MUM had a different start. As Dad used to say, she was strictly old money. Or sometimes she came from “mouldy old dough”. She didn’t like that. Usually it was just that she was “born with a silver spoon in her mouth”. I used to visualise that … the little baby being delivered … startled doctor having to pull out the silver spoon … can’t get the image out of my head.
She came from suburbs where the garages are as big as the average house and driveways are so wide they’ve got go-fast lanes along the middle. It was private schools all the way for her. Princess High School, Dad called it: where they wore shoes made of glass and had bank notes for toilet paper.
What did she see in Dad? Who knows. She used to say she was a “possum in the headlights”. One minute she’s there, minding her own business, next thing, bang, it’s all over. Sounds extreme, but it’s probably sort of true. Once Dad set his mind to something there had to be some pretty powerful force to stop him achieving it.
The story goes like this. He spotted Mum working at the make-up counter at Smith and Haughty’s, a big department store in Newmarket. He was on his lunch break and used to cruise Broadway to line up what he was going to buy one day. And there was Mum, leaning against the counter and staring into space. From the moment he saw her, he was history, he reckons. There was a loud clattering sound in his head as all the items on his “to do” list were reshuffled. This major new mission jumped to the top of the list. He said that in a heartbeat he was sure of three things.
He had to have her.
He would do anything to achieve her.
He would do nothing else until she was his.
My father’s tunnels were always like that. At the end of each one was a glittering prize spurring him on. I guess that’s why things went so wrong when Mum died. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Dad researched her first. He’s not like me, the impulsive type. He’s a plotter and a planner. He couldn’t work out how to strike up a conversation with a girl at a perfume counter so he had to circle her for a few days, “researching” her. Where she went for lunch, the colours she wore, how she got home, that sort of thing.
Mum claims that his inherited criminal instincts helped here. That he “cased her” the way burglars “case a joint” on TV. Dad never thought this was very funny. Probably because it was true.
Here’s what he did.
Mum got picked up by her father every evening after work. Her father drove a big blue Mercedes. They were uncommon in those days, but, as Dad likes to say, “these days every jerk drives a Merc.”
A friend of his, Rufus O’Malley, detailed cars at the big Mercedes dealership nearby. Through Rufus, Dad managed to find out who Mum’s father was, where he lived, all that stuff. He cruised out to the leafy ’burbs to check her out. When he saw the house he almost gave the mission away. He’s a confident guy, Dad, but he thought that he might just have bitten off more than he could chew. But there is this other quality that Dad has. He backs himself. After the first shock he would have been even more determined.
The first thing he found out was when her lunch hour was: by moving his backwards and forwards until it matched up. Then of course, he followed her.
Mum was always a creature of habit, Dad says. Every day she used to walk via the florist, the shoe shop, the jeweller, giving everything the once over, and then she’d take her lunch into a little park at the end of Broadway. She would sit at the same bench sharing her sandwiches with the pigeons. After that she would amble back on the other side of the street checking out the music shop, the newsagents, and those little shops with the designer names like Piece of my Heart or The Road to Rome. Then it would be back to her counter at Smith and Haughty’s.
Within a fortnight he knew lots about her: what she liked to eat, her musical tastes, even her weird little tics, like how she used to always touch her left ear when she found something funny. I never noticed that until he pointed it out. Yes, he’s got sharp eyes, Dad, especially when he’s after something. He used every scrap of what he had seen to plan his next move. Nothing was left to fate: he knew he had “only one chance to make a good first impression” (to quote another Dad expression). Though she was one of the high and mighty, the sort most people would think were out of reach, he wasn’t put off. “Even the Queen of England puts her knickers on one leg at a time, does she not?” How could he possibly know that?
So it was with famous Dad cunning that he was seated on her park bench when she arrived. In one hand he had a bag of scraps from which he was tossing bread to the pigeons, and in the other was a bunch of red roses. He watched her approach out of the corner of his eye but never moved his head, gave nothing away. She sat down and he slowly finished feeding the birds then he stood up quickly, slapping his hand to his forehead like he had forgotten something. He turned to Mum as though he knew her and said, “Would you mind holding these? I’ll be back in a minute,” and passed her the bunch of roses. She looked a bit flustered but she took them and he hurried off. When he came back he had one of those disposable cameras. He insisted on taking a photo of her. I still have that photo in my box of special stuff. There’s this pretty teenager, all dressed up, holding a bunch of flowers in one hand, and the other hand is open and sticking out towards the photographer. Her face, everything about her, seems to say, “What the hell’s going on here?”
I guess it’s not surprising really, I mean here was this guy she had never seen before snapping her in the park. She didn’t know what to do. Nothing in her sheltered up-bringing had prepared her for this moment, Dad claims. Mum tried to give back the roses but of course Dad had an answer lined up (he had probably being practising it in his spare time).
Dad told her he wanted her to keep them. He claimed it was only fair.
“My people have this tradition: when I have taken something from you, I must then give you something in return.”
This sounds pretty cheesy to me, especially when I think about “his people” but he seemed to get away with it. Then he said this line that I still find hard to believe. Only Dad could have pulled it off without a mouthful of knuckles.
“I hate to tell you this…” then he paused for dramatic effect, “but your father’s a thief.”
Mum, mouth hanging open in amazement, says, “What?”
He repeats himself, this time more confidently, “Yes, your father’s a thief.”
He waited for a moment while her confusion turned into anger. Then he came back with the punch-line. “He stole the stars from the night sky and he put them in your eyes.”
It makes me cringe to think of it, but it worked, he reckons. I guess I’m the proof of that. I mean, I’m here aren’t I? Anyway, the point of all this is to show you what a determined customer Dad is, well organised too, which made it even stranger the way he went to pieces after Mum died.
I guess he had no tunnel dug for that one.