6
‘At least we learnt the difference between right and wrong in the Youth Offenders wing.’
Believe it or not, I was sitting with Lucy in the bar of the Intimate Bistro somewhere in Aldershot. I had a Becks beer, my praeceptor had ordered a Pernod with ice and water. The drinks were on her.
‘Who taught you that? The chaplain?’
‘No! It was the other inmates. They had a code, the inmates did.’
‘They taught you morality?’
‘They had their morals, yes.’
‘What were they exactly?’
‘Anything you did wrong to children you got pushed in the scalding shower. No doubt about it.’
‘Anything else?’
‘You couldn’t rob from poor people, like hurt them. There was one big offender there called Jim. He’d set fire to an old tramp asleep on a park bench. He got enough cocoa poured on his head to float a ship.’
‘So what could you do then?’
‘Rob from building societies. Places where they had more money than they knew what to do with. Sort of jobs my Uncle Arthur did but he wasn’t all that good at it, half the time.’
‘What about breaking into houses by night?’
‘Like I said, that was all right. If you stuck to rich people.’
‘Lot of Robin Hoods then in the Young Offenders. Stole from the rich. Did they give to the poor?’
‘Not often,’ I had to admit. ‘But your dad, he said it was all right. All of it. I mean, he’s a vicar and never heard of hell.’
‘You’re such an old-fashioned boy.’ She seemed to be laughing at me. ‘Hell disappeared years ago.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘What a nice old-fashioned boy you are!’ she said again.
‘That’s all right! That’s what he said about breaking and entering.’
‘I think Robert goes more for understanding than passing judgement.’
‘Who’s Robert?’
‘My dad. Whenever I remember to call him that.’
I looked at her. She had her fair hair parted at the side so it fell across her forehead. Her trousers stopped way before her T-shirt started, leaving her bellybutton open to the world. Her beaten-up old leather jacket was on the seat beside her. She hadn’t dressed up at all to visit her mum and dad. Not a bit of it.
Anyway, I’ve got myself too far ahead, telling you about us sitting at the bar of the Intimate Bistro in Aldershot, waiting for the arrival of its owner, Robin Thirkell, about whom I’ll have quite a bit to tell you later.
I suppose I’ve had low times, like when I stood up in the dock at the Old Bailey and the red-faced judge, with his black cloak and dirty grey wig, who’d been against me from the start, said, ‘Keegan, you’ve clearly grown up to be a habitual criminal. The least sentence I can pass upon you, in the interest of the public, is four years’ imprisonment.’ But oddly enough, the lowest of all my moments was when I woke up beside a pile of sick in Euston Station. I had no Aunt Dot, no cash and no bed for the night unless I gave into Mr Bloody Markby’s hostel. It was then I decided I needed the help of Lucinda (call me Lucy) Purefoy. No question about it.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, I did find her mum and dad a bit strange. He wore this red shirt with a great big wooden cross hanging over it. But he didn’t seem to believe in religion, anyway not as we learnt about it from a teacher at my primary school, who made it pretty obvious that in her view heaven was up there and very pleasant and hell was down below and extremely hot. She also wanted us to be ‘born again’, which was something I didn’t think I could manage, so I didn’t pay much attention to her after that. All the same, I didn’t think Lucy’s dad, the bishop, knew all that much about religion either. And her mother seemed very anxious to get on the sauce, which in her case was gin mixed in with tonic, which was not a drink I could ever stomach at all.
But who am I to criticize after my experience of mothers? In a way I’m sorry for ‘call me Lucy’ if she hasn’t got someone like my Aunt Dot, who was always good to me and kept off the gin. But what did become clear when I was in the palace (so called!) was that they had fixed up somewhere for me to sleep nights and even discussed the situation with the probation officer who delayed my parole.
So I got it clear in my head what I should do. I was going to play along with them as I had with Enhanced Thinking Studies. That way at least I’d get a bed for the night and hopefully a bit of loose change in my pocket and, when that was accomplished, I could walk free of them, just as I’d walked free of prison.
In the end, to help myself towards freedom, I told the dad that I was extremely grateful. When I said that, ‘call me Lucy’ looked as though Christmas had come and she’d struck lucky with her first offender, who was now well on the way to reform.
All the same, she wasn’t so sure of me when we set out to inspect the accommodation at the flat of the person they called Timbo, who seemed to be another sort of chaplain. When I happened to remark that it was a bit unusual of Lucy’s dad never to lock a door, she gave me a suspicious look. ‘Don’t think about it, Terry,’ she said. The truth was no decent fence would offer you anything much for a large wooden cross to hang around the neck or even the one small silver cup on the mantelpiece, so I wasn’t that interested.
Timbo’s flat, however, was absolutely stuffed with silver cups. Sorry. His name was the Rev. Timothy Rideout. It seemed only the bishop called him Timbo and ‘call me Lucy’ said I was always to say Mr Rideout. Whatever you called him, he was not very tall, with broad shoulders, bright little eyes and hair cropped so short it was almost a number two. He had a sort of soft voice and a funny way of speaking so that the r’s came out a bit like w’s. All the same, I reckon he must have been strong, because he’d won all these cups for cricket and football and the walls were covered with pictures of the Rev. Timbo holding a bat or a ball in the middle of a team of men who looked much taller than him.
