A Patient Man

by S. Lynn Scott

  She had given birth to twins since then. They had been the result of a passionate affair with a Turkish waiter from a London nightclub. I suspected, even in my callow youth, that the arrival of the twin boys had been an ideal opportunity for my mother to gain some sort of permanent hold on the one man she was truly passionate about but on whom the love-hate relationship had begun to pall. The strategy didn’t work though, and the Turk had fled back to his homeland taking his dark-haired offspring with him. Mum got the occasional card from their father, usually requesting money. I don’t know if she ever sent any, but it seems unlikely. Her relation to her friends of this second venture into motherhood was rather different. She must have loved the man very passionately, if not deeply, for she now hated him with a towering hate and, whatever love she might have initially felt for the two little mites who disappeared so suddenly from her life, appeared to have been subsumed by the bitterness she now felt for their father. She never forgave him for leaving her. She wasn’t strong on forgiveness at the best of times.

  Towards the end of the 60’s of course, contraception appeared. Mother had by then met my father, although there had apparently been one or two even less successful relationships in the meantime. My father was ten years older and had two kids already. I can only conclude that it took some time for the pill to become as efficacious as it is now for I was born. Out of wedlock of course but at some stage afterward, as my mother romped towards her forties, a marriage did take place. The photos of that joyful event were sparse, grim and no one looked particularly happy in them, but I had been legitimised and my mother had some sort of stability for the first time in her life. For what it was worth.

  I have no idea what happened to the mother of my half sister and brother. Gary was now twenty and sometimes sloped off to an unspecified job somewhere in London. I remembered Gary at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen being the perfect brother. We would play boisterous games tumbling over the worn settee in our chaotic living room. We would run wild together over the salt marshes. It was Gary who taught me the lay of the island, took me cockling and taught me the choicest swear words, Gary, who shared his very limited knowledge of sex (from a purely masculine point of view of course) and gave me my first puff of a cigarette. I looked up to him as everything a young man should be. At age eighteen, however, he lost any interest in his little brother and transferred it to his car, a battered Ford Cortina which had seen better days although it was difficult to see how even those days could have been that good considering the beating it had taken. I became an irritation and, as I was growing up too, I felt myself already too mature to stay where I was not wanted so I worshipped my hero from a distance and bothered him as little as possible. We shared a room of course, as we had always done but Gary was rarely there. Neither was I. I saw him sometimes at the seafront with his arm around or his hand on the bottom of some sulky girl or other. The girls were always sulky. I think it was the fashion rather than the effect Gary had on them. Thinking about it though, it might have been a bit of both.

  Gary didn’t talk too much at home to any of us except Dad and not much to him. They went off together sometimes in the evening, but we never asked them where. You learned early in my family not to ask questions. You just didn’t.

  My sister Sarah was eighteen and talked a lot about her wedding, which would take place, she said, as soon as she had enough money to get exactly what she wanted for it. Dad had reluctantly agreed to pay a set amount, but Sarah’s grand ideas outstripped this measly stipend, as she saw it, and she determined to delay the magnificent nuptials until she could screw a lot more money out of either her father or her prospective in-laws. Oh, and until her fiancé, Barry got a job. Having seen Barry on numerous occasions staring blankly as Sarah moved him from place to place as necessity or whim demanded, the chances of him attaining anything other than a statement of special needs seemed unlikely in the extreme. It was far more likely, to my mind, that Sarah would tire of moving him around and return him permanently to the care of his parents with whom they both currently lived. This arrangement was at Sarah’s instigation no doubt and to the great discomfort, I am sure, of his inoffensive and helpless parents. In the meantime, Sarah planned a romantic wedding (with Barry as a bit part player), inadvertently fell pregnant and bought pretty but impractical baby wear from charity shops. You had to admire her ability to find romance in the tawdry. Despite her impossibly romantic notions, she was a determined woman and one who was never troubled by doubt or anyone else’s opinion.

  And so, I come to my father and whilst my pen has run over these sheets of writing freely until now, I find myself suddenly lost and unsure and groping for words. My father was a big man, over six foot, and heavy. Not fat. He was never that, but still heavy. Heavy in everything, in body, in speech and in manner. He was a Londoner through and through. Silvertown in the East End was his manor.

  We’d lived in a flat there until I was about five years old. I had vague memories of small dark rooms, concrete corridors, and foul-smelling lifts, the whole thick with acrid cigarette smoke. The sudden move to Canvey Island and a house with space and clean sea air (sort of) had been, for me, like being transplanted to heaven. The move was an uncharacteristic whim on my Dad’s side and I don’t believe that either he or my mum ever really felt at home there. They were Londoners and if London hadn’t still been so close I don’t think we would have remained long. The purchase of the house was occasioned by the death of my paternal grandmother. I don’t think I ever saw her as there had been some dreadful family falling out between her and my dad and as a result, she had left the dwindling proceeds of a failing family grocery shop to the local cat’s home. Purely to spite her wayward son it seems as she, like me and dad, didn’t like cats. However, it transpired that she had not done something legal that she should have done and as a result and entirely against her vindictive wishes the money was reluctantly passed in its entirety to my father, her only living relative.

