The relatively normal course of Tim’s affairs, which had climaxed with the capture of the flag single-handed and the ravishment of Helen, was only short-lived. Whether the shocking revelation about Jack set it off, or whether it was his biological clock, it was not long before Tim was into one of his far-out phases.
His two weeks’ holiday was coming up in September, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it. The Boathouse was closing. He could never do another Enterprise weekend, because of Norman. He could not go back to Warfare, because Derek had sounded stuffy about the overalls and pistol.
If he was a millionaire, he would go to Australia to see Zara, whose last postcard had sounded a bit low, and ended, ‘Wish you were here with me.’
His parents had been to the Isle of Wight. The damp had got into his father’s chest and they came home two days early. His mother pretended that they had come home because the stairs at the Shanklin Hotel were too much for her. Val and Colin went to the Canaries. Brian climbed a mountain in Scotland with Jack (in camiknickers?). Helen went to stay with her cousin in Hull while Julian was at the camp, also in the Isle of Wight, where he might have come face to face with Wallace Kendall, and spat on his shoe.
Pocket Pickups, chapter 13. ‘FOLLOW UP: You’re on your way. Follow it up with a bang (excuse pun). Don’t give her time to wonder whether to you it was just a one night stand.’
Helen rang up when she got back from Hull. She would have Julian with her now until the end of August. She told Tim that twice, as if to make sure that he got the message, ‘Sex is out’, not knowing that it was probably good news rather than bad, now that the cammo had gone back to Warfare.
‘How is Julian?’ Tim wanted to see him. He wanted to feel the strong skinny arms clutching at his neck as the child fought urgently to climb up him, wanted to see the side of the gold-dusted cheek above which the blue eye stared mysteriously beyond him.
‘He’s fine, I think. I’ve not heard of any trouble.’
‘He’ll be glad to get home.’
‘Not necessarily. Coming and going is just a part of life to him.’
How do you know? You don’t know what goes on inside that princely head. You don’t know what goes on inside mine. If you did, you wouldn’t ring.
‘Well …’ Helen ended. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you. Drop in some time.’
‘I may do.’
Tim was evasive, because he felt funny, as if his brain were swimming about in a glass jar on a shelf. He got the tape, and measured his small head, to make sure it wasn’t shrinking.
Helen did not ring again. Just as well. Lone wolf. He travels fastest who travels alone. Tim bought a pair of black joggers with thick rubber soles and began to prowl when no one was looking, with longer strides and bent knees.
Once, Harold was looking. Tim had gone into the cathedral after a bewildering day at work, to be in a place where people talked quietly, or not at all, and to see if his jangled nerves could find respite in front of the crucifix.
The bench was empty, so he walked twice round the aisles to make it worth sitting down, and paid a visit to the old wall tablet that celebrated Thomas Pargeter, ‘whose noble spirit was at last exhausted by the too strenuous endeavours of an urgent mind’.
A nutter, in other words. Takes one to know one.
When he got back to the bench, a woman was sitting there, reading an information pamphlet.
Tim did not want to share that black scarred bench with anyone else. The woman looked up and smiled at him, with teeth bunched forward like a goat. He did not feel like giving out any information, especially as she had the real thing in her hands. He gave the poor man on the cross a glance of same-boat sympathy, and veered away to sit down in a pew in the nave.
A few people were scattered among the pews, one or two genuinely praying, some, like Tim, just part of the furniture. The man who settled with a thump in the pew behind was a heavy breather. He might be having a mystical experience, but he had no right to bother other people with it. Tim slid farther along the pew. At the end, by the central aisle, he gave his head a quarter turn and slid his eyes round to let the man see he was unacceptable, as you did to a driver who passed you at ridiculous speed.
Harold gave him a small salute. When Tim got up, Harold got up too, and caught up with him by the optimistically large contribution box at the bottom of the nave, which was made of glass, so that you could be embarrassed by the smallness of your offering.
‘Let’s have it, then,’ Harold said hoarsely, ‘and I’ll drop it in there to show how little I care.’
‘Drop what?’
‘What you owe me.’
‘I owe you nothing. Harold’ – as the man jostled him – ‘not here, for Christ’s sake. What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you leave me alone?’
‘I will,’ Harold said pulling a toothpick from his pocket and putting it between his teeth, ‘when I get my interest.’
‘What interest?’ Tim would have dodged out, but Harold was in his way, moving with the dexterity of a hod carrier on scaffolding every time Tim moved. ‘I paid you your ten per cent.’
‘Ten? I said bloody fifteen.’
‘Oh no.’ It was difficult to argue under your breath, and Tim’s fear and anger were drawn up and swallowed in the distant immensity of the roof. ‘Ten per cent. I wrote it down.’
Harold swung his heavy head from side to side.
‘Show me the IOU,’ Tim said.
‘And let you tear it up?’ If Harold’s eyes stuck out any farther, they would drop into the collection box. ‘Ha! I’m not stew-pid.’
‘Come outside and let’s talk it over,’ Tim said despairingly.
‘Nothing to talk about.’ Harold dusted off his hands.
They went out of the cool grey spaces into the sudden sun. Tim planned to give him the slip among the tombstones and memorials, but Harold walked slowly and deliberately away from him, crunch, crunch on the gravel path, and turned the corner outside the Great Gate of St Bernard, to be swallowed up in the traffic.
Tim prowled about for a while under the yew trees before he went home. This was unbearable. What would come next? Outside the wall of Brian and Jack’s house, he looked to see if there was a clod of superhod sitting on the bottom of his steps, or lurking under them, before he went in.
Up in his room, he sat on the window-sill for a long time, and watched the cars, and the late workers walking home. Easy to pick off Harold from here, it would be. He should resurrect the toilet plunger. Or buy a gun.
This was how criminals were made – by lunatics like Harold. Would Tim have to move, to get rid of him? Change his job? Change his name, dye his hair, grow a moustache and beard?
He stayed away from work on Friday, because he was starting the moustache. Over the weekend, Tim constantly fingered his lip and sought counsel with the mirror, and by Monday a light growth of hair was visible.
‘What is that?’ Mr D. pounced immediately at inspection.
‘A mus – I’m growing a moustache.’
Lilian sneered. Fred’s hands trembled. Gail went off into an explosion of giggles and Mr D. said, ‘Go downstairs and buy a disposable razor and dispose of that abomination.’
‘Why? I mean, excuse me, but –’
Lilian said, when Mr D. steered his own hairy cow-catcher out of the office to begin his parade up and down among the spotless early-morning cutting tables and the orderly, expectant bolts of cloth, ‘You ought to be committed. Only him can have face furniture.’
In the staff toilet, Tim said a bitter farewell to his newborn moustache, his disguise, his first step towards a full, ferocious beard that would transform his face into importance.
He went back to the department with clenched fists and a slow tread, fury rising in him like red-hot lava.
‘Oh dear,’ said Lilian, ‘your face looks ever so inflamed.’
So would yours if you had hacked at it savagely with the blade of a plastic razor.
‘Still, it’s better than that funny fuzz you brought in. I said to Gail, I said, “Look what came out of the carpet sweeper.”’
Tim turned away with his shoulders hunched, and paced along the rolls of curtain lining on the back wall. Gorilla man is on the prowl. Hide your babies. The armholes of his suit jacket felt tight and hot. At the rods and fixtures display, he turned to pace back. His friend Mrs Slade was doddering about by the velvets, with a piece of painted wood which she was matching against hopelessly unsuitable colours. As Tim started towards her, Lilian pushed bossily in front of him, rubbing her hands with her elbows out.
‘Can I help you?’
Mrs Slade turned her vague face. Tim caught Lilian’s stuck-out elbow, heard himself cry, ‘I’ll kill you!’, spun her round and slapped her on the jaw, with a shock of joy from the palm of his hand to his soul.
If Mrs Slade had not tried to bolt, Lilian would not have reeled against her. The old lady staggered, still holding out the piece of wood with the paint sample on it, into a hanging stand of bedroom curtains, and went down among their flowery folds.
For a few days, Tim went off every morning in the dark suit, as if he were going to work. It was quite a relief when Jack found out that he had left Webster’s: ‘Resigned’, which was a dignified translation of ‘Got out before he was sacked’.
But it was boring, depressing, degrading. No identity. A nobody. There had been many times when Tim would have given anything not to have to spend all day in the store, but now that he couldn’t, he had nothing to do in its place except grow the moustache, and soon nothing much to do the nothing with, as his savings dwindled and his job applications disappeared without trace. He had his phone disconnected. He could not run the car.
Soon, he did not have the car anyway, because Zara came home.
Zara had hoped to stay longer in Australia, but, without a work permit, she had never been able to do more than be a baby-sitter or a cleaner, or a waitress in fringe bars where she fell in with the seductively wrong sort of people from whom she was trying to escape.
Her father was triumphant, since he had known no good would come of Australia. Her mother was happy, because she did not realize Zara was not going to stay at home. Tim fell on his sister with a clutching desperation, as if in his whole life she was the only thing that was stable: a word not normally applied to her.
She could see that he was in one of his rickety phases, poor little Timmy, clinging to reality by the skin of his teeth.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him, quite soon after the first excited greetings.
‘Nothing, don’t be silly. I’m fine. Never better. Freed from the slavery of Mr D.’ The unsteady mouth grinned without the eyes, like a marionette.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Oh – lots of offers, you know. Lots of – a lot of things in the fire.’
