‘Yes,’ he said, transferring his attention to his ailing father-in-law. ‘I have some understanding of how cruel people can be.’
‘Well jolly good. I’m pleased to hear it.’ For a moment they were enveloped in a cheerless silence that was punctuated by the sound from the kitchen of clean cutlery being dropped into the appropriate sections of the silverware drawer. ‘Now then, you do love my daughter, don’t you? I mean really love her.’
As the train leaves Ladbroke Grove station and begins to sweep left in a wide arc towards Latimer Road, he notices that most of the empty carriage seats are covered in discarded crisp packets, empty cans of Coke, and abandoned free newspapers. Kids, he thinks. Every day now he witnesses packs of these youngsters on the street, or on the tube, or on the buses, swearing and carrying on with a sense of entitlement that is palpably absurd. Each of them seems to believe that he or she is an ‘achiever’, and that they deserve nothing less than what they call ‘maximum respect’. Thank God, Laurie isn’t like this, although Annabelle appears to be increasingly concerned by his behaviour. He has tried to explain to her that all teenage boys go through some form of rebellion, and that she shouldn’t take Laurie’s surliness as evidence of anything more than his ongoing, turbulent, passage out of childhood and into the no man’s land of young adulthood. The urgency of Annabelle’s recent messages speaks both to her disappointment with him as a husband and father, and to her concern for their son, although he senses that some other anxiety is troubling her which she will most likely never reveal to him or, he suspects, to this new friend, Bruce. He stands to get off the train and he glances again at the old lady, who appears to have neither accepted nor totally rejected the ill-manners of the teenagers, but rather to have achieved an enviable place of quiet serenity. She raises her eyes to meet his own, and she smiles. As the train pulls away he can see her, still smiling at him, through the filthy carriage window.
He steps out of the tube station and into the frigid November air. It is Sunday evening, so the traffic is not nearly as heavy as it might be on a weekday, but he assumes that there must have been a gig at the Empire for people are impatiently sounding their horns and he can see that there’s some kind of bottleneck at the roundabout. Across the street he sees the blue and white neon lights of the new Cineplex that he once went to with Yvette. He cannot remember the name of the romantic comedy that they sat through, for he fell asleep soon after the opening credits. After the film, her sullen silence at Pizza Express spoke volumes about her sense of disappointment. The trip to the cinema took place before he began visiting her north London terraced home, so in a sense she had no right to be irritated with him. As he forked the last slice of margarita into his mouth, he looked across the table at her but she would not meet his eyes. For Christ’s sake, he thought, these things happen and it was hardly a criticism of her. She, more than anybody else, should understand that he has been working hard, and he was just tired, and that’s all there is to it. End of story. As the waitress placed the stainless steel tray which held the bill to the side of his now empty plate, he reached for his credit card and wished that she would get over her disgruntlement and grow up. Her sullen demeanour had managed to cast a cloud over a perfectly nice evening and a pretty good pizza. He turns towards Uxbridge Road, and wonders how the atmosphere will be when Yvette comes to work in the morning. He had tried to explain to her that all he wanted was for things to return to how they used to be before they got involved, but as he nervously redistributed his weight on the designer barstool, then sipped at his warm white wine, the look on her face made it clear that she was in no mood to end their arrangement amicably.
He dashes across Uxbridge Road before reaching the pedestrian crossing, and moves towards the building society cash machine. He really doesn’t need any hassle at work, especially not now when the local authority seem determined to make his life an administrative nightmare by merging his Race Equality unit with Disability and Women’s Affairs. He was pleased when Clive Wilson called him in and told him that as the chief executive he had decided that a certain Mr Keith Gordon should be the one to head up the merger, for it meant more money, a bigger office, and double the number of staff to manage. He soon discovered that it also meant learning about the problems of wheelchair accessibility, understanding why rape crisis centres could not be funded if they excluded male rape, coming to terms with the irony of being an able-bodied black man speaking on behalf of disabled white people, and being the highly visible male spokesperson for feminist groups, many of whom appeared to despise men. The workload was such that it was no longer possible for him to leave the office early and go back to the flat and work on his book. These days it was also unlikely that having surreptitiously scanned Time Out or the Guardian and discovered that some refugee from the seventies such as George Clinton or Sly Stone was playing in Tooting or Brixton, he could just shoot off early from work and go down to the gig with his notebook. After the announcement of the merger, most evenings were taken up with his trying to digest the contents of thousands of pages of printed policy reports, and then adding to the rubbish with short directives of his own. Then he noticed Yvette, who had recently been recruited as a research assistant in his unit. As he tried to tell her over pizza, he didn’t fall asleep at the cinema because he was bored, but because these days he simply has too much work to do and he often finds himself still awake at two o’clock in the morning trying to make sense of endless reams of local government bureaucracy.
He grabs the five £20 notes and tucks them into his wallet before slipping the thick wad back into his pocket. A sudden gust catches an abandoned newspaper and it begins to fly in all directions. He kicks away a few pages that are swirling around his feet and begins to move off in the direction of his flat. There are very few people out walking on this windy Sunday night, and he imagines that most folks are sensibly at home watching television or already safely tucked up in bed and getting ready for another week of work. For over twenty years he shared a front door with Annabelle, which meant that there was always a good chance that he would not be coming home to an empty house. The lights would be on, and the smell of cooking would have permeated the flat or the house, and perhaps there would also be the sound of music blaring out. After graduation they had decided to stay in Bristol, and so they moved out of their respective halls of residence and into a slightly damp one-bedroom flat in the supposedly respectable Clifton district. He accepted a job in the black community of St Paul’s, and Annabelle also successfully applied for a position in social work, although her own particular focus was single women and violent men. After a difficult pre-graduation dinner with her mother and father, Annabelle had decided not to apply for any jobs in publishing, which would have meant moving to London and perhaps spending the occasional weekend in Wiltshire with her parents. At the dinner, she finally introduced her boyfriend of two years to them, but having witnessed her father’s behaviour Annabelle had decided that there was nothing further to be gained by trying to be diplomatic. They had forced a choice upon her, and so she had chosen. The idea of moving into social work interested her, and it seemed practical given her boyfriend’s vocation but, after four years in Bristol, Annabelle felt burned out and in need of a change.
They were offered a husband and wife job in residential care in Birmingham and, without even thinking about it, they went one morning to a registry office in Bristol and asked two guests who were there for the wedding before their own if they would stay on for a few minutes and be witnesses. The registrar would not look them in the face, and the man’s hand shook as he turned the book around for them to sign. Having blotted the ink dry, the registrar handed the certificate to the husband, who quickly folded it in half and gave it to Annabelle, who pushed it into her handbag. They then drove out to a country pub for a celebratory lunch that soon descended into silence. He knew that as happy as Annabelle was with him there was no getting around the fact that Annabelle’s parents had ‘let her go’, and that he had no real family to offer her as a substitute. After two difficult years in Birmingham, a city they both loathed as much for the grating accent as the labyrinth-like city centre, it was he who suggested that they move to London and that Annabelle might consider switching careers and trying to get a job in the media. They had saved enough to put down a small deposit and buy their first property, a tidy Victorian terraced house by the village common in an unfashionably scruffy part of west London, and while he took up his new job as a community liaison officer for the local authority, Annabelle found employment reading scripts for a theatrical agency who, as though already anticipating how her life would develop as both she and her husband now closed in on thirty, suggested that she could work some days from home. Three years later, and only months after Mrs Thatcher was finally removed from office, Laurie was born. In addition to the house being filled with the aroma of cooking, and the sound of music, there was now the babble of a newborn child and the breathless gunfire of his excitable laughter.