The Year of the Ladybird (2 page)

I looked back at the man. ‘I didn’t want to crowd you. There aren’t any other seats.’

At last, at long last, he lifted his bony head and gazed up at me. His complexion was ruddy and weathered, all broken surface capillaries. The whites of his cold eyes were stained with spots of
yellow. He blinked in frigid assessment. Finally he offered the briefest of nods which I took as permission to sit down. I unloaded my soup and my fish and leaned my empty tray precariously against
the leg of my chair.

The man’s wife – I took the wide gold band on her finger to mean that they were married – relaxed a little, but not completely. She glanced at me and then back at her husband.
Meanwhile he put his head down and continued to eat, reaching all the way round to the far side of his dish, digging back into his soup before raising his spoon to his mouth. His sleeves were
rolled. Naval tattoos, faded and discoloured on the pale skin beneath the dark hairs of his arms, flexed slightly as he ate. Between the lower finger knuckles of his fists were artlessly tattooed
the words LOVE and HATE in washed out blue ink.

I started in on my leek soup.

‘First day?’ I heard him say, though he appeared to growl right into his dish. His voice was a miraculous low throaty rasp. Southern.

His wife looked at me and nodded almost imperceptibly, encouraging me to respond.

‘Yes,’ I said brightly. ‘Trying to work out where everything is. Get the hang of things. You know? Got lost three times already.’ I laughed. I was a bag of nerves and I
knew it and he knew it. I coloured again and I hated myself for it.

He lifted his head at last and looked from side to side as if an enemy might be listening. It was like we were in prison. Almost without moving his lips he croaked, ‘Keep your head down.
Be all right.’

His wife was looking at me now. Her beautiful brown eyes blazed at me. But behind them her expression seemed to be saying something else
.

He pushed his empty soup bowl aside and sucked on his teeth before reaching for his plate of fish. His wife quickly buttered a slice of bread and set it before him. She had long elegant fingers.
Her extreme delicacy and prettiness was a shocking contrast to the coarseness of her husband. He took the buttered bread and between strong fingertips coloured like acorns with nicotine he folded
and squeezed it. After swallowing a mouthful of fish he leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Don’t give ’em nothing.’

I had no idea who he was talking about.

He shot a glance through the window and spoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘Don’t lend ’em any money. Don’t buy ’em a beer.’

I was about to say something but his wife flared her eyes at me again. Very wide. She was warning me not to interrupt him.

‘You can lend ’em a cigarette. A cigarette is all right.
One
cigarette. Not two. One cigarette is all right.’ Then he looked back at me again. ‘Don’t tell
’em nothing they don’t need to know. Nothing. Be all right.’

Then he bent his head over his cod in white sauce and ate the rest of his dinner. The conversation was over. His wife looked up at me briefly and this time her eyes said
there you are,
then
.

Football I could do. When I got down to the bone-hard and dusty soccer pitch there were about twenty enthusiastic lads waiting to be organised so I divided them into teams and
let them have at it. I lavished them with uncritical praise and if they fell over I picked them up. If they got roughed up I pulled them to their feet and told them what a great thing it was they
were so hard and that good footballers needed to be tough.

When it was time to finish I noticed Pinky and another tall, slightly stooped man watching, both with folded arms, from the side of the pitch. I gave a blast on the whistle to end the game,
collected the ball and walked over to them. Pinky introduced the man to me as Tony. I recognised him as the fez-wearing figure on the billboard in the foyer of the theatre.
Abdul-Shazam!
Though in real life he looked no more Arabic than do I.

Tony – or Abdul-Shazam – gave me a wide professional smile and pumped my hand. ‘You’ll do me, son. Pick ’em up, dust ’em down. Up you get and carry on. Like
that. Like it. You, son, are now officially on the team. Come on. Coffee time.’

Pinky excused himself and Tony whisked me to the coffee bar. There he charmed a couple of free and frothy espressos out of the girl behind the counter. He introduced me to her and said something
that made my face colour. When we sat down he proceeded to brief me.

