspects of the job weren’t so good, but on balance ‘good’ was the right word. The coffee was the cheapest brand of instant, and he made it to a strength that was undrinkable.

  ‘How much longer will you be there?’ I asked.

  He gave me a look that was gauging the motive for the question. ‘A week or two. Thereabouts,’ he answered.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I’ll be off to who knows where. Might be here, might be there,’ he sang, waving the spoon, baton-like, from one side to the other. This was why he had the caravan, he explained. He had mates all over the country, ex-squaddies who were now in the building trade, and if one of them rang him about a job and he liked the sound of it, he could just go. Last week he’d had a call about something that would be coming up soon: a huge job, ripping the guts out of a manor house in Scotland and refitting the whole place, for some film producer. ‘Near Oban. You know that part of the world?’ he asked. I told him I didn’t. ‘I might go for it. Very decent money. Nice scenery. Make a change to open the curtains in the morning and see something worth seeing,’ he said, as he perched himself on the table. The caravan was so cramped, his knees were only inches from my face.

  The caravan was not his only home, he told me; he owned a flat as well. When he came out of the army he’d bought a small place in Matlock. He hadn’t known what he was going to do after the army, nor where he was going to live, but he knew he wasn’t going to stay in Birmingham, so the first thing he did after getting back was to buy a car and drive north, and the first town he came to that he really liked was Matlock, because it was a nice-looking town that was handy for the countryside, and he’d come to feel that at heart he was more of a country boy than a city boy. For most of the year he rented out the flat, which made him a bit of a profit; only in the winter did he live there – for the rest of the time he was on the road in his caravan. He liked not knowing where he was going to be from one month to the next, though it could be a pain not having a decent bathroom. ‘You could do with a good long soak from time to time, in this line of work,’ he said. ‘A lukewarm shower just doesn’t do the business.’ And then, as if suddenly reminded of the purpose of my visit, he pushed himself off the table and announced: ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘So I believe,’ I said.

  He grinned and made his eyebrows twitch. ‘No, something else,’ he said, and with both hands he seized the carrier bags and hurled them onto his bed. A cherrywood bowl was uncovered; I recognised it at once. ‘Ta-da,’ he fanfared. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘But why am I telling you that? It’s yours, isn’t it? You made it.’ He picked it up. ‘I tell you, I’d give anything to be able to make something like this,’ he said, as his fingers gently caressed the curves of the bowl. He handed it to me, with great care.

  I told him that it was just a question of picking the right piece of wood, and that my father had done that for me. My father was a proper woodworker, I told him, but my skills were more limited, far more limited.

  Sam frowned, giving short shrift to false modesty. ‘You’re not telling me this was easy,’ he said. I couldn’t be sure if he really did think that it had been a difficult thing to make; I suspected that he did not.

  ‘It’s nothing special. Not in the slightest,’ I said.

  The glance he gave me said that he was trying to understand why I was taking this attitude. ‘You must feel strange, looking at it,’ he said. ‘I should have thought of that. Sorry.’ I assured him that I didn’t feel strange at all, but this too he doubted. ‘You must do,’ he persisted. ‘Fuck me, it must have been brilliant, to make things like this. I mean, I’m OK with my hands. You know, I can knock things together and they won’t fall down on you. I do a good job. But this,’ – he took it back from me – ‘this is a work of art. I tell you, I’m impressed,’ he told me. ‘You still make stuff, in your spare time?’

  ‘No,’ I answered.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, astonished and doubtful.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘But you must miss it, no?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I told him.

  ‘You must do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. His expression was offering commiseration, as if it were inconceivable that the bowl would not have awakened in me a sadness for a career, as a craftsman, that had failed to flourish.

  The bowl was a nice object, I told him, and I was glad to find that it was still in good condition, but it didn’t make me feel nostalgic. And this was true: the sight of the bowl had raised a faint reminiscence of my father, a pallid sense of bereavement, but no regret for the period of my life that it represented. It was disconcerting that the bowl had come to be in his possession. Otherwise, what was uppermost in my mind was a question: why does he want me to feel what he thinks – or is pretending to think – I’m feeling? His intention, unmistakably, was to discomfit me.

