Rebuilding Coventry (17 page)

Coventry’s
father had nodded and the policewoman had given up and left the antiseptic
house.

As she
placed the last apostle spoon in the crumbless drawer the front door bell rang
and Bread Knife heard the voices of her grandchildren quarrelling in a
desultory fashion on the doorstep. They always visited on Sunday morning. It
was a great inconvenience.

‘Ask
before you borrow my things, Mary.’

‘Oh
shut your face, it’s only a scarf’

Before
she opened the door, Bread Knife went to a cupboard and took out two plastic
bags for her grandchildren’s shoes. The children were in their stockinged feet
by the time she had slipped the bolts and opened the mortice locks and removed
the chains from the door.

“Lo,
Nana. Mum’s in London.’

Bread
Knife noticed that John’s fingernails were ragged and grimy. They produced a
feeling of physical revulsion in her.

‘We’re
going to look for her,’ said Mary, placing her shoes in the plastic bag her
grandmother was holding out.

‘Well,
young lady, you’ve been a bit lackadaisical with the Cherry Blossom, haven’t
you?’ said Bread Knife, looking at Mary’s scuffed black shoes through the
plastic bag. The children padded through into the living-room and sat on the
plastic-coated sofa. Tennis Ball bounced to his feet and greeted them. ‘So she’s
in London.’

John
said, ‘Yeah, we’re going down there.’

‘Up,’
said Mary, ‘It’s
up
to London.’

‘Down,’
said John.

‘Up,’
said Mary.

‘Don’t roarm
about like that,’ said their little fat tennis ball of a granddad. ‘You’re
wrinkling the plastic covers.’

Through
the kitchen doorway their grandmother could be seen furiously cleaning their
sinful shoes.

30
Sly Closes In

During the time it took Sidney’s
erection to subside, Inspector Sly did ridiculous, futile pressing up and down
actions on the knobs of the telephone receiver. After twenty seconds of this,
he conceded that Sidney had put the phone down at the other end. Sly replaced
his own handset and commanded a young dogsbody in uniform to order a car and a
driver. He was ‘going to the Smoke’, he said.

He rang
Derek at home. Did Derek know if his wife had friends or relations in London?
Derek spoke (and thought) of London as being as far away and remote as Saturn.
No, they had never been to
London.
They knew no Londoners.

Inspector
Sly said he was travelling down tomorrow, ‘weather permitting’.

He made
it sound as though his transportation was to be a team of huskies, pulling a
provision-laden sledge. He intimated that the journey would be fraught with
dangers, that the elements of air, earth, water and fire would be ranged
against him. In a sense he was right. The M1 motorway demanded — and got —
human sacrifices every day of the week.

Sly
then rang his wife and ordered her to pack a small suitcase. He was ‘closing in
on Coventry Dakin’, and ‘might be gone for some time’. Sly’s wife made
jubilant, arm-stabbing-the-air gestures at the news of his absence; but was
careful to keep her voice under control. Such duplicity was second nature to
her now.

She had
married Sly twenty-seven years ago, when he had been a police cadet with ideals
and she had been a typist with a salary. She’d seen her husband change into a
barbarian. It was all those criminals he mixed with, she thought. Mrs Sly went
into the utility room and started to iron her husband’s vast cotton shirts.

Detective
Inspector Sly started to prepare for the next day. He packed his brief-case
with files, floppy discs and fistfuls of photographs in which Coventry could
be seen dancing, swimming and digging; with new-born babies; twirling a hula
hoop around her waist; sitting on a rug in a park, blinking into the sun;
peeling potatoes; changing a nappy; reading the
Daily Mirror
on a park
bench. There was Coventry with Mary, with John; Coventry in trousers, shorts,
overcoats, summer frocks; and finally Coventry pointing a gun at the camera,
the photograph that Sly had picked out to be used by what he called the ‘meeja’.

31
I Leave the City

‘Geoffrey’s over there.’

Dodo
pointed to a distant copse of trees. We were in the country; standing in a
graveyard. A dark church glowered over us. Lichened gravestones lurched at
crazy angles. We walked through long, wet grass to Geoff’s grave. He was lying
under a pink and grey marble slab; his was a designer grave.

A
tombstone said:

Geoff
is here, he was Dodo’s husband.

She
loved him.

Born
1946, died 1985.

A Coca Cola bottle stood
next to the tombstone. Beetles swam about in the inch or so of water in the
bottom.

I said,
‘A
Coca Cola bottle?’

Dodo
replied, ‘The villagers nick the vases. Geoff wouldn’t have minded; he had a
tremendous sense of humour.’

She had
brought a small bunch of freesias and now she stuck them into the bottle and
fiddled with them until she was satisfied, then she placed the bottle in the
dead centre of the slab and walked away. I caught up with her by the dank yew
hedge which lined the path to the churchyard gate. She smiled and said, ‘Right,
that’s the husband’s grave visited, now to meet the brother’s plane.’

The
London cab we had come in was waiting for us outside in the narrow lane. The
driver was looking around suspiciously at the trees and fields. He looked as
though he was in the first stages of an agoraphobic panic attack. We had lured
him into the countryside by showing him many twenty-pound notes. He only
brightened up when Dodo said, ‘Gatwick Airport, please.’

But
before the taxi could draw away a herd of cattle turned the corner of the lane
and trotted up to the taxi on their spindly legs. We were soon surrounded by
cows who gazed curiously into the cab with their lovely eyes.

‘Who’s
in charge of ‘em?’ shouted the cab driver to himself.

‘Cows
are so
camp,’
said Dodo. ‘Such OTT eyelashes. They always remind me of
Danny La Rue.’

‘I hope
he keeps his arse cleaner than
them,’
said the driver, looking with
disgust at the casually excreting animals.

