The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (34 page)

‘Oh, Diana,’ says Laura to the phone. ‘No, I’m up. What time are you getting here? Yes, that’s fine. Not wonderful, cloudy and grey right now. No, Henry won’t mind. He doesn’t claim to be a wine expert. I’m not saying Roddy’s an expert. I really don’t care, Diana. Something new, I bought it on Thursday. No, not madly expensive. Brown’s. How about you? Yes, I will. I will. Bye.’

‘There’ll be less cars on the road,’ says Jack.

‘Fewer cars.’

‘It’ll be safer.’

‘That’s simply not true, Jack. This is the time people go to work.’

‘It’s Saturday.’

‘Jack, there’s always traffic on the Newhaven road, you know that. Big lorries too. Just leave it for a while, will you? I’ve got too many other things to do.’

‘But why? Traffic’s not a reason. Just give me one reason why. You’re always saying I should take more exercise. Well, riding my bike’s exercise.’

Henry appears in his pyjamas.

‘Who on earth was that?’

‘Diana of course. Wanting to know what the weather’s like before deciding what to wear. You know we’ve got Glyndebourne today.’

Henry nods mutely, pours himself a mug of coffee. Jack pads softly to his father’s side.

‘Dad, can I go for a ride on my bike?’

‘Don’t see why not.’

‘Jack!’ His mother can’t hear, but she knows his methods. ‘You know perfectly well I said no. You shouldn’t go asking Daddy when I’ve already said no.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t have a reason. I’ve been allowed to go for a ride on my bike before, haven’t I?’

Henry says, ‘Let him go.’

‘Oh, Henry.’

‘He’s eleven years old. He’s not stupid. I’d rather he was out on his bike than playing those damn computer games.’

Jack knows he’s won. He doesn’t want his parents to argue.

‘I’ll be really careful, Mum. I’ll look out at every crossing. I’ll stay right by the side of the road, and if a big lorry comes I’ll get off and walk.’

Laura shrugs, annoyed.

‘If Daddy says you can.’

Jack runs out to the garage and pushes his bike across the gravel to the road. It’s colder outside than he expected and he wishes he had gloves, but there’s no way he’s going back into the house. The air makes his eyes water as he rides down the lane, and the verges have this sharp sweetish smell that you never smell in the car. Every time he brushes against the verge in his zeal for road safety his left thigh gets drenched with moisture. The letter is in the pocket of his jeans, folded over to fit in, he can feel the ridge it makes with every turn of the pedals.

He forks left at the three poplars, past the electric gates to the Critchells’ drive, and at the T-junction onto the Newhaven road he gets off and pushes his bike. Nothing on the road, despite his mother’s fears, so he gets back on and bikes into the village. All quiet in front of the Fleece Inn, where later there’ll be crowds of hikers gathering to walk on the Downs. The gate in the church porch is open. In the shadow of the church tower there’s a man digging, but he doesn’t look up. Past the shuttered shop, and the row of terraced houses with blue doors, all the same blue. And there’s the flint wall and the narrow iron gate that says Home Farm.

Funny how things join up. The way to school is the other direction entirely, you turn left onto the Newhaven road, not right into the village. And yet by some mystery to do with turns in the road, the fields beyond the school playing fields join up with the fields at the back of the village, and this house that’s right in the middle of the village is where the Dogman lives.

Toby found it out.

‘You can’t miss it,’ he said. ‘It’s the only house that’s all mucky and has weeds in front.’

Jack cycles past the Dogman’s house and slows to a stop by the village hall. He turns round and rides back again, more slowly this time, his heart beating loudly. He doesn’t want to be seen. If anyone appears, on the street or at a window, he’s not going to do it. But there’s no one.

He brakes, jumps off, leaves the bike lying on the narrow pavement. Pushes through the iron gate and up the weed-clogged path to the front door. Breathing fast, he pulls at the folded letter and can’t get it out of his jeans pocket. He has to bend over and pull, then it’s out, but the iron flap on the letter box won’t give, it seems to be rusted shut. He forces it with his fingers, willing it to give, and at last it shudders ajar. He pushes the letter in, pokes his fingers after it, hears it fall free on the other side. Then he turns and runs. Back down the path, scrape the gate closed, yank his bike upright, swing it round to face the road home—

An old lady is rolling silently along the pavement on an electric buggy. Her body is bent, her face turned down and sideways. She sees where she’s going by this witchy sideways peeping.

Did she see me post the letter?

Impossible to say. He’s dimly aware that he’s noticed her in the village before, but he’s never paid her any attention, and has no notion of her name. So with luck she has no notion of his.

He pedals past her with his face averted, and then looks back, imagining the view from her buggy. Of course she saw him post the letter. There’s no way she could not have seen him, the one moving object in the whole scene. Jack wants to go back and find the letter and take it away before the Dogman reads it, but the door will be locked. It’s too late now.

A sense of dread grips him as he cycles home. The letter is blackmail, and blackmail is a crime. People go to prison for it.

Most likely the old lady’s too gaga to know what she saw. Most likely her eyesight’s so bad she can’t tell one boy from another. Most likely the Dogman will just laugh when he reads the letter and throw it in the bin. Most likely nothing will happen ever.

But there is just a very small possibility that the Dogman has already found the letter. That he’s about to go all round the village, red with anger, asking if anyone saw who pushed the letter through his letter-box at quarter to eight in the morning. Then the old lady will remember the boy on the orange and purple bike. No one else has a bike in those colours. If her eyes are good enough to drive her buggy down the road, they’re good enough to see an orange and purple bike.

Best if I hide it.

Duh! What good is that? The police come to the door and say, ‘Does anyone in this family own an orange and purple bike?’ Mum says right out, ‘Jack does.’

He turns off the road into the lane to home.