  Both Mum and Dad had spent away days at Southend, getting drunk on the seafront and into fights at the Kursaal (my mum more than my dad apparently). So, with money in their pockets and creditors at their heels, they sunk the whole lot into buying the house on Canvey, moved in within a day or two and then disappeared to Benidorm for six weeks. I was left to the teenage mercies of Sarah with some help or hindrance from Gary, but it was summer, and I was a streetwise five-year-old. We ignored the shocked and nosy neighbours, evaded the Social Services and ran wild over the island paradise.

  I’ve no idea how we managed to feed ourselves. Presumably, we were left a pot of money but as Sarah suddenly had a whole new wardrobe of mini-skirts and platform shoes and Gary was never entirely sober, I suppose we must have foraged successfully for I don’t remember being any more than usually hungry.

  And now I find that I have wandered from the description of my father yet again. He was tall. I have said that. Muscular but not with that sleek firmness of a really fit man. It was a lumbering, bullish masculinity. His head was large, and his eyes were dark brown, almost black. His hair was grizzled with tight curls that he kept cut short at the back and sides even through the rebellious sixties and even more questionable seventies. He had a complementary thick matt of grey-brown hair across his chest that continued to a slightly lesser extent down his back, legs, and arms. His features were heavy too. He had a large well-proportioned nose and a wide full-lipped mouth with even white teeth and a heavy-set jaw. He was olive-skinned. I think he had spent most of his youth working on the market stalls and perhaps the long hours in all weather had stained his skin permanently nut brown. His later years were spent in the nightclubs, pubs and snooker bars of London but the bronze of his skin never faded.

  So that is what he looked like. What he was actually like as a person, a man, even as a father, I find at this late stage that I do not know and that is why my pen is so hampered in creating a description of him.

  He looked like a villain and I have
no compunction in admitting now that that is exactly what he was. A little research at a much later date confirmed what I already knew. He was a petty small-time villain who ran on the periphery of the greater London villains. He knew Ronnie Knight and the Krays, and they knew him as useful occasionally in a small way. He’d done time for petty theft in his early years and, in his twenties, he had been charged once for assault. Someone, another small-time criminal, gave him an alibi and he walked on that charge. He had an interest in market stalls which gave him a small income and some legitimacy but yes, my father was undoubtedly a villain and his expertise and education lay in protection, money laundering, gambling, receiving stolen goods and probably some small-time drug trafficking. I have no reason to believe that he was possessed of the sort of morality that would draw a line anywhere. And yet... I don’t believe that he would ever have physically hurt a woman or a child or have taken a life. But he was my father, so I would believe that, wouldn’t I?

  However, from all that I could see, he wasn’t a particularly successful criminal although he knew a number who were. He knew the men who lived in mansions in Chigwell but never lived in one himself. He knew any number of bronzed well-to-do wide boys who sunned themselves permanently in Benidorm or Majorca because England was too hot to hold them. He even holidayed with them on more than one occasion, usually when some nefarious scheme was being planned or after a job that required a low profile for a while.

  So that was my father, what he did and how he looked but I am no nearer describing the real man. Perhaps you can best judge a man by his relationships with the people around him. His relationship with my mother was…Even that is difficult for me to describe. She was afraid of him. That almost goes without saying. Most people who knew of his connections, but also most who didn’t, regarded him with the respect you would give a large dog with big teeth, though currently inoffensive you never knew what might provoke him to savage you.

  I honestly don’t know if mum ever loved him. I think he offered a sort of precarious security when she was losing her pert prettiness to age and that she felt he was probably the best she could do.

  He, however, loved her, of that I am sure. I don’t believe he ever raised his hand to her even though she gave him provocation over and over. I don’t remember him ever raising his voice to her, although she certainly did to him. He just loved her silently, doggedly and he controlled her every move by force of will. He didn’t stop her going out and, to all intents and purposes, she was as free as the wind to go where she wanted when she wanted and with whomever she wanted, but he would know and before long mum would recognise a face in the crowd, sometimes male, sometimes female and would know that her freedom was a dream and that my father owned her. They rowed often but my father’s voice would rumble short replies in laconic response to her frantic, high-pitched complaints liberally laced with filthy oaths and epithets. She was never aware of winning an argument with him in her life, but he always found a way to give in to her without ever seeming to. He gave her everything he had. Everything that is, except her freedom.

  He wasn’t sexually faithful to her either. He had one or two women up in London that he saw frequently. She knew but was too wise to bring that up in argument. It was after all just the way things were. The marriage was probably his idea, another way in which to stamp ownership and remind her not to stray.

