This time her lack of interest was a blessing. He managed to get the badge in his pocket without her or anyone else seeing it. He felt official now. No longer was he just playing at being a special agent. Now that he had his badge, he had serious standards to uphold, like his father had always said. And he would start his new role by keeping a close eye on Uncle Arthur.
UNCLE ARTHUR WASN’T his real uncle. Tommy’s mother was an only child, like Tommy himself. It was three months after his father’s funeral when she had first introduced them. She said that Uncle Arthur was an old friend she had known many years ago, and they had just met again by chance on Kensington High Street. Wasn’t that a wonderful coincidence? She had been so lonely since his father had died. Uncle Arthur was fun and made her laugh again. She was sure that Tommy would like him. But Tommy didn’t. And he was certain he had seen Uncle Arthur before, while his father was still alive, but he didn’t say anything.
It was also because of Uncle Arthur that they moved from London to Leeds, although Tommy’s mother said it was because London was becoming too expensive. Tommy had never found it easy to make friends, and up north it was even worse. People made fun of his accent and picked fights with him in the school yard, and a lot of the time he couldn’t even understand what they were saying. He couldn’t understand the teachers either, which was why the standard of his schoolwork slipped.
Once they had moved, Uncle Arthur, who traveled a lot for his job but lived in Leeds, became a fixture at their new house whenever he was in town, and some evenings he and Tommy’s mother would go off dancing, to the pictures, or to the pub and leave Tommy home alone. He liked that because he could play his records and smoke a cigarette in the back garden. Once, he had even drunk some of Uncle Arthur’s vodka and replaced it with water. He didn’t know if Uncle Arthur ever guessed, but he never said anything. Uncle Arthur had just bought his mother a brand-new television too, so Tommy sometimes just sat eating cheese-and-onion crisps, drinking pop, and watching Danger Man or The Saint.
What he didn’t like was when they stopped in. Then they were always whispering or going up to his mother’s room to talk, so that he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But they were still in the house, and even though they were ignoring him, he couldn’t do whatever he wanted or even watch what he wanted on television. Uncle Arthur never hit him or anything – his mother wouldn’t stand for that – but Tommy could tell sometimes that he wanted to. Mostly he took no interest whatsoever. For all Uncle Arthur cared, Tommy might as well have not existed. But he did.
Everyone said Tommy’s mother was pretty. Tommy couldn’t really see it himself, because she was his mother, after all. He thought that Denise Clark at school was pretty. He wanted to go out with her. And Marianne Faithfull, whom he’d seen on Top of the Pops. But she was too old for him, and she was famous. People said he was young for his years and knew nothing about girls. All he knew was that he definitely liked girls. He felt something funny happen to him when he saw Denise Clark walking down the street in her little gray school skirt, white blouse, and maroon V-neck jumper, but he didn’t know what it was, and apart from kissing, which he knew about, and touching breasts, which someone had told him about at school, he didn’t really know what you were supposed to do with a girl when she was charitable enough to let you go out with her.
Tommy’s mother didn’t look at all like Denise Clark or Marianne Faithfull, but she wore more modern and more fashionable clothes than the other women on the street. She had beautiful long blond hair over her shoulders and pale flawless skin, and she put on her pink lipstick, black mascara, and blue eye shadow every day, even if she was only stopping in or going to the shops. Tommy thought some of the women on the street were jealous because she was so pretty and nicely dressed.
Not long after they had moved, he overheard two of their neighbors saying that his mother was full of “London airs and graces” and “no better than she ought to be.” He didn’t know what that meant, but he could tell by the way they said it that it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Then they said something else he didn’t understand about a dress she had worn when his father was only four months in his grave, and they made tut-tutting sounds. That made Tommy angry. He came out of his hiding place and stood in front of them, red-faced, and told them they shouldn’t talk like that about his mother and father. That took the wind out of their sails.
Every night before he went to sleep, Tommy prayed that Uncle Arthur would go away and never come back again. But he always did. He seemed to stop at the house late every night, and sometimes Tommy didn’t hear him leave until it was almost time to get up for school. What they found to talk about all night, he had no idea, though he knew that Uncle Arthur had a bed made up in the spare room, so that he could sleep there if he wanted. Even when Uncle Arthur wasn’t around, Tommy’s mother seemed distant and distracted, and she lost her patience with him very quickly.
One thing Tommy noticed within a few weeks of Uncle Arthur’s visits to the new house was that his father’s photograph – the one in full uniform he had been so proud of – went mysteriously missing from the mantelpiece. He asked his mother about it, but all she said was that it was time to move on and leave her widow’s weeds behind. Sometimes he thought he would never understand the things grown-ups said.
WHEN TOMMY GOT back to his room at the boardinghouse, he took the badge out of his pocket and held it in his palm. Yes, he could feel his father’s power in it. Then he took out the creased newspaper cutting he always carried with him and read it for the hundredth time:
Police Constable Shot Dead
Biggest Haul Since the Great Train Robbery, Authorities Say
A police constable accompanying a van carrying more than one million pounds was shot dead yesterday in a daring broad-daylight raid on the A226 outside Swanscombe. PC Brian Burford was on special assignment at the time. The robbers fled the scene, and police are interested in talking to anyone who might have seen a blue Vauxhall Victor in the general area that day. Since the Great Train Robbery on 8 August, 1963, police officers have routinely accompanied large amounts of cash…
Tommy knew the whole thing by heart, of course, about the police looking for five men and thinking it must have been an inside job, but he always read the end over and over again: “PC Burford leaves behind a wife and a young son.” Leaves behind. They made it sound as if it were his father’s fault, when he had just been doing his job. “‘It is one of the saddest burdens of the badge of office to break the news that a police officer has been killed in the line of duty,’ said Deputy Chief Constable Graham Brown. ‘Thank God this burden remains such a rarity in our country.’”
Tommy fingered his badge again. Burden of the badge of office. Well, he knew what that felt like now. He made sure no one was around and went to the toilet. There, he took some toilet paper, wet it under the tap, and used it to clean off his badge, drying it carefully with a towel. There were still a few grains of sand caught in the pattern of lines that radiated outward, and it looked as if it were tarnished a bit around the edges. He decided that he needed some sort of wallet to keep it in, and he had enough pocket money to buy one. Uncle Arthur was still at the pier, and his mother was having a lie-down, having “caught too much sun,” so he told her he was going for a walk and headed for the shops.