1985
There was a pause after the boy spoke. The man behind the counter at the builders’ merchant smiled.
“Not a rubber hammer?” asked the man.
“Sorry?” said the boy.
“Don’t you want a rubber hammer as well as the sky hooks?”
“Er… no,” the boy replied, trying not to sound uncertain.
“Really? What about a skirting board ladder or a long weight?”
“No, just the sky hooks, please.” The boy’s skin began to feel hot.
“How far?” the man said, shaking his head but still smiling.
“Sorry?” The boy cleared his throat, swallowing nervously.
“How far they sent you to get ’ere?”
“Other side of town… from the King’s Hotel.”
“What’s yer name, son?”
“Greg.”
“Take your time walking back, Greg. Get yourself a Coke or something.”
“What?” the boy looked confused.
“First week at work, is it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a joke, Greg, see? Sky hooks… an old joke.”
#
The plaster was drying on Greg’s skin and under his fingernails and where it had splashed onto his face and his head, collapsing his carefully combed James Dean hair style; he’d have it shaved off that first weekend.
“I’m gonna stop you,” said Big Mac.
“Oh,” said Greg, who hadn’t heard him approach. He got up from his knees and stood back to admire his work.
“You know why?” said Big Mac, smiling.
“To let it dry?” Greg ventured.
“No. ’Cos you now got about free fuckin’ hours work to do scrapin’ off what you splashed all over the fuckin’ place, including on yerself.” He picked up the paint scraper and handed it to Greg. “Every speck.”
Greg watched Big Mac’s big arse juddering away down the corridor, then turned to look again at what he’d done. Kneeling back on the bare floorboards, he took a breath and began with the paint scraper, jabbing grudgingly at the lightening splashes of plaster that were suddenly everywhere, blossoming like a whole field of weeds.
2022
“Larissa? Jesus, Dad!”
“What?” said Greg, attempting a thin veneer of surprise.
“Please don’t tell me that she’s one of your students?”
“Not anymore.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dad!”
“She’s not! She was, then we lost touch and then she came back to a reunion. She was one of my first students when I started here.”
“How old is she?”
Greg took a deep breath. “Twenty-sev…”
“Dad!”
His voice hardened. “Sarah, please don’t give me any profound advice before you consider whether or not I might already have explored some, if not all, of the avenues down which living a cliché has led me. I am relatively self-aware; I do have warning bells of my own.”
“Really? Didn’t they go off when you woke up next to someone the same age as your daughter?”
“She’s not your age.”
“Not far off.”
“Look, I’ve already done this conversation dozens of times in my head.”
“Tell me how it goes, then.”
“Normally, it ends with me telling you that everything you’re saying – however strongly felt and apparently unarguable – is only the product of the amount of time you’ve been alive, and that that – just that, not lack of intelligence or moral heft – is what restricts your view, and that nothing you can say or do now will enable you to understand where I’m coming from until you, too, are standing on middle-aged legs, staring in the mirror at a face that’s become unrecognisable, living a life that you can feel slipping away from you, and all the time wondering when it started, this loss, this decline, and why you didn’t realise earlier or do more to stop it or make yourself better prepared…,” he was breathing fast now, “…and how the hell are you going to slow it, just to give yourself a little more time to think, to come up with something that might help you fight the panic whose vindictive dark matter fills all the alarming gaps and cracks appearing in your confidence, the panic that, increasingly, you sense will one day – one night, rather, because did I also tell you that the nights are a whole lot fucking worse after fifty? – overwhelm you, drag you down and drown you in some hideous, unfathomable depth of lonely regret.” His face had reddened and his eyes were hard on her. “’Cos that’s how it ends, Sarah, this conversation, this life.”
She stared impassively back as she said: “And at that point, you fuck a student.”
