In which Paul McKee, a hindered character, works from home, eats biscuits and attempts to unleash his enormous talent
There’s been a lot more weather recently – masses of the stuff – but the rain held off for long enough last week for Irvine’s Footwear, ‘Always One Step Ahead’, to be able to put in their new shopfront. There was nothing wrong with the old shopfront, actually, but as Mr Irvine explained to Big Dessie Brown’s daughter Yvette, a cub reporter on the Impartial Recorder conducting her first big interview for the paper – which was a success, which was praised by everyone, even the editor, Colin Rimmer, and which Big Dessie now has proudly magneted to the fridge – ‘Bigger windows showing more shoes means more choice means more customers.’ Irvine’s old hand-painted fascia has gone, then, with the stained-glass fanlight and the cracked plastered niches: IRVINE’S is now spelt in red plastic on white, and there are the obligatory pull-down metal shutters. It took two men just two days to rip out the old and bring in the new, and Mr Irvine is delighted with the results. Mr Irvine is getting on a bit now but he still likes to think of himself as a go-ahead kind of guy: he had the town’s first electric cash register, years ago, and he accepts all the major credit cards today, still something of a rarity among our few remaining small businesses and sole traders.
Mr Irvine is a man who understands selling and who understands shoes: he has always had a feel for feet and Irvine’s has always been a popular shop, particularly among the wider-footed men and the narrower-footed women of our town. For a long time it was the best shoe shop around: now, of course, it’s the only one, if you don’t count the chain stores in Bloom’s, which we don’t. Irvine’s is the only shop between here and the great beyond where you can still buy all lengths of shoelaces and ladies’ brogues.
Next door to Irvine’s is the old Brown and Yellow Cake Shop, which has retained its original wide windows, its little recessed entrance and its barley-sugar columns, and where, as well as the old brown and yellow cakes, they do baguettes and ready-to-bake garlic bread to take away, and hot and cold snacks, including a very popular bacon and egg morning sandwich – ‘Start the Day,’ says the handwritten fluorescent orange star-burst sign pinned to the front of the microwave, ‘the Right Way’, the right way in the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop being to load up your system with sugar and saturated fats and carbohydrates, and maybe a polystyrene cup or two of tea or instant coffee. The Lennons, Sean and Mary, who own the shop, like to keep their staff costs to a minimum, so they employ only two shop girls, Deidre, who is seventy-three and deaf, and Siobhan, who is seventeen and pretty typical. This leads inevitably to long queues, but in our town a long queue is not necessarily a disincentive to shop: indeed, it may be a recommendation. There are a lot of people around here who are more than happy to join the back of a long queue, and who feel a genuine sadness when they arrive somewhere and there’s no queue to latch on to: queuing in our town is a vital sign. If you’re queuing you’re still alive: you have something to be thankful for, you’re looking forward to the future, even if it’s only a nice tray bake for elevenses or a fresh floury bap with some soup for lunch. The Brown and Yellow Cake Shop is busy, then, as always, full with people on their way to work starting the day in the right way and celebrating their existence. Mr Irvine is buying a celebratory cream horn for later: he does love a cream horn and that new shopfront is certainly something to celebrate.
Next along is Nelson’s Insurance, which always looks shut, and then Lorraine’s Bridal Salon and Tan Shop, which is shut and has been shut for some time because Lorraine has been in hospital again recovering from a mystery illness – they say it’s the slimmer’s disease and she certainly is thin, which should be an asset in her line of business, where every customer is watching weight and could do to lose some, but Lorraine is getting so thin now that people notice and comment, and not always favourably. It’s not good to be too fat or too thin in our town: about a maximum 38-inch waist and a 44-inch chest for a man and nothing below a size 10 for a lady. It’s not good to fall outside the average: it’s not good to stand out. We have noticeably few tall women in town, for example, and all our hairstyles lean towards the same, men and women. Even our ethnic minorities are not really large enough to be minorities: they are still individuals, which is just about OK. If you stray too far off the mean, or there’s too many of you, it’s best to move away: that’s what cities are for, after all. If you want to be different that’s fine, but we’d rather you did it somewhere we didn’t have to see you every day.