  His relationship with his children from his former liaison, Sarah, and Gary, was similar in many ways. He watched them silently when they were younger but made no show of filial affection towards them that I ever saw. It was enough of course. They went to school, came home and did what they wanted, provided it did not disturb the tenor of my parent’s lives. Mum screamed with regularity at both and Sarah moved out as soon as she could convince the first of a succession of singularly unattractive boyfriends that she wasn’t jailbait and that her father wouldn’t duff them up if she moved in with them. Barry was the most recent in a long line. He promised Sarah some stability if not much else. My father just watched her. I think he was trying to work out how she might possibly be useful to him but, as she had inherited his heavy looks and heavy body, no immediate use came to mind.

  Gary, too, was watched silently until his sixteenth year when he climbed into his precious Ford Escort and careered, drunkenly along Southend Seafront, ricocheting off two cars and an ice cream kiosk before coming to an abrupt rest against the entrance to Peter Pan’s playground. Luckily it was very late on a winter’s night or his career may have commenced with a long sentence for manslaughter. In the event, he got off with a suspended sentence and was banned from driving legally for the next three years. As he had been driving illegally anyway that didn’t bother him much. Dad, unlike most parents in that situation, did nothing. I don’t suppose he was in a particularly strong position to do anything anyway as, whilst he confined his ‘work’ to London, he was, of course, well known to our local bobbies as a ne’er do well. (Though they never used that charming old-world expression to describe him I am sure.)

  He simply watched Gary as the process of law took its course. Mum called her stepson ‘a stupid f….’, shrugged her shoulders and, in one of her rare fits of industry, got herself a job at the local hairdressers doing ladies nails. She quite often decided to be a career woman and had worked at everything from barmaid to factory work. It never lasted long and was usually after something had annoyed her.

  However, when the court business had run its course, my father made his move and Gary was taken under his wing. They would both disappear up to London for a week, sometimes two. Gary changed. He had been taken into the family profession and was quite happy that it should be so.

  Now we get on to my father’s relationship with me. It wasn’t what you would call close. That’s for sure. He watched me too as I ran wild and I think he watched with interest as if there was something foreign about me, something that he did not recognise and did not understand in the child he had created with the woman he loved. Gary and Sarah, he understood. They were not complicated characters by any stretch of the imagination but I was different and that interested him.

  When he was around he generally made me go to school. He’d open the door and say ‘school’ in his low firm voice and I would obey, after a fashion. Mum regarded my non-attendance and her own lack of insistence on this point as a small victory of disobedience to his wishes. Perhaps he intended me to have a different life from his own. He demanded my report cards and would study them wordlessly when I reluctantly produced them. “Work hard, don’t disappoint me, boy,” was all he would say, and, for a while, I would discover a new interest in my lessons and attendance would be better until freedom beckoned once more.

  Does that paint an accurate portrait of my father? I don’t think so, for he was a vivid character, the strongest influence in my life, but there was something untouchable, unknowable about him. He lived his life holding on to many secrets and had become secret himself.

  Was he intelligent? He wasn’t successful or rich and those were the only measurements that mattered, so no. My mother was clever but without intellect. Her ideas and imagination, either because of nature or nurture, had transformed early on into cunning and a grasping selfishness, but it was difficult to tell if dad had more than the usual modicum of intelligence because he kept so much of himself hidden. It is an incomplete portrait but perhaps the rest of the story will reveal more of the man than my poor powers of description.

  The day after Peggy’s abduction the police arrived on our doorstep and stayed for some time. They interviewed everyone in the street of course but we were marked for special attention and everyone knew why. My father had been in London but that made no odds. It would have been easy enough for him to get back to Canvey with no one any the wiser. I knew about one flying visit to mum immediately after the kidnapping which had left her subdued, sulky and short-tempered but we hadn’t seen him since. It was a good move.

  My brother said h
e had been in bed at the time of the kidnapping. I knew he hadn’t, but no one asked me. Gary came and went when his social drinking, sex life, and occasional commitments in London dictated, but my mother confirmed his alibi as a matter of course and didn’t care whether they believed her or not, or whether it was true or not. Anyway, when mum staggered home from the pub she would have been hard-pressed to find her own bedroom door and it would never have occurred to her to check if Gary and I were at home. It was a shaky alibi but unless they could prove his presence elsewhere it would serve.

  For seven whole days after Peggy’s disappearance, the police were in evidence at our house on a regular basis and in our street constantly. The Peppermint Copper breezed in every now and again breathing bonhomie and peppermint fumes in equal measure. He was friendly, we were surly and nothing material was gained by either side. On his second visit, he said that while he was sure that we didn’t have anything to hide it might be a good move for us to allow a search of the house. He said that would allay the suspicions of our neighbours in the street. We didn’t care about that, of course, and my mother’s initial reaction was loud and very vulgar but, to my surprise, having relieved herself of enough colourful invective, she flung open the door and insolently told them to do what the hell they wanted. Gary, lurking in the background, nearly had a fit but I’d already cleared our room of all the weed and pills I could find and was looking forward to blackmailing my step-brother out of some substantial cash for their safe return. If there was anything else Dad would have taken it.