Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

  Clive outlined the system, explaining that by the time he met her, he’d already know his intended well enough through letters and emails. He reminded Roger that none of his pub pick-ups had lasted more than a few weeks and usually were one-night stands. He pointed out that neither Roger nor himself had time to do the cooking and the cleaning any more – what with a busy scrap business to run and high-standard décor to maintain – and that if this were a restaurant, health inspectors would close down the kitchen and several streets around it as a public health hazard. The kitchen wasn’t Clive’s thing at all.

  And these being Asian girls, they’d be all right about doing a bit of work around the house, unlike British birds, who preferred to divide their time between nail bars and the ones in pubs. And Asian birds were lookers, as far as Clive could tell. It wasn’t long before Roger was persuaded and had started exchanging letters and photographs with a tall, slim and very striking Malaysian girl, called Pao-Pei.

  Clive and Roger had spent the early part of this afternoon talking about Pao-Pei, whose name Roger still struggled with, and how she would fit into their lives. ‘Pom Pei will love it here,’ Roger assured Clive, mooning over her slender neck, her very un-British white teeth and her eyes, which seemed to look deeply into his. ‘She won’t have to eat all that foreign muck for one thing. And she’ll be able to watch proper TV, without subtitles.’

  ‘Course, she’ll love it here,’ Clive said. ‘Look at all the shops Sheffield’s got.’

  ‘It says here she likes football too,’ Roger said. ‘She’s a hardworking, twenty-two-year-old student of home economics whose interests include cooking, housekeeping and – fuck me – soccer! And with looks like that, son, pardon me, but she’s got to like a bit of how’s-your-father too. Doesn’t get any better than that, believe me.’

  Clive read out her details for himself. ‘Pao-Pei is looking for a kind English husband who will help her perfect her English, broaden her understanding of Western culture and widen her sphere of interests.’

  ‘Widen her what?’ Roger said.

  ‘Her sphere of interests,’ Clive said.

  ‘I think I have something which will widen that,’ Roger said.

  He wrote to Asian Brides, who forwarded his introductory letter, together with a photograph of Roger Dyson looking every inch the prosperous English gentleman, to their client in a village by the sea in Malaysia. When at last they received a reply, Roger and Clive were most impressed with the standard of Pao-Pei’s written English. It was better than theirs. She said how delighted she was with Roger’s letter and that she thought he was a very handsome man. She was fascinated to hear about Roger’s exotic life in that far-away land and said how much she would like very much to see it for herself.

  She told him something about her own home life, about her parents and her sisters and her brothers and how keen they were that she followed her dream and found herself a new and satisfying life in the West. Roger wrote back and then, discovering that she had a computer, they exchanged increasingly amorous emails and Pao-Pei sent photographs of herself wearing sarongs in several vivid colours. Roger hinted delicately that she might like to send him a photograph of her without the sarongs, but clearly Pao-Pei was a highly decorous girl as in her next mail, she made no mention of his suggestion, but she did ask him when they could be together. As soon as she liked, Roger thought and proposed to her there and then.

  After paying a generous fee to Asian Brides, he set to with a will, dealing with all the red tape which had to be sorted out before he could send Pao-Pei a one-way air ticket and finally meet his bride-to-be in person. Clive was almost as excited as his father. It was just like Faruk’s arranged marriage, he told his friend, though Faruk didn’t really see it that way. While he waited for permissions to be granted, Roger spent his days making sure everything in the house was ready for her reception.

  He did everything that Clive said had to be done: he cleared out a drawer for her smalls, installed a new wardrobe for her things, bought scented soaps, candles for the bathroom and an air-freshener for the toilet. And then, much to the consternation of my own father (‘He’s up to something, Violet’), Roger set about clearing his garden, shifting the huge heaps of metal and compacting the scraps, fencing off untidy areas and then, under Clive’s direction, rescuing and restoring the greenery. When at last they had done, the bungalow featured a pleasant little garden with flowerbeds, a shrubbery and a winding gravel path which led the eye to a freshly-painted bungalow with roses around the front door. If it also had its own scrap yard around the side, then it was, as Mum observed, the tidiest, and perhaps even the prettiest scrap yard in South Yorkshire.

  And now Roger had only days to go until the day he would drive down to London Heathrow and meet the gorgeous Pao-Pei off her plane. He made lots of last minute preparations, arranging to have flowers delivered to the house on the day of her arrival, bought a new bottle of mouthwash and some flavoured condoms and crossed off the days on the calendar. The mood in the house was infectious: Clive was as feverish as his father. He couldn’t wait to meet Poon-Tang, as his dad was already calling her, and take her out shopping in Sheffield.

  If I’d known Clive had visitors I wouldn’t have dropped round, but Clive had insisted I come in all the same. Now I’m sitting in the corner, my right hand recovering its shape after the mangling Frank gave it when Roger made the introductions. No one looks comfortable. Frank has done his best, draping his Crombie on a chair and then dropping himself onto the new sofa and then his big boots onto the new coffee table. He sits there waiting for someone to say something. No one has taken a blind bit of notice of Clive’s own notice, which hangs by the back door: Whether you live in palace or mews/ it’s always polite/to take off your shoes.

  Behind Frank, Harry and Les look still less at ease, sitting rigidly erect on a pair of straight-backed, reproduction Rennie Mackintosh chairs. Harry sits with his pork-pie hat on his knees, while Les is taking quick glances at everything, like a chicken pecking for corn. They’re just a little intimidated by the colours, the fussy newness of everything, by the wotsit? The design. Roger stands by the window, screening a group of fragile figurines and looking little more at home than his unexpected guests. He must be seeing his gaff through their eyes and wondering what they’re thinking. When they used to roll up at his old drum on Peckham High Street, as Roger told Clive, it was the sort of place you could happily flop down wherever you liked, bang on the telly, crack open the beers, pass out the fags and put your feet up. And it’s Frank’s feet, or rather Frank’s boots, still resting on the coffee table, which are the focus of all attention now. Even Les and Harry can’t take their eyes off them. Finally, Frank catches on, removes the boots, coughs loudly and crosses his legs.

  There’s the first of many pauses.

  Then Frank coughs again and says, gazing about at the pristine room of many colours and unexpected items. ‘We was at Hillsborough but this eagle-eyed twat—’

  ‘On the fucking turnstiles,’ Harry says.

  ‘Recognizes us from our mugshots.’

  ‘And has the old Bill escort us off the premises.’

  ‘No fucking football for us today.’

  ‘So being as we was up your way,’ Frank says. ‘We thought we’d take you up on your invitation, like.’

  Les breaks his silence with an economic, ‘Yeah.’

  Frank’s taken a good, hard look at the strange way Nutter’s chosen to sort out his place up North. But it’s not the room but Roger himself that Frank’s looking at now.

  ‘Nice fleece,’ Frank says, then turns to see Clive coming in with the beers. ‘Fuck me, does everyone wear them up here?’

  Clive offers around a tray of small, lager-filled glasses. They have never had beer from anything but pint pots and bottles before and each man takes the little glass gingerly, as if he’s not sure what it is. They drink, however and Les shows that although he might be quiet, thoughtful, if you like, he’s also the sophisticated one.
He grips his glass and cocks his little finger.

  There is another pause. Frank tries to throw off first impressions and be as genial as surroundings permit. He coughs again. ‘So, Nutter, my old old mucker, how’s life treating you up here in the sticks?’

  Roger says he’s doing okay, business going well and everything on the up. He’s not going to tell them that he hasn’t felt so happy in years and the reason for this is that he’s shortly to marry a woman more beautiful than any they will have ever seen in Peckham, or Peckham, New Cross and Lewisham put together, for that matter. He knows instinctively that having them turn up at the Registry Office might not be a good thing.

  ‘We had some times, didn’t we?’ Frank says, thereby opening a fertile field of reminiscence as he and Harry try to outdo themselves by recalling ever more violent incidents in their not-too-distant pasts. Like the time Harry and Les picked up a security guard and tried to use his head as a battering ram against an off-license window.

  ‘He was a Northerner too,’ Harry says. ‘Ain’t that right, Leslie?’

  ‘He was thick-headed, all right,’ Les agrees.

  ‘There we were, banging his head against this plate-glass window and all he can say is—’

  ‘Gee’ o’er, lads, tha’s giving me a headache.’

  There’s some more chat along these lines and Frank fills Roger in on what’s happened to which of their old mates, who’s got hitched, who’s still in hospital and who’s in which prison. Then they all look into their empty glasses until Clive takes the hint and carries them off for refills. The men watch him leave.

  ‘Dainty on his feet, innee?’ Les says.

  Harry gives him a look. They’ve all had their suspicions about Clive since he took his embroidery along to a gentleman’s boxing evening in Catford, but he’s Nutter’s boy and Nutter is, or at least, was, Nutter. You don’t go casting asparagus, as Clive would have said, at members of their firm, past or present. Or their offspring. They have a code of honour, these men. Roger has begun to relax. He talks about my dad and the trouble he’s had running a business when he’s had a barrage of complaints via the Council, all emanating from the house over that big fence out there.

  Now it’s my turn to feel uncomfortable. The lads immediately offer their services. They’ll fix him good, they say. Trash his garden, torch his car. Post something nasty through his letterbox. Threaten the cunt. But Roger says, no, that’s not the way you do things in places like Laurel Gardens. What you do, Roger says, is you ignore such provocations.

  ‘Ignore them?’ Frank says, clearly amazed.

  ‘That’s right,’ Roger says. ‘You rise above them.’

  ‘Fuck me, I see. It’s different up here, innit?’

  For his part, Frank seems prepared to ignore Clive’s dainty walk as he returns with another tray of little glasses and perhaps to overlook the way Roger’s gaff has been decorated, entirely by Clive, he’s certain of it. And also to overlook the way his old mate dresses himself these days. Though, fuck me, I can hear him thinking, it’s all going to make for some funny stories down the Dog and Duck when they’re all safely back down South. But what he can’t ignore is whatever bulky item he’s sat down upon, and which he’s been aware of ever since but has been too uncomfortable in other ways to do anything about. Now he reaches under his big arse and pulls something from under it. It’s a magazine, or something. It’s porn, a jazz mag, he reckons. Looks like Asian Babes. No, wait a minute, he thinks, as he holds it up to get a better look and the thing becomes a magnet for the gazes of everyone present, it’s only a fackin’ catalogue for mail order brides!

  But he doesn’t say that, just flicks through pages and pages of smiling female faces, while everyone else is silent and then he finally pronounces, in an almost amiable way, ‘You’re a bit of a dark horse, Nutter. I didn’t know you liked a taste of the tar brush.’

  But no matter how Frank has tried to treat it lightly, Harry and Les snigger behind him like a pair of Muttleys behind Dick Dastardly. Roger himself is wearing a look like Frank has probably never seen before, because the magazine has naturally fallen open on Pao-Pei’s page and her silk-covered breasts are beneath Frank’s fat thumb. Frank sees he has made some sort of a mistake, a little faux pas, and tries to back-pedal.

  ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mate, not in this day and age. And to be honest, now, who could blame anyone for fancying a piece of that, eh? I mean, Harry, you’d poke that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘She’d look all right with a bit of British beef inside her,’ Harry concedes.

  Les’s turkey neck is craning for a better view. ‘I’d not kick her out of bed, either,’ he says. ‘Not until I’d given her a proper porking, anyway.’

  Roger is doing his best to keep a lid on it, but Clive recognizes the danger signs. If he looks carefully, he can see that his dad’s eyeballs appear to be rolling independently of each other. Only a little, but he’s sure he’s seen it. It’s not good. But Frank and Harry haven’t noticed. Harry’s now on about a piece of scientific evidence a friend of his read about on the internet, saying that coloured people were 85 percent less intelligent than white people. All of them, even their doctors, he’s saying.

  ‘That’s right,’ Les says. ‘I heard that.’

  Frank’s unsure about the figure and says so, though he thinks the general idea is right enough. But, he says, having another glance at Pao-Pei’s smiling face, that needn’t stop you wetting your willy where you want to, need it? Especially if you wore a nice, thick condom.

