by Tony Hawks
I felt rather unnerved at this point. The way sportsmen feel when they’ve won a big trophy, but without the elation. I was experiencing the ‘Ah, this has actually happened’ moment. As we gathered around the table, the new committee eyed each other in turn. The looks weren’t suspicious, but they could have been interpreted so by any onlooker who didn’t know what was going on. Introductions were made, followed by hasty judgements. There was Rose, apparently strong and confident. Ann, sweet-looking and timelessly dressed. Brenda, whom I already knew, well-dressed and genial as ever; and Mary and David, a smiling and assured couple. Then there was Fran. I knew her. I’d slept with her. Good. Always good to have slept with at least one person on any committee on which one sits. It’s the British way.
We all sat down and David, the incumbent treasurer from the previous committee, showed himself to be the only one who had the vaguest idea of the protocol.
‘I suppose the first thing we’ll need to do is elect a chairman,’ he said.
‘And how do we do that?’ I asked.
‘Well, we’ll need to see if anyone will volunteer for the position and if so, if anyone will second them. I don’t want to do it, but is anyone happy to be chairman?’
Chairman? Who would make a good chairman, I thought? I was pondering this baffling point in my head, when I received a dig in the ribs.
‘Put your hand up!’ muttered Brenda between her teeth, presumably having made a judgement that I was good chairman material, based on the authoritative way in which I had viewed her house.
The jab was sharp and sudden enough to cause me to obey without thinking. Only when my arm was aloft did I realise that I was now volunteering for the position of chairman of the village hall. Before I had a chance to drop my hand, Rose chimed in.
‘Great. I’ll second Tony,’ she said, her hand aloft now alongside mine.
‘Excellent, that’s it. That’s decided then,’ said David, who proceeded to jot something down on a piece of official-looking paper.
Was that it? Was that all it took? A jab in the ribs, an arm aloft and everything was done and dusted? Seemingly so.
I flushed. Strangely, I was experiencing a sudden and entirely unexpected rush of adrenalin, as it dawned on me that for the first time in my life I found myself in a position of authority. Albeit only seconds into the job though I was, it felt strangely invigorating. I found myself thinking about power. I was the Chairman. OK, I wasn’t Chairman Mao – presumably I had an altogether different remit – but I had power.
My creative mind ran amok, allowing me to indulge in absurd fantasy. It told me to stop and think of all that authority! Boy, the changes I could wreak upon these people. For a moment I was Napoleon, Gaddafi and Hussein, Assad, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot – the only difference being that, rather than torturing, maiming and slaughtering, I would be deciding whether we undertook a three-phase electrical renovation.
In that moment, I understood what drives men to seek power. It was intoxicating. It was all-consuming. It was seductive. And, in my case, unfeasibly stupid.
‘L . . . l . . . let’s get the me . . . m . . . m . . . mee . . . meeting underway,’ said David, falteringly.
It now became apparent that David had a slight stutter. He’d spoken smoothly before, but perhaps now the realisation of who was holding the position of chairman was making him nervous. A horrible thought occurred to me. What if he knew?
What if he knew that in 1988 I had written and performed (as one third of the trio that were Morris Minor and the Majors) the Number 4 hit ‘Stutter Rap’.2 Rather insensitively, and with a brash disrespect for political correctness, the lyric had outlined the difficulty of the stutterer when faced with the task of rapping.
My life was so well-planned
Survivin’ and a-jivin’ in a funk band
’Cos rapping it’s my bread and butter
But it’s hard to rap when you’re born with a stutter
What if David knew? What if he’d harboured a 25-year grudge against me and that this entire ‘village hall crisis’ was a sham, fabricated so that I could be inveigled into becoming chairman and then slowly be driven to suicide by the weight of petty and yet overwhelming bureaucratic tasks?
Time would tell.
‘W . . . w . . . what should we call you?’ asked David.
‘What do you mean?’ I replied.
‘Well, should we refer to you as Mister Chairman?’
Oh yes, it was coming back to me now. This was the protocol for committees, wasn’t it? The chairman suddenly loses his or her first name and becomes mister or madam, gaining the new surname ‘Chairman’.
‘Mister Chairman?’ I said. ‘That sounds a bit weird.’
‘It’s normal.’
‘Does anyone mind if we go with Tony?’
The first radical seed had been planted. Outrageous. Suggesting that we call someone by their own name, rather than a silly made-up one.
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ said Brenda.
The others looked on nervously but then, as if struck by a thunderbolt of good sense, they all began nodding. Before we knew it, we had unanimous approval. This seemed to be rather a nice committee.
Of course, Napoleon, Gaddafi and Hussein, Assad, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot would never have done such a thing and allowed their apparatchiks to be on first-name terms – to become friends, instead of subordinates – but mine was going to be a benign rule. I had never sought out this office, but now that it was mine, I was going to use it to make the world a better place.
‘OK, so what happens now?’ I said, demonstrating enormous authority.
‘We need to appoint a secretary,’ said Rose.
‘Well, are you willing to do it?’ I asked.