I must have been mad to think no one would see me. I’m a total jackass.

But they can’t prove it.

This thought brings sudden relief.

So I was in the village at the time. So it’s my bike. I never sent the letter. Prove it. You got to have proof in a court, you can’t just say, Well, what were you doing in the village street if you weren’t delivering the letter? If you can’t prove it, I’m innocent. That’s the law.

He pushes his bike into the garage and enters the house by the back door. Mum and Dad still in the kitchen. They’re arguing.

‘You know you’ll love it, Henry. And anyway, Mummy’s got the tickets, which is very generous of her, and I can’t say, Oh, Henry’s changed his mind at the last minute.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘It’s far too late to get someone else now.’

‘So leave the seat empty. Put your coats on it.’

‘Do you know how much those seats cost?’

‘You want me to pay your mother back?’

‘Please, Henry! You know you’ll like it when you’re there.’

‘I’m back,’ says Jack.

‘Jack, your jeans are soaking.’

‘They’ll dry.’

He goes up to his room and strips off all his clothes. He’s decided to have a shower and put on clean clothes. This won’t stop him being identified by the police, they’re allowed to search the dirty clothes basket, but he still wants the feeling of being a different person.

While he’s in the shower working the bar of soap between both hands to make foam he has a new thought.

Can you leave fingerprints on paper?

He becomes aware of a banging on the door. For a split second he feels a stab of sheer terror. Then he hears Carrie’s voice.

‘Hurry up! I need the loo!’

‘I’m having a shower!’

‘Hurry up, Jack! I’m bursting!’

‘Go away!’

And there’s something else too. There’s some way they have of finding tiny traces you’ve left on things and proving they come from you. They catch people years and years later that way.

Jack rubs the lather all over his body, more thoroughly than he’s ever done before, wanting to erase all traces of his day so far and be again the boy eating Weetabix and reading
Tintin
. But there’s no going back. What’s done is done.

41

Jimmy Hall stands silent and unseen at the back of the church as the service proceeds. There before the altar rails, resting on a small table, stands a wooden coffin that is about the size of a wine box. He thinks it may well be a wine box. He makes a note in his notebook. On the box is a home-made floral wreath. There are five people in the church apart from himself, and none of them has noticed him. Jimmy Hall is accustomed to this, and is learning to find a peculiar distinction in his invisibility. He is the spectator. No one knows just how much he sees, and therein lies his secret power. Everything that makes him insignificant – his middle age, his small stature, his balding head, his forgettable features, his unwanted area of expertise, and his bachelor status – conspire to render him uniquely equipped for his new role. He is a reporter. He is a newspaper man.

The image fits his sense of himself so perfectly that he wonders he never thought of it before. Reporters, like private detectives, live alone and dress shabbily. They have no money, and commonly no family. Their job is their life, their vocation and their obsession. They believe in the good story, the well-turned phrase, and nothing and nobody else. They are loners with attitude.

At the age of fifty-six Jimmy Hall finds himself standing on the lowest rung of what could become an entirely new career. He is present in the church of St Mary’s Edenfield today in his capacity as roving reporter for the
Sussex County Chronicle
. While driving through Edenfield from Denton, where he lives, to the school, where he goes even on non-school days to help out with the boarders, he observed the strange little entourage entering the church. He recognized among them one of his pupils, Alice Dickinson. Alert as every newspaper man always is to the chance of a story, he pulled his car in to the side and entered the church after them. Alice came when beckoned, and told him that the service was for a dog.

Jimmy Hall saw at once that a dog funeral would make a quirky but touching human interest item. He has hopes of being rewarded with his first-ever byline. Snippets of news supplied by him have been printed before, but always within longer pieces credited to ‘our Correspondent’ or ‘the
Chronicle
news team’ or sometimes ‘Arthur Joby’. Arthur Joby, a veteran of old Fleet Street, is the editor and mainstay of the
Sussex County Chronicle
, and he is Jimmy Hall’s mentor. He has promised that Jimmy Hall will get his own byline when he submits an item of sufficient interest to warrant a hundred words or more.

The vicar is now saying a prayer over the wine-box coffin. The elderly couple in black are presumably the dead dog’s owners. The girl from school, Alice, is present with her mother.

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me though he were dead yet he shall live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’

Odd to say such prayers over the body of a dog. Are there dogs in heaven? Jimmy Hall suspects that there are not. But he is a journalist, not a theologian. He’s here for the human touch. He must find a moment to talk to the mourners. Arthur Joby has taught him the technique. Never say, ‘What are you feeling?’ Few people can articulate their feelings. Give them options, as in a multiple choice test. All they have to do is tick the box, and bingo! you’ve got a quote. Talk to the vicar too. Add the usual descriptive colouring and he should have no trouble reaching the hundred word mark.

By James Hall. By James M. Hall. By Jim Hall. By J.M.Hall. Anything but Jimmy. Jimmy’s a little boy’s name, but he’s never been able to shed it. Now he’s known as ‘poor old Jimmy’, which is simultaneously infantile and senile. He accepts the name as he accepts the world’s indifference, knowing that appearances deceive.

How did the dog die? Does it matter? Get the names. Spell them correctly. Look for the shorthand phrase that places social class: luxury home, golf club member, pub regular, single mum.

The prayers by the altar seem to be finished. The old husband is picking up the wooden box. The vicar is leading the mourners up the aisle.

Jimmy Hall shrinks into the shadows. They do not see him but he sees them. After they have left the church he follows. At such times the press is discreet. Discreet but ever-present.

A quiet Saturday morning in the churchyard of St Mary’s Edenfield. The grave has been dug round the far side of the church, close to the oil tank, where a patch of nettles has been strimmed for the purpose. The wooden box is lowered into the hole as the vicar prays.