Lorraine’s problem is the opposite, in fact, of her noticeably roly-poly father, Frank Gilbey, a man who stands out, but who can carry his weight, due to his age and his charm and his general assumption of seniority. If anyone in our town had ever used the word chutzpah – and the Kahans and the Wisemans may have done, but in private, so as not to shock, behind closed doors, tucked up in their kosher kitchens, provided by McGinn’s, our kosher kitchen specialists – they’d have used it about Frank Gilbey.
Frank these days is a man under pressure – his appeal against the council’s refusal to allow him change of use for the Quality Hotel had become bogged down in the usual paperwork and bureaucracy, which Frank has no time for and which his solicitor, Martin Phillips, should have seen coming, and he’s facing a few cash flow problems as well, although nothing he can’t handle, he tells himself – but when he’s at his best, when he’s on form, you might say Frank is the kind of man who puts the ‘pah’ into chutzpah. Frank is a man whose influence and whose tentacles stretch far and wide in our town. In fact, there just aren’t enough local pies into which Frank can put his little fat fingers, so his grasp has reached as far as a share in a racehorse in Newmarket and a number of investment properties in southern Spain.*
Frank had set up Lorraine in the Bridal Salon and Tan Shop after her disastrous and painfully short marriage to the bad Scotsman, who said he was an actuary but who was also an alcoholic. It was a difficult time for Lorraine, who turned to sunbeds and to binge eating as a comfort, and for Frank, who was then still mayor, and for Frank’s wife, the town’s first lady, Irene. It was just lucky that Frank was such good friends with Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor of the Impartial Recorder, or the paper might have had a field day.
On the opposite side of Main Street, the dark side, the opposite to the bridal side – what we call the Post Office side – an unnamed shop owned by an out-of-towner who may or may not be foreign and who employs sixteen-year-olds to run the place and who doesn’t seem to have invested too much in his staff training, sells cheap toilet rolls, king-size cigarette papers, novelty items and out-of-date foodstuffs. Next to them is what used to be Swine’s, the newsagent and sweetshop, which after fifty years of selling sweets from jars by the quarter has recently thrown in the towel and caved in to the inevitable tide of videos and instant microwave burgers. It was always a mystery to us as children how a man as miserable and as thoroughly unpleasant as the late Mr Ron Swine could preside over a place so magical and so beautiful and so full of delights. All those jars of liquorice and lemon drops and cherry flakes and dinosaur jellies seemed like treasures to us, locked up and kept in a palace by an evil giant, who begrudged handing over even the slightest of penny chew or gobstopper.
The evil giant’s daughter, Eva, now runs the shop and she is a lovely sweet woman who waited until after her father’s death to change her name by deed poll, and she is patiently explaining to an old man who wants to buy a quarter of butterballs that Wine’s don’t do them any more. Eva had wanted to change her surname to something romantic and evocative, something like Monroe, or Hayworth, perhaps, but when it came to filling in the form she could hear the voice of her dead father nagging her about the cost of changing the shopfront, so she’d gone for the cheapest option and bought a pot of all-weather black gloss and gone out under cover of the night to erase the offensive initial. Of course, people from out of town sometimes get confused and locals have been known to set out to irritate and annoy Eva by going into the shop and asking for a bottle of Chardonnay or some cans of super-lager. Eva just shrugs it off: it’s a small price to pay for her freedom from the tyranny of some ancestor’s idea of a joke, or their job as a pig man. She suggests to the old man in search of butterballs that he try the Pick ‘N’ Mix up in Bleakley’s, the big department store in Bloom’s, the mall. The town’s only other old-fashioned sweetshop, and Wine’s only town centre competitor, Hi, Sweetie!, on Central Avenue, closed last year, on the site that is now Sensations.*
Next to Wine’s, where Main Street is slowly collapsing into the Quality Hotel, is the Select Launderette – motto, ‘Dirty Collars Are Not Becoming to You, They Should Be Coming to Us’ – which is full, today being Wednesday, half-price-for-pensioners day. Betty and Martha, who run the shop and who would, in fact, qualify for Wednesday’s generous discount themselves, if they’d ever admitted to their ages, or looked them, are just about run off their feet. Betty is known to Martha and to the regulars as Iron Betty, and Martha as Martha the Wash. The pair of them talk all day and listen to local radio, they have eighteen grandchildren between them, have recently both given up smoking and they have no intention of retiring, although they have started to shut up shop for an hour at lunchtime, so they can sit and nap in the room out back. They have worked together for thirty years, eight hours a day, and have never spoken a cross word.