There was sensible logic behind this offer. Rose had thought that we needed a secretary and therefore Rose should be the secretary. It was borrowed from the sensible logic of children – a kind of ‘he who smelt it, dealt it’ approach.
The remaining committee looked at Rose. She raised her eyebrows.
‘Well, I suppose I could do it,’ she said.
‘Excellent,’ I said, getting into the swing of things. ‘You can be secretary then.’
It felt like I was a team captain and we were picking sides in the school playground.
‘What about a vice-chairman?’ asked Brenda.
‘Good idea,’ I said, ‘can you do it?’
‘Well, I suppose I could,’ said Brenda.
I was on a roll. Why had I not been in government before? I was a natural.
‘Right, I think that’s all the positions filled,’ I announced. ‘Shall we make a date for a proper meeting next week?’
‘Yes, and I’ll write an agenda for it,’ said Rose.
‘Good.’
‘And I’ll prepare a treasurer’s report,’ said David.
‘Splendid. Everyone all right for Thursday night at 6.30 p.m.?’
Nods followed. No London-style consulting of agendas, or negotiation on the time slot, so that it could be ‘squeezed in’ between other meetings. Here in Britain’s rural countryside we all seemed to be frighteningly available.
‘Well done, everyone,’ I said, ‘I look forward to Thursday night.’
‘We’re a great team,’ said Rose.
We were indeed. OK, we hadn’t done anything yet, but that is always the high point for any government or organisation. This was our ‘Obama moment’. We were popular for two reasons. We were different to what had gone before, and we hadn’t done anything yet.
It would be all downhill from here.
6
The R Word
The seventh of August was another scorching day. It was the kind of heat you expect when you alight from a plane in a far-off, exotic location; the kind of heat that hits you, as you walk onto the aircraft steps and cannot help but exclaim, ‘Wow!’ – such is the contrast to the dreary, cloudy mediocrity that you’d just left behind. Now we had it all on our doorstep. No need to fly a
nywhere. Devon was a holiday paradise with few shortcomings.
Everything seemed right with the world. OK, snippets of the global news accidentally reached my ears via the odd radio dotted around the place, so I knew that all was not well everywhere. However, Devon remained blissfully devoid of drones, landmines, terrorists, freedom fighters, corrupt dictators, human rights abusers, food shortages, contaminated water, power shortages, and disease.
‘I am,’ I said to myself, ‘a lucky, lucky bastard.’
Fran was not so lucky this morning, though, complaining of feeling unwell. We had recently registered with the doctor in the neighbouring village, so I called up and made an almost instantaneous appointment – something that in London might have taken a few days to achieve, following a conversation not unlike this:
‘I’d like to make an appointment with the doctor, as I’m not feeling very well.’
‘The first appointment I have is in a week’s time, at four p.m. on Thursday.’
‘But I might be better by then. Or dead.’
‘In which case, make sure you have someone cancel the appointment for you.’
I shouldn’t moan. It’s incredible that we even have a National Health Service. I grew up taking it for granted. It had been all I’d known and it seemed a sensible way to do things. If you felt unwell, you went to see someone and they helped you. They didn’t ask you for money or demand to see insurance paperwork. It seemed normal and remarkably civilised. It was only after reaching the age when I started to travel that I learned this was not necessarily the natural order of things. There were places in the world where doctors would leave their citizens in all kinds of discomfort until they were sure they could perform the operation that they deemed most important – the location and removal of money from their patients’ bank accounts.
‘I am,’ I said to myself, in the comfortable, clean environment of the surgery waiting room, ‘a lucky, lucky bastard.’
A copy of Devon Life and a host of other kindly magazines stared up at me from the coffee table, but I was content simply to sit and wait, occasionally eyeing other patients and having an inward guess at the reason for their visit. Fran had been gone less than five minutes, when she appeared in the corridor.
‘Tony, you’d better come,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Just come.’
Fran turned and headed back into Room 4. I followed her down the short corridor, my mind beginning to fill with fears. Was this going to be the announcement of some earth-shattering news? A terminal illness? An amputation?
I entered the room and was immediately greeted by a pleasant-looking lady doctor of about Fran’s age. She was smiling. Good. That was comforting. Doctors don’t smile when they announce terminal illnesses. It’s not something they learn in their formal training, but it’s a little thing they pick up along the way.
‘Congratulations,’ the doctor said, ‘Fran is pregnant. You’re going to be a father.’
Blimey.
So that’s it? Pregnant.
Blimey.
OK, I’ll be honest. This had been at the back of my mind. Fran and I had stopped using contraception a few months previously, and in that sense we had been ‘planning’ to start a family. However, we hadn’t bothered to work out when Fran would be at her most fertile, and I hadn’t cut down on hot baths, or done anything to facilitate the production of top-quality sperm. All we’d done was halted the deliberate prevention of pregnancy. In truth, probably neither of us was quite ready for this news. Especially me. I was definitely in shock.
‘I think I need to sit down,’ I said, rather like a feeble geriatric.
