Jog On Fat Barry (23 page)

When I told the woman from the dry cleaners I thought I might be in love, she asked me how I knew. I said it was simple. For the first time in my life, what made Agne happy was more important than what made me happy. I’d never known that before. When Agne wasn’t beside me I felt like I was only half there. I felt like I had when my dad shot through, or when my mum left, or my gran died. Agne and me would make love, and lay in the dark, and listen to the other suck in air, and feel safe. I told the woman I’d thought all the fear had been frightened out of me when I was a boy, but discovered fear was often replaced by fear. It was easy to become troubled by the very thing you wanted most. I didn’t let people in, because if you did that, things went pear: dads fucked off; sisters died, and mums did themselves in.

Dad had tossed Janelle’s pram on the skip. It was the last thing I ever saw him do. I had been in my room looking out the window. And I watched as the wheels of the pram spun around, and how the little gold and silver stars I’d put on them caught the sunlight. I never saw my dad get in the car; never heard him start up the engine; never noticed him drive away to start his life anew.

Just how much a human life might be worth in the world of today is a mystery. To some, £5000 might appear to be a fortune. But money had nothing to do with what we had done to Bashkim and Duka. That was about principles. And when it came to beliefs, you did as your conscience dictated. I told the woman in the dry cleaners that Agne was expecting; we were going to be married the following Friday. I said that no matter what happened in the future, regardless of whatever surprises life had in store for us, I would never compromise my wife or child. I told her I had wanted Ronny to be my best man. But he was in prison. He bumped off a child molester that needed bumping off on Christmas Day, so Jimmy King was taking his place. And Pauline Jacks would be the bridesmaid. I said it was a shame my mum and my gran couldn’t be there for it.

“But they will be,” the woman had said. “They’re in there, son.”

She placed her hand over my heart.

“They’ll be in there with you for the rest of your life,” she added. “And nothing can change that. Not death. Not anything.”

I wondered if my mum would’ve been pleased with me, proud of what her son had become. And I also wondered if she had come across my granddad yet, floating out there Happy as Larry in the English Channel.

national service

My decision to end it all came right after Virginia Waters won the Thousand Guinea Stakes at 12-1 on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket. It was a Sunday, and I was going out a winner. There was more than £15,000 in my pockets. Fuck-all to some perhaps, but it would be the world and then some to whoever found it, if they were game enough to rummage through my jacket, that is. And think of the mystery, any mug could step off the roof of a building when they were potless, but to do it when you had fifteen large in your pocket, well, that was sublime. My plan was simple: Bray, a tower block on the Chalcot Estate had twenty-three floors, and I was going to jump off the top of it. Jack was dead: had gone into the ground that very morning, and with Jack gone, it was game over. He was the last, and had meant the most to me. Not that we were bandits. There was never anything kinky in it. But we were together for thirty-five years, and if nothing else, ours was a marriage of sorts. I entered the lift. It stank of piss, and a dog had taken a dump on the floor. I pressed 23 and the lift began to ascend. I thought about falling, all that, force equals mass times acceleration. I’d be moving at 9.8 meters per second squared, or 9.7 if I removed my wig, and I’d reach terminal velocity at 125 MPH. There was a little bump and the lift opened. I jimmied the emergency door up onto the roof. The wind was blowing and little clouds drifted by. My mobile phone started to ring, but I ignored it. I stepped up to the edge. The ground lay 220 feet below me. I glanced over the side; felt the £15,000 against my hip. It was a shame that I couldn’t take it, but there was no need for money where I was going.

1940 was a leap year that started on a Monday. It also happened to be the same year Daisy Mallet gave birth to an 8 lbs 7 oz boy at Barts. Fireworks announced the birth: Germany had begun the Blitz over London on the 7th of September, and Hitler was the odds-on favourite for a quick and decisive victory. But the clever money was on England, because
never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few
. And even though Hitler would go on to kill 43,000 people and destroy a million houses with his spikes and butterflies, he never had a chance of taking over the Land of Hope and Glory:
keine Möglichkeit
.

I had remained nameless until I was one. Mum had been waiting for Dad to come home because they never chose one before he shipped out. But then word came from the army that Dad had got himself caught and would see out the rest of the war as a POW. So Mum was left to name me herself and she picked ‘Harold’ on the London to Brighton line. We were being relocated under the Civilian Excavation Scheme but we never even got past Greater London. Mum said Hitler could kiss her “blooming arse” while the train was on the platform at Croydon station.

“He’s not scaring me out of house and home,” she announced.

Then she gathered up all our things, stepped down off that train, and went straight back to the Angel.