A row
of low terraced cottages stood opposite the church. Out of a rustic door came a
woman carrying a shallow wicker basket. She stood in the tiny garden watching
the cows and then stooped down to pick nasturtium flowers, which she laid in
her basket. She looked so simple and charming in her pretty full-skirted dress,
her hair tied back with a ribbon. Even the green wellingtons she wore didn’t
seem inappropriate. I remarked on her to Dodo.

‘Oh
her,’
said Dodo. ‘That’s Veronica Minton. She’s a merchant banker. She’s got a
telex in her back parlour.’ Dodo wound down her window and shouted: ‘Veronica!’

Veronica
turned around and saw Dodo. She didn’t look too pleased, but she came over to
the taxi.

‘Dodo,’
she said. ‘Been to Geoff’s grave?’

‘Yes.
How’s the country?’

‘Bloody.’

‘Bloody?’

‘Yes,
we’re selling up.’

‘Why?’

‘The
noise and inconvenience and the
vandalism.
You wouldn’t believe it. Have
you seen what the village yobs have written on the War Memorial? And these
sodding
cows.
Four times a day they pass our cottage. The
shit
and
the
smell
and the tractor fumes. And the noise when the village pub
chucks out. And, there’s nowhere for the kids to play. And we’ve been burgled
three times and nothing will
grow.’

‘Your
nasturtiums look pretty,’ said Dodo.

‘Yes,’
said Veronica bitterly. ‘They thrive in poor soil.’

‘Where
will you be moving to?’ asked Dodo.

‘Somewhere
quiet,’ said Veronica, ‘in Clapham.’

A
twelve-year-old-looking boy came round the bend in the lane. He was swishing a
cane towards a few recalcitrant cows. The taxi driver started his engine and
began to creep through the gaps between the animals. The boy shrieked, ‘You mad
bugger, watch them cows!’ The driver shook his fist out of the window in
classic fashion and shouted, ‘Get them bleedin’ scumbags out of my way, sonny,
before I mow the bleeders down.’

Veronica
sighed deeply and said, ‘See? The countryside is so
unpleasant;
it
brings out the worst in people.’

As we
careered through the village I noticed that the village shop was called a ‘Provision
Centre’ and that the War Memorial was covered in graffiti, ‘Veronica sucks’
being the most prominent. Large prairie-like fields stretched into the far
distance. Dodo was quiet, only stirring herself to point out a large house just
visible through wooded grounds.

‘Geoff
was born there.’

I
asked, ‘Do his family still live there?’

‘No, it’s
a retirement home for gentlefolk now.’

‘A long
walk to the Provision Centre,’ I said.

Dodo
laughed and was silent.

I had never been on a
plane, or visited an airport. Gatwick looked like a rat’s maze to me, but Dodo
seemed to know exactly where to go and which computerized sign to read. She
told me that Sidney’s plane was due to land at 6.10 p.m.

We had
three hours and five minutes to kill, so we had a meal in the restaurant. We
sat by the window so that Dodo could watch the planes taking off and landing.
It looked a risky business.

Four
American men came and sat at the next table to us. They ordered steaks in loud,
happy voices. They called the old waitress ‘ma’am’ and asked for her advice on
their choice of side salads. When she’d hobbled off with their large order,
they lit cigarettes and began to talk business. A main in an orange and green
checked jacket resumed a previous conversation.

‘Sure,
singing telegrams are kinda old news. I mean, you
know
you’re gonna get
one on your birthday, yeah?’

The
other three Americans said: ‘Yeah.’

‘And
other
happy
occasions. Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So the
market’s saturated with two-bit outfits all over Europe, and they got King
Kong-o-grams, Roly-Poly grams, Kisso-grams …

Another
main with a mad haircut cut in: ‘Sure, we know, Wayne. Jeez, he’s here in
England one week and the guy is so
slow
already.’

Wayne
laughed with the others. ‘Yeah, I guess I caught it from the British Railroad
Company.’

Laugh?
They couldn’t stop. Eventually Wayne was able to go on. After wiping his eyes
he said, ‘So the market’s static, there’s no innovation … agree?’

‘Sure
for Chrissake, Wayne …!’

‘Hey
don’t push me, Conroy. I gotta
explain.
I’m gonna spring a new concept
on ya. You ready?’

‘So,
spring.’

‘Singing
telegrams for
unhappy
occasions.’

‘Unhappy?’

‘Yeah,
divorce, bereavement, splitting, telling a chick she’s too fat or some’pn’ . .
. hey, Steel, what’s the worst thing you’d ever have to tell your mother?’

‘That I’m
Aids positive?’

‘No, we’re
talking hypothesis here. This bad news is to do with
her.
She’s old, she’s
ill …’

‘She’s
dying?’

‘Yeah.
You
don’t wanna tell her, do you, Steel? … She’s terminal.’

‘No
sir.’

‘The doctor
don’t wanna do it …’ ‘Uh-huh.’

‘So you
ring and order a terminal-a-gram. ‘‘A what?’

‘A
terminal-a-gram.’

Wayne
stood by Steel’s chair; he started to sing to the tune ‘Whistle While You Work’:

Oh
happy, happy day!

You’re going to pass
away …

Steel burst out, ‘Wayne,
that is grossly
gross.’

Conroy
said, ‘Cool it, Steel. This could
be.
Got something for announcing a
divorce to your wife?’

Wayne
thought for a moment and stood again and sang to the tune of ‘Some Enchanted
Evening’:

Your
husband doesn’t love you:

He’s been to see a
lawyer.

The
hearing’s in November

Inside a crowded room…

The fourth man burst out: ‘It’s
phenomenal. Think of it! Driving examiners don’t have to worry about failing
candidates; they have regular depot-based bad-news-o’-persons to do it for
them.’ He sang to ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’: