Starting Over (10 page)

I had been in the holding cell for a couple of hours when Keith turned up. He settled his great bulk next to me on the bed and sighed.

‘Who’s a naughty boy then?’ he said.

There was a stag party in the audience. Maybe a dozen of them, right at the front but with their backs turned to the stage as they howled and cackled in each other’s faces. Foaming beer bottles in their fists. One of them was being held up by a couple of his mates. They were playing this game where they’d let go of him, allow him to start sinking to the floor, and then hoist him up before he hit the ground. A stag party was never good news. They always wanted to be the funny men. And I couldn’t help considering them with the cold eye of a seasoned professional.
Pick the biggest one and stick your baton in his lughole,
I thought, remembering my training days in Hendon. It seemed a lifetime ago.

‘Old man walking down the road and he comes across this talking frog,’ said Rufus. He could cross the little stage in three paces, then he had to turn and go back again. He looked trapped. ‘The talking frog says, “Old man, I am not really a frog at all, but a beautiful princess who has had a spell cast upon her by a wicked witch. If you kiss me I shall be free of this enchantment, and I shall reward you with one
night of wild, passionate love.”’ There was wild laughter from the stag party, completely unrelated to Rufus. The legless one had sunk to his knees, causing much hilarity. ‘The old man keeps walking and the talking frog looks shocked. “Old man,” it says, “I don’t think you heard my offer. I am a beautiful princess –” The old man holds up his hand. “I heard,” he says. “But at my age I would rather have a talking frog.”’

There was a ripple of laughter around the pub and the stag do seemed to take this as a personal affront. They looked up at Rufus as if noticing him for the first time. One of them – squat, overweight, with the kind of shaved head that is meant to hide baldness and promise violence – looked like trouble. But when he began his half-cut heckling, Rufus was waiting for him.

‘What’s that, sir, what’s that?’ He had that smile, the vicious smile that Eamon Fish had lent him. ‘Speak your mind, sir – if you’ll excuse the overstatement. Yes, sir – you. The man with the head like a giant boiled egg.’ Rufus cupped a hand to his ear, and kept getting the man to repeat the insult, screaming the same two words until they were drained of all their sting, and turned to ashes in the mouth of the man with the head like a giant boiled egg.

He did it, I thought, and my heart filled with pride.

‘Maybe I’ll come down to where you work tomorrow,’ Rufus said, turning away, his borrowed smile still in place, ‘and shout at you while you’re asking everyone if they want fries with that.’ He laughed shortly. ‘You ugly bastard.’

Pub gigs were always bad. The comedy clubs had their share of haters, hecklers and lager-chucking nay-sayers, but the pubs were the worst because there were always men who resented a bunch of show-offs taking the stage for a night,
demanding attention and applause, a procession of smart-arses who couldn’t wait to move on to better things – and almost anywhere would be better than one of these dying pubs. But this was different.

We came out of the pub and the stag party were there, unsmiling and smoking and waiting. They looked up and with the precision of synchronised swimmers they threw down their cigarettes, sparks flying and dying on the pavement as they walked towards us, the one with the head like a giant boiled egg at the front.

I shoved Rufus back and placed myself between the men and my boy, although it did not make any difference in the end. But he is my son and I love him.

And as they got stuck into us, I suddenly understood that this was the missing lesson of Eamon Fish.

Don’t provoke the bastards.

I opened the garden gate of my parents’ house and there it was – the perfect blue rectangle of my father’s swimming pool, glowing and shimmering in the heat like the window to another, better world, some suburban Narnia.

My father was at the poolside with a black man around his own age. Winston, the pool guy. They were peering into a little fishing net that Winston was holding. My father suddenly turned with eyes blazing, and then calmed down when he saw it was me.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I thought you were one of them.’

‘They don’t come in daylight,’ Winston said. ‘They too scared of the old man!’

Winston and I grinned at each other, but my father wasn’t smiling. He was at war with the local youth. They sat on his wall. They dropped empty crisp packets and half-eaten kebabs
in his roses. They made noise. They breathed in. They breathed out. And, worst of all, when the summer came they sometimes sneaked into his back garden in the middle of the night and frolicked in his pool. He took something out of Winston’s net and showed it to me. An empty can of Red Bull.

