England and Other Stories (11 page)

But now I remembered Mercer saying ‘tragic’ to Ronnie’s wife.

‘Yes it has a meaning,’ Mick says. He takes a breath. I thought: Here we go. He could see me drumming my fingers.

He started wearing the half-rims a couple of months ago. Because of them everyone began calling him ‘Prof’. But I think the glasses only brought out something already there. It was like his face had been waiting for the glasses to complete it. Mick himself had been waiting. Mick Hammond, the man who likes to let you know he thinks.

‘It has a meaning . . .’

He was all shy at first about wearing them, but now he fancies himself in them, he likes the business of looking over the top of them. And I quite like Mick in his reading glasses. Because they make him look serious, and that makes me want to laugh.

‘It has a meaning . . .’

I could see he really was doing some thinking now, but he was also in a bit of a fix. I thought: You started this, Micky mate.

But mainly I thought: I’m gasping. And I thought: He’s only dawdling over his tea because he’s trying to quit the fags. He doesn’t want to cross the yard with me and slip out the gate to what we used to call Death Row. Till Ronnie Meadows died.

Mick’s a mate, but this whole giving-up thing’s a bastard. It doesn’t seem right for Mick to stop me nipping off for a drag. But it doesn’t seem right for me to nip off anyway without Mick. Even if he’s not going to smoke himself, he should come outside with me and stand beside me while I do. But that’s daft too.

‘If . . .’ he says, ‘if . . . a famous mountaineer dies while trying to climb a new way up the north face of the Eiger, the papers would call that tragic, but it wouldn’t be.’

That seems a long way from Macintyre’s warehouse, but I let it go. I can see Mick is getting all important with himself. I thought: Stay calm.

‘What would it be?’

‘It would be. . . well, heroic maybe.’

‘Or mad,’ I say.

‘No, no, it would be the right sort of death for a mountaineer, wouldn’t it? It would be how a mountaineer might even
want
to die.’

I don’t say, ‘Who
wants
to die?’ And I don’t say, ‘Why are we talking about mountaineering?’

‘So?’ I say.

He shifts the half-rims on his nose a little, lifts them up with one finger, lets them drop again. Any moment now he’ll take them off and wipe them. He didn’t just get new glasses, he got a whole new act, a whole new bloody Mick Hammond, or the one that had only been waiting.

Maybe because of Mick and his glasses, I thought: Tragedy’s about acting too. It’s about stuff that happens on stage. Shakespeare and stuff. That’s the thing about it. It’s not real life. And Mercer can’t have been thinking that Ronnie Meadows dropping off his fork-lift was—well, like
Hamlet
.

Micky Hamlet, I thought. Mickey Mouse.

‘If, on the other hand . . .’ he says. I thought: Here we go.

‘. . . if a famous mountaineer dies not on the north face of the Eiger, but climbing up some easy-peasy little mountain in, I don’t know, the Lake District, then that’s tragic.’

I didn’t know what to say to this. Mick must have done some thinking, I’ll give him that, to come up with this. I sort of got what he was getting at, but then again I didn’t, I didn’t at all.

I thought: I never knew Mick had a secret hankering to be a mountaineer. And I thought: We’re nowhere near the Lake District, Micky, we’re in Stevenage.

So I said, ‘Why?’

Which is always the killer question. When I said it I couldn’t help thinking of when Gavin, our first, started up with his ‘Why? Why? Why?’. It often sounded more like ‘Wha! Wha! Wha!’ but, God, he knew it was the killer question.

Gavin’s nearly eighteen now.

‘Well, don’t you see?’ Mick says. ‘It’s got something about it. It’s not how a mountaineer would want to die, or should die. It’s—’

‘Just stupid,’ I say.

‘Tragic,’ he says.

Mick Hammond’s totally different from me. But, yes, he’s my mate, has been for years. Search me.

‘If you say so, Mick.’

And those glasses sometimes make Mick look like a granddad, twice my age, though there’s only a year in it.

I didn’t say, ‘If you say so, Prof.’ I thought: How did we get to this? The newspaper. Ronnie Meadows. The Lake District. But it was the newspaper first. I thought: I’m gasping.

