by Sid Smith
Tom in a pub toilet, washing his wounds: a cut eye, sore ribs, blood in his nose. He’d been stumbling through Brixton, forced from the van by the dreams, which had followed him through the evening streets while he blundered across the market, bumping people till the dream worked itself out, May pleasuring herself in hell as he reeled under the viaduct. Then he’d seen the same two big Chinese-British boys.
He couldn’t fight. He’d watched them come, and put up his hands at the last minute, bowing humbly after the first punch, going down with a roaring in his ears. Then it was a rough pub all night, sipping a half in a corner, blood in his nose, until it was time for the van.
He walked to the side street, head down but watching for watchers. Not the back doors, too obvious, so he got in the driver’s side then over the seats and onto the mattress. He pissed out of a rust hole in the wheel arch, the piss dropping smooth and straight from his new dick. He was aching for a smoke, but it was damned cold so he slid into the doss bag, the dusty rug pulled over him, his eye and ribs and stitches sore.
‘I need a girl.’ A girl and a room. He’d be happy, and the dreams would stop. But he shivered, thinking about Western girls: ‘I might not manage it.’ Only a China girl would do. They all want white boys anyway. You see them with a Chinese boyfriend. Useless, like a sister. A bit of sweat and stubble: that’s what’s needed. Not a black man: that’s too much. Just a little whiff of the sweaty bollocks. ‘If I can just lose my cherry.’
He shivered and got warm. The pleasure of hiding. Peace after his beating, but God knows he didn’t want to sleep, so he lay in the doss bag and thought about the pool hall and big Chung saying, ‘You friend from hospital.’
Actually it was a nursing home. On his first morning Tom took two buses to the next town, where Mrs Walston brought him tea on the kitchen steps until Harold appeared – a huge old man with the look of a stunned ox, complete with a dent in his forehead which the sledgehammer could have made. And he was being steered from behind: stepping out from his wake was a stocky boy a little older than Tom. In a flat Scottish accent he said, ‘Enjoy the little man,’ and then left.
Harold led him around the overgrown lawns and weedy flowerbeds, his big boots turned out at the toes, gesturing vaguely, a rumble in his chest betokening the good advice he couldn’t now deliver. Suddenly he lumbered off down a brick path, Tom following through dripping rhododendrons, under a trellis dragged down by a rampant climbing rose, and on to the shed. Harold edged his great sofa shoulders through the door, squeezed past a mower, nodding and rumbling with good advice he thought he was giving, and sat with a bump on a sack of fertilizer. He blinked with surprise, opened a greaseproof package on his lap, his huge thighs coyly together, and slowly ate a cheese-and-jam sandwich, his eyes bewildered over bulging cheeks as if at uncalled-for dentistry.
Tom stroked the mower. It was a big red tricycle, very old, with handlebars and levers and a rusty engine on the front wheel. A scrap of floral carpet padded its steel seat. Its smells filled the shed. Harold sucked his dentures, occasionally passing a hand over his eyes like wiping away cobwebs, so Tom climbed onto the mower, working the levers, until at last the old man took bigger and bigger sighs, as if pumping himself up to speak.
‘Edge the lawn,’ he said in a rush. ‘New gardener. Edge the lawn.’ Then he fell asleep.
Next day Tom was alone. He sat for a while in the shed, but even the mower couldn’t hold him. Towards lunchtime he took a spade and began trimming around the huge front lawn. Once he looked up and nearly dropped the spade: ten feet away, Harold sat behind the murky glass of the old folks’ lounge, his great hands empty, watching him open-mouthed. In the afternoon Mrs Walston bustled out in her sensible shoes, a pencil in her tight hair, and said, ‘Goodness. What a difference already.’
Next day it rained. By ten o’clock he’d eaten his sandwiches, cleaned the spade, cut his finger on a billhook, oiled the shears, and stared over the dripping garden. Mostly, though, he sat on the mower. From this perch he noticed a high shelf. He was searching along the shelf among starved spiders, boxes of ten-year-old seeds, woodworm dust, shrivelled seed potatoes, when he found the manual. He looked at its oily thumbprints, its talk of hundredweights and quarts, and saw that the mower was as old as his dad.
