Always the Sun (15 page)

One of his sons ripped the aerial from Sam’s car. Sam didn’t mind. The son waved the aerial around for a few seconds, like a conductor’s baton. Then he chucked it in next door’s garden. The light winked from it as it tumbled and fell. Sam’s eyes followed its trajectory. So did Dave Hooper’s. It landed silently, on a cushion of lawn in the darkness.

‘Stay away from my property,’ said Sam.

‘And you,’ said Dave Hooper. ‘You fucking watch yourself. You know what I mean.’

Sam tilted his jaw to show how the threat rolled from him.

There was a perilous, unbalanced moment. Nobody knew what direction to move in.

Then Dave Hooper turned and led his sons towards home.

Still bathed in radiant light, Sam watched them go. Then he went back inside. He stood in the hallway for a few moments, to listen for their singing. But he heard nothing.

13

Sam closed the door and became afraid. It occurred to him that he’d been very foolish. Had there been two men at his door, not one, by now he could be lying in the garden beaten and toothless, while the Hoopers tore apart his house.

A sequence of fantasies brought him to a standstill.

When Mel came downstairs with Jamie behind her skirts, Sam was standing with one hand on the lock, staring at the door.

Mel said, ‘Are you all right?’

She had to repeat the question.

Sam nodded, slowly.

‘Yeah. Fine.’

He snapped back to the present.

‘How are
you
?
Are you all right?’

‘We’re fine.’

‘And Jamie? How are you, mate?’

Jamie seemed nonchalant. Sam might have been fooled, had he not clung to Mel’s heels on the way to the kitchen. Sam turned on the lights and the naked glass bounced their reflections back at them. Their sightlessness, the knowledge that a dark garden lurked behind their bleached reflections, spooked them all simultaneously and, without a word, Sam pulled down the blinds for the first time since they were fitted, rendering the kitchen subtly unfamiliar.

Jamie said, ‘Dad? Do you want a cup of tea?’

A cup of tea was the last thing he wanted.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘tea would be good.’

‘I’ll put in extra sugar.’

‘Why?’

Jamie shrugged and opened the cutlery drawer.

‘I don’t know. It’s supposed to be good for you.’

Dutifully, he scooped two heaped spoonfuls into the mug and put the kettle on to boil. As the water began to grumble and hiss, he said, ‘Do you think they’ll come back?’

Sam was lighting a cigarette. He exhaled a long rope of blue smoke.

‘No, Jamie. They’re not coming back. They were drunk, is all it was. They’re just bad losers.’

‘How come?’

‘Just trust me.’

‘But what about Liam?’

‘Liam won’t touch you. Not any more.’

Jamie looked at him with wide and faithful eyes.

‘What did you do?’

Sam’s sadness was a physical pain. He wanted to rush over and bury his head in Jamie’s hair, to savour the last remnants of little-boy about him.

‘Never you mind,’ he said.

‘Tell me.’

Sam tapped his nose with a forefinger.

‘Mel,’ said Jamie. ‘What did he do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mel. ‘Don’t bother asking me.’

‘Tell me,’ said Jamie.

But nobody would.

Eventually, Jamie made them all a cup of tea and they sat together at the breakfast bar to drink it. Their excited, relieved conversation died away and they stared into their mugs.

Sam could tell that Mel wanted to talk. He knew she wanted to tell him that it was far from over. Dave Hooper wouldn’t be back that night, or the next. But if he chose to, he could make their lives impossible.

Mel had seen it done to others. She’d even joined in jokes about it, down the Cat and Fiddle, when the Hoopers took it upon themselves to drive an incoming Romany family from the estate. The family was multigenerational and large, and had something of a history. They were what the council described as ‘difficult to house’.

At the time it had seemed just and hilarious that the Hoopers did what the Council and the police couldn’t do, and protected the community from that family of inbreeds and thieves.

Eventually, Jamie fell asleep on the sofa. Mel draped her coat over him. By then, she and Sam had relaxed. They sprawled in exhausted torpor.

There was a lot to say, but neither seemed capable of saying it. They just stared, glassy-eyed, at late-night crap on the TV. Each was waiting, without telling the other, for the telephone to ring.

Shortly before 4 a.m., they roused Jamie just enough to get him up the stairs and they slouched in his wake to their respective beds.

When they woke, it was Sunday. Saturday night might have happened long ago, to different people.

Sam woke refreshed and, before showering or cleaning his teeth, he pulled on a pair of tracksuit trousers and went to get the papers. It was a bright, crisp morning and he decided to walk to the Merrydown arcade. And that’s why he didn’t notice until he got home that, during the night, somebody had stolen his car.