And then I thought: If I get up and leave Mick here and go out across the yard to the gate to have a smoke and if I keel over while I’m doing it, would that be tragic? Smoking kills. It says so on the packet. Or would it be more tragic if Mick comes with me, is standing right beside me when it happens, and if he’s smoking too? Or if he isn’t, because he’s trying to give up and he’s just keeping me company?

Or would it be more tragic still if I go and have a smoke all by myself and feel all the better for it and meanwhile Mick here slumps forward and croaks. Slumps forward, with his tea unfinished, onto his newspaper with the word tragic dotted all over it.

‘If you say so,’ I say.

Mick thinks quitting smoking is wise. It goes with the glasses, maybe. But I know he only started trying to quit because of Ronnie. It wasn’t because he’s wise. It was because he was scared.

When Ronnie dropped off the fork-lift onto the yard floor he was still in a sitting-down position. It must have been a zonker of a heart attack.

I thought: Mick’s wrong. He’s talking cobblers. None of those deaths would be tragic.

I’m not a newspaper reader, I’m not any kind of reader, but when I was at primary school and it rained and we couldn’t go out to the playground, there’d be this big box of old
Beanos
and
Dandys
brought out for us to read. I used to love reading them—because it wasn’t reading at all. How they used to make me laugh. Biff! Bam! Kerrchow! I never thought then I’d end up being a warehouseman at Macintyre’s, dying for a smoke in my break.

Mick did his nose-shift thing again. He looked very pleased with having won his argument, if that’s what it was, or with me not understanding and just giving up. Or with him getting away—we’d run out of time now—with not having a smoke. If that’s what this was really all about. His little score on that.

Not exactly mountain climbing, Micky.

I thought: Okay, Mick, you’re my mate, if you’re really giving up, then that’s up to you, but next time I’m going out by myself, I’m leaving you here, matey. And don’t you ever start preaching to me, with your new glasses, about how I should give up myself. Don’t you ever start that.

Then I saw, in my head, Mick slumped forward over his spread newspaper, dead as a sack of cement.

And of course I understood. Of course I understood that tragic was a word people used when they didn’t know what else to say—about people dropping dead. But I thought: It’s not because they don’t know what to say. It’s not that at all. It’s because they can’t say the other thing, they can’t ever say it. The thing that goes with tragedy and happens on the stage too, and doesn’t have much to do with Macintyre’s warehouse either.

Biff! Bam! Kerrzang! How I laughed. How I’d love to get out a copy of the
Beano
in the canteen. Though I’d look a bloody idiot, wouldn’t I? The word you ought to use about that mountaineer in the Lake District, or about Ronnie dropping off the fork-lift still sitting down, or even about Mick here, slumped over his newspaper with his neat little new half-rims all scrunched up against his face, is comic.

Comic. That’s what you ought to say. But you can’t.

H
E
’
D BEEN EARLY
and Sue had still been upstairs, getting ready, as Alec ushered him in. Her voice had floated down, through a half-opened door, from above. ‘Hello, Bill.’ Then a hurried and apologetic, ‘I’m not decent.’

‘You’re always decent,’ he’d called back.

What did that mean? And the word stuck with him: decent.

Alec had phoned days before and said that Sue was having a night out with the girls, so he’d be all on his own. Why didn’t Bill come over?

‘I’ve got a bottle of Macallan. Fifteen-year-old. It fell off the back of a lorry.’

Alec didn’t say that he knew Bill would be on his own too—Sophie and the boys being away for half-term at Sophie’s parents while he soldiered on at the office. Bill reckoned that it was Sue who knew this, not Alec, so this was really Sue’s idea, Sue’s invitation. But Alec was Bill’s oldest friend.

‘Come over. I haven’t seen you for ages. Don’t bring anything, just yersel.’ Alec could get all Scots when he wanted.

So there he’d been, a little early, and Alec was giving him a cardiganed hug and there was the smell of the shepherd’s pie in the oven that Sue had cooked for them. He’d driven, which was easiest, but also stupid—given the bottle of Macallan. But he’d told himself that if he drove then he’d have to go carefully on the whisky, and if he had his car outside then he’d avoid any pressure as things got late to stay the night, which was all false upside-down logic. It wasn’t that he didn’t like being with Alec and Sue, quite the opposite.

Alec had flicked his eyes upward and said, ‘Making herself beautiful.’ Then said, ‘How dastardly of me, there’s no making about it.’ And Bill had smiled and thought nonetheless how women made themselves beautiful for nights out with other women. For a boys’ night out, or in, men hardly bothered. Witness the pair of them, like two adverts for woollens.

