‘What you have to realise about Mrs Turton,’ Lyle explained, ‘is that she channels her own views through the mouths of other people, and if these people happen to be dead then all the better, because dead people can’t contradict her. She’ll claim to her dying day that immigration hasn’t affected her, because if it had she wouldn’t be the Christian woman she believes herself to be… I presume she told you about that church minister telling her she didn’t have an unchristian bone in her body? She tells everyone that. The guy must be addled.
‘No, son, I’m afraid Mrs Turton used me for her own purposes. She has her good points, I’ll grant her that, and she was always a good neighbour to me – especially after your mother passed – but she thinks the same way most people of her generation do. I don’t approve of it, but I can understand it. Maybe I should have said something to her while I was still here, but people at that time of their lives aren’t going to go changing their minds. I’d have been wasting my breath.’
Lyle paused for a moment, pulled a face and adjusted the dress around his groin area.
‘I remember the first time I saw someone of a different colour,’ he went on. ‘I must have been five at the time, and a Chinese family moved into the neighbourhood. A whole bunch of us kids would go and stand outside their house and wait for them to appear. We’d never seen anyone like them before. They’d smile at us and we’d smile back at them, and we’d follow them to the bus stop and wait with them while the bus came. To us, they were like celebrities.
‘And I don’t mean these two-bit celebrities you get nowadays, people famous for their stupidity and wrongdoing, or for taking their clothes off in public. These Chinese people were real celebrities. Think about it: they’d travelled half-way across the world to a country they knew nothing about and didn’t even speak its language. That took guts.
‘People never do something like that without good reason. Things have got to be bad in their own country for them to leave family and friends behind, and they have to believe that things are going to be a whole lot better in the country they’re going to. I take my hat off to these people, I really do. But I can understand why it’s easier for people to welcome a single family into their community rather than thousands.’
The immigrants who came to the city from the late 1950s onward, Lyle said, were for the most part from a rural area of Pakistan called Azad Kashmir. They were subsistence farmers in their own country, poor and largely illiterate, and needed little persuasion from the British government to move to a city thousands of miles away whose mills were in desperate need of cheap and unskilled labour. In the blink of an eye, these incomers from Mirpur moved from mediaeval to modern times.
They congregated in ghettoes within the inner ring road, but instead of making the city their new home, made it their home away from home and continued to live in the style and times of the country they’d left behind. They retained their identity, their customs and continued to speak their own language. In doing so they became marginalised from the wider society. The city fathers turned a blind eye to the fragmentation that was going on in their own backyard and pretended that all was well, preached multiculturalism and urged other cities to follow its example.
But then the manufacturing base of the city collapsed.
‘That’s when the real problem started,’ Lyle said. ‘When there’s full employment people just get on with their lives, but when jobs are scarce or non-existent they start looking for scapegoats. It’s always easier to blame others for your own misfortune. You’ll know this from studying history.’
And the others in this case were the immigrants. Over the years their number had grown exponentially and their visibility marked. They moved into neighbourhoods beyond the ring road, opened businesses and built mosques, and the old-time dwellers of the city started to fear for their identity. There were murmurings, rumblings and then riots – as often as not provoked by outsiders. No longer was the city an example that others aspired to follow.
‘I blame both sides,’ Lyle said. ‘The people of the city should have brought the immigrants into the fold earlier, given them a real welcome and encouraged them to assimilate instead of letting them go their own way. How else are you going to get a culture that’s common to all, a culture that everyone can feel a part of? The obligation was on both sides though, and the immigrants should have been more ready to enter that fold. You can’t go to a new country and expect your life not to change, to go on living as if nothing’s happened. The worst thing you can do is cut yourself off from the culture you enter.’
Greg remembered his father being a man of few words, a man who communicated as much through sighs as he did language, and certainly not a man who shared viewpoints.
‘How come we never talked like this when you were alive, Dad? I can’t recall a single conversation we had. I can remember you telling me not to do this and not to do that, but other than that, not a thing. I left home thinking you didn’t have an opinion on anything.’
‘I don’t rightly know, son,’ Lyle said, giving the matter careful thought. ‘I always figured other people’s opinions were a waste of time and that mine would be no different. I know this isn’t always the case, but in my experience most opinions are borne of ignorance and the people with the strongest opinions are usually the most ignorant. Besides, I wanted you and Billy to make up your own minds about things and not parrot some dumb thing I might have said.
‘Anyway, it takes two to talk, and I can’t remember you ever volunteering your services on that front. You either stayed in your room or went out. It was like having a lodger in the house rather than a son. You never used to be like that when your mother was alive.’
Greg averted his eyes and Lyle abruptly changed the subject, the way he’d always sidestepped emotion. ‘Have you and Billy given much thought to selling the house? I want £150,000 for it. It’s bigger than the other houses on the Grove and it’s got more land.’ (The dining room had been extended by three feet and the back garden by ten yards.)
‘I don’t know whether we’ll get that, Dad. I bumped into Ian Collard in the Brown Cow and he said that the market was in a slump and that house prices were falling. He gave me the impression that £130,000 would be a more realistic figure.’
