A! Wrong ear again. But he wanted the wrong ear, this time. For now he was about to join the dads—the peer group; and Mal’s mobile would help conceal his wound. Mobiles meant social mobility. With a mobile riding on your jaw you could enter the arena enclosed in your own concerns, your own preoccupation, your own business. “Cheers, lads,” he said, with a wave, and then frowned into his phone. He’d called Linzi, and was therefore saying things like “Did you, babes?… Have a cup of tea and a Nurofen… Go back to bed. With them brochures… They the Curvilinear or the Crescent?… Are you, darling?” Hunched over his mobile, his knees bent, Mal looked like a man awaiting his moment in the shot put. He was doing what all the other dads were doing, which was putting in an appearance. Presenting an appearance to one another and to the world. And what did Mal’s appearance say? With fights and fighting, this was ancient knowledge. When you received a wound, you didn’t just have to take it, sustain it. You didn’t just have to bear it. You also had to wear it, for all to see, until it healed.
Nodding, winking, grasping an arm or patting a shoulder here and there, he moved among them. Blazers, shell suits, jeans and open shirts, even the odd dhoti or kaftan or whatever you like to call them. The dads: half of them weren’t even English—thus falling at the first hurdle, socially. Or so Mal might once have thought. “Manjeet, mate,” he was saying. “Mikio. Nusrat!” Socially, these days, even the Pakkis could put the wind up him. Paratosh, for instance, who was some kind of Sikh or Pathan and wore a cravat and acted in radio plays and had beautiful manners. And if I can tell he’s got beautiful manners, thought Mal, then they must be really ace. “Paratosh, mate!” he now cried… But Paratosh just gave him a flat smile and minutely re-angled his stately gaze. It seemed to Mal that they were all doing that. Adrian. Fardous. Why? Was it the wound? He thought not. See, these were the nuclear dads, the ones who’d stuck with their families, so far, anyway. And everybody knew that Mal had broken out, had reneged on the treaty and gone non-nuclear. These men, some of them, were the husbands of Sheilagh’s friends. Clumping and stamping around among them (and trying Fat Lol again now), Mal felt ancient censures ranged against him in these faces of ochre and hazel, of mocha and java. He was pariah, caste polluter; and he thought they thought he had failed, as a man. Awkward, massively cuboid, flinching under a thin swipe of dark hair, his fingers hovering over the contours of his damaged cheek, Mal was untouchable, like his wound.
Other dads talked on mobiles, their conversations disembodied, one-way. For a moment they sounded insane, like all the monologuists and soliloquizers of the city streets.
2. ASIAN BABIES
Linzi’s real name was Shinsala, and her family came from Bombay, once upon a time. You wouldn’t guess any of this, talking to her on the phone. Most of the foreign dads—the Nusrats, the Fardouses, the Paratoshes—spoke better English than Mal. Much better English. While presumably also being pretty good at Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, or whatever. And he had to wonder: how could that be? How come there was so little left over for Mal? Linzi, on the other hand, prompted no such reproaches. She spoke worse than Sheilagh, worse than Mal. She spoke as bad as Fat Lol. She spoke straight East End, with only this one little exoticism, in the way she handled her pronouns. Linzi said he where an English person would say him or his. Like “compared to he.” Or “driving he car.” Same with she. Like “the way she wears she skirts.” Or “I hate she.” It sometimes gave Mal a fright, because he thought she was talking about She. Sheilagh. And Linzi was always threatening a confrontation with She: like today, for instance. Mal didn’t want to think about those two getting together. A!
But now the big man was shouldering his way indoors. He passed a Coke machine, bulletin boards, the entrance to the changing rooms, a snack hatch and its hamburger breath. Jesus. Mal wasn’t a big boozer, like some. But last night, after the smacking they’d taken, he and Fat Lol had got through a bottle of Scotch. A bottle of Scotch each. So he now had the notion that after a couple of pints he’d feel twice the price. He peered round a corner, paused, and then strode forward, jangling his change. Everything in him responded to what he saw: the fruit machine, the charity jar full of brown coins, the damp gray rags beneath the wok-sized ashtrays, the upended liquor bottles with their optics on the nozzles, guaranteeing fair trading, guaranteeing fair play. And here was the ornately affable barman, plodding up through the floor.
“Mal!”
He turned. “Bern, mate!”
“All right?”
“All right? How’s little Clint?”
“He’s a terror. How’s…?”
“Jet? He’s handsome.”
“Here, Mal. Say hi to Toshiko.”
Toshiko smiled with her Japanese teeth.
“Nice to meet you,” said Mal, and added, uncertainly, helplessly, “I’m sure.”
Bern was the dad that Mal knew best. They’d rigged up an acquaintanceship on the touchline of yet another sports field: watching their sons represent St. Anthony’s at football. Clint and Jet, paired strikers for the Under Nines. The dads looked on, two terrible scouts or stringers, shouting things like “Zonal marking!” and “Sweeper system!” and “4-4-2!”—while their sons, and all the others, ran around the place like so many dogs chasing a ball. Afterwards Mal and Bern sloped off down the drinker. They agreed it was small fucking wonder their boys had taken a caning: nine–nil. The defense was crap and midfield created fuck-all. Where was the service to the lads up front?
“I heard an interesting thing the other night,” Bern was suddenly saying. Bern was a photographer, originally fashion but now glamour and social. He spoke worse than Mal. “A very interesting thing. I was covering the mayor’s do. Got talking to these, uh, detectives. Scotland Yard. Remember that bloke who broke into Buckingham Palace? Caused all that fuss?”
Mal nodded. He remembered.
“Well guess what.” And here Bern’s face went all solemn and priestly. “They reckon he fucked her. Reckon he gave her one.”
“Who?”
“The Queen. Remember he was found in her bedroom, right?”
“Right.”
“Well these blokes reckon he fucked her.”
“Phew, that’s a bit steep, innit, mate?”
“Yeah well that’s what they reckon. So you uh—you moved out.”
“Yeah, mate. Couldn’t hack it.”
“Because every man has a…”
“His limit.”
“Right. I mean, how much shit can you take, right?”
“Right.”
It was good, talking to Bern like this. Get it off your chest. Bern had left home while his wife was pregnant with little Clint. Not for this Toshiko, who was presumably Japanese, but for somebody else. Every time Mal bumped into him, Bern had some new sort on his arm: foreign, thirtyish. As if doing it country by country. To keep himself young.
“Look at this one,” said Bern. “Twenty-eight. You know something? She’s me first Nip. Ain’t you, Tosh! Where they been all my life?” Without lowering his voice or changing his tone, he said, “You know, I always thought they’re built sideways. Down there. But they ain’t. Same as all the others the world over. God bless ‘em.”