Just off Main Street, in South Street, builders are busy repointing brickwork, a postman delivers parcels, a dog squats at the side of the road and then trots on, and the man on the corner with a garden prunes his roses.
Paul McKee watches them all from his bedroom window: Paul is unemployed.
Paul is not from around here. He married Little Mickey Matchett’s daughter Joanne just over six months ago. It was a registry office job – presided over by Ernie King’s son Alex, who took over from Mrs Gait as registrar a few years ago now, and who has finally got the hang of it, the right kind of smile and the right signature* – and it was close family only, and Paul had to hire a suit and he’s so skinny he couldn’t get one to fit. He looked pathetic, like a matchstick man, said Joanne’s mum, and not a groom. Joanne wore blue and did without a bridesmaid, but she had her little nephew Liam as a ring bearer. The reception was in the upstairs room at the Castle Arms, a venue which was not without its charms, as long as you overlooked the York Multigym and the punchbags, and the other boxing paraphernalia, including a three-quarter-size ring, which were used by the Castle Ward Amateur Boxing Club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As long as you kept all the windows open the smell of the sweat wasn’t too bad.
Paul and Joanne had met in Paradise Lost, where Paul was DJ-ing on Friday and Saturday nights: it was a handbag kind of a crowd, but Paul enjoyed doing it. The money was good and sometimes you do have to prostitute your art: his set list included the Jackson Five and James Brown for emergencies. Neither Paul nor Joanne believed in love at first sight, but it seemed to have happened to them, without the assistance even of mind-altering substances – which Joanne does not agree with – and they counted themselves lucky. Unfortunately, Paul lost the gig at Paradise Lost when he and Joanne went to Ibiza for their one-week honeymoon and he’s had trouble picking up anything since. He has big plans, though – he’s just in a period of transition at the moment. Joanne jokes at work that he’s a kept man, while Paul tells people that he is working from home, which he is, and he does, as much as anybody can: to be honest, he finds that there are too many distractions and too many biscuits for working at home to be a great success. Still, he’s working on a few things. He’s been trying to get a job in the music business, as a sound engineer or something, through a few contacts at the Institute. His tutor there was Wally Lee, a man with the occasional goatee and thinning hair swept back into a ponytail, a man in his fifties who wears stone-washed denim jeans and retro Adidas trainers, who sports a dangly earring, who wears sunglasses all year round and who has been known to wear leather trousers – in our town! – and who has no idea how he ended up here, who puts it down to amphetamines, who plays jazz at the Castle Arms on a Sunday lunchtime while people huddle over tiny wobbly tables and eat roast pork with boiled vegetables and mashed potatoes, and suffer Death by Chocolate, a man who has come a long way, who worked at one time as a keyboard technician on tours by Jean Michel Jarre and Chick Corea. Wally is an alcoholic, a dope fiend, and an incoherent and incompetent teacher, but he had inspired Paul, which can be a dangerous thing to do to young people in our town and which can lead to all sorts of trouble. Under Wally’s influence, Paul became determined that he was going to do something, that he was going to make something of his life.
But first this morning he has to get up and make Joanne a cup of tea. It feels like a punishment, this, for Paul, a man who like many unemployed young men in our town only really comes alive around about midday, and who only begins to feel good when he has a beer in his hand after about six o’clock in the evening. He had a job as a fork-lift driver for about six months, but the hours were killing him – 7 till 6, five – days a week, for a measly £200, through the books, which was the equivalent of just one night on the decks, cash in hand. Still, he put himself through it and he puts himself through this, the morning tea-making routine. Joanne has always said that she can get up and make her own tea – she’s only twenty-two years old, after all, and a feminist – but the one good thing Paul’s mum ever said about his dad was that he always used to make the tea in the mornings and so it seemed to Paul like the right and proper thing to do, a man’s job, an adult responsibility and no excuses. He listened to a lot of gangsta rap at home and tea making is not a big part of the whole gangsta rap worldview, but sometimes in life you have to make compromises. After tea in bed Paul actually gets up again, to set out the breakfast things: cereals, milk, toast, marg and jam, which is a one-up on his own absent father and more like the behaviour of a saint, frankly, than a DJ, let alone an Eminem in the making. While he’s sorting out the Shreddies, Joanne has a shower and gets dressed, and gets herself ready for work. Joanne has a job as a trainee catering supervisor at the hospital up in the city, which is long hours and shift work, but pretty good pay. When she’s on days she departs from the house at 7.30, leaving Paul ten hours before her return.
