I should have turned the mobile off, was Nick’s first thought that Sunday morning.
‘WHERE ARE YOU THEN?’
‘What?’
The electric alarm clock with its red numbers hurt his eyes. 6.15.
‘Where are you then?’
Astrid rolled towards him. ‘Who is it?’
‘Ken.’
‘Oh God, no.’ She rolled back the other way.
‘What is it, Dad? Is something wrong?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t feel right.’
‘Are you ill?’
There was a pause, then, ‘I’m lonely.’
‘Can we talk about it in a couple of hours’ time?’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘Well, if it’s just a matter of feeling a bit down, why do you have to call me at six in the morning?’
‘Because I need you.’
He said nothing. Then came the old man’s querulous voice, and in the background the cry of the seagull.
‘You still there, Nick?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are you then?’
‘At a friend’s in Oxfordshire. With Astrid.’
‘’Ave you called your mother?’
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Busy? Busy?’ Nick held the phone at a distance from his ear, recoiling from the noise. ‘Too busy to call your own mother? What’s wrong with ya? Time’s not on my side, sunshine. Now you listen to me, big’ead.’
‘Don’t start . . .’
‘You call her and you call her now! She’s your mother!’
‘I’m not calling anyone at six in the morning.’
‘You call her and you tell her you’re coming to see ’er and you tell her we’re all coming to see her, that’s what I need you to do. Now you give me your word you’ll do it. You’ve been nothing but a disappointment. Not so much as a bleeding card on my birthd’y. You might think you’re something, son, but I tell you what . . .’
He turned the phone off.
‘Go back to sleep,’ said Astrid. But he wouldn’t sleep again now. This was the way a hangover always got him: guilt.
It was a matter of seconds before he said, ‘I’ve got to give up drinking.’ Normally he said it around midday. Astrid made no reply.
‘I’ve got to start getting some exercise.’ Still she said nothing.
‘We’ve got to stop all this.’
‘All this what?’
‘Fun.’
‘Sleep . . .’ she said greedily, ‘sleep now.’
Maybe getting married will help, he thought, treading down the stairs gingerly.
He found Ed in the kitchen. Wearing a hotel-issue white bathrobe, he turned to Nick with the faintest smile and said,
‘Just the man. Make the coffee, pal. Feel rough as guts.’ He resumed his dinner seat, pushing the plates away from him.
‘Can’t bear to look at them now. I said to her, to the missus, Come on, let’s do some shots. And she tricked me. I did mine but she passed out. So, who is it that calls you at six in the morning?’
‘My father. Sorry.’
‘Ah, Ken,’ said Ed, ruminatively. ‘Poor old Ken.’ He picked at the corners of his eyes.
‘To be honest, he’s been a right thorn in my side lately.’ Nick brought over their coffees. With mugs warming their
cold hands, they sat at the table side by side and squeamishly counted the bottles from last night on the table and on the counters.
‘Eight. You?’
‘Nine. There’s a dead one in the sink. Two and a half each.’
‘Shit.’
‘The girls will have had one and a half each, which means we had three apiece.’
‘Just like old times.’
‘Hardly. This is high living. It was always spag bol and a two-litre bottle of red.’
‘That’s right. Mince fried in canned tomatoes. That was as far as our culinary skills stretched. God, I’d love to spark up a fag now, wouldn’t you?’ Ed sighed. ‘How is your old man then?’
‘I hadn’t seen him in years, then he starts calling me out of the blue just before Christmas. Off his rocker. Silly old shit. First of all they’re silent calls, then he starts abusing me, calling me all the names under the sun. Astrid didn’t know what to make of it. I’d sort of avoided the subject of my family, you know. I’d just said to her we didn’t get on, that was all. Anyway, Dave calls me and says the old man’s at death’s door, so I give in and agree to have a sort of family reunion, and we go to meet for lunch at Dave’s and it turns out he’s leaving everything to my brother
– which is fine, by the way – but what’s more, and this is how nutty he is, Ed, the old sod, he wants to divorce his second missus, and for me to do the paperwork. But then she does a runner, doesn’t she? And he’s on and on all the bloody time about going to meet his maker. This morning it was all, “I’m lonely, Nick.” Honestly, Ed, it’s like having a kid.’
‘Poor old fucker.’
‘And Astrid seems to think I’m a chip off the old block now.’
‘Dear old Ken, we used to live high on the hog thanks to him. You’d get that cheque and we’d pop down to PizzaExpress and stuff ourselves with dough balls and Valpolicella and raise a glass to old Ken and his clients at the DHSS.’
‘No, we didn’t.’
‘Many a time.’
‘I never got any money from Ken.’
‘Don’t be an arse! We used to whoop when the envelope came through the door. We used to do a jig.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Course we did. Memory’s a selective thing, matey, I can tell you. There are plenty of things I’d prefer to forget.’
‘I don’t remember it at all.’