1985
Greg had the town to himself, nearly. Cycling through the beginnings of heat, empty streets lined his way, save for the seagulls scavenging rubbish sacks or the pigeons scattering from the curbs as he passed them, weaving from road to pavement and back again, ignoring traffic lights and one-way signs, pedalling furiously down the long hill to the almost empty town centre till he couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted to, the gradual curve of the road flinging him out finally onto the wide, flat mile of promenade that wore away at his speed while he watched the morning sun shoaling its glimmers on the waves and flaring off the windows of the small hotels and shabby B&Bs lining the front.
Leaving his bike in the storeroom, Greg hurried to the kitchens.
“Too late, matey!” Dave shouted.
“No way, it’s not eight!” the boy feigned outrage.
“Well… maybe, matey, this time I lets you.” Grinning, Dave handed him a plate of sausage, eggs and bacon, before going back to wiping the surfaces with the filthy dishcloth he always carried over his shoulder. “Is rain later, you see,” he added, whistling. “Like a flood.”
While Greg ate, he watched Dave take a slice of bread to the outside bin store door, where he crouched and cooed till the sparrows came, taking the crumbs from his hand. After a while, he stood, brushed his palms together, wiped them on the dishcloth and took from the pocket of his thin, brown, striped suit trousers a great wedge of notes belted across its middle by two rubber bands.
Brian and Big Mac came in, Brian cuffing Greg lightly on the back of the head.
“Watcha!”
“You’re fuckin’ mad carryin’ all that round wiv ya,” Big Mac said, nodding at the money in Dave’s hand. What if you get mugged, eh?”
“Never happen, never yets, you see, matey,” Dave replied, patting the bundle as he slid it back into his pocket.
“No one carries their life savings round wiv ’em. Christ’s sake, put it in a bank!”
“I learn,” Dave shook his head vehemently from side to side, “back home, I know what banks take and what they leave from your monies. Is safer much, here.” He was from the Lebanon or Syria or, sometimes, Jordan.
“Your money.” Big Mac shrugged. ‘Anyway, Rockefeller, two large ones, all the works… and free sausages on each. I’m Lee fuckin’ Marvin this mornin’.”
2003
She looked steadily, not unkindly, at Greg as she spoke. “This isn’t a rant; I’m as much a part of all this as you. But we can’t ignore what’s happening, can’t go on pretending, saying the same old things, day after day. We have to do something, otherwise we’ll stay stuck here, with more lines on our faces and fewer choices, repeating the same old pointless words.”
Greg thought how tired she looked, the skin gathered darkly beneath each eye. It made him feel even more responsible. Yet she’d lost her temper only once, whereas his guilt had bred in him an increased tendency to shout, as well as a skilled nuancing that allowed him to interpret her lack of outrage as a default admission of lovelessness. Not that he underestimated her equability: it would leave him the inch of guilt and pitiful self-awareness with which he’d eventually spin a mile of martyr’s twine to dangle from ludicrously, fooling no one, least of all himself.
“You’re right,” he said.
“D’you know what you want to do?”
“No.”
“Well, we need to think of something. For Sarah’s sake.”
“Do something properly you mean, something right, for once?” He was surprised at the irritation that rose, like reflux, with his words.
“Something which makes some sense to a young child.”
“We chose to have her,” he said, hoping a shared guilt would dilute his infidelity’s residual bile.
“I remember.”
“So do I.” His pointless counterpoint fed on the silence, echoing.
1985
The Assistant Manager looked kindly at him. “And you’re settling in alright?”
“Yes, thank you, Mr Cribbs.” Greg shifted his weight on his feet, his hands meeting meekly behind his back.
“Well, that’s…” Mr Cribbs’ words disappeared into the paperwork that had drifted across his desk, piling to one side against an empty coffee cup. “And Brian says you’re finding your… Good! Yes,” and he leaned back, staring past the boy to the large window, its centre dramatically scarred with grey-white seagull shit, beyond which a murky blue somewhere harboured the invisible sun. “Yes.”
#
“Speak to Cribbs?” Big Mac asked, when Greg found him in the Ladies lavatory, unblocking one of the loos.
“Yeah, but he didn’t really say anything.”