‘What happened to your face?’ he said, crushing the can in his fist. ‘Walk into a door, did you?’

I nodded. ‘Something like that.’

‘You got to watch those doors,’ Winston laughed.

I waited by the edge of the pool as the pair of them fell into a debate about organic chlorine. Such a thing exists. The sun turned the surface of the pool to a sheet of molten gold. When Winston had gone my father stood by my side and stared at the water.

‘So they’re not charging you with anything?’ he said.

I looked at him. ‘What would they charge me with?’

He skimmed the water with a leaf rake, even though it was completely clear. Then he shrugged. ‘Illegal trespass. Obstructing an officer. Resisting arrest. Being daft as a bloody brush.’

I shook my head. ‘They’re not charging me with anything,’ I said. And then I could not resist. I held my arms wide, like a child pretending to be a plane, and dropped face first into the pool. It was surprisingly warm. My dad liked to keep the temperature turned up, and I suspected that this was one reason why his pool was such an after-dark sensation.

I lay on my back with the sun on my face and the chlorine stinging my eyes. I felt good. Like a new man. When I climbed out, my dad was still standing in the same place. I sat by the side of the pool, my clothes heavy and sticking. Already my magnificent gesture was starting to seem a little rash.

‘Have you lost your job, sunshine?’ my dad said. ‘Chief
Super tell you to do the decent thing and fall on your truncheon?’

I thought of my meeting with the Chief Superintendent. How understanding he’d been, how kind. How I’d thought he might offer to help me fill my little cardboard box. There wasn’t much to put in it. My family photos. My copy of
On the Road.
My fake gun. Then the embarrassed handshakes with a few colleagues. And no sign of Keith.

‘Six months’ leave,’ I said. ‘They gave me six months’ leave. Full pay.’ I thought about it. I was a bit fuzzy on the boring details. All I knew was that I was getting half a gap year. ‘And pensions. Something about pensions.’

‘Lucky boy,’ said my dad. ‘I would have got a toe up the arse.’

He knew that wasn’t true. The police have always looked after their own.

‘But I might not go back,’ I said, knowing it would provoke him. ‘At the end of the six months I might want a change of direction.’

My dad nodded thoughtfully. ‘Fancy a change of career? Something more fulfilling? More in touch with the real you?’

‘Yeah.’

He stroked his chin. ‘Rock star? Premiership footballer?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What’s the money like?’

My mum came into the garden and stared at us. ‘Why are you all wet?’ She turned to my dad. ‘What happened to his face?’

‘He walked into a door,’ my dad said. ‘And after that, all hell broke loose.’

‘You’ll catch your death,’ she told me, and went back into the house to put the kettle on.

My dad sat by my side, tapping at the water with his leaf net, as if he might catch something.

‘What about your family, George?’ he said. ‘What about your responsibilities?’

I stared sullenly at the water. I was starting to feel very cold.

‘I love my family,’ I said, and my dad had a good chortle at that.

‘With that and two quid,’ he said, ‘they can buy a cappuccino.’

I threw open the wardrobe and began pulling out clothes. Circus-tent chinos. Sad corduroy. Dead and dying pants. Terminal T-shirts with amusing phrases that made my spirits sink.

‘But what happens at the end of the six months?’ Lara wanted to know. ‘Is it the kind of six-month leave where you get your job back at the end of it? Or is it the kind of six-month leave where they never want to see your face again?’

‘I don’t know if I want my old job back,’ I said. ‘I hated my old job. My old job was killing me.’ I began stuffing the clothes into a black bin bag.

‘Then what about money?’ she said. ‘What happens if you don’t have a job after six months? Because we will still have bills. That boiler is on the blink. What’s going to pay for all that – my ballet class?’

‘We’ve got money,’ I said. ‘Six months’ money. Think of it as a sort of mini-gap year.’ I took her in my arms. She was as welcoming as a sack of spuds. So I released her and continued tossing out depressing clothes. But I really wanted her to understand that this was a good thing.

‘Don’t you see what this means? It’s a chance for me to do something that I really love. A chance to start again.’

My wife exhaled a married sigh.

‘Nobody starts again,’ she said, rescuing a pair of sludge-coloured cords from the bin bag. ‘You can’t collect some money and return to
Go.
That’s not life. That’s a board game. All you can do is get up after you get knocked down and carry on.’ She ran one of her hands over the cords. ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these trousers, George.’