‘He used to send a hundred here, a couple of hundred there, and I used to say, Christ, you’re a lucky sod.’
‘I used to work at that champagne bar . . .’
‘Oh yes, you did, but not for long. You got fired. You were nervous of opening the bottles, you big jessie.’
‘I’d forgotten about that. Kettner’s, it was called.’
‘Well,’ said Ed, breaking off a piece of the Toblerone that was left, ‘I expect you remember things about me I don’t.’ He popped it in his mouth.
‘Not really.’
‘Hmm.’ Dozie chewed.
‘I wasn’t much interested in your goings-on.’
‘I didn’t have much in the way of goings-on.’
‘There was the fat bird.’
‘Yes,’ he nodded, then swallowed the mouthful. ‘Your poor, poor, poor old mum,’ he went on theatrically. ‘Pearl. I knew who she was, of course, because you’re the spit.’
‘When did you meet her?’
‘When she came up.’
‘She didn’t come up.’
‘We were at McKenzie Road, and one day she just turned up, rang the bell and I went to the door and I knew it was her right away. So I called you and you came down; you were having a lie-in, or more like a love-in . . .’ he said, his eyes vacant as a butler’s, looking but not seeing. ‘We’d had a bit of a night in The Prince, and you got your end away with that girl from the poly, and you came down downstairs and I kept saying, Ask your mum in for a cup of tea, Nick. And she said, Ni-ick? I remember it well. You gave her short shrift. Said you were tired, it was too early and why hadn’t she called, and so on. She’d come all that way, hadn’t she? And I did take you to task over it and we fell out, and you moved in with that girl for a while. What was her name?’
‘I can’t remember any of that! Was I even there?’
‘Mandy? I think it was,’ said Dozie, breaking off another lump. ‘Want a piece?’
Nick shook his head. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘You wanted so much to be the angry young man.’
They sat there in the morning light, their feet sticking to the lino, surrounded by dirty dishes and empty bottles, the pine table stained, place mats encrusted, the nauseating sweet vinegar of wine in their mouths no matter the coffee they sipped.
‘You had your good points too. You were quite fun on occasion. Well, if you were shit-faced you could be rather amusing. You were ambitious of course, what I’d call a real eighties man, though of course the eighties had just ended. Callow youth. That’s the phrase.’
‘Cheers.’ He peeled one sole then the other from the floor and felt for the crumbs, which he rubbed off. ‘So, I let my mother stand at the door after she’d been a couple of hours on the train.’
‘It must have been more like four, what with changing stations in London. I can see her now. She was a country mouse, quivering on the doorstep. And all that way she’d have been thinking she’d soon be in the warm embrace of her favourite son.’
‘All right! No need to lay it on. I was only eighteen.’
‘Twenty.’
‘Well, there must have been a good reason.’
‘Yes. That girl, Mandy, she was upstairs. You were giving her one. That was it. Embarrassing, the utterances from that room of a Friday night. You know they don’t mean it when they go on like that.’
‘What made her come anyway?’
‘Who? Your mother? To see you.’ He raised his eyebrows and took a swig from his mug. ‘I’d imagine.’
‘Well, trust her not to ring in advance or write or anything.’
‘Yes. That was really shit of her. Really deplorable,’ said Ed, popping a finger into his back teeth. ‘Still, she must have learnt her lesson because she didn’t come again. More coffee?’ He got up and shuffled over to the kettle. ‘Sometimes, mate, sometimes, well, take old Tim Taylor – he’s happily married with four super kids – sometimes failure, as they say, can be as good for one as success.’ He measured out two spoons of coffee into their mugs.
‘In any case, the thing is to take from this hoo-hah with your dad what you can or what you need. I mean, you know what you want, Nick, more than anyone else I’ve ever known, you’ve always had the next thing in your sights and got it,’ he doused first one then the other with boiling water, then slapped the spoon against the sides of the mug, ‘but you’ve never known what you need.’
‘I just asked Astrid to marry me.’
Ed sat down so heavily on the bench that it lifted at Nick’s end. ‘No!’
‘Yes.’
With his mouth open, Ed undid the top of the port bottle and poured an amount into each of last night’s smeared tumblers. ‘Bugger me,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ Nick found that he could drink it quite easily. And, accepting another glass, said to Ed, ‘Seriously, mate, I’ve changed. Since I met Astrid, since I moved back home . . .’ It was the hangover; it made everything feel like it mattered. ‘I sort of think maybe it’s time to pick up the pieces with my family.’
‘That’s good, mate. Well, you know, as two quite obvious heterosexuals, I don’t think an arm around the shoulders could be misconstrued.’ He clasped Nick and shook him. ‘Had my doubts about you of course in that department, but this proposal thing has cleared them up. It was that George Michael rough-shaven look you sported, that’s what made us wonder. And all the exercise. And that fad diet you went on.’
‘What fad diet?’
‘Few years back.’
‘I stopped drinking for a couple of weeks one January.’
‘That’s the one.’