A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

  He couldn’t afford to lose the house, either. That was the bedrock of security for his family. At least he had made it a priority to pay off the mortgage, but he couldn’t allow the bank to treat it as part of his estate if he were to go completely broke. It would be better to put it immediately into Jackie’s name.

  And what about Jackie? She was being supportive, but she had other things to think about now, especially with this new high-powered job with Rebecca Tal-worth. He knew that he disturbed her every time he got out of bed. She would make that aggravated clicking noise with her tongue and turn over to face away from him. They never used to bicker, but it had now become almost a daily occurrence. But he couldn’t blame her for that. After all, it was he who had blown away the family’s security on a bad investment, and it was he who had been like a bear with a sore head ever since he had lost his job, and everyone in the household had been affected by it.

  All, that is, except Josh. He kept his own counsel. He had returned home, having dropped out of Manchester University during his first year, and had immediately set about making himself a stranger to his own family. He found himself a job stacking shelves in Tesco’s and then spent every bit of money that he made in the ear-shattering depths of Horace’s Inferno, one of Brixton’s more notorious clubs. Dan was inwardly enraged that his son should have given up on an opportunity in life that he himself had never been afforded. Yet he’d never sought confrontation over the issue, thinking that it might quite easily result in his son’s leaving home and setting himself up in some dive of a flat where he would be completely without parental control.

  Always, when morning came and Dan had been woken from his fitful slumber on the kitchen sofa by the sounds of Jackie moving around upstairs, neither one scene from the film nor one equation from the Open University course had ever registered in his brain. There had always been too many other things flying around in his head.

  5

  Dan attempted to open the door of Josh’s bedroom once more, this time with a dunt of his shoulder, but there appeared to be some object on the other side that only allowed it to open a mere six inches. He got down on his knees and put a hand through the gap, and at a full arm’s length, managed to extract a battered Nike trainer, its toe caved in where it had been acting successfully as a wedge against his entry. He stood up and opened the door fully, and the strong, fusty odour of a youth’s unventilated lair made him physically reel back. He took a deep inhalation of untainted air before entering, then stepped as gingerly as he would in a minefield over the disordered piles of clothing that were strewn across every spare inch of the darkened interior of the room. Having made it across the floor space without coming into contact with the prostrate body of any one of Josh’s friends, who dossed down with him on an all too regular basis, Dan drew back the curtains and pushed up the window as wide as it would go. He then turned to survey the living quarters of his firstborn.

  It was almost macabre, like a scene from a film showing the aftereffects of a raid by secret police. Every drawer was open and emptied, the doors to the fitted cupboard hung wide, the shelves empty except for one sock which drooped forlornly over the edge, as if caught making a valiant effort to join its companion somewhere on the ground. The walls were covered with posters, overlapping, askew, the majority showing the scowling, glary-eyed features of his son’s favourite rapper, Eminem. And there, on the bed, completing this scene of violent mayhem, was Josh, lying facedown on the crumpled undersheet, his head hidden beneath a flaccid pillow that happened to be the only form of cover on his otherwise naked body.

  Dan cast an eye over the prostrate figure from hidden head to outsized foot—the muscled arms, the wide shoulders, the lean back, the tight buttocks, the cluster of manhood between the dark-haired legs— and he laughed quietly to himself. How was it that such a beautiful, soft-skinned cherub of a little boy could have metamorphosed into this . . . lackadaisical monster?

  He took in a breath of nostalgia, realizing immediately that it was the wrong thing to do. He discarded the Nike trainer, the key root to the problem, onto an unused chair, and took hold of Josh’s heel and gave it a solid shake.

  “Josh?”

  He spoke loudly, but his voice sounded deadened in the clothes-padded confines of the room. There was not one twitch of movement from his son’s body.

  “Come on, Josh. It’s time to get up.”

  He grabbed hold of Josh’s ankles and dragged him forcefully down the bed, away from the protection of the pillow. With his body now bent over the edge of the bed, Dan found the target too tempting to ignore and finished off the awakening process by delivering a short, sharp slap to his son’s bare buttocks.

  Josh turned his head slowly, his long dark curls falling across bleary eyes. “Bugger off, Dad. That was sore.”

  Dan picked up the sheet that lay at the foot of the bed and threw it over his son. “Drastic action is sometimes called for, I’m afraid.”

  Josh flumped his head down on the bed again. “I heard you the first time.”

  “Then you should have made a move earlier, shouldn’t you?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten past twelve.”

  Josh groaned. “But my shift doesn’t start until seven o’clock tonight. I don’t have to get up yet.”

  “Oh yes, you do, mate. There’s more to life than sticking cans of baked beans on a shelf and head banging in a bloody club all night.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting this room tidied up for a start.”

  Josh swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, pulling the sheet across his lap. He surveyed the room through a curtain of hair, and his nose wrinkled in an expression of bewilderment. “Jeez, I only did it two days ago.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think so.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, then, you must have worn every article of clothing that you possess over the last two days.”

  A reluctant smile of acknowledgement creased Josh’s mouth. “Yeah, you’re right. I must have done.”

  Dan bent down and picked up a random pair of trousers from the floor. They seemed far too large for his son’s lean figure, but that’s how he liked them— worn so low on his hips that a vast expanse of knicker elastic was shown above the waistline. A pair of red, cupid-patterned knickers were still inside the trousers. He extracted them and dropped both articles onto the chair occupied by the Nike trainer, then sat down on the bed next to Josh. “So, how was it last night?”

  Josh swept a hand through his hair, pulling it away from his face. It was the first time that Dan had seen it uncovered that morning. He studied his son’s features, seeing so many similarities to his own. The full eyebrows, the dark brown eyes, the high-bridged nose. The small gold hoop, however, that adorned the upper part of his left earlobe was unique to Josh.

  “It was all right. Good DJ anyway.”

  Feeling little inclination to extract further information about his son’s nighttime escapades, Dan turned and picked up a book from the bedside table. It was a copy of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. He flicked through the pages. “Are you reading this?” he asked with an element of surprise.

  “Yeah. I think he’s a great writer. He’s brilliantly economic with his words.”

  Dan replaced the book on the table and let out a deep sigh. “Joshy, my boy, what are you going to do with your life? You’re too damned intelligent to waste away your time like this.”

  Josh turned and stared challengingly at his father. “I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

  Dan snorted out a laugh and gave his son’s unruly mop of hair a hard ruffle. “Touché! A very good question.” He pushed himself to his feet. “The truthful answer is that I don’t know, but I’m sure something will turn up.”

  Josh nodded. “Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking.”

  Dan kicked aside the clothing to make a path to the door. “If you take all these down to the kitchen, you can put a load in the w
ashing machine. We’ll get them hung out to dry when I get back.”

  “Where are you off to?”

  “I’m meeting Nick Jessop for lunch in the King’s Head.” Dan turned when he reached the door. “And incidentally, while I’m there, you can take the dogs for a walk around the block for me. And make sure you take a plastic bag with you in case Biggles decides to explode again.”

  Josh’s face expressed acute revulsion. “Thanks a bunch,” he murmured, out of earshot of his father. “Dad?”

  Dan had left the room by the time Josh called out his name. He returned, leaning a hand against the doorframe. “Yes?”

  Josh’s mouth was set tight, as if reluctant to speak.

  “What is it?” Dan asked again.

  “It’s just . . . well”—Josh leaned forward on his knees and began flicking at one thumbnail with the other—“things aren’t going too well between you and Mum, are they?”

  Dan paused briefly before replying. “What makes you think that?”

  “I heard you this morning.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. Just before she left for work. You were talking at the bottom of the stairs.”

  Dan raised his eyebrows. “Hell, I didn’t think that we were talking loud enough to wake you up.”

  “I was in the bathroom getting a glass of water.”

  “Ah, right. Well, I didn’t realize.”

  “They’re not, though, are they?”

  “What?”

  “Things between you and Mum. You seem to be arguing all the time.”

  “Not all the time.”

  Josh flicked back his head dismissively, but never raised his eyes. “Who are you trying to kid?”

  Obviously only myself, Dan thought to himself. “Everything’s all right, Josh. It’s just . . . a bit difficult at the minute, what with Mum working every hour of the day and me being out of a job. That kind of pressure is enough to put a strain on even the strongest relationship.”

  Josh nodded, but Dan could tell that his son was far from convinced. “The girls are being a pain in the arse too,” Josh continued. “They haven’t been giving you much of a break recently, have they?”

  Dan smiled at Josh’s unexpected concern. “No, not really. But again, I think it’s quite understandable. They’re both of an age when life can be, well, fairly traumatic, and I haven’t exactly improved their lot by having them move to a new school. They’re not particularly happy there . . . and, of course, they blame me for that.”

  Josh blew out a derisive laugh. “That’s such a load of rubbish! You’re just too good to them because they’re girls. I was never happy at my school, but you just kept telling me to knuckle down and get on with it.” He reached down and began to collect up some of his clothes. “Or maybe the difference is that now you have time to realize that Millie and Nina aren’t happy.”

  Dan scratched a finger repeatedly against the side of his face as his mind fought for an appropriate dismissal to Josh’s observation. He couldn’t think of one. “You could well be right.” He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. “So, are you saying that it’s my fault that you dropped out of university?”

  Josh laughed. “No, actually, I’m not. And, to be quite honest, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference if you had sent me to another school. I’ve always had a natural aversion to all forms of education.”

  Dan smiled at his son and walked back into the room and scooped up a pile of clothes from the floor. “I’ll put this lot in the washing machine. You bring down the rest.”

