Box Hill Page 5

  Except that this thoroughbred was a stickler for speed limits, whether he was leading the pack or riding alone, and invariably stopped at pedestrian crossings when someone was waiting, or even approaching. Perhaps it amused him to show good manners when nothing was expected of him but thuggish haste. I noticed that the pedestrians he deferred to, however infirm, scuttled across the road, as if they were mortified rather than pleased that he put their lowly interests before his own. Somehow by treating them with respect he drew their attention to their own worthlessness.

  I went into the bathroom soon after I moved in with Ray and couldn’t find anything from my toilet bag — no cologne, no anti-perspirant. I was going to ask him where he’d put my stuff when I saw them in the bathroom bin. He’d thrown my things away without saying a word to me. He’d also left the evidence of what he’d done in plain view, as if he wanted me to understand something.

  I was put out, but I had enough sense to lock myself in the bathroom for a moment to think about the message Ray was sending me. He’d thrown away everything in my toilet-bag that carried a fragrance. He didn’t want me to smell of anything but myself, that was pretty clear. I suppose he wanted me to take pride in my body, or not to be ashamed of it at any rate. Easy for him to say: if I’d had his body, I’d have been proud of that. And he’d thrown away my aftershave but not my razor. Disposable razors were on the market, but they gave a pretty brutal shave. Razors only had the one blade. Nobody would have known what you meant if you said ‘shaving system’. Most people in those days had safety razors that you unscrewed, though I had one of the new cartridge ones, so that the blade wasn’t exposed while you changed it. Having a chemist’s in the family brings some benefit.

  My razor was still where I’d left it, by the basin, but my aftershave was in the bin. I stopped, trying to work out the inconsistency. It wasn’t that he wanted me to stop shaving, he just didn’t like my aftershave. He wanted me not to use any cologne or antiperspirant, but he wanted me to use a nicer aftershave, one that he liked. So what was I supposed to do, use his?

  So I started to use his, and he never said a word. And if it was a test, then I suppose I’d passed it. I wish I could say I learned to take a pride in my body. But though there was a lot I could learn from him, I couldn’t learn that. There was no prospect of me imitating him there. In the short term, of course, I was more ashamed if anything — ashamed in a more complicated way that included being ashamed of being ashamed. But perhaps some of Ray’s underlying message got through after all, over the months and the years. That if I was good enough for him, then unlikely as it might seem I must be good enough for me.

  One Saturday morning about a month after I’d moved in, Ray went downstairs to clean the bike as usual, and I borrowed a tall stool from the kitchen and sat in the lounge window watching him do it. Cardinals Paddock was a quiet cul-de-sac, the sort of place driving schools send their cars on a Sunday afternoon to practise three-point turns, but I was always amazed at Ray’s trust in the world. He never even locked the bike. Essentially it was protected by its beauty. It didn’t even have a lock on the petrol tank, so all it would take would be a teenager with a match and the thought, ‘Why should he have that if I can’t?’ in his head, and Ray’s great treasure would be all flame and melting.

  I took up my position on the kitchen stool and watched him at work. He was very thorough — he even drew a clean cloth tenderly back and forth between the spokes of the wheels. I saw a motorcycle being flossed long before I ever knew you could do the same thing with teeth.

  For the hour or so it took him to clean the bike to his standards he never once looked up. A few minutes after I’d perched on my stool it began to bother me that he didn’t show any signs of noticing me — as if I was so insignificant I was invisible. But he knew I was there. Obviously he knew I was there.

  It was like those Russian experiments in the paranormal we used to hear so much about. If someone predicts the cards being turned up one hundred per cent of the time, then it can’t be coincidence. That’s proof of ESP, proof that mind-reading is a reality. But if someone never guesses a card right, not ever, it can’t be coincidence either. That proves ESP too, it’s just not so crude a proof.

