Jog On Fat Barry (9 page)

“The shit-paper you wipe your arse with!”

I couldn’t see him anymore but could still hear him laughing.

“You just watch out!”

The Japanese were fond of Pacific Prawns and didn’t mind paying for them. Pensioners bought Coley and claimed it was for the cat. Jews liked Dover Sole. A tribal chief from Papua New Guinea who worked as a conductor on the 159 bus was partial to crab because he said it reminded him of the human flesh he had eaten as a child in his deepest darkest. The Chinese liked eel but only when the eels were live and the Chinese were allowed to prod and poke them. West Indians liked anything without bones that was inexpensive. Africans couldn’t give two fucks about bones, and would eat just about anything. Turks liked mince fish, and one named Ismet who ran the dry cleaners on Parkway, said when he mixed it with gunpowder it made his cock as hard as steel and gave him the energy to fuck his wife all night long.

“I’m going to miss this old shop, Freddie,” my dad told me as we were closing up.

Daylight was quickly fading. It was a cold November afternoon and my breath lingered in the air white and cloud-like every time I exhaled. Dad scattered a blanket of crushed ice over a dozen rainbow trout that were lying in a white polystyrene box. I carried the box into the fridge. It was the last one: twenty-seven other polystyrene boxes were already stacked up against the steel walls. I placed the trout on a box of Haddock, and my dad stared at those twenty-eight boxes for a few moments. It was our entire stock of wet fish; all that remained of the empire my granddad had built: the sum total of his parts. The pipes rumbled and spluttered as hot water flowed out of the tap into the steel sink. I held my hands under the water. They started to sting. Dense clouds of steam swirled upwards as I scoured each finger and thumb trying to scrub the stink off them. Dad had already pulled down the steel shutter and bolted the sides. He was waiting for me outside. I sniffed the fingers of my left hand as I walked through the door. He frowned when he saw me and was about to speak but decided to say nothing. He pulled the door shut and padlocked it. Then he stood there in the dark for a moment, not wanting to leave. I could feel the icy pavement through the soles of my trainers.

“Fancy a quick drink?” he asked.

“Think I’ll give it a miss if it’s all the same to you, Dad.”

“You got one on a promise?”

I sniffed the fingers of my right hand.

“Just going to see some bloke about a record.”

Dad wrapped his scarf twice around his neck and buttoned up his coat. Then he righted the black armband that was fastened around his right sleeve. Twelve weeks had passed since Frank was murdered.

“Oh, well…” he said. “I think I’ll stop in for one.”

As he pushed his hands into his coat pockets and started walking, I stood there watching him. He was hunched over with his shoulders bent forward and his head hanging down. And I realized it was the first time I’d ever seen him looking like that… stooped over like any other old man.

Frank died on Westbourne Park Road at 6:53 p.m. during the Notting Hill Carnival riots. A sixteen-year-old lad named Douglas Wright had thrust a paring knife into Frank’s neck, severing his carotid artery. Frank bled out in two minutes, and was left to lay in a pool of his own blood for a further fifteen. The police van he’d been travelling in was pushed over and set on fire, and the two officers responsible for looking after Frank did a runner up to the Harrow Road. Frank had been on probation. It was his second day on the job. My dad went to bed that night a middle-aged man only to wake up the following morning an old one. It was the last Monday of August 1976 and “Dancing Queen” had been Number 1 for four weeks running.

Before the council moved it, the public library could be found just up the road from the Hippodrome on Camden High Street, and, once a week, it remained open late to give people working in the area an opportunity to step outside of their routine. The bookshelves came stacked with adventure with writers like Kipling, Doyle, London, Dickens and Twain. And even though I was no bright spark, and never really understood the workings of the world, I had used books to journey outside the dreariness of my own life for longer than I could remember. I had drawn Excalibur from a stone, saw tigers burning bright, revelled in the Two Minutes Hate, flew down the vast Mississippi, and romped home on
The Rocking-Horse Winner
; and the bleak facades of Somers Town were forever being transformed by soaring mountains, sun-ravaged deserts, ice-blown tundra’s, and valleys of death, where the unexpected always loomed with the promise of being around the next corner.

One of the librarians told me that Beethoven had began to suffer from an annoying roaring and buzzing in his ears sometime around his twenty-eighth birthday. He also stated that a lock of the composer’s hair, taken at the time of his death, suggested lead poisoning might have played a part in his “untimely demise” at the age of fifty-seven.