“That’s cos ’e’s a cunt,” grunted Big Mac, his rubber-gloved hand busy in the U-bend. “These fuckin’ women… I don’t fink they can read. There’s fuckin’ signs all over this bog tellin’ ’em not to flush their tampons, but every fuckin’ week I got mi arm down here pullin’ out jammies.” He withdrew a handful of soggy, pink cotton, mottled with darker red spots, their pale strings dangling like dead rats’ tails. Dropping it into an open carrier bag, he added: “Cribbs couldn’t find ’is own arse in the bath. If ’e’s management, it’s no wonder this fuckin’ place is going down the pan.” He flushed.
2015
Sarah jutted her chin out. “I just think it’s not relevant… to me, my life at the moment. I’m not like you, Dad… I’m not an academic.”
“Christ!” Greg laughed.
“You know what I mean. It was easy for you. You knew.”
“No, I didn’t. Not at first.”
“OK, well, yeah, not till ‘the tampon moment’… I know. But from then on, you were sure.”
He felt a twinge of hurt, reminded again how he bored his teenage daughter. “I don’t think calling it ‘the tampon moment’ helps.” He forced a smile.
“Sorry, but at least it shows I was paying attention.”
“So like your mother.” He shook his head. “Tedious or not, it was a life-changing thing.”
“I didn’t say ‘tedious’, Dad. But the thing is, I haven’t experienced anything like that yet.” She looked out the window. “And, until I do know, I don’t want to waste time getting lumbered with some pointless debt. If I change my mind, I can always go to uni. in a year or two. If I waited five years, I’d still only be twenty-three. I can spend this time working on my photography and saving up some cash.”
“You’ll just go travelling and blow it all.”
“Why are you so obsessed with me travelling?”
“It’s worry, as you well know. And I’m not alone; Mum feels much the same.”
“You are talking to each other, then?”
“Don’t be cruel.”
“Me!? You two don’t need my help on that front.”
1985
Brian was grinning when Greg got back with the two bags. “Well, what d’you think?”
“She’s lovely,” Greg replied.
“Told ya. Two months now.”
“Really pretty,” Greg added, flattered by the older man’s evident gratification.
“Dunno if it’s serious, or what, yet. But…”
Big Mac strode in. “Are those them plugs?” he nodded at the bags in Greg’s hands.
“Guess who saw Julie?” Brian was beaming.
“Julie-wiv-the-tits Julie?”
“Yeah.”
Big Mac grinned at Greg. “Bet ya wouldn’t mind getting yer ’ands on them, eh?” He scrunched his fat face into one big gland of ecstatic expression. When he’d finished, he added: “Fuck knows what she sees in Grandad ’ere.”
“Don’t you worry, mate,” crowed Brian “she sees plenty in me. I’ve never ’ad one wander off before. All satisfied customers.”
Big Mac laughed derisively and then looked at Greg. “Right, come on then, you horny little bastard, pick them bags up. We gotta get the wirin’ done in Room 218 before lunch.” Big Mac lifted one leg, farted loudly and walked through the door, singing “Heigh-Ho, heigh-ho. It’s off to work we go.” Greg followed him out, clutching the bags.
#
Sue smiled at him. “You alright carrying all them, darlin’?”
“I’m fine,” Greg nodded.
“How they treatin’ you, those two?”
“Yeah, good thanks.”
“Any problems, just tell me. I’ll deal wiv ’em.” She stroked the top of his arm which was shaking with the weight. “You sure them sheets ain’t too ’eavy?”
“Fine thanks.” His voice was beginning to strain.
“Follow me then, luv.”
She squeezed past him out of the housekeepers’ airing cupboard, her breasts brushing his forearm. He stepped unsteadily, leaning round the tower of sheets, following her along the worn red carpet towards the bridal suite, where he heard the two other maids, Josie and Lauren, laughing. “Put ’em there on the bed, darlin’,” said Sue.
He felt his weightless arms flooding with blood as he tried to hide the rise and fall of his chest.
“You wore ’im out, Sue!” Josie said, smirking.