  Obviously Ray knew I was there watching him the whole time, otherwise he would have had to look up at least once in a solid hour. Law of averages. So he knew I was there the whole time, and he chose not to acknowledge me. As for why he preferred the subtler way of showing we were attuned to one another, well: one-way sharing was the sort he liked best. I can’t explain it any better than that. One-way sharing was the sort he liked best.

  As for why, I have no idea. It’s what worked for him. And in fact, after Ray had paid me no obvious attention for a while, it seemed to me that the atmosphere below me had changed. The air gradually thickened and clotted with secret excitement. Ray’s movements never speeded up or became flustered, but they were more and more loaded with sexual consequence. By the time he had polished the last square inch of elegant and potent metal, my heart was in my mouth. By now I was dreading his looking up as much as I had wanted it to happen when I started to watch. If he looked up, oh God if he winked at me, the whole extraordinary moment would fall to the ground and blow away.

  Luckily Ray was not a man who winked, and he never looked up, never broke the spell. I stayed watching him until the bike was gleaming, but before I heard the front door open I’d returned the stool to the kitchen. Keeping my side of the bargain, so there was no visible evidence of the whole little drama played out between us, in the lounge and below the windows.

  I enjoyed the weekends. I’d have Saturday lunch over at Mum and Dad’s, so even if I hadn’t seen them during the week, which I usually did, I kept in touch. I liked the poker club and the bike club. This was the first group I’d had anything to do with that actually seemed to work. They looked out for each other, and they shared things. They took turns choosing the music that was played on a Saturday night. Paul would choose and then Little Steve would choose and then Mark would choose, turn and turn about, an LP at a time.

  Up to then the group I knew best had been my Wolf Cub troop, and I was one of those Wolf Cubs who don’t go on to be Boy Scouts, who draw a line under the experience as soon as they can. I’d try not to be noticed in the church hall, hoping no-one would tease me for the fact that the buttons on my uniform kept flying off, and I still had stabilisers on my bike.

  If there’d been a needlework badge I could have got that. Obviously I didn’t ask if there was such a thing. But I’d taught myself to sew the buttons back on my uniform, and learned to reinforce them. I was too ashamed to ask Mum. Then when the buttons were secure the weak points became the seams, and I had to learn how to repair them and even shift them a fraction to get a little more room.

  We kept on being told by Akela to Do Your Best, Do Your Best, Do Your Best, and we were forever bellowing back that we would Do Our Best, Do Our Best, Do Our Best, but no-one gave me the impression that my best was worth anything. By the time I finally got my knots badge Akela had pretty much given up on me.

  I know not every Cub can make Sixer, but at the end of every session after the pledge two Cubs are chosen to take down the banners ceremonially, and I was never one of them. I must have radiated incompetence and the absence of leadership skills in an organization that only existed to build them up. It doesn’t really make sense, though, I don’t think. If there are to be leaders then there must be followers, and I had followership skills in plenty, just waiting to be tapped.

  To this day I can’t see a fat kid in shorts without wanting to rush over and give what comfort I can. To tell him it won’t always be like this.

  So the twin clubs that made up Ray’s social life were a bit of an eye-opener for me. I tried to fit my sense of how they worked into my scanty picture of the world. The sixties had only been over for five years, it had been the sixties for most of my life, and the word that
came to my mind as I looked up from my book, on one of those early Saturday nights, was commune. This must be what a commune was. All for one. And one for all.

  Weekdays were different. Ray wanted me out of the house by nine o’clock, and he didn’t want me back till six. It wasn’t that the routine suited me especially badly, but it certainly nipped in the bud any idea that the flat at Cardinals Paddock was my home. Home is a place you can go whenever you want. Isleworth and Mum and Dad’s was home. And somehow I knew from the start that living by Ray’s rules wasn’t a test. Or if it was a test, it was a test that would never be over, and I’d just have to keep on proving myself for ever. Whatever I did, there would never be any question of me being given a key.