I stared at them for a moment and then returned to the deforestation of my wardrobe. ‘There’s everything wrong with those trousers,’ I said, reaching for an anaemic-looking polo shirt. And then I stopped. ‘What’s that sound?’

We both listened. It was coming from Rufus’ room. Seeping through the wall. A guitar that sounded like – I don’t know – a waterfall made of beautiful jewels, jangling and shining as they fell. Johnny Marr, I thought. Johnny Marr on guitar. And a voice that was a miserable drone and yet somehow strangely hypnotic and lovely. The Smiths, I thought. ‘How Soon Is Now?’ by the Smiths. From that jeans commercial.

I used to love that song, I thought. And I still do.

The bin bag was full. I began tearing off my clothes. On the bed my new clothes were waiting. A black All Saints polo shirt with an even blacker ram’s head. A pair of brand-new Diesel Black Gold paint-spot jeans. Why were they different from my old clothes? Because they were tight. They clung to me. As if to say that they would not tolerate fat or old age. Although, ironically, the jeans looked as though they had already seen thirty years’ service in the decorating business.

I stripped down to my pants and advanced towards the bed. But Lara took me by the elbow, stopping me. She spat on her fingertips and rubbed at the tattoo at the top of my right arm. She sighed when it didn’t come off. ‘What the hell is that?’ she said.

We both stared at the two Japanese characters.

‘That’s my tattoo,’ I said.

She thought about this for a while. Her face was impassive. ‘Why is it upside down?’ she said softly.

‘It’s not upside down,’ I said, pulling away from her. ‘You’re looking at it wrong. You’re looking at it upside down.’

I sat on the bed and began pulling on my paint-spot jeans. Lara watched me for a while, and then turned away when I put on my ram’s head top, and the tattoo almost disappeared. You could just make out the bottom of one of the Japanese characters peeking out from the cap sleeve.

‘Don’t you think you’re a little old to be getting your first tattoo?’ Lara said. ‘Don’t you think you’re a little too old for all that?’

She walked away before I could reply, before I could tell her: But I did it for love.

And how can you ever be too old for all that?

My children smiled at me as I came down the stairs carrying my black bin bag, breathing with some difficulty in my ram’s head shirt and my new old paint-splattered jeans.

‘Yeah, Dad,’ Ruby said. ‘You rock.’

I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked at them. ‘Do I?’ I said hopefully. ‘Do I rock? Do I really? Am I rocking?’

Rufus snorted. The bruises on his face were fading to a dull yellow now, and they gave him a slightly malarial look. ‘Nobody says “you rock” any more,’ he told his sister.

She punched his arm and smiled at me, that smile that was like watching the sun come up.

‘We do,’ she said.

Under the blackened arches of Waterloo Bridge, the van served soup and sandwiches from ten until midnight.

I found Rainbow Ron sitting by himself, cradling a polystyrene cup of minestrone, watching the steam curl off it. I stood near him, but not too close. His beard had been roughly hacked off, or at least most of it. There were still tufts of hair clinging to his face where the nail scissors or garden shears or whatever it was had missed. But he no longer looked like some ageless Jesus. He looked like a young man.

‘Looking good,’ I said, and he glanced at me quickly with those eyes and looked away. ‘Really,’ I said, afraid he thought I was making fun of him, and afraid he might throw his boiling vegetable soup in my face. ‘Losing the beard – a good idea. It takes years off you.’

I held out the bin bag, but he made no move to take it. I opened it up, showed him the clothes, waited for a word of gratitude. Some recognition of goodness. But he would not touch the clothes. And by now the rest of them were gathering round, mistaking me for the Red Cross, rummaging in the bag and spilling their soup as they yanked out cords, and shirts and the clothes of my old age. Rainbow Ron just stood there buffeted by the men, but otherwise not moving. When the bin bag had been picked bare, the others wandered off.

‘I’m trying to do you a favour,’ I said.

He looked at me and smiled. If you could call it a smile. It was more like an involuntary spasm of the mouth, revealing teeth like a graveyard full of ruined tombstones. He looked me up and down, as if he had placed me at last, and I felt as though he saw right through me.

At first I thought she was sleeping.