Greg grinned sheepishly. The other girl, Lauren, stared at him, a challenge in her eyes. She was the youngest and had pink hair and a nose stud. She looked him up and down.
“’E our new maid, then?” she said, a smile nearly on her lips.
“Wassup wi you two? Go on, luv, you go.” Sue smiled at Greg. “They’re trouble ’ere today.” He was blushing.
He could hear all three of them laughing as he walked back down the corridor’s faded red threads.
1998
Greg watched his baby daughter sleep. She uttered small, fretful mews now and then, thrusting her little fists into the air before spreading pink coral fingers whose tiny nail-capped ends fascinated him. She seemed determined from within somehow, her moments played out to a secret rhythm whose results he watched with a mixture of worry and wonder. He’d had no difficulty accepting her deliverance from a gestating theoretical to the sudden, substantive weight of her in his arms, but this life-dance of hers, this stubbornly informed instinct for existence, unnerved him. He felt less, not more, useful with the passing days, as if she was moving away from him, borne off by other, more fundamental forces, leaving him behind, a bystander at her recession.
She woke, mouthing a gasp that became a yawn. He leaned towards her, smiling, but she looked past him, her eyes fascinated by something in the distances beyond his shoulder.
1985
Greg gripped the brown pay packet in his pocket. He’d hardly let go of it since Mr Cribbs had, with mock ceremoniousness, handed it to him barely an hour before. Now he hurried to the kitchen to show the others, waving the packet proudly at Dave, who was the only one there.
“You counted it, yet?” Dave asked, smiling. “I’ll get you some teas. Sit there and you count it, to check.”
It was all there, nestled in the packet along with the long, thin, printed slip bearing his name and National Insurance number.
“Oi, oi,” Brian strode in and sat down with his mug of tea as Greg stuffed the notes and coins back. “POETS day today, son.”
“Eh?” Greg replied, hurriedly re-sealing the packet before folding it in half and gripping it again in his left hand.
“Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday.” Brian grinned. “Anyway, you’re buyin’ ’em.”
“Eh?”
“Pub. Your round, the first one… from your first wages. It’s traditional.”
“Oh, er… yeah, I guess so.” Greg felt himself heating up, his skin suddenly pricking against his T shirt.
“Just the firsts,” Dave said, sitting with them. “Make them buy after that, Greggie.”
“Fuck off, Davey-boy. We’ll take care of ’im. ’Es one of us now.”
Greg swallowed, his skin reddening. “I… sometimes they won’t serve… you know… not always, but in some places, they want ID…”
“Nah! We’ll go The Blenheim. Steve’s alright. Anyway… you’re only ’avin’ a Coke.” Brian smiled, sipping his tea.
#
The £10 note looked tiny on the bar, its little corners sticking out from Big Mac’s great hand like some small animal being eaten.
“Alright, Macsy,” said the barman, approaching.
“Free pints o’ Tennent’s, Steve… and some of vem prawn ’n lemon scratchy snacks.”
Steve gave Greg a quick, unsure stare before reaching for the first glass. “Righty-ho.”
Greg watched as Steve poured the pints and took the note – one of just four in Greg’s pay packet – and gave Big Mac back the few coins which he, in turn, tipped onto the bar.
“Fanks fer this, sunshine,” Big Mac said to Greg. “Fink we might make it a regular Friday fing, eh Bri?” Big Mac added, handing one of the pints to Greg. “There you go.” He grinned. “Cheers!”
“Cheers!” said Brian.
“Cheers!” added Greg, louder than he’d meant. The glass was cold and wet and big in his hand. The bubbles frothed and tickled in his throat. Big Mac raised his pint; after one great gulp, half of it had gone. Greg hurried his second gulp and had to burp into his hand. Brian tore the wrapping off a packet of B&H and offered them round. The boy took one, the smell of new tobacco rich until Brian held his lighter to each of their faces huddled round the flame, and the blue-grey gulfs billowed across the counter or surged up to break against the ceiling, its thick paint yellow with such years. The lights on the fruit machine glimmered and flashed. Out, beyond the sun-bleached curtain edges, the town sat in afternoon light, the cars and windows glinting. Somewhere a horn sounded. Greg drew on his cigarette and slid his left hand out of his pocket, releasing the packet. He took another, longer drink.