Eventually, he managed to get inside. But he was still too apoplectic to speak. The house smelt of frying bacon and fresh cigarette smoke. The blinds in the kitchen were still lowered, but Mel had opened the windows behind them, letting in the fresh air. The wooden edge of the blinds clattered on the sun-fluorescent windowsill.

Sam thought he was having a heart attack.

Mel asked him what was wrong.

Wheezing, he pounded on his chest.

‘Fuckers,’ he said.

Mel’s eyebrows drew in. She opened the door and peered out. Then she went outside and examined the garden, the hedge, the gate. She went back to the house, crossing her arms because it wasn’t as warm as it looked. She stared at the house. Then she tilted her head and stared at it again. Finally, arms still crossed, she shrugged and came back inside.

She stood in the hallway, the door open behind her, and said, ‘What?’

Logically, Sam couldn’t be angry with her.

He said, ‘
They took my fucking car.
’

Mel went outside again.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ said Sam. ‘“Oh yeah”?’

Mel closed the door.

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that funny?’

‘No, it’s not fucking
funny
.’

Jamie had been sleeping late. Fuddled and bed-headed, he came downstairs to see what was happening.

He said, ‘What’s going on?’

‘They took the car,’ said Sam wearily.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Jamie.

Mel and Sam looked at him.

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Sam. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘You do it all the time.’

‘Yeah, well. I’m an adult.’

‘So?’

Even in more felicitous circumstances, Sam knew this question was unanswerable.

So he said, ‘Can we just concentrate on the matter at hand, please?’

Barefoot in pyjama trousers, Jamie opened the door.

‘What are you doing?’ said Sam.

‘Looking.’

‘Looking at what? The car’s not there.’

Jamie stuck his tongue into his lower lip.

‘Duh,’ he said. ‘Obviously, Einstein.’

‘Then what are you looking
at
?’

Jamie closed the door.

‘Just checking.’

Sam could almost hear the arteries popping in his head.

‘Just checking
what
?’

Jamie gave him a mystified look.

‘Well,
I
don’t know, do I?’

Sam turned to Mel for support and found none.

She said, ‘It’s no good shouting at Jamie. He didn’t nick your bloody car.’

‘I’m not shouting.’

‘I think you’ll find you are.’

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Who can blame me?’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Mel. ‘Stop being such a drama queen. You got off lightly.’

‘Lightly how, exactly?’

‘I don’t know. They could’ve put bricks through the windows. They could’ve torched the place. Don’t think they’re not capable of that. All they were doing was giving you the finger. Blowing you a raspberry. Let them get on with it. Get a new car.’

‘I just got
that
one!’

‘Sam, it’s only a car. You don’t even
like
cars. You’d rather get the bus so you can have a pint on the way home.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Then what is?’

He kicked the skirting board and mumbled something outraged and defeated.

‘Look,’ said Mel, ‘it was a piece of shit. You’d’ve had to replace it by Christmas, anyway. If it lasted that long.’

‘It’s a good car!’

‘It’s a pig. Call the police, get it registered as a crime, claim the insurance. The police are too busy to go looking for it. They know, and you know and I know, it’s burnt out round the back of Farmer Hazel’s fields somewhere. So make a claim and put the money towards a better car. And that’s that. All over. Nobody’s hurt and everyone’s happy.’

‘Dad,’ said Jamie.

‘What?’

‘Can we get a Chrysler PT Cruiser?’

Mel put her head on one side.

‘Is that the one that looks like a taxi?’

‘Whatever,’ said Jamie. ‘Dad,’ he said. ‘Can we?’

‘We’ll see,’ said Sam, meaning no.

‘Yeah,’ said Jamie, ‘but
can
we?’

‘We’ll see,’ said Sam, still meaning no.

‘Cool,’ said Jamie, and raced upstairs on the balls of his bare feet.

Disconsolate, Sam followed Mel into the kitchen. He leant on the worktop and took a can of Coke from the thin blue carrier bag he was still carrying. He opened it and took a series of long swigs.

Mel put the bacon back on the heat. Next to her was a plate stacked with pre-buttered white bread. With her back to him, she said, ‘Buy him the car.’

Sam hissed urgently in her direction.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Be quiet. He might hear you.’

‘I don’t care if he does. Buy him the car.’

‘Mel, those things cost fifteen grand without extras. I haven’t got fifteen grand to throw round on a fucking Batmobile.’

‘Yes, you have.’

This, the second unanswerable statement of the morning.

Huffily, he said, ‘You don’t buy your son’s love.’