  In the mornings Ray marched me downstairs and opened the front door to let me out. One day early in my stay I noticed there was mail on the mat and I bent down to pick it up. Ray didn’t say anything to discourage me, he simply trod on the little pile of letters as a way of telling me to keep my hands to myself. He was always very direct. He wouldn’t tell you something if he could simply show you.

  In my memory his every footfall had a metallic echo — there were heel plates on his bike boots to reduce wear. From time to time he must have gone barefoot, maybe he was even barefoot when he trod on the mail to declare it out of bounds. Maybe it’s a false memory that supplies the crunching boot, descending so finally on something that was none of my business.

  My first job, as you’d expect, had been helping out in the chemist’s during school holidays. I even enjoyed it. It was only a few years since Mum and Dad’s shop sold sweets from big glass jars. Sometimes when I was working there I’d close my eyes and think I could still smell them, the acid drops and the liquorice. I’d think I could reach out my hand and touch the big jars.

  At primary school I’d said that I lived in a sweet shop, and when my classmates wanted to come to tea, either because they believed me or because they didn’t, I said my parents had been killed. Run over by a lorry while they crossed the road at a dangerous place. Which made my class sympathetic for a day and mocking after that.

  Dad wasn’t a very businesslike businessman. It was a full year after decimalization that he gave in to Mum’s urgings and got a decimal till. Till then he must have thought that the new currency was no more than a fad, and shillings and pence would come back again once everyone had tired of the outlandish new coins. It was like county names. Technically Middlesex had stopped existing a couple of years before, and now everything was part of Greater London. But everyone just kept on putting Middlesex on letters, and ignoring postcodes, which had come in a little earlier.

  So I suppose Dad’s rebellion against decimalization was part of a larger thing. We would do the sums in our heads, pressing down any key of the old pre-electric till to make the money drawer shoot out. People could still do mental arithmetic then, not feeling faint when more than two numbers need to be added up, helpless without a calculator.

  In the 1970s, a family chemist’s was still a viable business. The supermarkets hadn’t really started to syphon off the toiletry trade, and the pharmacy side of things offered a service they didn’t even try to match. It’s absurd to think how restricted our stock was, looking back: some posh perfume for Christmas and people who’d forgotten their wives’ birthdays, a couple of brands of shampoo. There just wasn’t the range then, and people wouldn’t be conditioner conscious for years to come. Dentists had only just stopped telling people to brush from side to side, and now it was the heyday of up-and-down. We hadn’t been told to brush in one direction only yet, away from the gum, let alone to brush in little circles.

  Everything was old-fashioned, though of course that didn’t occur to me then. It was what I knew. When people came into the shop, a primitive mechanism made a bell ring, with a click that was almost louder than the ding it produced. The shop had only the most basic security: a household lock on the front door, another one on the pharmacy storeroom. It didn’t occur to us in Isleworth at the time that people might want to break in and steal drugs to use or sell. But then I remember the time when Kaolin & Morphine, which you bought over the counter, still had plenty of morphine in it, so anybody who seriously wanted to be stupefied didn’t need to try very hard.

  This was before specialised shops for developing film. Everyone took their snaps to the chemist’s. Anything quicker than a week counted as an Express Service and called for extra paperwork. Hardly anyone asked for it, and if they did we’d wonder why. Why would people want their holiday snaps back in such a hurry? More than likely it was just swank and showing off. A way of making out that you were important people and everything about you was urgent, even your holidays.

  I’d have been happy to go on working in the chemist’s, but Dad wasn’t happy to have me there. At first I thought it was because he’d be embarrassed to have me sell condoms to a customer. We had a few customers who bought Durex, and one who must have been allergic to latex, since we kept the special lambskin ones in stock for him. But eventually I realised that Dad was even embarrassed to serve those customers himself, when I was in the shop.

  By the time I met Ray I was a trainee gardener for the Council, working mainly in Lampton Park over in Hounslow, a bus ride away from home and no great distance from Hampton. Isleworth is only a hop skip and a jump from Kew Gardens, but I’d never set my sights that high. I’m just not cut out for it. The big league.