When Joanne goes, Paul’s day can really begin: he goes back to bed for an hour, exhausted already from all the effort of tea making and breakfast. Then, around 9, he gets dressed and goes out to buy a newspaper.
Eva’s rush hours are 7 to 9.30 in the mornings and 4 to 6 in the evenings, weekdays, and 9 till 12 on Saturdays. She shuts on Sundays, despite demand, because she is a committed Christian and has recently started to attend the People’s Fellowship, down round the back of the Quality Hotel. She likes the music and, like a lot of the older women in the congregation, she finds that she feels a motherly instinct towards Francie McGinn, particularly since his problems with his wife. She’s less keen on the speaking in tongues and the hand waving, but before taking up with the People’s Fellowship she’d been going to the Methodist for almost thirty-five years, during which time no one had said a kind word to her, she knew all the hymns back to front and upside-down, and she had grown tired of wearing long skirts and a hat – a knitted cloche that had belonged to her mother – so she was glad of the opportunity to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to services, and she figured that no church was going to be perfect.
Eva doesn’t know Paul, but she doesn’t like the look of him – he seems to have this effect on many people. His eyes are close together, and his hair is shaved short, and he does wear gold chains and a sovereign ring, and sportswear, and a baseball cap pulled low, and she knows that this doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person, because she is a Christian and she tries to think the best of people, whatever they look like, but still she likes to keep an eye on him every morning when he comes in to choose which paper to buy – most people already know before they enter the shop, but Paul enjoys the privilege of being both unemployed and having had the benefits of a liberal education, having done the two-year course at the Institute in Music Technology with supplementary modules in Media Studies, so he likes to think he’s pretty media savvy. He takes a while choosing – suspiciously, in Eva’s eyes, who is unaware of his sophistication. Paul always considers, at least for a moment, the Financial Times, but he knows that that’s to come, a treat for later in life, when he’s big, somehow, and eventually he picks the Daily Mail. That’s enough of a stretch.
He goes home the back way with his paper, along the lane between the houses, picking his way between the dog turds and the empty plastic cider bottles, and through the yard and in the back door, and goes into the kitchen. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen these days, smoking, making his plans, sitting at the breakfast bar staring out of the window, making cups of tea. One of the reasons why Joanne wants them to own their own place is so that they can have a nice big kitchen with fitted units and enough room for a table. Paul doesn’t mind the kitchen, actually – although there is a smell. Frank Gilbey, the landlord, claims he’s getting on to it. Joanne’s mother thinks it’s a disgrace: she thinks they should get on to the council. She does not agree with the standard of kitchens in private rented accommodation. She does not much agree with Joanne and Paul these days, in fact, and their life choices: she had hoped that her daughter might have had more sense than to marry an out-of-work DJ. Paul is not exactly the son-in-law she had imagined for Joanne, a bubbly, hard-working girl, with lots going for her and a good social life. Paul is pigeon-chested, a loner, has multiple body piercings and has been in trouble with the police several times, although fortunately Joanne’s mother does not know exactly how many times, or for how long.
Paul was first in trouble when he was fourteen, when he was part of a scam involving bogus charity bags organised by his Uncle Michael. His Uncle Michael had seen the scam featured on an American daytime television talk show and he was so impressed that he decided to import it – Michael liked to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He bought a thousand heavy-duty black bin bags, got a mate to print up a few leaflets on his computer, dropped off the bags with the leaflets at homes all around the city, then just went back a few days later to collect the goodies, which he resold at markets and car boot sales throughout the county. It was like taking the proverbial candy from a baby.
