Con man then? Well only in the sense we all were. We tried to look confident when we weren’t, we projected an image, embroidered an anecdote: usually stories which redounded (ever so subtly) to our own credit. But I had never tried to take anybody in with mischievous intent, and the lies I’d told had only been the kind that made life easier for everyone. Again. My parents had aimed to make us all considerate.
But still—
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Clem.”
Well wouldn’t you just have known it: that his name would almost have to be Clem?
“I’m Danny. Clem? Were you brought up to be considerate?”
“What kid ain’t if he’s raised up in a good home?”
“And were you raised up to be charitable?”
“How d’ya mean? Money to the poor and sichlike?”
“No I guess I’m thinking more about attitude: attitude towards the poor and suchlike. Giving money to them is the easy part.” Oh yeah? I was remembering that afternoon in Leicester Square—well naturally I was. “Not that I ever did. Give them much. Always told myself I couldn’t afford to. Another time maybe; when things got easier.”
When things got easier … But even with Brad I’d tried as far as possible to contribute to household expenses; hadn’t aimed to be a kept man. My salary from The White Hart had mainly been spent, if not on necessities or keeping myself looking decent (though Brad had always paid our fees at the gym), then on various bits and pieces I’d hoped were going to give him pleasure.
He’d probably have preferred me to spend it on the poor.
The sheriff spat again; again there was a clearly relished sound effect.
“Can’t say I ever thought a whole heap about it,” he remarked after a moment. “Can you be reared to feel them proper things you should towards the poor?”
I didn’t see why not. Superficially at any rate. But how deep it was going to permeate plainly depended a great deal less on your parents and a great deal more on yourself. And the sad thing was for me—I had to face up to this—it so clearly hadn’t taken.
“With me it didn’t take,” I said.
“Don’t follow you too well.”
“Who would?” I struggled to explain it; for both our sakes. “I think I never walked a mile in another man’s shoes, never more than a yard or two at most. I think I never said, ‘There but for the grace of God …’ Not seriously that is, not more than as a thing to say. I suppose in fact I didn’t waste much time in thinking about them at all—the really poor, the dispossessed—other than as total losers who in the long term had only themselves to blame. I think more than anything I usually felt revulsion and contempt. No that isn’t true: more than anything I usually felt indifference.”
“And is this then the charge you’re considering of?”
“I suppose it is—basically. Because that’s what I had on my own doorstep and could have tried to do something about.” I paused. “Though of course it reached out way beyond the poor on my own doorstep.”
“You’re doing well Dan I reckon you’re doing well. I guess you’ll be out of here in no time.”
I hadn’t been setting out to impress him nor expecting either encouragement or understanding from such a seemingly unlikely quarter. So to add to all my other sins I was patently a patronizing git. I smiled a little bleakly. “Thank you for your sympathy. You should have been a priest.” I looked about me at my tiny cell. “This should have been the confessional.”
He gave his yellow gap-toothed grin and meditatively—raspingly—rubbed his leathery unshaven chin. “But you always did show a fondness for them old western movies. Din’t you boy?”
Yes especially for the ones so old they were frequently in black-and-white. Where the good guys had invariably won and the bad guys had invariably received their just deserts. A fairy tale for all ages: monochrome simplicity. Why couldn’t life itself have been like that?
But if it had been … if it had been…? The question then was this. Would old Danny Boy have emerged wholeheartedly on the side of the marshal and the homesteaders? Or might he have been one of those outlaws weakly swayed by the rationalizations of a greedy and uncaring boss?
Because—yes—the indifference had reached way out. Dramatically. Victims of earthquake, flood and cyclone. Victims of war and civil war and genocide. Of terrorism. Victims of murder and torture and mutilation. Had I ever really cared? (Apart from New York and London, that is, but they of course were easy.) Often plenty of lip service naturally—maybe a reaction of genuine abhorrence lasting a full five minutes before the sigh and the switching of the channels and the pouring of the glass of Scotch. But could you really be raised to feel more than that … just that very fleeting moment of compassion? No man is an island. Any man’s death diminishes me. Because I am involved in mankind.
John Donne was Brad’s favourite poet. I’m not sure I’d even heard of him before I met Brad. I do know I could never have recited a single line of his entire output.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
I wish I could have written that. I mean I wish I could have written that in the knowledge of its being an absolutely honest reflection of the way I felt.
“He lacked compassion Clem.”
“Who did?”
“That’s what they should have written on my tombstone. Or”—once more I had forgotten—“should be about to write on it. I think that sums it up.”
In fact I had usually been more moved by the agony of just one individual. Only look at that girl of fifteen who had been killed by over fifty knife wounds slowly inflicted by her boyfriend. Or at the young man who had been kicked to death by three assailants in the street—every bone in his head had been broken. Or at families, often children, who awoke to find their homes on fire and themselves most terrifyingly trapped.
Or think about Ken Bigley. Imprisoned for weeks and growing old and growing thin from anticipating his threatened end—decapitation. And think about his eleventh-hour escape from the house, his stumbling flight across the field at its rear, his no doubt burgeoning hope of deliverance. Think about his sudden awareness that he had been spotted; that his jailers were fast catching up on him. Whilst brandishing their implement of execution. Only think about it.