  Noticing that I had become uncomfortable, he diverted the subject down a different route, albeit a parallel one. It was a disgrace, he said, that this country, the cradle of the industrial revolution (‘the fucking industrial revolution’), had become a bit-player in the world of manufacturing. His father (‘my dad – the other one – the one who brought me up – Mr Hendy’) was an engineer who had worked for MG ‘when MG was a proper company, making proper cars’. He’d learned his trade in Abingdon and he’d worked there until the Abingdon plant was shut down, when he’d moved to the Midlands to work at Longbridge. ‘At Longbridge they weren’t really making MGs – they were just slapping the badge onto cars that weren’t fit to wear it, but he was still making things, even if they weren’t as good as before, and that’s better than nothing, right?’ said Sam. ‘And then it all went down the fucking tubes, didn’t it? Out on his ear, he was. So now what does he do? He fixes cars. He doesn’t make them, he fixes them. All day long, fixing Japanese cars, French cars, Italian cars, German cars, Spanish cars, cars from Korea, even cars from the bloody Philippines. It’s not right, is it? How the fuck did it happen?’ he demanded. ‘You tell me – how did it happen? The Philippines, for fuck’s sake. We used to be the best, now we’re shit. How did that happen? Tell me,’ he urged, but there was no pause in which to answer. His father – ‘Mr Hendy, I mean’ – still drove an ancient Riley, as some sort of protest. ‘Flying the flag, even if it’s the slowest fucking thing on the roads of Britain.’

  Britain nowadays, Sam proclaimed, was a country of ‘management consultants, bankers, shit-brained celebs and hairdressers. We make weapons and money, and that’s about it.’ Did I know, he asked, why the economy lo
oks good, even though we don’t make anything any more? ‘I’ll tell you. It’s because the moneymen in London, our banker-wankers and all their mates, make more profit out of the money they invest abroad than the foreigners make out of the UK. That’s your reason. We make our money out of what the foreigners are making. That’s a fact. Fucking madness, isn’t it? I was reading about it the other day,’ he said, looking around as if searching for the source of this information, but there was not a book or magazine anywhere in the caravan – just a copy of the Sun, sticking out of one of the carrier bags. He enjoyed his work, Sam told me, with the vehemence of someone making a statement of a fundamental principle of his way of life. At the end of every day there was something to show for his efforts. He’d done something substantial; he’d added something. Most people in this country never have that feeling. ‘It’s all about satisfaction with what you’ve made, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘When you made that bowl, making it was enough. It was nice to get some cash for it, yes, but the money wasn’t what it was about, was it? I mean, the money let you go on working, but the money wasn’t the purpose, was it? I’m right, yes?’

  He had become so heated in his enthusiasm, it wouldn’t have been wise to qualify what he was saying. My workshop, I agreed, had not been a money-spinning enterprise.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘That’s not why you did it. But for most people in this country it’s the money that justifies the job, right? You do the job to get the pay, and you want the pay so you can buy things, lots of things, because in the end that’s what makes you think your life is worthwhile, that it means something. If you have lots of stuff, you have a life. I’m right, aren’t I? That’s how people think. Most people,’ he said. It was as though he believed he was talking to a righteous pauper. ‘And the problem with that way of thinking,’ he went on, ‘is that you never arrive at a place where you’re happy to stop. You always want more. There’s always the faster car, the bigger house, the better holiday. There’s never an end to it. Heaven is always just over the horizon, right? The way we live, there’s no such thing as enough, is there?’ he said, then he looked around the caravan again. He laughed, but it wasn’t clear what had amused him – the lunacy of the way we all lived, or the fact that he was someone who certainly didn’t yet have enough.

  I said I was assuming that Sarah had given him the bowl. He confirmed that she had, and added that she hadn’t had much else to pass on. She’d given him some money as well – not much, but enough to knock off a few weeks’ worth of mortgage payments. ‘Things had changed since you knew her,’ he said, at which point he went over to the sink, opened the cabinet above it, and took down a padded envelope. He rummaged in it for a few seconds, lifted out a photograph, and passed it to me. ‘Three years ago,’ he said. This woman’s face was not recognisable as Sarah’s – it was very much thinner than the face I had known, with deep lines to the side of the mouth. The hair was a dull grey-brown crop, whereas Sarah’s had been a tangle of thick auburn curls. The lips were too thin; the jawline was wrong. Yet the eyes, as I studied them, began to become similar to the eyes I remembered: intelligent, faintly suspicious, suggestive of an erratic vivacity.

  ‘She’d had some bad habits,’ Sam explained. ‘Habits not compatible with a healthy lifestyle, if you know what I mean. Her parents gave her a wad of cash to stay out of their lives, and that’s where most of it went.’ This was said not with any hint of grievance, nor for that matter with much discernible compassion. He spoke, rather, as though he were merely reporting the misdemeanours of an incorrigible old friend. ‘She’d been in a really bad way for years, she told me,’ he went on, ‘then she got into a serious relationship with some bloke and she’d straightened herself out for him. He didn’t work out, in the end, but she stayed off the shit. Takes a toll, though, doesn’t it? You want to see where she was living? I’ll show you,’ he said, rooting around in the envelope. He produced another photo, which at first sight showed only trees; on closer inspection, though, a row of windows could be made out, through the lower leaves. When Sam had found her she was living here, in an old train carriage. ‘See,’ he said, pointing to the windows, ‘there’s two of them. She lived in this one,’ he said, tapping the photograph, ‘and guess who lived in the other one? Go on, have a guess.’ I couldn’t guess. ‘I’ll tell you. Cats. Loads of fucking cats. Paying guests, some of them. But breeding the buggers was her big thing: breeding these exclusive Siberian cats, five hundred pounds a head. No kidding – five hundred quid just for something to stroke. Beautiful animals, but for fuck’s sake, let’s get things in proportion, shall we? Then again – good business. Not good business like your places are good business, but decent. Bloody amazing, how many people are ready to pay stupid money for a fucking cat. Mad, isn’t it? You a cat man?’ he asked, cocking his head to one side to appraise me. ‘You don’t strike me as a cat man. Dogs more your kind of thing, I’d say. Am I right? You’re not going to tell me you have a five hundred quid cat, are you? No, it can’t be. Tell me you don’t.’