Then he found Harold’s name. It was written square and clear on the flyleaf, and in the margins were numbers and diagrams and notes. Tom pictured him in his active days, and himself as Harold’s apprentice and then his son, the old man saying, ‘In the two-stroke engine, oil is mixed with the petrol to serve as the engine lubricant,’ and when they went to the tool shop they went to the trade counter and the salesman winked and said, ‘Here comes trouble.’
Tom read the manual all that day, stayed an hour after knocking-off time because he couldn’t understand carburettors, and took it home to read at the kitchen table and then in bed, sawdust and oily cobwebs on the sheets, working his arm to understand pistons, his eyebrows near the hairline at these parts that were hidden but followed rules.
He fell asleep and thought he was Harold. He was on the mower in his boiler suit and flat cap, his steel-toed boots turned out, then tramping back to the shed, lifting his knapsack off a hook behind the door, his old army number on the flap, and inside was milk in a pill bottle, sugar and tea leaves in a twist of silver paper, and a cheese-and-jam sandwich, which was delicious. So in the morning Tom was ready for the mower.
On the way to work he bought petrol and oil with his own money. The engine was rusty so he doubled the dose of oil. Later that afternoon everyone in the nursing home looked up, because the mower had no silencer. Then the windows went dark as blue smoke drifted across.
Tom blamed this notoriety on the old folk in the garden. First a trembling man stood by the boundary wall, blind and smiling, facing into a weedy corner. Then a woman was parked by the compost heap, her wheelchair tracks through Tom’s freshly planted peas. She couldn’t raise her head, but gave him a throaty knowing chuckle. Finally Harold returned to the shed. He was sat in his old corner, his feet in a sack of tulip bulbs, his cap on upside down, staring at the wall with noble indignation: ‘The Scotch one,’ he said. ‘The Scotch one and the other one.’
Tom led him to the house. The Scottish boy was sitting on the wooden ramp to the side door, watching him through cigarette smoke. Next to him stood a boy with greasy blond hair, who put his fag in his mouth and clapped slowly. Tom stared with his eyebrows up and the blond laughed. ‘We’ve been watching you,’ he said.
He was called Charlie. ‘We don’t do any work,’ he said at once. ‘And they can’t send us home because our dads are Friends of the Trustees.’ He glanced admiringly at his friend. ‘He’s got a gang. They do shoplifting and they burn things. Barns and things, in Ayrshire. And they, like, stampede cows into rivers, don’t you, Mac. I think that’s really funny.’
Mac said, ‘We’ve got a proposition.’
Every night Tom met them on his way to the bus stop. They had a rota of local towns where they stole from cars at petrol pumps, and Tom was a new face to get cashback on the debit cards. Afterwards they celebrated in cafes – Mac the restrained commander, Charlie laughing coffee down his nose because the people walking past were all ugly, like they were half chicken or half lizard or something, and Tom weak with relief, hunched over, his eyebrows up, watching their lips and eyes because they were eighteen and quietly posh, so that Mac said in his drab voice, ‘He should come to our dormitory, should young Tom.’
Charlie looked eagerly at Mac, giggling until he got a punch in the ribs. ‘Try punching me, you shit,’ thought Tom. He wasn’t going anywhere near their room, but he’d also no desire to go home early, his dad angry, the TV too loud, and Gillian dizzy and scared. He said, ‘You know, sometimes the ignition keys are still in.’
That’s how they found the Pub of Slags. Whenever they stole a car, Tom drove to the cheap housing estate and the one-storey pub with its flat roof, leaving them with the fat wives and going out
through parked prams to tinker cluelessly in the car park through the long summer evenings, fingers shaky with nerves then irritation, maybe taking a wheel off or gapping the plugs so that it spluttered all the way back, the engine following rules that he didn’t know. If they went with the women (the uglier the funnier), he delved deeper, once taking the cylinder head off a souped-up BMW for joy of its lovely tools, but the cambelt fell inside and they had to walk back to town – Mac furious on his sinister short thick legs that made his arse wag, Charlie dancing round him like a dog, and Tom baffled and lagging behind because he could never believe that a plan had failed: he would stare at a bolt-head he’d rounded or a finger he’d cut, but only saw what should have happened. If he went back to the pub, surely the Beemer would be fine.
One afternoon Johnny Tan walked past the cafe. He saw them, hesitated, gave a twisted grin, and slid inside with the door minimally open, coming to their table almost sideways with shyness, his thin legs only breaking his pants at the knee, like a man on stilts.