They’d hardly settled when Sue had come down and appeared in the doorway. Many years ago Bill had thought that Sue was just the sort of dumb and ditzy blonde Alec would end up marrying, then find the novelty wearing off. It had been his own reason for not marrying her, or rather for not making any move at all, though he might have done. He’d given precedence to his friend and felt he’d been shrewd.

He’d been best man, naturally, at Alec and Sue’s wedding, but by then he’d met Sophie and she and he had been the first pair to get hitched. And to have kids, pretty quickly, one after the other. Alec and Sue had waited several years. Perhaps there was a difficulty, but they hadn’t seemed unhappy at the time. So much for shrewdness. Maybe they’d waited simply because of that: because they were happy and wanted to have time just with each other. Then they’d gone and had twins. A boy and girl.

They’d be upstairs right now, still only four years old. Or was it five? He ought to know, he was their godfather.

Bill had said to Sue as she appeared in the doorway, ‘Sue, you look fantastic.’ He should have allowed Alec to say something first, perhaps. Anyway it was true. She was wearing a dress that wasn’t quite a party dress, but it had a shimmer. Or it was more that
she
had a shimmer, a kind of ready, default-mode excitement.

It was only a girls’ night out, he’d thought, it wasn’t a ball.

She said, ‘You look pretty good yourself, Bill.’ He said, ‘Rubbish,’ and had got up to meet her embrace which was always full-on and generous, as if she had arms for everyone. She’d been holding a black coat and a cream scarf but had slung them momentarily over the banister at the foot of the stairs, on top of his own undistinguished Puffa thing.

She picked up the coat again and looked at her watch.

‘Alec, you did ring for the taxi, didn’t you?’

Alec was already fetching two whisky tumblers. He thumped his forehead with his free hand.

‘Oh shit! Shit! I’m sorry, sweetheart. Let me drive you.’

Sue had said, ‘No, you have to look after Bill.’ There wasn’t any hint of anger or dramatics, just the small practical quandary. So, while Alec had done more breast-beating, he’d said, ‘I’ll drive you, Sue.’ It seemed a neat and diplomatic solution. His car was still warm. Alec would have to get his out of the garage. And he didn’t want Sue to be late.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Hathaway’s. Park Street.’

‘I know it. Good choice. No problem.’

Sue had protested, then finally said, ‘You’re an angel, Bill.’ And Alec had said, ‘The man puts me to eternal shame.’

Alec had put the tumblers down and helped Sue on with her coat. There was no reproachfulness. She said, ‘Don’t forget about the shepherd’s pie. And the twins are sparko. I looked in.’

Alec had draped the scarf round his wife’s neck then kissed her tenderly by the ear. ‘Sorry, precious,’ he said. ‘You better give this man here a decent tip.’ That word once more. Then, to him, he’d said, ‘I’ll see you later, buster. I’ll try not to open the bottle.’

So now here he was—it was only a ten-minute drive—sitting beside Sue in the car opposite Hathaway’s, and Sue, though she was several minutes late, didn’t seem in a rush. All through the short journey he’d felt inevitably that they were like some couple going out on a date themselves—particularly at the start as they got into the car, he holding the door open for her, chauffeur-fashion, she swinging her legs in and gathering up her coat, and Alec watching contritely from the front porch, like some stoical father.

Sue had spent the few minutes saying how sweet it was of him and he’d spent it establishing that the ‘girls’ were Christine and Anita and that all three of them had been at the hair academy together and now they each had salons of their own.

He wondered what a hair academy was and had his bizarre mental pictures, but didn’t ask. He’d long since stopped thinking it obvious that a fluffy blonde whose principal feature was her hair would go into hairdressing. Nothing was obvious any more.

He knew Sue’s salon was called Locks and that it had been set up—funded—by Alec. For all Bill knew, Alec might have among his many business interests a small chain of hair salons which involved funding Christine and Anita as well.

Bill had often passed Locks but never entered. He’d sometimes wondered how it would be if he were to walk in and ask to have his hair cut—by Sue herself of course. It seemed the most innocent yet intimate of requests.

Salon. Hair academy. These were easily scoffed at, bogus expressions. But he no longer thought like that.