Birthday (7 page)

A glimpse of old places set him reviewing the course of his life, though he didn't like doing so, there being so much to anger and shame him. Such recollections should have been pushed out of harm's way by now but weren't. However long he lived it would be the same, otherwise he wouldn't have left the place of his birth.

Arthur told him never to leave his car in such an area, either in daylight or in the dark, so he hoped it wouldn't get robbed (not much to nick), vandalized for devilment, or set on fire out of malice. ‘Nothing is safe anymore,' Arthur said, when they were settled in a snug pub on Prospect Street and could talk without music howling in their ears. ‘Nottingham's got the worst crime rate in the country, and the worst murder rate. If you stroll through town on Saturday night you risk a cleaver in your guts. When we were kids we walked anywhere, day and night, and nothing would happen. Nowadays, if I wanted to leave my car on the street for a few minutes I'd put a nice looking hip flask on the back seat, but it would have poison inside so that whoever broke in and took a sip would die in agony.'

‘Which would serve 'em right,' he went on. ‘Cars are owned mostly by people who need them to get to work, but thieves and muggers who break into 'em only do so to get money for drugs, or so they won't be bored by being too idle to work. It's the poor who suffer most from crime. The rich have got burglar alarms and guard dogs, and when they drive through areas where druggies live they wind the windows up and put their foot on the accelerator. They could stop crime right away if they wanted, but they don't because it keeps the poor in their place.'

‘What would you do, though?'

Arthur's graveyard laugh signified he could think of plenty. ‘It's unlikely I'll get the appointment, because I'm too old for the job. But I'd be ruthless. Anybody caught for murder I'd execute in Slab Square, and show it on television. Those who say it wouldn't make any difference if you did hang 'em, don't think they're ever going to get murdered. I'd train a special night force looking like old-age pensioners, but they'd know unarmed combat and carry guns, and if they found any trouble they could pull anybody in and ask 'em what they was up to.

‘I've worked all my life and don't want to live in a place where some snipe-nosed fuckface is going to point a knife at my guts when I go out at night. If I carried a knife and ripped somebody apart who threatened me I'd get sent down for ten years. It's civil war, and though I'm sixty I wouldn't mind having a go, because I'm still stronger than most of them. It used to be pleasant living in this town, but some areas are no-go now. I was in town the other week, and when a young bloke said something I thought he only wanted to know the time. He was nearly as tall as me, and had an earring hanging from his left tab hole, and a shaved head that made him look like an Aids victim. He asked me for a quid for a cup of tea, so I told him to fuck off. He shouted after me, but I didn't want to turn back and smash his face in because there were too many people about. He looked as if he'd never been hungry in his life, nor done a stroke of work either.'

Brian knew he was thinking of his son, Harold, who rarely had a job – a heartbreak father if ever there was one. ‘There isn't much work these days.'

‘There is if you try hard enough.' He stared into his pint. ‘You don't have to beg. Nobody starves, and I wouldn't want 'em to either. We was brought up on the dole, but we didn't beg.'

Brian finished his drink. ‘Have another?'

He would. Both did. Brian went for them. Such views as Arthur's would be in no way agreeable to the people he partied with in London, though after a lifetime away they remained very much his as well, always had been, and he felt no shame having them, though he softened their harshness when with his friends, unless releasing their uncensored force for the pleasure of shocking them, and to let them know there was another side to him. He unpeeled an Antico Toscano bought in Italy, as strong as all get out but tasting like honey when supping a pint of Nottingham ale. ‘I suppose the police do all they can to keep the place under control.'

Arthur blanched at the smell of the cigar. ‘I was wondering where my socks went to when I slung 'em out of bed last night. It stinks like a damp haystack on fire. Well, I expect they're doing all they can, but I never thought I'd live to say the Nottingham force was too soft. Blokes in prison ought to know they're banged up. There shouldn't be any television, no drugs, no sex magazines, no visits, and they'd be locked in dungeons day and night, the walls running with moisture, with only a crust to eat now and again. Anyway, let's drink up, and see what's going on at the White Horse.'