#
The park rose and fell like a sea, the masts and sails of its thick summer trees tipping in the night beyond the moth-thronged lamps lining the path, the lamps themselves rearing and falling away, their off-white lighthouse glows warning Greg as he stumbled between them. His knee was bleeding. Chips fell from the greasy parcel in his hand, two fingers of which still throbbed distantly with a cigarette burn. He yawed sideways onto the grass and back again onto tarmac. When he stopped, the park didn’t, its contours weaving on into the night. He lurched forward, sliding to grass before tripping over a flower bed’s neatly trimmed edge, the chips flung into the murk as he broke his fall. Up again, path again, with the great dark helmet of sky veering first to one side then the other of his head’s unresting spin, the lamps now flashing their stains like meteors above his heavy step. The path pulled suddenly to his right, leaving him a quick pause of warm air that became the thin, giving branches of a bush and then the rumour of a thud that left him laughing where he lay with the leaves and the lights and the far blue-black night closing over him, pouring down through his head and into his guts like a tide, each wave of which grew and fell and then grew again, bigger than before, till his stomach couldn’t hold them anymore and they broke out of him, one after another, glistening on the ground round his head. He spat several times and lay back in the quiet, his hand crawling to his pocket where it found the torn pay packet, crumpled round its few remaining coins.
2002
“Why don’t you just say it?” He looked at her.
“Say what?”
“What you’re thinking… about the job, the drinking, the…”
“What?”
“Dalliances.”
“A very literary way of putting it.”
“Is the label what you object to?”
“It encapsulates what I’m up against.”
“Which is?”
“Your life now: this place, keeping up appearances, lip service, ritual and proper behaviour… but underneath it all, the same old, same old blokey bullshit.”
“Is this the deep and disabusing well of new maternity speaking? I mean, I thought you liked being a lecturer’s wife.”
“This is nothing to do with Sarah; she’s more real by the day than this place ever was or will be. That’s just it, it’s the usual male dominance only here it’s dressed up in academic costume; you lot have put a gown and mortar board on it, given it a Latin name and a neo-Gothic building…”
“Actually, we don’t wear the cap, much, just the gown.”
She stared at him. “See? None of it gets beyond the jocular, ironic and incredibly self-satisfied surface. Once upon a time, you joked to make me laugh, to bring me closer; now, it’s to keep me away. After all this time, I don’t know any more what’s going on in your head. Because you used to mock all this dreaming spires stuff, I kept thinking you didn’t take it seriously. But now I realise that that’s what you used to be. When I look closer, you’re not like that at all; you actually do get off on all of it. I’m flattering myself because I used to think I knew you better than anyone. It was part of what made us, part of what made me feel special about us. All I can see now is the part you play, the increasingly thick academic skin that’s hiding… everything.”
1985
“You doin’ anyfin’ tonight?” Big Mac asked Greg, as he walked past.
“Er… no,” answered the boy.
“You are now.”
“What?”
“You’re goin’ out wiv Lauren.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t look too frilled.”
“I… don’t… I mean.”
“An’ don’t try nuffink, or Sue’ll crucify yer. She’s like ’er mum.”
“Right. I mean… I don’t… Maybe, it’d be…”
“Good, sorted. Come on, then, the Ladies is bunged up again. Better bring the jammy hook.”
“But… what do I…?”
“Jammy hook. I’ll see you there. I’m just gonna ’ave a shit.”
#
Greg stared in silence round the room. There wasn’t an inch of bare wall. Posters, photos, letters, record covers, old concert tickets, newspaper cuttings, fashion shots from magazines, torn-out library book pages, jokes from crackers, part of a school homework assignment, key rings, a bracelet, a cassette tape, a tourist pen with a picture of Tower Bridge on it, a small teddy bear on a string…
“Anything goes up there,” said Lauren, flinging herself onto her bed, “long as I like it. My whole life, all round me and I only have to look, so I can’t forget nothin’.”