‘You’d be crazy to sell the house for that, Greg! I know Ian talks a lot of common sense, but Syd reckons the house is worth a good £15,000 more than the other houses on the Grove, and he’s got no reason to be biased.’
‘He might be unbiased, Dad, but he isn’t an estate agent, is he? What did he do when he was working?’
‘He owned a small garage. Did repairs and sold second-hand cars. I presume he was at the funeral?’
Greg nodded.
‘Who else was there?’
‘Me, Billy, Jean, Katy, Uncle Frank, Jean’s mother, Mrs Turton, Barry, Syd, and Ian and Margaret Collard. The minister told Billy he’d seen a young woman there, but she left before we had a chance to meet her. You don’t know who she was, do you?’
Lyle looked out of the window. ‘I’ve no idea, Greg.’
Greg sensed that his father wasn’t telling him the truth. Lyle Bowman, he surmised, knew exactly who the young woman was.
Heathrow
Lyle continued to stare out of the window. ‘There are still some fine Victorian buildings down there,’ he said, pointing to the city’s centre, ‘but most of them were demolished in the sixties and replaced with ugly modern things. Most of those have been torn down now, and some of their sites are sill derelict. Anything they build nowadays is functional and cheap, without architectural value. Syd says they look as if they’ve been constructed from materials bought at Wickes!
‘Oddly enough,’ he smiled, ‘this was probably the safest place to live when the IRA was targeting the mainland. Everyone knew they wouldn’t waste their bombs on a city that already looked as if it had been blown up.’
The
y moved away from the window and sat in the two easy chairs facing each other.
‘What’s it like in the Afterlife, Dad?’ (This was the second of Greg’s outstanding questions.)
‘I don’t rightly know, son. I haven’t made it that far yet.’
Greg looked at his father quizzically.
‘You know the stories you hear about people dying on the operating table and coming back to life?’ Greg nodded. ‘Well, my experience was nothing like theirs. I was never drawn to an intense white light or overcome with feelings of inner peace. The nearest thing I can liken it to is that Big Dipper ride we took when we went to Blackpool one year. You remember the time: I was sitting behind you and your Mum with Billy, and Billy threw up?’
Again, Greg nodded. It was him Billy had thrown up on.
Lyle described how he’d woken up in a small rollercoaster car with no seat, no sides and no bar to hold on to. He presumed it had been attached to other cars, but couldn’t say for sure as it had been pitch-black and he’d been lying on the floor. For a long time the car hadn’t moved, but then it started to climb steeply and make strange clickety-clack noises as if it was running on a track. At first, it was doing no more than 5mph, and the higher it got the slower it went. For a moment he’d thought it was going to stall and roll backwards, but then, all of a sudden, there’d been an almighty jolt and the car had hurtled forwards, then downwards, corkscrewed upwards and then plunged again.
‘I tell you, Greg, there were times when I thought I was going to be thrown out of the car. It was an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.’
When the car finally came to a standstill, Lyle lay there thinking he was going to throw up; he couldn’t move and he couldn’t breathe. ‘I think that’s the whole idea of the ride,’ he said. ‘To soften people up for whatever comes next.’
Lyle’s journey had been completed in darkness, but the landing place was bright enough to have been illuminated by a thousand floodlights, and for a time he was blinded. There was no one there to greet him, but intuitively he’d known what to do. Once able, he climbed out of the car and joined a line of people, who he presumed had arrived in similar fashion. No one spoke; they just stood there, inching forward when space permitted. Some of them wore their Sunday best (the Burieds), and the rest of them were naked (the Cremates).
It reminded Lyle of the time he’d visited Greg in Texas and had to stand in line at the check-in at Heathrow Airport for three hours. ‘And just like then,’ he said, ‘no one came round to explain what the delay was or offer you a sandwich.’
‘Jesus, I’m sorry, Dad!’ Greg apologised, reminded that he was the host. ‘Can I get you something to eat or drink?’
‘Thanks, lad, but there’s no need. I don’t eat or drink anymore. It’s funny, when I stopped smoking my pipe I missed it for years, but I haven’t missed food or liquids for a second – not even chocolate. How strange is that?
‘Anyway, when the last person in front of me disappeared – and that’s what they did: they just disappeared into thin air – and I was standing at the front of the line, I was suddenly sucked upwards, whizzed around a couple of times and then deposited on a chair in a small windowless room. It was a process that reminded me of those old aerial delivery systems they used to operate in big department stores.’
Greg looked at his father inquiringly.
‘When you bought something in a shop in those days,’ Lyle explained, ‘you’d hand your money to the salesgirl who’d served you, and she’d put the notes and a bill of sale into a small metal pneumatic tube. She’d attach it to a rail and pull a cord. The tube would go flying overhead to a cashier sitting on a dais somewhere in the middle of the floor, and the tube would then be returned with your change and receipt inside it. Now do you understand?’
Greg nodded.
‘So I whizz from nowhere into a small white room and find myself sitting opposite a man who looks like a person in reverse, a bit like a photographic negative. I learned later that they call these men and women X-ray people.