The next morning they decided on Matlock, asked Avril to come, but she needed time to run up a dress on her Singer, and in any case could have a meal ready for when they got back.

‘We used to bike this way for fresh air and exercise at the weekends,' Brian said when they were crossing the motorway. ‘Toiling up and down through the hill towns to open country.' He had set out for Matlock with Jenny, who hadn't biked that far before, and was soon worn out with pedalling.

‘It's only another ten miles,' Brian said to her in the market place at Ripley. ‘And there aren't any hills.' Except a big one on the way back which he didn't mention. ‘It's downhill to Ambergate, and flat along the valley the rest of the way. We'll go slow. You'll be all right.'

‘I know when I'm done in,' she had said, and promised to wait in Ripley.

Sharp winds blew from the west, metal blue clouds charging over the livid green hills. Matlock felt dead, the line of dismal shop fronts full of artefacts he didn't want or couldn't afford. Hiking parties toiled up a footpath out of the valley, and he envied their freedom and companionship. He didn't feel like queuing for a boat on the river, or shinning up the Heights of Abraham, but stood bemused by the pavement, not knowing what to do.

He turned the bike around, and every mile to where Jenny would be waiting seemed like ten, all strength necessary to pedal four miles up the hill to Ripley. The wish to see her bolstered him during the struggle, mulling on how good life would be if he could spend it with her, imagining a future of mutual comfort and support in that rhythmical pushing forward of his toecaps against the ever ascending road. In Ripley he would take her to a café for tea and cake and, by the steam of the urn, tell her he wanted them to be engaged. After military service he would say, words she had been waiting for since their first meeting, we can get married. We love each other and will be together for good, the only way to go through life. I'll find a better job than in the factory, so there'll be no worry about us having money to live on.

Beyond the houses of Ambergate and into open land towards the summit, trees with their spring shoots wished him well, still no view of the crest for which he was heading. A following wind laid chill hands at the small of his back but helped him to where Jenny would be waiting to greet him in Ripley market place with a kiss of relief and welcome. They would ride home side by side, the ups and downs of the road not so onerous when they were together, talking about how they were made for each other and what a marvellous life they would have.

Drizzle settled on his jacket as he did three turns anticlockwise around the square. He looked into every shop, pub and café. A stray dog followed and tried to bite his back tyre. He kicked it away, landing a good one at its second attempt, thwarting the mongrel's bid for friendship. Then he cycled three times clockwise around the square, but she had gone home and who could blame her? He should have had more sense than to abandon her. It had been the biggest mistake of his life, and even then he'd thought so. Matlock could have waited, such a place there forever, so what had driven him to go on alone?

As more rain came he only hoped, though it was hardly a help, that she had set off home a few minutes after he had left. Working hard on piece work at the clothing factory, the fourteen miles to Ripley had worn her out. It was a marvel she had got even that far. He should have put his arms around her on hearing she couldn't go on: ‘I can't stand the thought of biking all that way, either. Let's go back together.' He ought to have cared for her as he liked to be looked after when exhausted and miserable – though he couldn't remember a time when he had been. They should have cycled happily homewards, stopping at a café in Eastwood for something to eat so that she would have enough energy to go on pedalling.

Forlorn and alone, she would think he had failed her, that he wasn't a young man worth having, and it wouldn't be anybody's fault but his if she did. If you didn't blame yourself for what went wrong you never learned anything, a lesson best taken in sooner than later which, now that it was too late, didn't do much for his spirit as he upped and downed the long road back, rain penetrating to his skin. Jenny's mother and sisters would say: ‘Why are you home so early? What's happened to Brian?'

‘I got tired. He left me in Ripley to go off on his own.'

They would look at her gone out, as if to say (and they very likely did say it) ‘Well, he would, wouldn't he? That's just like him. I can't think why you bother with somebody who does a thing like that.'