He showed me my room. There was an iron bed and a cross, this time with Jesus on it, hanging beside another photograph of the Rev. Timbo, this time wearing shorts and boxing gloves. I didn’t like to say this, but I thought the place looked rather creepy.
‘Suit you well, will it?’ Timbo looked round at what seemed a bit like a cell without the toilet. ‘Better than Wormwood Scrubs anyway.’
‘Oh yes,’ I told him, my idea being to keep everyone happy till I could plan my escape. ‘A whole lot better.’
‘Good! Jolly good! Now I’ll get the kettle on. I expect you’d like a cup of char?’
Lucy seemed to know that he meant tea. She refused in favour of a cigarette, but I thought I ought to be polite and said I’d have it with milk and sugar. As we sat round in his lounge room with all those teams staring down on us, Timbo looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘What’s your usual position?’
‘I’m afraid my usual position for the last three years has been in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.’
‘Mr Rideout knows that.’ Lucy looked at me as though I’d been particularly slow on the uptake.
‘What I meant,’ Timbo was smiling as though he could just about tolerate me, ‘was your position on the field. Is it in the slips? Silly mid on? Or perhaps you were out at third man?’
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr Rideout. I’m not quite sure what you mean.’
‘My dear fellow, have you never played cwicket?’
‘Never.’
‘Absolutely never?’
‘Never at all. We never had a teacher to tell us about it at school.’
‘Not wugby? I’m sure you must have played wugby.’
I had to admit that, whatever it was, I hadn’t played it.
‘Footie then.’ Footie seemed to come as the last resort. ‘I’m sure you enjoy your footie.’
‘Oh yes.’ I tried to sound enthusiastic. All I could remember was kicking a ball round the estate with Tiny McGrath and even that usually ended in a fight.
‘Sport!’ Timbo told us while he poured out mugs of tea. ‘That’s what’ll keep you out of cwime. Cultivate your cwicket. Concentrate on your wugby and you won’t go far wrong. Haven’t you found that, Lucy, in your life dealing with those who have strayed from the straight and narrow?’
‘I really don’t know.’ Lucy blew out smoke and looked doubtful.
‘Take it from me, young lad. Get your head down in a good wugby scwum and you won’t want to go thieving any more. It’s been an exciting time the past year, hasn’t it?’
‘Not all that exciting in the Scrubs,’ I had to tell him.
‘Even there it must have been exciting. Even in Aldershot. I tell you, I had to do a good deal of heavy knee work.’
By now he’d lost me. It was like listening to someone talking a foreign language. What did he mean? Bouncing a ball on his knees to encourage David Beckham? I could only repeat ‘knee work’ with a big question mark at the end of it.
‘On my knees. In the cathedral. Silent prayer, of course. I didn’t want to go public. Night and morning at my bedside, I prayed for our success in the European Championships. Heavy, heavy knee work. But Almighty God moves in a mysterious way, as I expect you’ve found to your cost, Terry.’
I didn’t have the answer to that, so I thought it was safer to nod my head and say nothing.
‘In his infinite wisdom he decided not to help us when it came to the penalty kicks. Well, there it is.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, stubbing out her fag on one of the Rev.’s saucers. It didn’t seem to me that she was enjoying all this talk about God and knee work. ‘But we’ve got no time for playing games. Terry needs a job as well as a bed to sleep in. Thanks, Timbo, we’ll be on our way.’
‘Yes, of course, Lucinda.’ Timbo was on his feet. ‘Do send my salutations to the dear bishop. What an inspiration he is to all of us! The photograph on the way out,’ he told us as though he was passing on an important secret, ‘is Cathedral Clergy and Staff versus the Aldershot Biscuit Factory. What a game that was. Three goals, all in extra time. I’m sure you remember it, Lucinda?’
‘No,’ ‘call me Lucy’ told him, ‘I don’t remember that at all,’ which I thought was really rude of her, quite honestly.
So, when I’d planted my toothbrush and toothpaste in Rev. Timbo’s bathroom, Lucy took me to the Intimate Bistro. We sat in the small, stuffy bar looking at old French posters showing girls in frilly skirts kicking their legs up, and ‘call me Lucy’ got her teeth into a strong Pernod and I went no further than a Becks beer. We were waiting, Lucy said, for someone she called Robin (‘you’ll adore Robin’), who, it seemed, ran the joint but only popped in occasionally.
‘My God, what an ass that Timbo is!’ Lucy shook her hair out of her eyes and took a big gulp of her white drink.
I told her that I didn’t get much help thinking about a life of crime from either the bishop or Timbo. In fact more sense seemed to have been talked about the subject in the Young Offenders wing. So the chat started which kept us going until Robin Thirkell blew in from the street and gave Lucy one of the longest and slushiest French kisses I’d witnessed since before I got four years from Judge Bullingham down the Old Bailey.