CLOTHING APPEAL
Dear householder(s), please donate whatever clothing, bedlinen, blankets, shoes and other household and electrical items that you may find no further use for. All suitable items will be sorted and shipped directly to African and Eastern European Countries to improve the local welfare. Please leave the bag provided in plain view outside your door on the day nominated below. Collection will begin at 9 a.m. sharp. Thank you.
That was Exhibit A. Michael, Paul’s uncle – or the criminal mastermind, as he was described in court – got six months’ suspended for that. Paul was lucky: he only had to see a social worker.
Joanne’s mum didn’t know about the charity bag fiasco. Or about Paul’s disorderly behaviour and obstructing police when he was seventeen (six months’ suspended), his driving without due care and attention (£250), his driving without a licence, without insurance and without an MOT certificate (£275), or even his driving while disqualified (four months’ detention and £150) and his unlawfully damaging a police car (£175). She only knew about his causing criminal damage to property (£200 for smashing a window at Paradise Lost, plus £75 compensation), which had recently been prominently featured in the Impartial Recorder. Paul wasn’t proud of it himself, but he couldn’t see what she got so upset about. It was a minor offence and they had it coming to them, sacking him just because he was going on honeymoon, and anyway he was drunk, which is hardly a sin.
One day soon, though, Paul is going to prove them all wrong – he’s going to be a big success – but in the meantime he drinks his cup of tea and goes through to the front room, or at least he gets down on his hands and knees and crawls into the front room. On the far side of the room is the window, and he crawls over and crouches below the sill and peeps out.
It is odd behaviour, but there’s a reason for it: the woman living opposite is watching Paul, waiting to catch him out. She’s spying on him. He’s sure of it.
You see, Paul, like a lot of people in our town, is paranoid. It’s not clear whether it’s the drugs or being unemployed, or what it is that’s done it to him. He has taken a lot of drugs in his time, but it could just be the effect of being married. Marriage affects a lot of us that way – it can make you want to duck for cover. Marriage can mess with your head in much the same way as a class A drug: it’s a kind of neurotoxin, marriage. The first few weeks Paul had coped with it fine, but as time passed and he realised he was actually going to be living with Joanne every day, and in perpetuity, he started to feel a little jittery and restless. He began to get depressed. He became withdrawn and uncommunicative. He came to resemble the rest of us.
Paul missed the DJ-ing. He dreamed of another life. He used to tell himself that he was going to be massive: that was the word he used in his head, all the time, when he was practising his music.
‘Massive,’ he would say to himself, ‘I am going to be massive.’
It had started out as a challenge, but had turned into a comfort and then a kind of mockery: he knew that he was never going to be massive. He wasn’t able to stick with it. He wasn’t able to stick with anything. That’s what his teachers and his social worker had said.
He didn’t even know if he was going to be able to stick it with Joanne. It had seemed like a good idea at first, getting married, then coming to town, getting a little house, so they could be near Joanne’s family. It seemed like the kind of life that Paul had always wanted. Joanne was all right, he loved Joanne, but he found it hard getting on with her family. He tried to get on with them, but he didn’t share their interests and they didn’t share his: they had never heard of drum‘n’bass, or ragga, or big beat, and jungle to them is a place with trees. Joanne’s family’s interests were restricted pretty much to Joanne’s family, and Paul was never going to be a part of that. He hadn’t realised that when you got married to someone you were marrying into their family: it had never occurred to him. He didn’t know that was how families worked. No one had told him.*
He tried working on his decks during the day, but he found himself quickly getting bored and then he realised he was frittering his time away, hanging around the job centre and the shops, always restless, and like a caged animal at home. Which is when the woman across the road started getting on his nerves. He became convinced that she was watching him. She watched him every day, nine to five, settling into her armchair first thing in the morning, her small table next to her with her tea things and a pile of magazines and library books. An hour for lunch and then back in the afternoon. Paul knew what she was doing: he’d seen her.
Paul did not want to give her the satisfaction of seeing him unemployed. It was none of her business. He’d bought some net curtains and put them up in the front room and the bedroom. Joanne had complained that they made the rooms too dark. He said that they needed their privacy, that he didn’t want the neighbours to see what they were up to. One Sunday he got Joanne to go outside and check if it was possible to see him behind the curtains.