‘Our new dorm-mate,’ said Mac, and Charlie said loudly, ‘They don’t do flied dog and shit,’ though Johnny had a London voice, clever and quick.
But maybe he recognized another misfit, so he was with Tom in the pub car park when Bert the Breaker turned up. Tom was working on an Audi with his fancy BMW tools while Johnny tweaked the radio. He got Chinese T-shirts from a friend of his dad, choosing them by their slogans: this one said ‘Travel! Living for easy and pleasant’, and was somehow like his nervous rehearsed jokes that ‘China is really advanced, you know, because they shave with lasers,’ and ‘He who laughs last laughs longest, as my father always says,’ and ‘Confucius say: Horse have four legs, but run more fast than centipede,’ all of which made Charlie laugh, but in the wrong way.
For no reason, Tom was trying to get a front wheel off. But two of the bolts wouldn’t shift, and he was sweating and desperate in the heat, his knees sticking to the soft tar, Johnny staring down from the driver’s seat, his smooth arm on the door. Irritated, Tom said, ‘I suppose you’re getting on OK with those two. In the dormitory.’
‘My. A very leading question.’ Tom bent back to work.
Johnny said, ‘Nothing so unappealing could be imagined.’ He rapped his knuckles softly on the hot door. ‘The real puzzle is why you waste your time with them. Mine too, actually. Shouldn’t you grow out of it? You’re not Charlie, after all.’
Then a skinny man in a baseball cap and tight oily jeans said, ‘Put the jack under the end of the wrench, for fuck’s sake,’ and afterwards flashed a wad of twenties, so the gang had cash and Tom took car-theft lessons, doing the risky bits while Bert parked around the corner, engine running, angry because Tom always sat for a while in the cars, breathing other people’s lives. ‘You’ll never be a natural,’ said Bert, wiping his hands on his jeans, ‘but you’re mad enough.’
It was the end of summer. Johnny was going to medical school, having practised nursing at the home, and Charlie and Mac were off to university. But they’d shown Tom another way to live: he would go to London.
To celebrate he stole a Peugeot 205 GTi he’d been watching for weeks, and followed the bus route home, Mac and Charlie in the back shouting, ‘Tom, we’re lost,’ and Johnny in the passenger seat, getting the breeze where Tom had pushed his fingers in the top of the door and bent it out till he could hook a wire onto the lock, Peugeots being made of tin.
He was nervous as he stood in front of the house, Mac staring around like a general, Johnny climbing tentatively out into the heat, and Charlie on the Pug roof shouting, ‘Look at me,’ dancing and stamping in pink sunglasses from the glove compartment.
‘It’s the Sabbath, of course,’ said Tom’s dad, at the front door in a surplice. ‘You would bring guests on a Sabbath.’ And Charlie laughed because here was the pure original of Tom’s yokel burr.
‘Say hello to Tom’s little sis,’ said Lawson, and they all looked at Gilly, sitting in the window, smiling and tearful at these boys she might have married. ‘Her first wheelchair came today, but it’s a big secret. And now someone has to fetch it from the shed, don’t you, Tom.’
The wheelchair was old and clumsy, the handles sticky as he hauled it around the house, under the dripping toilet overflow, the rotten window frames, over the weeds in the concrete path, and parked by the front door: ‘And?’
‘Get Gillian.’
The front room was dim and cool. She sat in the pale light by the window. ‘Hello, babe,’ he whispered. He held his breath and dived down, pushing his hands underneath and carrying her outside, her old lady’s smell, laying her in the chair, her numb hands curled.
His dad strode off, but the chair was stupid and heavy, the gang helping him through the gate, Gilly mewing in shame. Tom said, ‘Thanks, all. Now bugger off, please,’ and he hurried across the estate, the gardens full of car bits and staked dogs, his dad soaring ahead in his linen gown, a drunk shouting, ‘You.’
There was a proper meeting hall – a wooden summer house that smelt of incense and candles and stood in the garden of a widow and one-time benefactor who’d worked with Lawson on the decorating and had driven him in the evenings to country pubs, her fat Jaguar jamming the lanes, till finally she understood. She started nagging him for rent, and had cut off the power, though the other ladies said what did it matter in this lovely summer. She watched from the lounge window, gripping the curtain as Lawson and his followers entered through a side gate of her long garden. There were only four in the congregation, dropping cash into a box held by a long-haired youth, who assessed Tom with a pout.
