Birthday (19 page)

He recalled talking about it with Arthur, who said: ‘She should have left him at the beginning. He'd have been just as happy, though the few times I saw him he was a miserable bastard.'

‘You wouldn't leave me if I was crippled like that, would you?' Avril said lightly.

‘No, love, I'd stand by you to the end.'

‘Well, then,' she said, ‘how could Jenny leave him?'

‘But she didn't even love him.'

‘How do you know? She must have done.'

‘Not by then,' Arthur insisted. ‘Not with a real love. He'd have been just as unhappy with lots of young nurses looking after him.'

‘That's where I'd put you,' she laughed, ‘if you had an accident. You'd like it a lot better than being at home with me.'

Arthur kissed her. ‘As long as you came to see me every day.'

‘I'd do that,' she said, ‘but I'd have to make my toy boy wait outside, wouldn't I?'

Jenny came back with his cup of tea. ‘What are you going to do for the rest of the day?' he asked.

‘I expect I'll do some knitting. Then read a bit. Cook myself some dinner. I like my days.'

She could keep them. Time to run. The tea scalded his throat because he couldn't get it down fast enough. There had to be more in life than talking to someone with no common bridge.

She claimed a kiss at the door, as if by right, which he took as valid so as to get away more quickly. The day palled as he drove into town via the long south wall of Wollaton Park, passed the White Hart where his grandfather had taken his beer as a farrier, over Abbey Bridge and onto the boulevard by the Grove Hotel at whose bar his mother and her second husband used to drink, every glum place getting a good wash from the rain.

He parked by the Castle, which Arthur had always wanted to blow up. It would be a shame to destroy the works of art, but seeing it ascend into the sky even appealed to him at the moment. From the town centre he went into the Lace Market, wanting to walk his feet bloody and have them match how he felt, doubling back among the gothico-elegant warehouses and silent factories on Broadway (mentioned in Pevsner) to a pub on Bridlesmith Gate, where he sat in a sweat and had two pints of lager.

He browsed in Dillons and bought a street map he didn't need, then had a big tasteless five quid lunch in a tastelessly decorated open plan pub. The vast space of Slab Square wasn't where he wanted to be, either, but he walked around it twice, bought a magazine at the top of Birdcage Walk and threw it away at the bottom, then did an almost running march back to the car.

He drove to Wollaton Park, couldn't be bothered to walk around the lake, stayed in the car and tried the
Guardian
crossword, rain sprinkling the windscreen, cigar smoke steaming up the inside and blocking visibility beyond, just as he wanted it, voices and engines blurred in the drizzle, thinking maybe the Hall would vanish as well, up the spout with everything, didn't know what he was doing here, if it weren't for Arthur and Avril (and Derek and Eileen) he'd slide down the M1 back to his snug hole in Highgate. He fell asleep, then woke up and set off for Arthur's.

Basford Crossing looming up, flick the place, why had he come this way, with so many other routes? Remembered the time when they were going to Jenny's party in Arthur's car, Avril done with her chemotherapy and all of them optimistic about her chances.

Two traffic islands, and on the beam to get through there was a queue and he wondered why, thinking it must be the rush hour, if ever there was one, or maybe the traffic lights were broken, glued on red. The car in front moved, and he kept close, as if to unnerve the bloke, then he shunted forward, and on the turn saw the gates of the crossing closed, lights on red.

A train through Basford Crossing? Electric, no smoke, but a train nevertheless, and not a ghost train because it came in a hurry, electric invisible power rushing it between open gates, no kids to howl, but where was it going, and what for?

The gates swung inwards, lights flicked to amber and then green, and he was beyond before red came back. A train using Basford Crossing was a sign of hope, that things would get better for everybody, regenerate the area. Up the hill and over the top, on his way to the refuge of Arthur's, he stuck two fingers out of the open window, and shot down the road at fifty.

TWELVE

The snout of Brian's car pointed up the road, houses at the top, and above them a painting of clouds that brought the idea of freedom to mind, an aching to be off, knowing that one day he would have to go through the Tunnel and, after a while of wandering in France, set the compass for any other place culled out of the atlas.

Arthur walked across the pavement. ‘I saw you coming up the road. I've just got back from the hospital. I took Avril at four o'clock, and they kept her in. As soon as the doctor saw her this morning he got the hospital on his mobile and told them to send an ambulance. I sat with her in the ward till she went to sleep holding my hand. They doped her up to the eyeballs. I got back a few minutes ago, so you're just in time.' In the kitchen he pressed the kettle on. ‘It's the best place for her. She wasn't keeping anything in her stomach. There's nothing else I can do.'

‘I only wish I could help.'

He set down two mugs of tea, a shade of his old self returning: ‘I was surprised to see you back so early. I said to Avril, “He's giving her the one-eyed spitting cobra. He'll start living with her, and stay in Nottingham like the rest of us.” She was being tucked up by then, and burst out laughing. But I'll bet Jenny would be delighted, if you did.'

‘We sat around, and talked, just nattered like old friends.'

‘You won't tell me anything. I've got you weighed up. I know everything about you and always will. Want more tea?'

‘I'll never stop pissing.'

‘The place is only next to your bedroom door.'

‘Pour me one. If I thought I'd got myself weighed up I'd be dead.'

‘I don't know about that. If you've got yourself weighed up you're always spot on when it comes to weighing somebody else up.'

Such self-assurance was to be avoided, though his brothers only put on a simplicity of outlook to further their common humour. Upstairs, he looked along the shelves Arthur had carpentered, the top row tight with novels, others packed with travel and adventure books, atlases and maps, small encyclopaedias, date books and dictionaries found at car boot sales or Oxfam shops.

On the walls were framed pictures of Clifton Grove and Wollaton Hall and an antique map of the county he couldn't tell whether genuine or not. An enlarged photograph of their mother and her second husband Tom included Avril and Eileen, Derek and Arthur and himself, taken in a pub twenty years ago, the mother not dead nor Avril dying, pints on the table and cigars half smoked, shorts and cigarettes for the women.

Arthur's suits hung in the built-in wardrobe, shirts and underwear, ties and handkerchiefs folded and stacked in a chest of drawers. A chess set was laid on a table by the bed, a game Avril had learned from her father, and schooled Arthur in. Brian once found them in mid-match, each striving to avoid losing, or hoping for checkmate. He wondered whether Arthur would look at the board after Avril was dead, though his shirts would be as neatly folded in the drawers.

The central heating dulled him, so he hung his jacket over a chair and lay on the bed, recalling how he had a long time ago tried to become a novelist, but every proud-arsed bullshitting bowler-hatted toffee-nosed publisher with his rolled umbrella, idly indulging in his parasitical occupation for a so-called gentleman, had turned lily-white thumbs down on everything he wrote, Soviet Bloomsbury's censorship wanting none of him.

His furnished attic room had been at 13 Cockroach Villas near St Pancras Station, as if ever ready, at such failures, to lug his suitcase down the street and get on the Puffing Billy back to where he came from. Unable to look at another page of scribble one day, he humped a television set – black and white – back to his room from a stall in Camden Town. After using his know-how to still the ever rolling screen it was obvious, on seeing the staid crap displayed, that funny scenes from his pen would have a better chance of making money than novels nobody wanted.

The truth was, he thought, using the sink instead of walking down four flights of stairs, that talent couldn't be talent if it took so long to bring success, while the starvo humour of childhood and youth pattering in his brainbox for much of the day and night would make good entertainment on the goggle-box. To struggle at novel-writing, when cascades of money waited to overfill his pockets, hardly bore consideration.

In the sixties he'd had the good luck to meet Gordon Pike in a pub near the station.
The
Gordon Pike. The Great Gordon Pike. Gordon-fucking-Pike, mate. Well, nobody remembered him now, but why should they? Writers for television come and go, and so would he, which was why he thought it better to eat now and die later.