“What if you want to?” Greg asked, after a pause.
“Eh?”
“Forget stuff… shit stuff, I mean.”
“Well, obviously I don’t put that up there, dumbo.”
“If it’s not up there… is that how you forget it?”
“You’re weird.”
He laughed. The date hadn’t gone well. He’d felt uncomfortable from the start. Now he just wanted to go home. It was a long walk. Failure gave him a little courage.
“You might get up there, just for that. My night with a weirdo.”
“Cheers!”
“Seriously.” From her bedside table, she grabbed a bright pink notebook with a glitter-spangled biro stuck to its spine. She tore out a blank page. Taking a lipstick from the makeup bag lying on the bed, she applied it quickly and then planted a heavy, prolonged kiss on the blank page. “Go on!” and she handed it to him. “Sign that. And don’t forget to put the date. That way, when I look at it, I’ll always know. Stops me forgetting.”
“What, your night with a weirdo?”
She didn’t reply but, as soon as he’d finished, she grabbed the sheet from him, got quickly up from the bed and went to the far wall, where she pinned it low down, next to a photo of a donkey with a straw hat on its head.
“There, now you’re fixed!”
2019
“So, I mean, it’s not much of a place for a life-changing moment, eh?” Greg paused and took a drink, then smiled, shaking his head. The stranger on the bar stool next to him nodded emphatically as Greg continued. “Ladies bog, fishing for a tampon with a bent coat hanger… but that’s where it happened…” he made a theatrical, sweeping gesture with his hand, “… my Damas… Damascene moment.” He’d been struggling with his words since the last round. The stranger, struggling himself to follow the significance, raised his eyebrows in sympathetic understanding. A thick silence smeared between them over which the bar music pattered and slid. “I think what I feel now… you know, the bit everyone misses – the bit I’ve been missing all these years – is that I always thought it obvious… I mean, obvious that I’d made the right choice. But what if I shouldn’t have interpert… int-er-pre-ted it like that. If I’d known… I mean, known then, that what seemed obvious… you know: swapping a boring manual job for the cerebral life, right… I mean, for a professor’s life?” and he tapped his head bluntly with two fingers, “…but that, actually, you know, all I’d have had to learn to handle was the boredom… but that then there wouldn’t be… wouldn’t have been all this other stuff, these details… see, they’re what trip you up – no, wrap round you, like spider’s web… yes…” he faltered, the thread slipping, “… and I could’ve done it all… more simply, you see. Stayed there, kept it un… complicated. D’you see that? Because that’s come to be all that I can see now. I had one moment, made one choice… which I’ve always thought was the right one… only to find…” He paused and looked at his drink, the glass less than half-full. “And that has made all the difference.” The music had stopped. In the silence, the stranger continued nodding.
1985
As the song started, Greg watched Big Mac roll the joint, his huge fingers surprisingly delicate as they pasted the Rizla papers together.
“Right, listen to this next one, son,” Big Mac said to Greg, before shouting “Turn it up, Christy!” to a man lost in the hazy depths of smoke.
Greg turned to scan the packed room, its air’s blue, sour-sweet musk overlaid with the smell of beer and barbequed meat. People spilled out the door into the small hall and kitchen, then out the open front door into the warm, grey Saturday afternoon, their voices filling any pause in the music. Greg’s head felt stuffed with sensation and energy, bursting as if he’d absorbed the whole party. He watched the bodies dancing. One woman, wearing a miniskirt, never stopped dancing. He’d been watching her more and more.
“This one’s for you, Macky!” a voice shouted. The music got louder.
“Luv it!” shouted Big Mac, the first flame playing round the joint’s end. “Fuckin’ luv it!” He took three heavy tokes and handed it to Greg. “There, that’ll sort you out.”