I suppose I began to murder things when I turned four. My theatre of war was the little allotment and shed my granddad built at the end of our garden. That was where earwigs, beetles, and woodlice hiding under bits of old wood and broken paving stones, met their grisly deaths; where the bumblebees and butterflies that buzzed around petunias and marigolds in July, and blackberries in August found their final resting places; where slugs and snails who unwittingly left silvery trails on rhubarb and cabbage leaves got hunted down, and where spiders, having weaved elaborate webs in the dark corners of the shed, and having grown fat on bluebottles, moths and grasshoppers, ceremoniously had their legs removed.

One afternoon in late September I caught a Painted Lady that was as big as my hand. I studied the mottled patterns on its wings for a moment, and then began to tear them off. Somewhere off in the distance I could hear the drone of a doodlebug and began to mimic the noise it made. Moments later my granddad threw open a window and started to yell at me. My heart missed a beat and I instantly concealed the butterfly behind my back. Mum had told me time and again that killing insects for pleasure brought nothing but bad luck, and she had warned me I’d get what for if I kept on doing it. I glanced up expecting to see anger on my granddad’s face, but instead I saw something I’d never seen before: fear.

“RUN HARRY,” he yelled.

But I couldn’t move. My legs were glued to the spot. And then everything went dead quiet: the birds stopped chirping; the insects stopped buzzing. I looked up at the sky, cocking my ear this way and that, but there was no noise. The drone had stopped. I pissed myself. Felt it run lukewarm down my short trousers. Mum would belt me for that, but that I’d survive. And then my feet were moving and I was bolting across the garden.

“NO, THE OTHER WAY, SON,” Granddad yelled.

The ground was sticky like treacle. Each step seemed to take an eternity. The shed was a hundred miles away and my heart was pounding. I knew I had fifteen seconds. The rag and bone man told me so.

“Fifteen seconds and then… boom!” he’d said.

I ran past the garden swing uncle Albert had built; past the apple tree that bore no fruit; past the place we buried Nelson, and the rose bush Granddad planted when Mum was born. I never heard the boom, or saw the flash, but the shockwave picked me up and sent me reeling through the air like some kid’s raggedy doll.

Uncle Albert had a butcher shop in Camden Town and he banked a lot of money both during and after the war.

“God bless the Ministry of Food,” he always said.

He confessed that meat rationing had been the second best thing to ever happen to him, and had fourteen years of it, from March 11th 1940 to July 4th 1954. When I finally got out of the hospital, Mum often left me with him when she went to work, and I’d sit in the back of the shop while Albert sharpened his knives, or made us dripping sandwiches and cups of tea with evaporated milk. He never said much about Gran or Granddad, or my auntie Val, but every now and then he’d stop what he was doing and start to cry. And he’d fume when anyone said I was bald. If someone did that, Albert would jump out from behind the counter and lob them straight out the shop—man or woman, it made no difference to him.

The doctors told Mum my legs would get better. They also said it might be possible for the braces come off in a year or so. But the hair on my head would never grow back. I had
alopecia areata totalis
: baldness caused by trauma. Albert brought me my first wig when I was seven. It was handmade by an Italian hairdresser in Primrose Hill, and the Italian showed me how to wear it. Afterwards, Albert took me to Marine Ices.

“Sorry for what I did to that Painted Lady,” I told him. “I’d have never done it had I known a doodlebug was going to fall on the house.”

I found out later auntie Val had been in the family way. I overheard Mum talking to one of her friends about it.

“She was four months gone,” she said. “But she hadn’t started to show yet.”

Anyway, Albert never married again. Mum was forever trying to fix him up with one of her friends, but Albert wouldn’t have a bar of it.

“Val was the only girl for me,” he would tell her. “It wouldn’t be right to start over again. No, not with someone else.”

The braces didn’t come off my legs when the doctors said they would. I wore them when school started in September, and was still wearing them when it ended in July. They finally came off the following December, but I couldn’t play football or run about with the other boys because my muscles had withered away. And although I was given exercises to build them up, the doctors said the bones would always be susceptible to breaks. It was the pins, you see. I had six of them in one leg, and nine in the other.

My dad came home in September 1945, and he began to work for Albert after being demobbed. I never heard him talk about the years he’d spent in POW camps, but he hated the Germans for what it was they did to him, and Albert seemed to hate them nearly as much. Dad, Mum and me moved into a prefab that looked just like a caravan without wheels, and Albert put me to work in the shop during the school holidays. I swept the floor, made tea, and sometimes slept over on a cot in the back to wait for deliveries that always seemed to arrive in the early hours of the morning.

The black market in meat had blossomed during the war and it continued well after the war ended. Albert always dealt with two men from Somers Town: Wallace Pepper and Alfred Bath. Pepper and Bath owned a van and made nightly excursions into the countryside, where they pinched cows and horses and sheep and pigs and goats and chickens and rabbits and whatnot when farmers were in the land of nod. Wallace once offered Albert a gunnysack chock-a-block with dead cats, rats and dogs, saying he might consider making sausages out of them, but Albert said he wasn’t interested.