‘Whatever,’ said Mel. She passed over a small plate on which there weebled three perfect tomatoes. She asked him to slice them. She made sure he used a serrated knife in the way their mother had taught them, a few miles away and many years before.

Sam took his sandwich to the breakfast bar and called the police. The officer he spoke to didn’t sound particularly alarmed by this malfeasance. He told Sam they’d send some officers round.

Sam asked him, ‘When, exactly?’

He was told, with some emphasis: ‘As soon as possible.’

They came round late in the evening and stayed for about six minutes.

Sam was frustrated that nobody seemed to care about his car and he let the police officers know it. They stared at him impassively. In the heat of anger, Sam told them he knew the thieves. Mel shot him a warning glance. But the police officers still weren’t interested. One of them said, ‘And do you have any evidence to that effect?’

‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘A stolen car.’

A slow, weary blink.

‘Did you see the car being stolen—in which case we’ll have to take an immediate statement? Or did you perhaps take some photographs? Or better still, did you video the thief as he went about his business?’

The officer’s frosty, bored eyes told him that of course he hadn’t, because he was an idiot. The police officer’s frosty, bored eyes had seen a lot, and they would forget Sam Greene and his stupidity the minute the door closed behind them.

On a matter of abstract principle, Mel had no love for the police force. But it was she, apologetically, who showed them out.

Sam sat on the sofa, quietly wrathful. He decided that, to prove a point, he would buy the Chrysler. He wasn’t altogether sure what point he was making. Nor was he sure to whom he was making it. But the decision provided him with immediate, grim satisfaction, as at an unpleasant job well done, and he went to bed strangely content.

To maintain the impulse, he used the Internet to locate the nearest showroom the next morning and, during his lunch-hour, he paid it a visit. He wandered round with his arms clasped regally at the small of his back.

Despite giving every pink-eyed impression that he was of Anglo-Saxon stock, the youthful salesman had the perfect post-colonial name of Monty Cashmiri. Sam liked Monty for his cordial desperation to close a sale, even at lunchtime on a Monday.

He told Monty what he was looking for and Monty led him to a Chrysler PT Cruiser that stood resplendent on a low, white plinth. Monty caressed its shining Batmobile curves and confided in Sam that he was able to offer him preferential finance. Sam was interested. He sat at a pale wood desk opposite Monty, while Monty tapped on a filthy keyboard that seemed at odds with the otherwise gleaming surroundings.

Perhaps stupidly, Sam wished he’d worn better shoes and trousers.

During that moment, looking down at his unsatisfactory footwear, it occurred to him that he was actually going to buy this car, in part because he liked Monty and didn’t want to disappoint him. He accepted the proffered sheaf of A4 print-outs that detailed the various terms offered, and stuffed them in the teacher’s briefcase with the broken clasp.

He thanked Monty. Monty looked moist-eyed and hopeful.

Sam paused at the sliding glass door by the glass showroom walls and turned to wave a cheery goodbye. Then he wandered through the ranked muzzles of second-hand cars in the forecourt, waxed and polished and each priced as a once-in-a-lifetime deal. At the bus stop, he unfolded his newspaper and fought with the wind to be permitted to read it.

The rubbery imprint of a trainer sole was clearly visible just below the lock on the front door of the house on Balaarat Street. Last night, he’d considered presenting it to the police as corroborating evidence. But then the police would ask him why a car-thief should try to kick down his front door. So he decided against it.

Passing it now, he realized the perfect, unsmeared imprint would be there for ever. Neither he nor Jamie—and still less Mel—would ever get round to cleaning it off. This thought filled him with a strange, summery contentment. Somehow, the slight damage had familiarized the house. He all but patted the doorframe as he entered.

In the front room he found Anna, who he’d met in the Cat and Fiddle. Her legs were crossed, one elbow rested on her knee. In her hand was a cigarette. Mid-laughter, she and Mel looked up and paused when he entered. He got the impression he was being talked about.

He said hello to Anna and took a cigarette from Mel’s pack. He sat on the floor with his back to the sofa.

He said, ‘Where’s Jamie?’

‘Out,’ said Mel.

‘Who with?’

‘Stuart.’

She didn’t add
of course,
because she didn’t need to.

Mel went to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. It seemed obvious that she wanted Sam to flirt with Anna, but he didn’t know how. While Mel was gone, he asked Anna a few carefully weighted questions. She worked for an insurance company down town. It was boring, but it was all right. She was about to tell him how she’d met Mel—her eyes had narrowed to crinkles at the edge and she was smiling as at some memory she had yet to articulate—when Mel came back in.