The service was a parody of the Church of England. His dad’s drawl was worse, more insultingly negligent as it echoed off the whitewashed walls, his long head turned away, until abruptly he sat down and crossed his arms and scowled, the women standing doubtful, hand in hand, waiting for the spirits as Gillian whimpered into the silence.
Tom began to drift, feeling the old terrors. He tumbled out, lit a cigarette, and wandered the garden till he couldn’t hear, sitting on a roller, forcing himself to look at the greased bracket that held the axle, and how the roller was in two halves so that it cornered better.
‘He’s getting worse, your dad,’ said the pouting youth, a little too close, staring down, nervous and snooty like Johnny, tight trousers tucked into funny black pixie boots.
‘Not really.’
‘Well, you haven’t seen him,’ said the boy. ‘Wait till he goes off on one.’
Tom, elbows on knees, stared through his smoke at the restless boots with their wrinkled pointy toes and sticking-up tabs at the back.
The boy said, ‘I have to get out of this dump.’
‘Good luck.’
‘I bet you’re not coming back. I bet you’re going somewhere with a bit of life.’
Tom thought: ‘My dad bought those boots.’
The boy said, ‘I wondered. We could meet up.’
‘Look, no offence, but fuck off.’
‘Fair enough.’ The boots turned away. ‘But your old man is mad.’
After the service they waited while the ladies gushed at his dad, the summer breeze flapping his robes, white lace in the sunshine, and then Tom pushed Gilly home: her trembling old-woman’s head, but bright girlish hairs at the nape. He said, ‘How do you manage?’
‘I never take her,’ said Lawson, pleased at his trick. ‘So it was kind of you to volunteer.’ He followed as Tom carried her to the kitchen, then said, ‘Where did you get the car?’
Tom shrugged, but it seemed after all to be a real question. ‘It’s borrowed. I mean it’s from a friend.’
‘Very kind, your friend.’ He flung his gown in the washing machine. There were grey tufts on his cheekbones. ‘So now I understand the Scotch accent. All of a sudden you’re Scottish, because of that thug.’ His twisted mouth; white cottony stuff in the corners. ‘No, go to London. We’ll be fine. Plenty of thick widows. And Gillian doesn’t care. She can’t say the days now, have you noticed. G
o on, ask her: Monday, Tuesday, Pilchards . . . Whatnot. This kind friend, did he or she ask if you were insured? Or is that too boring?’
‘A bit boring, Dad.’
‘But you parked in front of the house. With your mates carrying on.’
‘Don’t shout.’
‘And now they’re doing God knows what, then coming back here.’
‘Jesus, not so loud. Why are you angry?’
‘Because this is my home.’ Gilly was flapping her arms.
‘Christ. Well, they don’t have to come back. Neither do I, in fact.’
‘Dadda,’ said Gilly, starting to cry.
Tom drove to the High Street and sat on a wall by the Thames, here only a track of green reeds along a hidden ditch, watching until Mac and Charlie appeared, Johnny trailing hopefully behind. On the drive back he couldn’t speak, gripping the steering wheel until his arms ached, not thinking about Gilly’s curled useless hands, which she’d push in his pockets when she was little, giggling as she stole his change. Johnny cleared his throat in the silence and said, ‘Tom’s dad was / Cross-dressed with an actual cross.’
‘Not again,’ said Charlie. ‘Crap rap. The world’s only black Chinky.’
At midnight, in a suburb of Reading, Tom parked and grabbed a bit of silver paper from the ashtray. ‘Watch.’ He got out and smashed the side indicator of a Mazda MX-5, then laid silver paper on the bulb holder. He bounced on the bonnet and the alarm chirruped and died, its fuse burned out. He broke a window and got in, working in the footwell with his tools in the smell of someone’s life, grinding his teeth when he thought about Gilly.
Mac said, ‘I’ll have the Mazda,’ and drove off, so Tom took Johnny and Charlie back a couple of miles in the Pug then crashed into a parked Mondeo. He drove around the block, by which time Charlie had finished swearing and the alarm had stopped. No one had come, but the airbags had fired, meaning that the doors were unlocked – helpful to paramedics and thieves. Charlie took the Ford, saying, ‘You’re the Napoleon of car crime.’
