8

I have to say that I found her behaviour disgusting. When I got my job with the Intimate Bistro she welcomed Robin Thirkell by allowing him to put his tongue halfway down her neck, or so it seemed to me. Three weeks later, there she is holding hands with this Tom and staring into his eyes as though he was the only man in the world for her.

Do you know what that sort of behaviour reminded me of? It reminded me of my mother. I just couldn’t put up with it.

All right, I showed my feelings. There she was pretending she was always in the right, knowing how to behave and teaching it to what her boyfriend Robin called her ‘little criminal’, i.e. me - and yet there she is putting herself about to all-comers. As I say, like my mum.

I just couldn’t be doing with it any longer. All this happened a good three weeks after I’d started work at the Intimate Bistro. Things hadn’t been so bad during that time. I did my work, got my 120 a week and, seeing as I lived rent-free with the Reverend Timbo, it wasn’t too bad - all things considered.

There were also a number of laughs to be had in the kitchen. The chef was a big fat Scot called Graham, who came down from Glasgow in search of excitement and landed up in, of all places, Aldershot. He cooked with the help of a good many bottles of the house champagne and it was a wonder to me that Robin didn’t seem to notice how much he drank.

He had some jokes too which made the girls laugh in the kitchen, except for Hermione, who was Robin Thirkell’s other girlfriend, so he didn’t do it in front of her. He might say that the cold cucumber soup needed ‘just a soupson [I can’t spell it] of urine’ and add it in. I’ve also seen him stick a lump of pastry into his armpit ‘just to moisten it a wee bit’. I don’t think he’d peed into the chicken with wine sauce that Lucy and her then boyfriend, Tom, had that night. Perhaps that was a pity.

Anyway, I made my view of what was going on pretty clear by the way I picked up their plates. I did it quickly and I didn’t make any apologies. I left them to whatever they had in mind as quick as I could, with the result that I had a bit of a crash going down the steps to the kitchen. So, to put it mildly, I wasn’t in a very good mood when I went home to the Reverend Timbo’s. I’d hardly got up the stairs and into the lounge when an extraordinary thing happened. I felt a bloody great bash to my chin, a vicious sort of upper cut which made my head spin and bloody near unhinged my jaw.

When I opened my eyes after this experience, what should I see but the Reverend, who must have been waiting for me behind the door. All he was wearing was shorts, a T-shirt with a picture of Aldershot Cathedral on it, socks and trainers and boxing gloves that looked about the size of footballs at the ends of his white arms. I could also see another fat pair of boxing gloves on the coffee table, beside a picture book of English country churches.

‘Come on, Terry,’ Timbo was hopping about shouting. ‘I heard you come in downstairs. You get the gloves on and why don’t we go a couple of rounds before bedtime? Blow away the cobwebs. A decent punch-up to get rid of your criminal tendencies. I’ve helped a lot of lads this way.’

And I’m fucked if he wasn’t aiming another upper cut at my criminal’s chin.

I’ve got no violence in my record. A lot of them I got to know in the Scrubs were there for violence of various kinds and I could never see the point of it myself. There was no profit in violence of any kind. But this was an exceptional moment. Number one, I was about to get another stunning knock on my jaw, and, number two, I’d had enough of the Rev. jumping about in front of me. Anyway, the next time I’m up for a sentence of any kind, I’ll have to ask for the following to be taken into consideration: a couple of knocks to the side of the Rev.’s head, a temporary grip to his throat, a knee in his groin and a bit of a push which saw him and his boxing gloves falling backwards across the coffee table. I’m not proud of this, but I freely admit that’s how it happened.

I collected my money, a couple of new shirts I’d bought, my toothbrush etc. On my way out I also collected just one of the Reverend Timbo’s silver cups and put it in my bag, just as a memento really.

‘Terry, that’s my boxing cup. Where’re you going with it?’ he called out from the chair, where he was making a rapid recovery.

‘Away,’ I told him. And I left.