  Which is where Clive thinks it might all kick off. But it doesn’t, as at that moment, the door chime plays I Will Survive and Clive goes out to let in Faruk, with two of his mates from the mosque. ‘Fuck me, blinding game,’ Faruk’s saying. ‘Four nil. Four nil, Clivey! I’m fucking fucked! Got anything to drink? Is BJ here? I thought we could all go down the Casablanca. You up for that?’

  But Clive isn’t saying anything as he leads the three newcomers into the living room, where jaws do a little dropping at the sight of the two Asians and Faruk.

  ‘Tell them we don’t want any,’ Harry says. ‘Whatever they’re selling.’

  ‘Christ,’ Frank says. ‘Can’t an Englishman have a little privacy in his own castle?’

  ‘This is Faruk,’ Roger says. ‘A mucker of my boy’s.’

  ‘I don’t give a toss about him,’ Frank says. ‘It’s the monkeys with him.’

  ‘They’re my friends from the mosque,’ Faruk says. ‘Khalid and Sadik. What’s your problem?’ Having a low fear threshold has often been a problem for Faruk.

  ‘Oi, Roger, Clive’s mate or not, this bloke’s out of order,’ Frank says.

  There’s a moment when it seems to me that positions are being reconsidered. Then—

  ‘They’re all fucking Muslims!’ Harry says, remembering what a ‘mosque’ is, at last.

  ‘No, no,’ Roger says. ‘That’s Faruk. He’s not a Muslim.’

  ‘Um,’ Clive says. ‘I think he is, Dad.’

  Roger takes a minute. ‘But he’s white.’

  ‘He’s Turkish.’

  Another minute. Roger’s face performs some awkward contortions.

  ‘Well fucking hell, so what?’ he says, when he’s straightened things in his mind, apparently. ‘He’s still Faruk.’

  Which, of course, doesn’t play well with Roger’s mates.

  ‘He’s a Muslim but he’s white,’ Harry says.

  ‘Which makes him not just a Muslim, but a traitor,’ Les says, fingering something in his pocket.

  ‘I don’t think it does,’ Roger Dyson says, uncertainly.

  ‘Tell that to some squaddie who had his legs blown off,’ Frank growls.

  ‘What’s a poof like him know about real men, anyway?’ Harry says.

  I have an awkward feeling that I ought be standing up for Clive at this point.

  ‘You call my son a poof and you’ll answer to me, you cunt,’ Roger tells Harry.

  Is it n
ow, Clive’s thinking, will it all kick off now?

  ‘He’s just saying, Nutter,’ Franks says. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I’m not having it, Frank,’ Roger says. ‘You come around here, insulting my boy and his friends…’

  ‘But come on, Nutter, they’re fucking Pakis,’ Frank says, reasonably.

  ‘And Muslims,’ Les mutters from behind.

  ‘What need teaching a fucking lesson,’ Harry says, ‘if you ask me.’

  It’s now, Clive’s thinking.

  And he’s right.

  Frank, Harry and Les are on their feet. Les has something in his hand. It’s a Stanley knife, probably made in Sheffield. I’m pumping adrenaline, heart hammering. Roger clocks the knife but keeps his hands in his pockets. Faruk and his mates stand their ground, the silly sods. Clive is with them, but must be wishing he wasn’t.

  ‘I want an apology, Nutter,’ Frank is saying.

  ‘An apology? For what?’

  ‘For putting three Englishmen in the same room as these fucking Muslims and Pakis. For this poncy house. For leaving Peckham. For fucking changing, Nutter. I want an apology for all of that. And especially’ — he points a broken-nailed forefinger at Clive, who is flicking back his floppy hair – he does it unconsciously in times of crisis — ‘I want an apology for him.’

  One final, brittle pause. And then:

  ‘This is all the apology you’re getting today, Frank.’

  Nutter swings a brick fist squarely at Frank’s jaw. Something flashes – who would have thought there was a knuckleduster in his Hugo Boss chinos – and there’s a sickening cracking of bone or tooth. Frank spins about and lurches backwards, smacking into Harry and Les and all three land neatly on the sofa, looking briefly like visitors just arrived for tea before scrambling to their feet, Frank with a nasty, bloody mouth, Les nursing his craft knife and Harry wielding one of Roger’s bone china vases.