#
Greg danced with his eyes closed, effortlessly, his body winding round the music. Every note seemed perfect, the rhythm lifting and swaying him. He never wanted it to stop. When he opened his eyes, the woman in the miniskirt was dancing in front him. He opened his arms.
“Thought you’d never ask.” She moved closer, placing both arms round his neck, her hips swaying. He felt distanced from his own shock; it wasn’t confidence but a lightness in him as if he wasn’t fully there and so it didn’t matter what he did. He slid his hands forward, resting them on her hips. She brought her face to his, pushing her body against his, their hips moving together.
#
Greg couldn’t remember going up the stairs or getting to the bed where she lay, her legs bent as she lifted her waist and slid her knickers off. She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, where her hands began working at his belt while he stood, motionless. Behind her, he watched the bedhead smudge across the wall. Next to it was a chest of drawers, a chair, then a full-length mirror, their clumsy queue stumbling into his view. Then he was on the bed, lying under her, his Y-fronts and trousers bunched at his knees, her legs either side of his waist as she straddled him, her hand reaching behind her back till she found him and guided him to her. Beyond her now he could see, on the opposite wall, a framed picture of a couple arm in arm, laughing. Next to that was another, smaller mirror that slid around as he tried to focus on it. He felt himself go into her. The couple in the picture juddered. The mirror slid and slid again, meeting the door that had opened suddenly, bringing with it a little girl who stood there, staring at them.
“Mummy.”
2022
Greg watched the last of the tourists drift out of the quad heading for the tea rooms and the Old Town bridge where, selfie-smiling and baseball-capped, they would pose for their phones. They left the quad to a lone gardener, kneeling in a bed of perennials, her barrow hung with exiled weeds. Greg often thought that being a College gardener must be a stressless and gently patterned life, inconspicuous among the eternal stone and ever-skuttling minions of academe. Did they, he wondered, ever look up from the muddy ground to his window and fancy themselves sitting there, draped in tweed and theories, musing through the clean and comfortable days? He smiled at the comfort of equally shared misconceptions.
His eye was caught by half a dozen gnats swirling in the sunlight just outside his window, their chaotic, gilded volitions strangely calming. Inside the glass, the same beam lit drifting whits of dust above his desk where a stack of papers lay, awaiting his attention. He felt reluctant to let the moment go, wanting the insect-woven, dust-wandered light to fall forever in the stillness and silence which asked so little of him.
1985
The party had thinned out. Three or four people were still dancing, but slowly now, shuffling among empty beer cans and spilled ashtrays to the slower, sadder music of romance. A man was slumped over one end of the sofa on which Greg, dazed and nauseous, sat listening to the small, bitter-sounding middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face who was sat between them, talking half to him, half to herself.
“’Er own fuckin’ kid. I mean, ’oo’d bring a kid to a party like this? It’s a fuckin’ disgrace. She’s a tart, that’s all.” Dragging heavily on her cigarette, she blew the smoke down in one long, straight, piercing exhalation. Greg stared at the floor by his feet. His head was pulsing above his sickness; the mass of smoke and noise and beer and weed all heaved and rolled, forcing itself against his skull, thump after thump, trying to break its way out. “And ’er nickers off for you, not much more ’n a kid yerself.” He couldn’t say anything. The music faded, as if it, too, was leaving. When it had gone, she added: “Well, all I can say is, I ’ope you know a good VD clinic.”
#
As Greg stumbled on, the moon bumped and skittered after him, its blue-tinged white staining the bruise above. He wanted to throw up but couldn’t, nothing leaving him but the tears, sorry and unstoppable, sliding down his face. In his head the party’s deafening swell kept coming and going, an echoing, polluted tide that brought the middle-aged woman’s last words washing back in each time. He thought of his parents and his home. He was still sobbing when he reached it, creeping in like an infection, silently so as not to wake them.
