Crusher (15 page)

I stumbled on the final words, and saw the sad sympathetic smiles of the actors in the front row. Did they think I was filled with emotion about losing my dad? Or did they know I was faking it, and the only sorrow I’d felt at that moment was for myself? I folded away the printout I had never glanced at, stepped away from the lectern and made my way back to my seat in the front row, aware of the squeaking of my scuffed black shoes on the tiled floor.

The young Polish priest, Father Januszek, stepped forward. He had a strange 1970s haircut that made his ears stick out and apple cheeks like a kid in a yogurt advert, but at least he didn’t spout theatrical clichés about all the world being a stage or boom out fairy stories about Jesus receiving Dad in heaven. He talked about Dad’s career, and the parts he had played, and the reviews he had got when he first started out, and managed to make it sound like he’d been the chairman of Dad’s fan club. Of course I had supplied him with all the details, from an old CV I’d found among Dad’s files on AnyDocs.

“In later years,” Father Januszek was saying, “Noel had started to explore new aspects of his talent through writing. Sadly, he was taken from us before his project could come to fruition, a project we would all like to have seen.” He sounded so full of regret for a moment even I was convinced, until I remembered that a few days ago Father Januszek had never heard of my dad. All the same, when he ended his address with a cheesy little joke about Dad taking his last bow before the final curtain, I found it in my heart to forgive him. The priest caught my eye and invited me back up front for the final part of the ceremony.

Dad’s favourite band had been U2. I’d grown up with their distorted and layered guitars reverberating through the house, while Dad had sung along tunelessly. When I’d finally grown sick of the pious droning I’d made him wear headphones, but he still sang along tunelessly. Now as their guitars echoed, faint and plaintive, from the beamed chapel ceiling I knew it was time to let him go.

I pressed a single button on a beech wood box mounted on a plinth. With a discreet hum the short red curtains in the rear wall parted, and the coffin jerked into motion, rolling slowly backwards through the gap to where everyone knew the flames of the furnace waited, licking. The curtains closed again and
the music faded. Father Januszek called down a bland, non-denominational blessing upon all present and pronounced the ceremony over.

The congregation sighed and shifted in their seats. The actors leaned over to each other and exchanged reviews, while the neighbours checked their watches, wondering if they really needed to stay and express their condolences. I remembered a motto from one of Dad’s threadbare showbiz anecdotes: “As long as the audience outnumbers the performers, you have a show,” he’d told me. If Dad and the priest and I were the cast, then a crowd this big was definitely a success.

A latecomer had slipped in and was sitting at the back, a slim woman all in black, big shades covering most of her upper face, her hair drawn up under a beret. Elsa Kendrick, I thought, and my gaze flicked to Amobi, who was at the other end of the pew from her. He saw me looking and nodded solemnly, then rose and headed towards the pale sunlight spilling through the chapel doors, without even a glance towards Elsa. That was Elsa, wasn’t it?

“Finn, that was a lovely ceremony. Your dad would have been proud.” A stocky man in his forties had taken my hand and was gripping it firmly. His face was vaguely familiar, but that’s the trouble with actors—you know you’ve seen them in your living room, but were they really there or only on the telly?

“Sorry—Bill Winchester, I was in
Henby General
with your dad for a while, back in the 1990s, or possibly the 1890s …”

There were lots more conversations like that, as Dad’s old mates introduced themselves and congratulated me—anyone would think I’d got married—and recited the bit of their CV that overlapped with Dad’s. No one asked what exactly had happened to him, of course, not to my face. That conversation would be reserved for later, vague speculative gossip exchanged in hushed tones over port and brandy in the pub. I shook hands and thanked people for coming and gave out the directions to the Weaver’s Arms so often I wished they’d been printed on the order of service with the hymns, all the time working my way towards the doors to catch Elsa Kendrick. But before I could get to her Jerry and Trudy stepped forward from their pew, blushing and embarrassed. Trudy babbled something about being so sorry, and Jerry nodded, and I thanked them for coming and really meant it. But by the time they moved off—Andy was probably docking their pay for the hours they missed—Elsa had vanished, if it had been Elsa. Maybe it was another of Dad’s old showbiz friends. She’d certainly looked familiar.

I hurried out into the bright, damp air and looked
around, but saw only a few knots of mourners lighting up cigarettes in the shade of the gloomy evergreens that lined the drive to the crematorium. A voice called after me from the chapel doors, the thin high voice of a woman too old to catch up.