“Mind you,” the librarian said, “lead levels in people back then were often a hundred times higher than they are in people today.”

He pulled a vinyl disc out of its record sleeve, placed it on the turntable and added it was unlikely however that lead poisoning had played a part in Beethoven’s deafness.

“Most researchers think the loss was caused by systemic
lupus erythematosus
,” he said. “That’s an autoimmune disease called ‘lupus,’ due to the butterfly shaped rash the disease sometimes creates on the cheek.”

The librarian switched on the turntable and he handed me the headphones. I slipped them over my ears and looked at the album cover. It said, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Opus 125, conducted by Herbert Von Karajan. Deutsche Grammophon made the recording. The librarian gently placed the needle on the swirling record and I sat down as music began to play. The album’s notes said that the first movement “…opened with low murmurs and portentous figures in the strings, open fifths and fourths with no distinct harmonic foundation.” The principal theme showed itself to be “…jagged, plummeting, severe and final. String and brass sonorities pre dominate and maintain the titanic otherworldly feelings.” There were also “…ominous interjections and slashing scales continually interrupting the lyricism.” Now what all that actually meant I couldn’t say, but I do know for sixty-five minutes and sixty-eight seconds, all my otherworldly feelings stopped as the most incredible sounds filled my head. My skin tingled. I was that farmhouse in
The
Wizard of Oz
, snatched up out of the earth and sent swirling through the heavens. I now understood why Alex had lamped Dim in the Korovo Milk Bar. It
was
an out-and-out liberty to interrupt anything so beautiful. And although I really knew nothing about the music, I felt Beethoven had got as close to perfection as anyone had a right to. Everything was in its place. And when I heard the
Presto
, followed by all the people singing, I got the feeling that there wasn’t a thing in the world I couldn’t do if I put half a mind to it.

My mum had withdrawn into herself when Frank died and didn’t speak for weeks after the funeral. Dad pottered about the flat in a daze for the first week, and then spent the next two worried sick Mum was about to follow Frank to the grave because she wouldn’t eat and never slept: she just sat on the edge of his bed, in the room him and me had shared for sixteen years, holding his jacket, or a pair of his shoes, and stared at the wall. I quickly learnt to look after myself. I got my own tea, did the washing up, went to the laundry, ran the shop, banked the takings, and made sure there was food in the house just in case Mum or Dad felt like eating. And just when I’d nearly forgotten what Mum sounded like, she walked out of the bath room one day and told my dad she’d always thought it’d be nice to live somewhere by the sea. Dad certainly needed no convincing. He and Mum had honeymooned in a little town called Leigh-on-Sea on the north bank of the River Thames Estuary in 1955, and he thought that part of Essex would be as good a place as any to make a new start in. The following Sunday Mum and Dad drove east on the A13 and found a bungalow high above the Chalkwell Oaze that looked out across the Channel. Dad said he was going to sell the fishmongers and put the money into a small business, and Mum said she’d have a garden, and would grow sweet peas and violets.

Mum packed everything that Frank and Granddad ever owned into five cardboard boxes and put them in Granddad’s room: two against one wall and three against another. Apart from those five boxes, plus the carpet and curtains, the room was bare. Mum had written Salvation Army on a sheet of paper and attached it to the top box in the stack of three, and Leigh-on-Sea had been written on another sheet and attached to the top box in the stack of two.

“Listen to this, Mum.”

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my face buried in the pages of a book on Ludwig Van Beethoven.

“It says in this book, ‘…the master, though placed in the midst of this confluence of music, heard nothing at all and was not even sensible of the applause of the audience at the end of his great work, but continued standing with’—”

Mum cut me off.

“The Sally Army’ll be here in the morning, so if you’re going to look through them boxes, you’d best do it quick smart.”

“This geezer was completely mutton, Mum.”

“Yes, I’m sure he was, Freddie.”

“The Brotherhood of Man!” I cried. “The Fatherhood of God! Trombones and male voices intoning like Gregorian celebrants! Imagine it, this bloke had just composed the most beautiful music in the world and yet he couldn’t hear a single bloody note of it!”

But Mum didn’t seem that impressed with Van Beethoven, or his music for that matter, and she snatched the book out of my hands.

“I’ve no time for your pissing about,” she snapped at me. “We’re moving house, and there’s too much to do, so shift your blooming arse!”