Or think about James Bulger, the three-year-old plastered in model paint and then stoned to death, his body left on the railway line, to be cut in half by an early-morning goods train.
Or think about anyone, absolutely anyone, who’d had the misfortune to die horrifically. Where was God, on all occasions such as these?
(Yet nobody ever asked where was God when all the good things happened: when the universe was created, the first breath of human life blown into it—animal life as well—when butterfly wings began to be designed.)
But even after learning of these sorts of tragedy how long-lasting had been my state of sober-mindedness—and how could you possibly hope to share; or do any good at all by attempting to imagine? And again—how long before I might have been chatting cheerfully to some friend on the telephone or selecting with Brad the DVD we thought we’d like to watch?
“Or what about this, boy? ‘He came to know he lacked compassion.’ That’s at least some slight improvement ain’t it?”
“‘But came to know a bit too late. He was such a dunderhead.’”
“Seems to me this inscription is getting longer and longer.” The sheriff chuckled. “Poor stonecutter will sure need to put in some danged overtime. Seeing as how there are other things could just as easily be added.”
“‘In fact to tell the truth he probably always knew. Just never did anything about it.’ I feel it in my bones: this stonecutter isn’t going to care for me a lot.”
“Unless he’s getting paid by the word—and twice as much for the long uns.”
We laughed; although in truth there wasn’t much to laugh about.
“Them weren’t the other things I was thin
king of anyways.”
He lifted his boots down from the corner of the desk. Took up his bunch of keys and walked unsteadily towards the door of my cell. “Hell’s bells a man gets awful stiff,” he said.
“Why are you letting me out? Even if I’m more or less right about what I’ve been charged with I don’t see how I can make up for it. Is there any way I can make up for it?”
“Never say die boy,” he answered. “Never say die.” Again he took the straw from his mouth. He contemplated it like there was writing there: very small print that he couldn’t quite decipher. “But … what’s done is done. Don’t you go leaning over backwards to think that you’re a bad person.”
“Thanks.” I was now standing on the outside of the cell and shook his hand. “But it’s a fairly new experience,” I continued drily. “Perhaps you oughtn’t to discourage it.”
(In fact—to be entirely accurate—it wasn’t all that new an experience, not by any means.)
Yet in any case he ignored it.
“Because if it was up to me,” he said, “which it’s not; but if it was … I’d do my best to see you didn’t swing. And that’s the truth of it boy.”
I gave him a hug.
12
Double feature?
Or work experience? It felt more like work experience. Much! There seemed no way on earth that I could simply have been sitting on my butt. There seemed no way on earth that I couldn’t have been actively involved.
I don’t mean in a film. I mean for real.
Right there outside the window the old woman was giving the old man a blow job.
“Oh come on Gertie do you need to make it quite so public? We’ll have the police back here again.”
I expostulated further.
“Besides. Who ever knows where that thing’s been?”
The woman didn’t so much as pause. Her lank grey matted hair fell forward from her grubby neck and it looked—though mercifully didn’t smell—like someone had been sick down the back of her dress. Six inches to the right of where she knelt there was a newish pile of dog’s muck.
The man, however, sitting with his ragged-trousered legs stretched out across the gateless cement forecourt and with his brown-jacketed shoulders resting against the windowsill (it didn’t strike me as too comfortable) did in fact cast me a look. A drunken distracted conspiratorial look. He winked at me too as though to say, “You after me mate. If you’re smart and play your cards right.” Then his eyes lost focus and he gave himself up once more to his enjoyment.
I couldn’t just use force and pull her off him.
“Well I’ll go and fetch the garden hose, set that on the pair of you!” We all knew it was an empty threat. I think I even delivered it like the punchline to some joke.
“Yes you do that lad,” said the old man. “You just do that.”
But the sad thing was—he wasn’t an old man. Well one of the sad things. It shocked you each time that you remembered. He was forty-eight; looked every bit of sixty-eight. Gertie was indeed in her sixties, late sixties, could easily have been his mother although she was no more connected to George than she was to any other bloke who ever used the refuge; she was just fairly free with her favours. George had been a teacher who’d had a fling with one of his fourteen-year-old pupils. His wife had left him. He’d never seen any of his three daughters again. He told us he’d once lived in a six-bedroomed house, detached, in the nicest suburb of Birmingham, a house that had cost about a hundred and fifty grand. Now he sat on the cement and let a woman who was twenty years older than him (when he had ruined his life for a girl at least twenty years younger) join him in a highly public performance of indignity and sleaze.
We knew hardly anything about Gertie’s history. Gertie herself knew hardly anything about Gertie’s history.
I went back inside. “Well you have to make the gesture,” remarked my colleague Bill—we called him Beanpole—who was in the kitchen beginning to prepare the evening meal. “Admittedly a bit token but now at least we can try to pretend we haven’t seen.”
This was made a little difficult by the cries of another inmate who was standing at the window in the recreation room. Earlier I’d closed the window and pulled across the curtains but this bloke had drawn one of them back and was bawling his encouragement through the glass. “Go on Gertie! Attagirl! Doin’ a gran’ job. Mus’ be comin’ up to juice time.” When I strode over and—perennial spoilsport that I was—again pulled across the thin patterned curtain he stopped feeling himself up through the pocket of his trousers and said, “Got a cigarette yer fucker?”