‘Everything son, you do everything. It’s all in the programme. You get Saturday off every week, changeover day. Meet in the theatre each morning at 9.30 sharp. Check in, cover the
bases. Can you sing? Dance? Tell a funny story? Just kidding son, just kidding. You check the bingo tickets, get everyone in the theatre, give the kids a stick of rock every five minutes. Been to
college, haven’t you? You can write, can’t you? Write down the names of the winners of the Glamorous Grandmother comp and all that. A monkey could do it, no offence. If you’re
chasing skirt, make sure you share yourself round the ugly ones, because it’s only fair. Smile all the way until October. That’s all you have to do. A monkey could do it.’

‘What happened to the last monkey?’

‘What?’

‘The one I replaced.’

Tony looked up and waved wildly at a family passing by our table. His face was like soft leather and it fell easily into a wreath of smiles, like it knew the lines into which it should flow. His
skin was super-smoothed by remnants of stage make-up. ‘Howdy kids!’

‘Shazam Shazam!’ the entire family shouted back at him. He looked pleased.

When they’d gone I reminded him of my question.

‘Look, don’t worry about a thing.’ I don’t know why he said that because I wasn’t worried. ‘Any problems, see me, except when there’s a problem, see
someone else.’ Then he burst into song, crooner style, throwing his arms wide and turning to the campers seated at other tables.
The answer, my friend-a, is a-blowing in the wind-a, the
answer is a-blowing in the wind
. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose very loudly. Everyone laughed and I did, too, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.

He drained his cup and stood up. ‘You’re back on duty in one hour. Bingo in the main hall. After that, theatre, front of house.’

Then he was gone.

I was an Alice in Wonderland. It was a world I knew nothing of, hyper-real, inflated, one where the colours seemed brighter, vivid, intense. I was excited to be working there,
being a part of it, but the truth is I felt anxious, too. It wasn’t just about being an outsider, it was the strangeness of it all. Many of the staff I met were odd fish. I had a crazy idea
that they all had large heads and small bodies, like caricature figures on an old-style cigarette card.

Back in my tiny room on my first night I lay awake for hours. Of my room-mate there was still no sign and I was wondering what I’d done in signing up to this place. I was over-stimulated
by the day’s events and sleep didn’t come. I lay in the darkness with my eyes wide open.

At some point I put the light on and got out of bed. The toilets and showers were at the end of the staff block. It was about 3 a.m. and I decided to take a shower to try to relax. When I got
back to my room I dried myself off and decided to take my clothes – still in my backpack – and hang them in the slim wardrobe.

When I’d done that I sat down on the bed and took the photo from my leather wallet. It was a small black and white photo, maybe three inches square with a thin white margin. The
photo-chemicals were either unfixing or the picture was over-exposed. Either way the shot was of a seaside scene. The subject was slightly blurred but a muscular man, maybe in his twenties, wore
dark bathing trunks and smiled back at the camera. The wind whipped his hair across his eyes so you couldn’t fully see his face. He stood with arms akimbo and behind him the sea frothed and
foamed at the sand.

The man in the picture was my biological father. I turned the photo over in my hand. On the back of it someone had written one word in pencil. The pencil had faded just like the photo, but it
was still easy to read what was written there: Skegness.

One word. It was a word I’d peered at many times, as if it were code or a mantra or a key of some kind. My father had taken me to Skegness when I was three years old – I don’t
know where my mother was at the time – and I was told he’d suffered a heart attack on the beach. I was with him at the time, though of course I had no memory of these events. Later my
mother married my stepfather. This was the only photograph I had of my father. I’d stolen it. I don’t even know whether Mum knew I had it, though she might have guessed.

I’d found the photograph when I was old enough to snoop. It was in a tin box kept at the foot of my mother’s wardrobe. In the box were various documents like birth certificates and
some old costume jewellery plus a series of postcards. There were photograph albums in the house so I knew instantly this one was rogue. I quickly figured out this was my natural father. At some
point in my teens I took and kept the photograph for myself.

It was not as if we had never discussed my biological father. Any time I asked I would get some basic biographical details and the same account of a tragedy that took place on a beach. The
account was always consistent and unvarying.