‘Just a shadow,’ said Joanne. He decided then he’d have to keep down during the day, so that nobody would be able to see him. They wouldn’t even be able to see his shadow.
He peeps out of the window and sees her there, reading, sipping tea. An inquisitive old lady with nothing better to do than to look out of her window all day. Paul felt bad enough without people checking up on him all the time. He knew by the way people looked at him. He knew Joanne’s family thought he was a shirker. He thought Joanne probably thought he was a shirker too.
‘But I didn’t marry you for your money,’ she says sometimes, joking. It didn’t exactly make him feel any better. She never really said what she’d married him for, actually, and he had no real idea either.
Paul lies down on his stomach in the front room and turns on the telly. He does his best to be quiet during the daytime. If he listens to the radio or watches television he turns the volume right down, and he uses headphones on his decks, so no one can hear him. Not that there’s anyone else around to hear him. The fella next door is at work, of course, and the people on the other side. He watches TV and smokes a cigarette. He’s given up smoking dope: it’s too expensive and Joanne didn’t like the smell, and it made him tired.
It was difficult to say what had given Paul the most pleasure in his life, what had made him happy. He thought about this a lot at the moment, believing it might unlock the secret of what he should do next. They were mostly little things that had made him happy. Silly things. There was the time he’d won at the county Rabbit and Cavy Club event, for example – a silly wee things looking back on it, but it had meant a lot to him then. He’d won it with his black-and-tan buck, Bucky. They’d won the Junior Any Colour Tan class and Paul had imagined himself as a respected professional breeder, sweeping the board at rabbit shows worldwide. London: ‘And the Winner of the All-English Fancy Challenge is … Paul McKee!’ Paris: ‘And the winner of thé European Fancy Grand Challenge is … Paul McKee!’ Singapore: ‘And the winner of the Asian and Pan-Pacific Best in Show Award is … Paul McKee!’ He’d have liked to have moved on to French lops: he liked their big long ears that dropped down the sides of their faces.
But it had all gone wrong: Bucky had come to a bad end. Paul used to keep Bucky on the landing of the flat, and there were some older boys on the same floor who’d got into drugs and Paul’s mum had had to speak to them a few times, and then one night, when he was eating his tea in the kitchen by himself – sausage and chips that his mum had left in the oven for him when he got home from school, while she went out to work – he looked outside and he saw two of the boys, smiling and laughing, they were totally off their heads, and they took Bucky from his hutch and threw him over the balcony. They were on the fifth floor. Paul was about eleven, and he ran outside and the boys just laughed at him. That seemed inexplicable at the time. Paul had cried for hours and when his mum came back from work, exhausted, she just said to him, ‘Well, life’s hard,’ which was irrefutable.
At lunchtime he eats two packets of crisps, an apple and some crackers, and at 12.30 he goes upstairs. He peeps out of the window. There’s nothing happening. The postman has done his rounds, the builders have knocked off, the man on the corner with the garden has gone in. Even the old woman is probably on her lunch break.
He decides to lie down on the bed and have a think. He thinks maybe he’ll have a nap.
Paul doesn’t sleep well at night, now that he’s started sleeping during the day. He doesn’t like sleeping during the day, but it has become a habit. He always dribbles and wakes up with a headache.
So he lay there, dozing, and trying to keep himself awake, trying not to think of all the things he could have done that day, like working and having weekends off, like normal people. He tried again to think about what he was going to do with his life. What he really wants to do is something spectacular – but who doesn’t? He wants to create his own thing, be his own person. When he was at the Institute he cut some dub plates of his own and they played it, only in the studio there, but still, to have your music played, to be somebody. That was a buzz. Being married, on the other hand, is not a buzz, on the whole, he has found. Or being in our town. These things are ruts and a rut is pretty much the opposite of a buzz.
The only person Paul has talked to about his plans is his best friend from the Institute, Scunty, who is pretty much as his name suggests, and who has a mohawk haircut and a pierced lip, and who is into computers and who works in the Big Banana, the independent record shop up at the top of High Street, and who has promised that he will design some flyers for Paul – all Paul has to do is decide what he needs the flyers for.