  6

  It had happened exactly one month and two days after he lost his job. At the precise moment when the first news report broke on the radio, he had been standing in the kitchen, making himself a mug of instant coffee to accompany his lunchtime sandwich. He remembered that he held the spoon brimming with coffee granules hovering above the mug, frozen in his actions, as he listened to the broadcast. By the time that the reporter had signed off, promising to keep listeners up to date with news as it broke, and the incongruously lighthearted music had started once again, only two minute coffee granules had fallen to the base of the mug. In the plethora of reports that filled the newspapers for the next two weeks, it became clear that others throughout the world had also remembered exactly what they were doing, down to the last detail.

  He had immediately turned on the television and watched, transfixed at the scenes that were being beamed live from New York. He knew the building so well. He had been in it so many times before, but still he found it impossible to orientate himself, to tell from the shaking, street-level camera shots which tower had actually been hit. When he eventually realized that the one that housed the headquarters of the company for which he had worked for fifteen years still stood, apparently unscathed, he felt a moment’s selfish relief that his colleagues would be all right and that they would be able to escape. It could only have been a moment, because as he stood there, no more than three feet away from the television screen, he watched in horror as the second aircraft hit the surviving tower.

  Once he had managed to break himself away from the mesmeric images of utter catastrophe, he tried to call his old office in the City. The lines were jammed. He then tried Nick Jessop, an ex-colleague who had coincidentally lost his job at the same time as himself. The domestic help informed him that Mr. Jessop had taken his baby son for a walk. At first, Dan couldn’t believe that Nick was able to carry on with such a normal, everyday routine when, twenty minutes before, an occurrence had taken place that was destined to change the world forever. And then he realized that it had only happened twenty minutes ago and that Nick wouldn’t even know about it. He told the woman to get Nick to turn on the television as soon as he arrived back in the house.

  He was now desperate to speak to someone that he knew, someone that he cared about. So he rang Jackie. The receptionist told him that his wife was in a finance meeting and didn’t want to be disturbed. Dan had sworn at the girl, really sworn, and within ten seconds he was speaking with Jackie. “Is this really important,” she had said, “because I’m in the middle of an extremely tense meeting, and, by the way, don’t you dare start calling the office and using the f-word with my receptionist.” Dan had said nothing more, other than to tell her to get her ear to a radio or her eyes to a television as soon as her meeting was over.

  And then he had remembered that Josh was upstairs in bed. He rushed up the staircase and entered his bedroom with such force that Josh had awoken immediately. Even in his soporific state, Josh could tell that something had happened.

  “What’s the matter, Dad?” he had asked in a voice that registered real concern. “Why are you crying?”

  Until that moment, Dan hadn’t realized that he was. “Could you come downstairs, Josh, and watch television with me?” He heard his voice choke as he spoke the words.

  “Why?” Josh asked, jumping out of bed and hurriedly pulling on a pair of boxer shorts. “What’s happened?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think that I might have just witnessed a whole load of my friends being killed.”

  They had sat on the sofa together for the rest of the afternoon watching the television. They never spoke, except to murmur an occasional expletive at the sheer magnitude of the devastation. Dan tried, on a number of occasions, to contact his old office in the City, but still the lines remained busy. He had never felt so helplessly out of touch in all his life.

  When the newspapers eventually managed to compile lists of those who were missing, believed killed, he had counted eight close colleagues and three others whom he had met on a couple of occasions. John Fricker had probably been one of his closest friends, and in the instant that he read his name, he could recall every moment of the beautiful fall weekend that he had spent with John and one of their work colleagues, Debbie Leishman, in upstate New York. It was after that weekend that John and Debbie started to become pretty serious about each other. Dan found their telephone number in his address book, bu
t it took him a full week after reading the name in the newspaper to pluck up the courage to try to make contact with Debbie. When he eventually spoke to her, he found that he couldn’t even begin to find adequate words to express the way that he felt, so for a quarter of an hour, he had just listened to the voice of complete incomprehension and desolation at the other end of the line.

  It was after he had finished that telephone call, when he was alone in his office at the top of the house in Clapham, that Dan had started to reevaluate his whole life. His own troubles now seemed insignificant. He thought how lucky he was to have a family, how proud he was to have a seventeen-year-old son who had the sensitivity and strength to sit with a protective arm encircling his father’s shoulder as they had watched those scenes from New York. He thought of the girls, miserable at their new school, and he vowed that he would be there for them, to help them through it. It was, after all, only a pinpoint of time in their lives. And he thought how unimportant it was to be without his high-flying job in the City. There were so many other things to cherish, to nurture. From that moment on, he was going to be happy, he was going to be fun, and he was going to be around for a family that needed him.

  There was, however, one aspect of that day that Dan had never been able to comprehend. It left a chill where before there had been nothing but the warmth of mutual love and friendship. During those interminably long, dismal hours of September the eleventh, when families throughout the world, totally unconnected with those who had lost their lives, had telephoned each other just to touch base, just to express feelings of togetherness, Jackie had never bothered to call him.