Where the money was, he had to be, and when fate took the upper hand he was only too willing to dig a fur-lined grave and live with good wine, cigars and fifty quid meals till he popped his clogs. No one but a wool-head would do otherwise. Largeness of spirit meant letting fate take care of you, and only self-indulgence would give the best out of life. Seeing a rung on the golden ladder, he swung on and held tight, coming from too far away to let anyone push him off.

Gordon Pike hadn't had much schooling, the same for me, Brian said. Even dyslexics get into university these days, but then it was different, or maybe not so much, but a maverick had a chance. Pike, five years older, an air gunner in the war, had written concert party sketches to entertain every erk and bod at the Much Bindings and Little Wedlocks and Upper Mayhems he had flown from on his two tours of ops. Connections made got him into radio, and then writing for the box.

He made mattresses of money, but seemed about to descend into the melancholics' plughole when Brian met him at the bar, unwilling to get the train to his wife and four kids in St Albans after dragging his feet (in elastic sided boots) from the bed of a girlfriend on Marchmont Street. Pike sobbed on about the hard days of his childhood, not fashionable to do so, but Brian outlined, over the third pint, something of his underprivileged infancy.

Pike, having met a man who understood, went up manic by manic steps to thinking life might be worth going on with after all, and gave Brian his card, telling him to phone if he wanted advice about his scripts.

Brian's new acquaintance – the inert Pike, no less – spewed his way across St Pancras booking hall, but he got him into a train, then phoned the wife to say (no news to her) that hardworking dedicated Gordon would be needing assistance at the other end, and that she ought to be there, hoping she wouldn't turn on the big guns of justifiable invective when the poor misunderstood genius opened his bloodshot eyes in the morning and shot his fist into her long suffering face.

Brian's work was taken, sketches and short plays which, Pike said, were plugged into the hearts and minds (insofar as they had them) of the kind of people which those who ran the television business hadn't a fart's chance in a whirlwind of meeting, though they saw good money when they sniffed it. The light of magnanimity in Pike's eyes betrayed pride at being able to overcome his loathing of everyone in the world just this once. For Brian it was enough, because Pike was God, and he learned from him, then forgot all he had learned, and became himself, as far as a self could be found.

Material came with nothing like the effort of writing a novel. Television up to then had shown family entertainment of the drabbest kind, while as the sixties picked up steam you could write about the lowest of the low provided the decibel meters showed a high enough score of idiot laughter.

He moved by taxi from his room in Cockroach Villas to a flat in Highgate and then, able to believe his wealth wouldn't melt after waking from a good dream turning bad, a removal van took his accumulating chattels to a property in Chelsea. After waiting till Gordon Pike had conveniently killed himself, he sold his abilities to a company paying higher fees.

If he knew that the sixties were different from any other time it was only because he had read it in the newspapers, unable to believe any particular decade wasn't similar to those already lived. He was behind the time, detached from it, observing, unwilling to use drugs at parties where hooks could be hung on the stench of marijuana smoked by those of all ages. A certain amount of alcohol and a good cigar was enough for him.

Too old to show interest in those bearded charlatans who toned down their posh school accents to a proletarian mumble, he recalled how so many people claimed to have an engine-driver as a grandfather (instead of being descended from an Irish grandmother) that the country must at one time have been chock-a-block with puffing billies going around in circles.

No utopian nursery themes impressed him, though he wasn't so daft as not to notice any phenomena which might be useful in his trade. As the decade went on, better and better contracts came his way, as if being in opposition to the times made it easier to exploit his sense of humour.

During his marriage to Jane she showed him a barely comprehensible review in a weekly paper of a so-called play at the Roundhouse, a redundant engine shed in Chalk Farm made into a theatre. A troupe of actors in black tracksuits scrambled up and down a monkey climber in semi-darkness for over two hours, screaming insults at the audience, so that he regretted not having a few stones to hurl back. After the show he heard a man and his wife say they'd never enjoyed themselves so much.

His scorn brought on a quarrel that marriage could hardly sustain; either the actors' intention had succeeded, or he used the event to undo a relationship there was no further use for. The beginning of the end, they lost their sense of irony, and humour turned into malice.