“No Joey I don’t smoke. You know I don’t smoke.”
“Forget them cigarettes. Just ask ’im about fags,” advised a raucous voice from the further end of the ping-pong table. Alf and Ron were currently taking a breather.
I turned in some surprise. I hadn’t thought there was anything about me that was camp.
“No offence,” added Alf. “Takes all sorts. You’re a good bloke really. One o’ the best,” he said to Ron who’d only come that afternoon.
All of which appeared to be a little beyond the present comprehension of old Joey. He was old: halfway through his eighties.
“Gimme a cigarette yer fucker.”
When I told him again that I hadn’t got any he swung round and took an ineffectual swipe at me. It could have been half-playful but he lost his balance and fell. Thereupon he gave a ripsnorting fart and shat his pants and amid the resulting cheers and hoots of easy laughter a pool of urine spread across the mottled flooring.
“Oh God.” Joey was immensely fat. No way could I have raised him on my own. “Have you hurt yourself?”
And only that morning he had shown me with pride a snapshot taken in Blackpool immediately postwar. He had been lean and looked athletic. Handsome in a flash sort of way. You could guess he had a comb in his rear pocket; was always slicking back his Brylcreemed hair. A bosomy blonde in ankle-strapped high heels hung on possessively to his thickly muscled arm.
I called to Bill and another colleague supposedly on his break to help me lift him. There were two or three relatively young men in the room but though in their way amiable enough none appeared to have much idea of what was going on or what might be required of them. Besides. If anybody was about to strain his back all those poor sods already had far more than enough to contend with.
I said again, “Joey are you hurt?” And to my pair of workmates: “Should we telephone the doctor?”
“Yer should’ve given me a cigarette yer fucker. Look what yer’d’ave saved.” It was even with the glimmer of a smile of triumph that he glanced from me to the other two. “Haven’t any of yer got one bleedin’ cigarette among the three of yer? Talk about a load of fuckers!”
“He’s all right,” said Alan. “Aren’t you Joey? God but what a whiff! We’ll get you to your feet and then we’ll have to leave you in the capable hands of young Danny here who’ll get you all spruced up for your supper.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you so very much. Just the kind of treat I always dreamed of.”
“One of the perks of the profession,” called out Alf who was evidently keeping an eye on us. “You get to take Joey in the shower with you! You get to take Joey in the shower! No offence mind. We got to ’ave our little joke.”
In fact my own earlier little joke hadn’t been entirely without basis. Hosing people down was a prominent feature of our work in the refuge. Because a hands-on approach was definitely not advocated; rubber-gloved or not. The cutting away and disposal of fouled-up clothing was already sufficiently stomach-turning.
After Joey I got George. (Beth, lucky thing, won Gertie.) The only way that I could get George to co-operate was to give him an ultimatum: “No shower no sausages!” And the damned thing was I’d have had to keep to that and then later cook him a fry-up. But thankfully this wasn’t called for: first I hosed down the guy who had once walked along the promenade with an independent air and then I got the one who’d
apparently lived in a house in Solihull which might now be worth a cool half-million; and I could honestly have cried at the drooping fat of the first and the premature aging of the second and the fact that both of them had lost the plot. I had a reasonable idea of what had happened to George; yet what on earth had happened to Joey? I had at one time asked him about his experiences in the war but I might just as well have asked what he remembered of being inside his mother’s womb. It struck me now that if this were too often the way of things—and who ever had the slightest idea of what might lie ahead?—I was indeed quite lucky to have snuffed it young.
Although in truth I still kept on forgetting that I had snuffed it young. Still kept on forgetting that I had snuffed it at all.
In the kitchen afterwards when it was little short of midnight Beth and Alan and I sat over a mug of hot chocolate. Beanpole had gone home; Alan himself should have knocked off nearly an hour ago. Beth said: “I think I’ve had about as much of all this as I can cope with. I’ve decided I’ll be getting out soon. The moment they can find themselves some other idiot.”
“Don’t blame you,” answered Alan. “Can’t think what keeps any of us here longer than a single day.”
“Idealism,” said Beth. She was twenty-one; looked older. Round-faced, round-figured, with mousy hair already thinning. But in a way that would never have occurred to me before … me with my penchant for the instantly nice-looking … she herself was in fact nice-looking. It was easy to see how, almost without having to go to any effort, death would make her beautiful. “You really believe that you can change the world.”
“But you can,” I smiled, “you can! Just because you may be doing so only in exceedingly small ways doesn’t mean it’s any the less worthwhile.”
They looked at me, both of them, with an air of surprise. “Well who’d have thought it?” remarked Beth at last. “Pollyanna is alive and well!”
Amazingly I didn’t bridle at the comment like I knew I would have done when I was younger. “I only wish I could be worthy of her!” I gave a mighty yawn. “But I know of course it’s so easy just to say these things about improving the world piecemeal … Talk comes very cheap.”
On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory Page 8