‘Why on earth would you want to go there?’ This was my stepfather, Ken, when I announced I was going to Skegness to look for seasonal work.

It’s an extraordinary thing. If my mother had dropped the dishes on the floor or they had turned to gaze at each other meaningfully, I could have understood it. But when I said that I was
going to Skegness they instantly announced their serious displeasure by not doing anything. Ken was eating his fried breakfast and Mum was at the sink. I’d been back from college for just two
days. The fact that they made no movement – made no eye contact either with each other or with me – tipped me off to the fact that I’d just lobbed a grenade.

Ken gazed down at his breakfast, carefully sawing through his bacon and sausage with his knife. His blond eyebrows seemed to bristle over his red, weathered face. Mum rinsed a plate and shook
the droplets from the plate as if they had to be counted.

Finally she spoke, but still without turning to face me. ‘But Ken’s got you good work with him.’

Ken was a builder. He usually had a number of projects going on different sites. I’d worked for him before, mostly as a ladder-monkey and errand boy. It was okay but unless you like
running up and down a ladder and whistling at passing girls once every four hours it was dull. ‘I know that, Dad,’ I said. Sometimes I called him Ken and sometimes Dad, without
particular intention. ‘But I want to do something different.’

‘How much are they paying you?’ he wanted to know. ‘It won’t be much.’

‘I haven’t even got a job yet,’ I said.

‘Why there?’ Mother said.

‘I’ve got a friend who is working there.’ This was a lie.

‘I’d got it all set up for you,’ said Ken. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

My mother turned off the running tap and with agonising delicacy she set the plate on the draining rack, as if it were a fragile and rare piece of china.

The next day at the morning briefing I got to meet some of my fellow Greencoats. One was a rather sad and overweight sixty-year-old with a pale face and a rotten wig. The three
girl Greencoats were professional dancers in the evening theatre, doubling on the entertainments programme in the day-time. They were all sweet-natured, leggy, tanned and beautiful, and seemed as
unattainable as the planets in the night sky. The other male Greencoat was absent to no one’s great surprise or concern.

Offered the choice between organising a Whist Drive or a kids’ Sandcastle competition on the beach I plumped for the latter. I preferred the idea of outdoor work. I had little desire for
the beer-and-smoke taverns in which I now knew a lot of the activities took place. One of the dancers, Nikki, felt the same and because her pirouetting colleagues preferred the indoor work, she was
the one who showed me the ropes.

Which meant showing me the store-room where the gun-metal bins of pink candy-rock were kept under lock and key. I carried the bin to the beach. It felt ceremonial. Nikki meanwhile took with her
an official-looking clipboard and pen.

Down on the beach about thirty tousle-haired kids had assembled. The sea in Skegness ebbs a long way out, exposing miles and miles of light golden sand backed by a dune system. The tide that
morning had pulled the sea out and the waves were only a distant murmur, visible through a rippling heat haze. Nikki kicked off her sandals and, barefoot, she marked out a big square on the hot
sand, telling the wide-eyed kids she was timing them and that they had exactly one hour, not a minute more, not a minute less. She told them they could start when she blew her whistle.

From her pocket she pulled a whistle on a string, exactly like the one I’d been given to referee the football game. She looked at me pointedly. ‘Are we ready?’ I guessed we
were ready, so I nodded. Nikki produced a short blast on the whistle and the kids set to it.

‘What do we do now?’ I said, still cradling my tin of rock.

‘We sit down ont’ sand,’ she said. ‘Then after an hour you give everyone a big smile and a stick of rock.’

She rewarded me with a smile of her own. Nikki had jet-black hair and flashing dark eyes. With her skin like dark honey I suspected Mediterranean blood but her accent was as Mediterranean as the
Ilkley Moor. She stripped off her candy-stripe blazer and sat back on the golden sand. I did the same. She hitched up her white skirt to let the sun to her lovely legs. I could see the white cotton
of her knickers.

Nikki made a visor with the flat of her hand and looked at me. ‘Student then, are you?’ She made the word roll out on her tongue.
Stooooodunt
. Is it possible to fall in love
with someone because of their accent? I think so.