1985
Mr Thomas looked steadily at Greg, who seemed uncertain as to how to answer the principal’s question. Mr Thomas had a busy day ahead of him; the first term of the new academic year was only a fortnight away. He’d squeezed this interview in as a favour to the boy’s father, who’d said on the phone that his son was ‘at a crossroads’, a moment of decision that could alter his whole life to come. Fortunately, this was one of Mr Thomas’s favourite themes: a faltering path returned to the true. For this lost young traveller, he had found time, and found some more now.
“It sounds strange, sir, but it was when I was at work… at the hotel. I was cleaning… well, we have to unblock the loos, and it’s, you know…” Greg stopped, and Mr Thomas nodded, smiling encouragement. “The Ladies get blocked with the tampons and you have fish them out with an old hanger… all the time, I mean, not a one-off. Well, I’ve done it fine all summer, and then, one day I was kneeling by the bog… lavatory, fishing around with the hanger and the thought suddenly just hit me: This is what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t realised before, you know, that it wasn’t much of a job, but I’d never felt it so strongly… I mean, even when I left school and applied for the job, I never stopped to think how it might… you know…” He faltered again.
“Go on,” said Mr Thomas.
“If I don’t get some exams, don’t go to university… It’s… it’s like I’ve seen the future if I just carry on as I am.” Greg looked up suddenly, straight at Mr Thomas. “That’s why I want to come here, Mr Thomas. I don’t want the future I’ve got, the one that moment showed me.”
Mr Thomas smiled broadly at the boy.
2005
Greg could see the next sheet of rain slanting across the long row of hills behind. He was too hot, his shirt stuck uncomfortably to his back. He took his cagoule off and draped it over the rucksack already humped on the short, tough grass. A crow called into the evening. The breeze sounded softly, sighing through the smell of damp soil and damp vegetation.
“Here, Daddy?” Sarah looked up at him with an expression of mild disbelief.
“I reckon so, love.”
“Is it alright?”
He’d considered every possible place they’d trudged through for the last hour before settling on this one, decided more by the lessening light and Sarah’s increasingly tired entreaties than anything else. It was a bleak and charmless spot, something he’d rather leave than stay to enjoy. A childhood unease crept over him; he imagined them, lying in the early hours as some predatory growl threatened nearby, or a truck’s drunken approach roared out of the deserted night, its headlight’s seizing on the little tent. He scanned the approaching rain and then glanced at the tufts of scrubby, brown grass spreading beyond the rucksack, comforted by the hope that they promised nothing more than a haunting discomfort. He took a deep breath, knelt down and unpacked the tent.
Soon surrounded by inexplicable components, he wished he’d practised this at least once before they came.
“What’s that bit for, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, love.”
“Why don’t you know, Daddy?”
He fished around in the bag the tent had been packed in, pulling out the last bunch of pegs. When he broke the plastic clip binding them, they fell onto the grass, revealing the large hammer that they’d been clustered round. It had a plastic handle, metal shaft and a large, rubber head. He stared at it for a while before lifting it up.
“A rubber hammer!” He laughed.
“What, Daddy?”
“It’s a rubber hammer!” He tipped it towards her, a trace of disbelief still in his voice. “See?” She stared at him, puzzled. “It’s funny, Sarah.”
“Why?”
“A rubber hammer… it’s a joke, see? If you hit things with it, it bounces back at you.”
“Why d’you want a joke, Daddy?”
“I don’t. I mean, I guess maybe it’s changed now. I dunno, I haven’t seen one before. Maybe it’s not a joke anymore. It used to be, that’s all. Like sky hooks.”
“What are they, Daddy?”
“They’re an old joke, too, love.” In the fading light, he lifted the hammer up, past the child, smiling as he half-shouted at the grey, rain-bled clouds beyond her: “See! Sky hooks and a rubber hammer!”
About the Author:
Craig Dobson’s had fiction published in Active Muse, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, Black Works, The Delmarva Review, The Eunoia Review, Flash, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Frogmore Papers, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Interpreter’s House, Literally Stories, Rue Scribe, Runcible Spoon and Short Fiction Magazine. He lives and works in the UK.
Isele Magazine 