I hugged Fran, and held her hand as the doctor talked us through what happened next. I didn’t listen properly. For the moment, I felt I knew enough. Fran would get tubby, and then a baby would pop out roughly nine months from now. I’d get to grips with the technical side at a later date. My mind was currently preoccupied with what we’d be losing rather than gaining.
Freedom.
I felt a little faint. Sick even. Probably morning sickness. Here I was, just past fifty, finally about to embark on doing what almost every single one of my contemporaries had nearly completed – raising a family. Why these feelings of trepidation? Why not joy? That was what you were supposed to feel, weren’t you?
‘You must be thrilled!’ said the doctor.
‘Oh, I am,’ I said, failing to display any sign of such an emotion. ‘We’re both thrilled.’
Fran smiled, a twinkle in her eye. I could tell that she wasn’t as afraid as I was. I’d spent much of my life avoiding it, but now there was no escaping it. The R word.
Responsibility.
This was the word that was written on the bullets that would soon emerge from the barrel of the shotgun down which I was now staring. The doctor was saying something about midwives and appointments, but I could barely hear her above the deafening sound of the R word.
Responsibility.
Even though I was clearly grown up, I’d never been a grown-up. OK, I was no longer what most people consider to be a young man. But that’s not the point. I felt like one, and I lived like one. I’d never had a ‘proper job’. Most mornings I got up when my body was ready, and consequently, on those rare occasions when the alarm needed to go on, I always needed to remind myself how to set it. If I wanted to go somewhere, most of the time I just went there. Adventure was not off-limits. Risks (I preferred calculated ones) could be taken.
I was routine-free, often taking a kind of perverse delight in not knowing when and where the next paid job would materialise. I owned stuff, but I was prepared to lose it. I jumped in the air with the expectation that I would land on my feet, and if I landed on my arse, then I accepted the helping hand that always seemed to be offered. I didn’t want for much, and what I had, I liked. The only thing that was missing in life was . . . was . . . was, well, responsibility.
Perhaps I’d yearned for it without knowing. Maybe the very thing that scared me now was what I actually needed. The reality was that I had sown my seeds, and therefore roots were bound to grow. Maybe this was just supposed to happen and that up until now, for reasons that an expensive psychoanalyst might be able to figure out, I’d simply spent my life avoiding it? Or could it simply be that we all move at different speeds, and that I just happened to be ready twenty years later than most people, that’s all?
Either way, on the seventh of August in the thirteenth year of this millennium, I became a grown-up.
As we left the surgery I looked down the corridor. On the far wall there was one of those eye-test charts with letters arranged in varying sizes. I could only see one letter.
R.
***
‘How are you feeling?’ I said to Fran, as I drove her to her first hospital appointment, a fortnight after the revelation of the ‘thrilling’ news.
‘Fine. Just fine.’
Fran appeared to be having a relatively easy time of it. Apart from those initial feelings of discomfort that had prompted the first doctor’s appointment, she was now only experiencing tiredness. No throwing-up in the mornings. Not bad, given the enormous physiological changes taking place in her body. To me, it felt like Fran was living a science-fiction story similar to that in the movie Alien. She had another body growing inside hers. Quite extraordinary, except for the fact that it was so commonplace. And yet it felt so weird – another body growing inside hers . . .
Maybe I would have been less incredulous if I’d known more about the biology. My extensive ignorance on this subject (which I made a good fist of concealing from Fran) was entirely my own fault. In the past, whenever the subject of childbirth had arisen, I had zoned out. Words like labour, contractions, placenta, Caesarean and umbilical cord had all been signals for me to extricate myself from a conversation where I had neither any interest, nor anything meaningful to contribute.
There was an irony here, though. For all the time I’d spent pursuing female bodies over the years, I’d
been comprehensively uninformed when it came to what was actually contained within them. Having been to a boys’ grammar school, where sex education had been non-existent, I’d been reduced to garnering any information regarding the workings of the female body through playground banter and occasional access to pornographic magazines. The vagina, according to teenage lads, had been created as a play area – a source of potential pleasure, not unlike a football pitch or table-tennis table (although ideally hosting very different activities). The pivotal role it had played in us boys actually being there in the first place, didn’t seem to concern us. We were, as Mr Mainwaring might have accurately described us, stupid boys.
However, it was an embarrassment that over the years my knowledge had not really advanced measurably. Yes, I knew (or thought I knew) what bits of a woman to touch in order to elicit the pleasure that I hoped would then enable my sexual needs to be sated. But I would never have picked the female body as my specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind.1
‘It’s an odd word “midwife”, isn’t it?’ I said to Fran, as we pulled into the hospital car park. ‘Do you know what it means?’
‘Not really. Doesn’t the “mid” stand for “middle” because the midwife is a conduit between the child and mother?’
‘Sounds logical. But why wife? That would mean that she’s halfway to being your wife.’
This might have been a dangerous conversational area to negotiate had Fran not been so level-headed. I’d never asked Fran to marry me, and I had no intention of so doing, even though we were about to be bound together in the most binding of ways. However, this was not a bone of contention, and we’d discussed the matter and found ourselves to be in agreement.