  People who’ve done a little weekend digging and mowing always think it would be great to be a gardener for a living. All that fresh air. I suppose it might be more satisfying nowadays — ideas about what makes a good park have moved on, though these days of course all the work is put out to private tender, so someone like me would never get a crack at it.

  In those days there were no wild areas in parks. Everything was regimented and symmetry was all the trend. You might spend days planting begonias in perfectly regular lines and rows, though if you like flowers you probably don’t like straight lines. If you were mowing the bowling green you wouldn’t expect the work to be anything but repetitive, but everything seemed to be like that.

  We trainees worked under a Mr Jarvis — Mikey behind his back. We thought of him as a terrible old ponce, though I suppose he was only in his late thirties, younger than I am now, and he was more pathetic than anything else. He was easy to make fun of, having hair growing out of his ears and nostrils, and I can’t say I was above the temptation to play along with the others. There were poofter jokes too which I didn’t have the courage to challenge or take the sting out of. Well, you don’t when you’re eighteen, do you? If it wasn’t him it would certainly be me. The other trainees made no end of fun of me when my hairstyle changed. My new look was a bit drastic.

  Mikey Jarvis’ previous job had been in the Royal Parks, and he was always comparing everything with those glory days: the equipment, the human resources. The human resources, meaning us. He was forever telling us about the time he drove his tractor down Piccadilly to Fortnum & Mason to pick up a vast pottery jar of something called Gentleman’s Relish for Her Majesty the Queen Mother (it’s fish paste), and the times that gracious lady in person toddled across the lawns of Clarence House with a glass of beer in her hands — a full pint, mind you, not a half — to say ‘Happy Birthday Mr Jarvis’. Apparently she’s a great one for those sorts of touches.

  Of course since Mikey was always boasting about the past, we wondered what he could have done to end up in Lampton Park, which he clearly saw as a sort of Siberia of gardening where he would toil and die. We decided he must have arranged plants in some pornographic pattern, or used fertiliser to spell out obscenities on the lawns. We did that a lot ourselves, spelling out COUNCIL PAY IS SHIT in yellow tulips against red for the entertainment of passing helicopters. As far as Mikey’s disgrace was concerned, we wasted a lot of time trying to work out what message had got him into trouble. The idea that cracked us up the most was PRINCESS ANNE LOVES HO
RSES, spelled out somewhere it could be read from the Palace.

  In winter gardeners work short hours, and then Ray’s rules affected me more. It was like a curfew only in reverse — not being allowed home until a certain time. But there was always Hounslow Library to spend time in, though you can’t spend more than an hour or two in a library without feeling that the staff see you as a borderline tramp. The bus connections were pretty good back them, though people still complained, just for the practice. And I could always visit Mum and Dad in Isleworth, in the house that I had a key to. Most of my books were there anyway. Ray allowed me half a shelf in Hampton for books, on condition that I took in exchange a pile of old martial arts magazines that he wasn’t yet ready to throw away. There wasn’t any spare shelf room, so that was the only way it could have worked, really, by our exchanging a block of books.

  Ray could throw out my naff toiletries and keep me out of the house during the day, and he didn’t need to give a reason. That was just the way it was. So what if the cleaning lady had more privileges than I did, seeing as she could let herself in with a key every Thursday? Maybe I felt a little resentment of the cleaning lady and her key, all the same, resentment I wasn’t even aware of. One Thursday morning I left the bed unmade, thinking she was going to be changing the sheets anyway, so what was the point of putting myself out for no reason? That was one of the few times I ever saw Ray angry. He talked about how fucking inconsiderate I was being, till I wondered if maybe he had been brought up with servants, to be so concerned about their working conditions. After that first night I didn’t sleep in the bed anyway unless Ray needed me, but I was perfectly comfortable in the sleeping bag on the floor. I got good rest there.