What Paul has in mind at the moment is some thing – he can’t be more specific – some kind of thing, some kind of thing like the things he’s read about in books. He’s read about the rave scene in the 1980s and the 1990s, but he was hardly even born then, so it’s all academic to him. He’d studied it at the Institute, where for two years he learnt the theory and practice of music technology, all about channels and monitors and gates and compressors, and attended seminars and lectures with titles like ‘Smashed Hits’, in which tutors like Wally Lee – sad, unmarried, middle-aged men not originally from our town with creative facial hair and skaters’ T-shirts – would examine issues of musical freedom of expression, beginning with Elvis Presley and ending with Puff Daddy, and Paul would sit there transfixed, listening to people talk about Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson, men who took an art form, shook it up and made it into something new. That’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to make something happen. He wrote a long essay once about acid house and another one about the invention of breakbeat. They were good essays. He got nearly 60 per cent for those – they were his highest marks.
He dozes off to this ambient mix of memories and ambitions in his head, and he doesn’t wake up until four o’clock, the whole afternoon wasted and almost time to make the tea.
He checks to see if she’s still there, the old woman opposite. She is. He feels exhausted after the sleep. Sometimes he’s sure he can actually feel himself getting older, actually physically older by the day – his life draining away. He used to exercise, but he couldn’t really be bothered with that either these days. (After Bucky, he’d started going to the gym, straight from school. He trained for a while at the All Saints boxing club, up there in the city. There were loads of big names who’d started out there: Micky McCann; the Monaghans, the boxing dynasty; Mickey Hillen; Tom McCorry. He told himself that he was going to be a great boxer. He was going to be like Barry McGuigan. He was going to be a Great White Hope. But he couldn’t stick that either. He didn’t like getting hit. Or having to get the buses. In the winter he’d rather go home and watch the telly.)
He goes downstairs and while he gets the tea ready he switches on the radio.
It’s the local station, HitzîFM, a phone-in, and there’s a woman on from town complaining about the high prices charged by vets. She’s had to pay £150 for her dog to have a hysterectomy, she says. The DJ on the radio, he’s called Julian Johns, he thinks he’s hilarious. He thinks he’s some kind of a shock-jock. He says that if the woman were to go into a private hospital to have a hysterectomy it would cost her – what? – about £3500, what with the anaesthetist’s fees and everything. So what on earth is she complaining about? She’s getting a bargain. Paul laughs for the first time that day. It was ridiculous to compare a human with a dog.
The programme ended and Paul got some peas out of the freezer compartment, and another programme came on, a panel discussion about the protection of the county’s historic architecture, and they had on a local councillor, a woman, Mrs Donelly, talking about the need to preserve our heritage, the usual stuff, and then suddenly she mentioned the derelict Quality Hotel, which was just round the corner from where Paul was standing peeling potatoes. Mrs Donelly says she can remember when they used to have big show bands at the hotel in the old days, and dances, and people came from miles around to enjoy themselves. ‘We had,’ she says, ‘the time of our lives.’
This rings a bell with Paul. He has been looking for somewhere to have the time of his life all his life. He’s been thinking about a venue for ages: whatever it is he’s going to do he’s going to need somewhere to do it, and he knows it needs to be somewhere big. Which rules out most places in our town, unless it’s the People’s Park, but he doubts the council will grant permission, since they even stopped the circus coming a few years ago, because of all the horse shit and the damage to the flower beds and the grass.
Potatoes peeled, he crawls into the lounge to watch TV and wait for Joanne to come home.
It’s a lovely sunny evening.
He thinks, maybe when Joanne gets home they’ll go for a walk, down to the Quality Hotel, just to have a look.
* For a full account of Frank’s business interests, see the Impartial Recorder, 20 June 2003.
* See note in Chapter 12
* See Chapter 18.
* He should have attended the ‘How to Be a Family’ seminar series at the Oasis, based largely on Cherith’s reading of Robin Skinner and John Cleese, and Freud for Beginners, and her admiration for The Forsyte Saga in the BBC adaptation, and Roseanne, and Butterflies with Wendy Craig.