Val would have retorted, ‘Such as?’ to a flight of fancy like that. Zara, wary of jolting Tim down to earth, as if he were a sleepwalker, said, ‘That’s fine.’
‘Everything’s fine now you’re here.’
Zara said cautiously, ‘Remember, you haven’t got to pretend with me, darling.’
‘Oh, I’m not, I’m not, why would I do that? It’s like, it’s – everything’s going great.’
He had that slightly feverish look, nervous brown eyes not quite meeting yours. Watching him, she saw that he blinked a lot, and had developed a little twitch in the hollow under one cheek. He was biting his nails again, which he had stopped doing when his hands were on show at the fabric counter.
Their mother wanted a big family Sunday lunch, with a turkey. ‘Why do I dream of turkey, although it’s not Christmas?’
‘Because it’s cheaper at this time of year,’ Wally said.
Tim told Zara he didn’t want to come.
‘Because of Wally?’
‘I don’t want him banging on about me being unem – not at Webster’s.’
‘But he was always down on the shop when you were there.’
‘He’ll change his tune when I start one of these better jobs I’ve been interviewed for.’
‘So, up his,’ Zara said. ‘Come for the food, if not for me.’
She had taken Tim out for a couple of meals, and tried to eat the carbohydrates which helped her to keep down on the booze. Her little Timmy was as ravenous as he had been as a teenager.
On Sunday morning, Tim lost his nerve and shaved off the seedling moustache, but Little Hitler could not have been fouler about Webster’s, so he might as well have kept it.
‘I hate him.’ Tim went into the kitchen and clenched his fists at his mother.
‘No, Tim, no, you don’t.’ Annie lifted saucepan lids and steamed her rosy face.
‘You know what he said to me? He said, when I told him I’d been treated like dirt for doing abso – absolutely nothing, he said, “Looks as if they were waiting for a chance to get rid of you.”’
‘Don’t pay any attention to him, love. He’s not very well.’
‘He’s been pulling that one ever since I can remember.’
‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Tim’s mother said with surprising honesty. ‘He was never liked at work, you know, so he didn’t want you to be.’
After lunch, Tim, Zara, Val and Colin sat in the garden and planned how to set fire to the workshop shed – with Little Hitler in it.
‘How’s Helen?’ Valerie asked Tim.
‘Oh – I don’t know. OK, I suppose. Haven’t seen her.’
‘Oh?’ Val said, in that swooping voice of disbelief. ‘Well, not much loss, I suppose. Now let’s hope you can find someone your own age, who doesn’t look like the back end of a bus going north.’
Tim – wake up! Stand up for Helen. Be a knight – throw down the gauntlet, whatever it is they do – don’t let her jeer at Helen like that.
‘Shut – shut up,’ was all he could say. ‘You introduced us.’
‘Last hopes.’
Valerie’s laugh made even Colin raise the black loops of his eyebrows and say mildly, ‘Valerie …’
‘Trouble with you,’ Val kept on at Tim, ‘you don’t meet people.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You don’t go anywhere or do anything.’
‘I do!’
He was goaded to tell them about Enterprise and about Warfare, exaggerating as much as he thought he could get away with. When he told the truth, no one believed it. They never had. As a child, it had not been worth not lying.
‘In three of the battles, I was the one who ran for the flag. They’re sniping at you from all round see, and you got to kill ’em off and grab their flag and –’
‘Why?’ Val, short and sharp.
‘Why grab the flag?’
‘No, moron. Why did you want to play that kind of pseudomacho nonsense?’
‘It was fun,’ Tim said stubbornly.
‘I bet.’ Colin was giving him a calculating look.
‘I was good at it. I – I excelled.’
‘So would Barry McCarthy, if he had played it,’ Colin said. ‘I’d keep quiet about that weekend, Timothy, if I were you. After a massacre like Green Ponds, people begin to watch the loners.’
‘Colin, friend, sometimes my feeling is that you go a little bit too far.’
If anyone was going to insult her brother, Val could do it herself.
Zara, who had been asleep on the grass, woke up to see Tim jerk clumsily out of his chair and lurch into the house.
‘What have you been saying to my little Timmy?’
‘He’s in bad shape,’ Val said in her psychological voice. ‘He’s got real problems.’
‘Who wouldn’t, in this family?’
‘He needs some first-class counselling.’ Val and Colin both nodded sagely, as if they were prepared to take on the job.
‘He needs love,’ Zara said.
She took Tim out for a drink before he went home. He wanted a second, so Zara had to have one with him, and then another, because quite suddenly, while they were dreaming fantastic schemes about living and working together, he started to weep, in a back booth at the Stag.
Zara did not know what she was going to do. It was all she could do to cope with herself. How was she going to cope with Timmy?