“Finn? Finn …” So many strangers calling me by name. It was a brief sort of fame, I thought. Dad had longed for that, but I wasn’t so keen on it.

I thought this woman was another of Dad’s old acting cronies, but as she approached I noticed she was much older than most of them, with silver hair cut in a smart bob, some serious jewellery on her fingers and an old-fashioned fur stole that looked new and very expensive. Too well-off for an actor, I thought—if she’d made that much money from acting I’d probably have known her face. She was about eighty, maybe, though she wore a lot of make-up, impeccably applied, and her eyes had the mischievous sparkle of a woman far younger.

“Dorothy,” she said, “Dorothy Rousseau.” Reaching forward she grasped my shoulders and I leaned down to let her kiss me on both cheeks. “Noel never even mentioned me, did he? Ungrateful cad.” She squeezed my upper arms with her bony fingers. “My God, you’re built like Charles Atlas.” She stood back and blatantly
assessed me like a butcher judging a side of beef. “Not bad-looking, either. Did your father ever get you to do any modelling?”

“He bought me an Airfix kit for Christmas once.”

She stared at me for a moment, then hooted with laughter and clapped her hands. I liked her laugh; it had a girl’s giggle in it.

“God, you’re so like him. I was Noel’s agent, years ago, when he first started out. We argued, of course—he was such a prima donna, God! But he was a lovely man, and I was always fond of him, and so very sorry to hear about what happened.”

“Thank you, Dorothy.”

“And you were marvellous up there, darling—no, really, I mean it. And what a great turnout!”

“Yeah … I’m not actually sure how all these people heard about it.”

“Oh, that was my doing, dear, sorry. I may have retired, but I still have the connections, and as soon as I heard the news I put the word around. Nothing worse than a funeral where nobody turns up to drink your booze and blacken your name with disgusting stories. They’re not just here for the beer either—this lot really did love your dad, though no one even knew where he’d been for the last few years. And he could be such a pain in the backside, he was his own worst enemy … Oh
God, do you hate me for saying that?” She clutched my arm as if for reassurance. I wasn’t surprised Dorothy had become an agent—she was way too over-the-top to be an actor. “There are plenty more who would have been here if it wasn’t for the ridiculously short notice,” she went on. I would have apologized for that, but she wasn’t letting me get a word in edgeways. “Charles Egerton, for one. He always had a bit of a hard spot for your dad, if you know what I mean.”

“Charles Egerton?”

“Oh God, I keep forgetting how young you are. And how old I am. Charles Egerton, he was in all those old Ealing Jeeves and Wooster films, darling, playing Jeeves. Of course he’s getting on a bit now, retired to his castle in Spain years ago. Practically a recluse. He was so fond of your father, you could have had your very own gay grandad.”

“I think I went there once. His castle in Spain.” I’d almost forgotten, it was so long ago. A big tumbledown house surrounded by mountains … walking in the woods with Mum and Dad. The smell of hot earth and rosemary. Mum and Dad and me splashing in the pool together—I must have been … six? And a tanned old man with a long white beard and a cackling laugh I found a bit scary.

“Anyway, I really mustn’t hog you, Finn darling, you
have guests to attend to.” I bent down and she kissed me again, or kissed the air around me, chattering all the while. “I can’t come to the pub, I’m afraid, I’m bad enough sober. I just have time to talk to your mother. Where has she gone?”

“My … sorry?”

“That was Lesley at the back of the church, wasn’t it? In the shades and the beret? Such a shame about her and your dad, but I’m glad she came to the service, life’s too short. Do you know where she’s staying?”

“My mother hasn’t come,” I said. “That was someone else.”

“Oh.” She blinked and looked puzzled, then rolled her eyes like a dotty old aunt. “I am hopeless. Just ignore me. Alzheimer’s probably. Billy, you creep—!”

She rushed off to embrace Dad’s old mate from the hospital soap, and left me standing there with my head spinning.

That couldn’t have been my mother … could it?

Christ, can actors drink. The pub had roped off the back of the lounge with its own little bit of bar, and now that corner at least was roaring like it was Saturday night rather than Monday afternoon, even with only a dozen or so mourners. But they weren’t exactly mourning, and the actors were waving their arms about so much as
they played the other characters in the stories they were telling, it felt like the room was packed. They were all tales about my dad, a lot of which I hadn’t heard before, plus a few I had, but with newly added scabrous detail. The beer and the shorts and the port and brandy gushed like an oil strike, and McGovern’s bounty behind the bar was burned up in less than half an hour. Without even pausing in his anecdote Bill Winchester slid his credit card along the counter and told the barman to keep it coming. Spot the actor with the steady job.

I sipped my drink slowly, trying to keep sober. Jack and Phil and Sunil kept buying me pints but I passed them over to the thesps, who sank them no questions asked. I wanted to keep my head clear, partly to remember all these tales from when my dad actually had a career, but also to think about my conversation with Dorothy Rousseau.

Eventually I managed to catch Bill Winchester having a whiz in the gents,’ a bleach-scented sanctuary from the racket and hooting next door.

“It’s a shame Dorothy Rousseau couldn’t come to the wake,” I said. “I bet she had a few stories about my dad.”

“Damn right,” said Winchester. He wasn’t slurring his words yet, but he was staring carefully at his knob in case it went astray and pissed all over his shoes.
“Dorothy has an infinite supply of the very finest dirt on the biggest names in British showbiz. Who was on coke when they met the Queen, who gave who a hand job backstage of some seventies West End musical that closed after three nights … That’s why everyone says they love her—they’re fucking terrified of her.”

“Has she ever forgotten a face?”

“Dorothy? Oh no. Dotty by name, mind like a stainless-steel rat trap.” That’s what I’d been afraid of. It meant the woman in black really was my mother.

The world toppled slowly off its axis and rolled about inside my skull like a marble in a pudding bowl.
My mother
. I’d been staring right at her, and I hadn’t even known. Why hadn’t she come over and said something? Was she ashamed of herself, or ashamed of me?
You know why, and so does she
. Because I would have told her to piss off back to America. I’d had the whole conversation mapped out in my head since I was twelve years old.

I’d have another chance, I guessed. She’d pop up again, if only to reassure herself I wasn’t a total fuck-up because of what she did.
Hate to disappoint you, Mum, but I am
. Lousy timing on her part, I thought, showing up when Dad was dead. He might have taken her back. I never would.

Dad’s ashes were rattling around in a bland grey
vase inside a cardboard box under my chair in the pub. They were still there when I came back from the bogs, which surprised me, because the locals from the Griffin estate would nick anything, and I’d half-expected to be searching for Dad in every car boot sale in West London for the next few weeks. But of course back here in his little box he was surrounded by lots of drunken theatrical buddies, and the locals were probably afraid to gate-crash in case they got snogged by some old queen, or worse still had some Shakespeare recited at them.

A big platter of sandwiches was going round, watery ham and tragic lettuce between fat slices of white sliced loaf. The Weaver’s kitchen wasn’t going to worry Chris Eccles any time soon, but actors don’t get to eat much, and alcohol makes everything taste better. The platter was bare before it got halfway round the room.

If that had been my mother sitting at the back, where was Elsa Kendrick? If she and Dad had been a couple, why hadn’t she come to the service? Had something happened to her? I checked my phone; it was later than I’d thought, and I wouldn’t have time to change out of Dad’s suit. Maybe that was for the best—it would serve as set dressing. I’d just have to be careful not to get blood on it, particularly my own.

I picked Dad up off the floor—it wasn’t the first
time—and headed for the door. I had all sorts of excuses prepared for leaving while I could still walk, but nobody even noticed me slip out into the dusk.

Canal Market Road ran parallel to the canal, but it didn’t lead to a market, and hadn’t for about a hundred years. Nowadays it petered out at a bus garage. The road had once been a sort of business park, and was lined with crumbling industrial units, a few of them with the shabby remnants of Art Deco detailing, if you cared about that sort of thing. Today most of the businesses were struggling to survive, like weeds sprouting through the cracks in a concrete car park just in time for a hard frost. I’d chosen a unit about three-quarters of the way up, until recently the premises of a firm that made flat-packed cardboard boxes. Appropriately, it had folded. There were still a few lights burning in the deserted building. Whoever had locked up for the last time clearly didn’t give a toss about the electricity bill—it was no longer their problem. A fresh “To Let” sign had been nailed to the building’s facade, high up. It didn’t help the impression I was trying to create, but on the other hand there were so many “To Let” and “For Sale” signs around the eye stopped seeing them.