‘He was sitting behind a desk flicking through a file and for a long time he didn’t look up. He said he’d be with me in a minute and told me to watch a short film he was about to play. He wasn’t kidding when he said it was short: from beginning to end it was no more than fifteen seconds, and all it showed was me being knocked down by a bus, put in a bamboo coffin and then set on fire. When the film ended, he looked up at me and gave me one of those smiles that puts you on your guard. “Hello, Lyle,” he said. “How are you today?” ’
‘I told him I wasn’t sure how I was, but that if I wasn’t dead I was having one hell of a bad day. He asked me what I’d prefer the outcome to be, and I said a bad day. He shook his head – the way a person does when you give them a wrong answer – and made a note in my file. He then put down his pen, clasped his hands together and told me I was dead.
‘He asked me how I felt about this, and I answered that I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the idea as I’d been in the middle of a paint job and still had a few family matters to attend to. He picked up his pen again and made some more notes, and then asked me what my favourite animal was, what my least favourite animal was and what I thought of glass.’
‘How did you answer those questions?’ Greg asked, his curiosity roused.
‘Hippopotamus to the first, cat to the second and okay to the third. The glass question was the hardest one to answer. I’ve seen some beautiful glass ornaments in my time – and it’s always good to have windows to look through, isn’t it – but I once cut my finger on a shard when I was weeding the back garden and had to go to hospital for some stitches and a tetanus shot.
‘Anyway, he noted all this down and then took three cards from a drawer and asked me what I saw on them. For a time they just looked like black splodges, but after a while I started to see shapes: on the first card was a hippopotamus, on the second a cat and on the third a glass window. I asked him if this was some kind of conjuring trick, but he just smiled and said nothing.
‘He asked me then if I had any questions, and when I asked him if I was going to see Mary again his brow wrinkled. He asked me who Mary was, and I told him she was my wife who’d probably passed this way some twenty-nine years earlier. He checked his file again and told me there was no mention of any Mary in it, and that according to his records I was a bachelor. When I told him I was a widower with two sons called Billy and Greg he looked at me and said: “You’re not Lyle Bowman from Buffalo, New York, then?” I told him I wasn’t and that I was from England, and asked him if this meant I could go back home again.’
‘ “I’m afraid not, Lyle,” he said. “I might have the wrong paperwork in front of me, but you’re still dead. However, if you’re not Lyle Bowman of Buffalo, New York, then it might mean that your answers make more sense than I first thought. We can sort out the bureaucracy later, but in the meantime I’d advise you to ask questions. This is the only opportunity you’ll have.” ’
‘So I asked him if I was going to meet God and he said he didn’t know, but that stranger things had happened. When I asked him if I was going to see Jesus he just looked at me strangely and asked who Jesus was. I told him He was the Son of God – surely he’d heard of him – but all he did was shrug his shoulders and tell me there were a lot of people called Jesus there – just as there were a lot of people called Mohammed.
‘To tell you the truth, Greg, I gave up on the man after that. I was going to ask him if he was an angel, but figured he wasn’t or he’d have known who Jesus was. He didn’t seem to know much about anything and he took offence when I asked him if he was a trainee. He got all hoity-toity and started lecturing me. He said that 155,000 people passed through there every day of the week, every week of the year, and that some mistakes were inevitable.’
‘So does God exist then?’ Greg asked, still trying to come to terms with his father’s story.
‘I have absolutely no idea, Greg. There’s obviously something, but I don’t know what that something is. I’m hoping that once I pass through the transit camp I’ll get a better idea. I’m hoping there is, because I’ve believed in God my whole life, and I was sure it was Him who’d got me through your mother’s death. But if the guy I was talking to hadn’t even heard of Jesus, then it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’
‘So you’ve no idea what comes next?’
‘No. You hear rumours of course, but none of them make any sense. One old guy said we were on our way to a giant warehouse with millions of pigeon holes inside it. He told us that the compartments were the size of a small apple and each one could house four people. He was in the same boat we were in though, so there’s no reason why he should have known this. I think he was just one of those clever Dicks who likes to show off.’
‘What happened to you after you left the room then, Dad – after you’d finished talking to this X-ray man?’
‘I was sent to a lounge reserved for Americans,’ Lyle replied. ‘They had me down as a Yank so I had to stay with them until my paperwork got sorted. I kept to myself in the early days, turned myself into a golf ball and hibernated – that’s something the X-rays encourage you to do. No doubt it’s another form of crowd control that makes life easier for them, but it’s pleasant enough, and at least you don’t think about things when you’re in that state.’
‘You can actually turn yourself into a golf ball?’ Greg asked.
‘Not as such,’ Lyle replied. ‘That’s just X-ray-speak. It’s more like a standby light. Anyway, I was in this mode when a truckload of GIs arrived in the lounge and woke me up. They were a good bunch of guys to hang out with though, and they told great stories, so I decided to stay awake after that. They’d all been blown up by an IED in Afghanistan and every man jack of them swore like a trooper. Maybe that’s why I was cussing like I was yesterday: their language must have rubbed off on me.’
The Last of the Bowmans Page 11