How right they would have been. It wasn't the first cold-blooded act of his life, though regret was futile. Similar situations had often been turned against him, and though everyone received only as much as they gave, his treatment of Jenny was one of the first, though when a few days later she didn't complain he felt that maybe his mistake hadn't been so bad after all. ‘There wasn't much use waiting in cold old Ripley,' she said. ‘I knew you wouldn't come back for at least a couple of hours.'

‘I'm sorry I left you all the same.'

‘Oh, it didn't matter.'

‘I shan't do a thing like that again.'

‘Won't you?' She looked as if certain he was only waiting to do something so painful it would part them forever. She couldn't trust him. He couldn't trust himself, and that was worse.

Arthur cut into his thoughts. ‘Do we go through Eastwood?'

‘No. A bypass skirts it along the line of the old railway.' Every mile brought back Jenny's clear and all-knowing face. ‘You shoot up to Ripley, and down into Ambergate. It used to be a real slog on the old push-bike. I didn't even have a three-speed, if I remember.' He clocked seventy along the bypass. ‘There's a D. H. Lawrence museum in Eastwood. I'll take you some day.'

‘I tried to read
Lady Chatterley's Lover
,' Arthur said, ‘but I couldn't get into it. I liked the one you sent the other week, though.'

‘Which was that?' He'd recommended so many:
The Woman in White, The Autobiography of a Super Tramp, The Worst Journey in the World, Goodbye to All That
, among many others.

‘
Clayhanger
, and it was marvellous. He knew what he was doing, Arnold Bennett did. But I bought
Lady Chatterley's Lover
at a car boot sale for twenty pee, and it didn't interest me, so I gave it to a bloke at work.'

Books brought them closer, if that was possible, but Arthur would have read whether or not they had been brothers. ‘He's a great writer, though.'

‘Well, I liked
Sons and Lovers
, but not that one.' Into Derbyshire, the narrowing road went through Langley Mill, Aldercar and Codnor. ‘In the old days these places were full of life.' He wondered how people occupied themselves now that the mines were closed, mills forsaken, and factories boarded up. ‘The pavements used to be crowded, but the area's dead to what it was. They didn't get paid much, but at least they had work.'

Arthur went on to say how, motoring around the coalfields during the great Scargill strike, he had sided with the colliers every bit of the way, yet knew they couldn't win, because not only had the strike started in the summer, when fuel stocks were huge, but the Nottinghamshire men hadn't been balloted, as if their views didn't matter and they could be ordered about like the poor bloody infantry. Maybe Scargill knew they wouldn't vote for the strike but hoped to shame them in when the action began. The Notts miners had their own ideas, and worked on full pelt, so it was only a matter of time before the strike collapsed, though Scargill said that if the Yorkshire men lost everybody would lose. They did. Ten years later even the Notts miners, who thought it could never happen to them, had been paid off.

Brian noted the placid Derwent coiling its way to Derby, and fields bordered by greystone walls, land uprising to either side. Rage against the fate by which people lived dissolved in such scenery, even the diminishing years of life not worth thinking about. He could remember as far back as if he had lived forever, but an existence far easier than Arthur's long stint in heavy industry.

He parked by the chalet style railway station at Matlock Bath and bought tickets for the aerial ropeway. Neither had taken it before, but Arthur agreed they should give it a try: ‘As long as the ropes weren't made on a Monday.'

The valley seemed more gorge like from above, the main road winding along by the Derwent, choice houses among clumps of green uphill to the right. ‘If I win the lottery I'll buy one, then you can stay in it to write your scripts.'

The cableway stopped halfway, over the highest, point of the crossing, Brian noting with binoculars the hotel he had stayed at with a girlfriend, while his wife went off on one of her affairs. They had laughed at the system, which he called ‘mutual indemnity', but back in London she made a fuss as if her tryst hadn't gone as well as expected. She created a morally indefensible screen to stop him seeing his girlfriend again, perhaps out of revenge, or in the belief that control was sweeter than loyalty or love. Such miserable quarrels didn't go on too long before, discovering that she hadn't stopped his affair, they separated and were divorced.