  ‘I don’t have a cat, no,’ I said.

  ‘Dog?’

  ‘Nor a dog.’

  ‘Bloody nuisances, I say. Worse than having a baby around the house. If I had to choose, I’d go for a dog. Not much of a one for cats. Dull fuckers, if you ask me. Only interested in Number One. But Sarah, she was mental about them. She have a cat when you were an item?’

  I had an urge to answer that we were never an item, but said instead: ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘Well, she got the cat-bug big time somewhere along the line. Six of them she had living with her, in her carriage. All of them super-special. Each one unique, according to her. Real personalities, like people. Far as I could see, they were bloody identical, apart from the fur. Even then, you had to look hard. They used to bring her presents: a rat or a mouse or rabbit with its head pulled off. She’d get out of bed in the morning and there’d be blood all over the floor. Rabbit guts in her slippers. Nice, eh? Women like them a lot more than men do, I find. Apart from queers, of course. What about your wife? What does she think?’

  I balked at the mention of my wife, but Sam either didn’t notice a reaction or pretended not to notice. ‘We don’t have pets,’ I replied.

  ‘Sarah was crazy about them,’ he continued. ‘One time, she told me, she’d had a dozen of the fuckers living with her. She was meant to be selling them but couldn’t bear to let them go. There was a top cat – had some stupid fucking name, something Russian. They all had these poncey names. Anyway, this Russian cat had made himself indispensable, she said. Can you believe it? “Made himself indispensable.” What, like he can fix the drains and pour the milk on your fucking muesli, can he? I mean, I liked her. We had a rocky start, but I liked her in the end, a lot. But it’s got to be said: she was flaky as fuck. Magic crystals and horoscopes and all that shit. A lot of purple in the wardrobe, but no hairbrush. You know what I mean? I have to say, I can’t quite put you and her together, know what I mean? You don’t seem a match. Don’t take this the wrong way. But you strike me as a guy with a clear head, and she was a girl with some loose parts up top, no? I mean, it’s hard to imagine: you and her. She must have driven you nuts. And vice versa, I suppose. No offence.’

  I told him that it had happened a long time ago; he nodded, but obviously regarded this point as an irrelevance. ‘I had to laugh,’ he resumed. ‘It made me feel kind of weird, you know. There she was, fussing over these fucking animals, going on about them as if they were her kids, and there I am – the kid she let go. I think it’s what you’d call ironic, no? Preferred cats to men, she told me once. She didn’t mean me – she was talking about men she’d been with. Deadbeats, the lot of them. The thing about cats, she said, was that they don’t judge you. Total bollocks, I know, but that’s what she said. I mean, the fuckers do judge you, don’t they? “You got a tin of food for me? A bit of fresh fish? No? Well, you can piss off then.” That’s judging you. But Sarah reckoned they didn’t, and that was where they scored
over the deadbeat boyfriends. Like I said, the wiring up top wasn’t in one hundred per cent working order.’ He smiled at me, but the eyes were waiting to see if the full significance of Sarah’s alleged remark had eluded me. I gave him, in reply, the blankest face I could muster.

  Then he slapped his thighs and cried: ‘Anyway, time is short: agenda item number one.’ From the envelope he took a piece of paper that was handed over without comment, and I found myself holding a birth certificate for Samuel John Williams: born in Canterbury on September 5th, 1981; mother – Sarah Clementine Williams (Occupation: Musician); father – Dominic Pattison (Occupation: Carpenter). The date made his story possible – but barely, I thought. But whereas Sam’s name and Sarah’s name were written in ink from a fountain pen, mine was in ball-point ink, and the script was obviously different. The thing was a forgery, a crass forgery, and it was all I could do to prevent myself from laughing at it. Did he really think I would be so unobservant as not to notice that he’d tampered with it? ‘This doesn’t prove anything,’ I told him, neutrally. I pointed out that the space for the father’s name had originally been left blank, and that someone had filled it in later.