Jog On Fat Barry (25 page)

A beautiful girl sitting alone at the bar in Regan’s said my Tony Curtis looked “cool.” Her name was Aileen and she claimed she’d never fucked anyone who wore a wig before. Jack and me were, well, taken aback because girls from the Angel didn’t talk like that. I bought Aileen a drink, and then another, and another. Should’ve left when Jack did, but I was getting married… and what Carol didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

Black earth stood in a tidy pile beside the grave at Abney Park in Stoke Newington. The sky was grey, and every now and then, ephemeral sheets of rain drifted across the cemetery like some aimless phantasm. The vicar spoke with his eyes closed. Mum and Albert were his only audience. The double plot they stood beside had been purchased forty-three years earlier by my dad’s mum as an eternal resting spot for her and her husband. But Granddad got killed when a shell landed in his trench during the Spring Offensive on the Western Front in 1918, and what they found of him, an ankle, three fingers, and part of his right ear, was put in a tin and buried in Amiens. Two years later, when a Kingsway tram crashed into Gran outside the Southampton Row subway entrance, and Dad hurried to see her at the Royal London Hospital, she told him my granddad had no need of the plot she’d purchased, but if her one and only son didn’t mind spending eternity beside his old mum, then it was his for the taking.

“Seems silly to waste it,” she said, sitting up in bed; a great turban of white bandage wrapped around her head.

My dad said he would, and days later, comforted by the fact that in time, she’d have her only child lying beside her forever, my gran died.

Mum said she’d never forget the day
that
little boy came to live in the orphanage at the end of her street.

“His nose was running,” she always said, “and no one bothered to wipe it.”

She and my dad quickly became inseparable. Years later they got married and had me. Then Dad came back from the war, and he too died: ashes to ashes; dust to dust. Albert grabbed a handful of earth. Mum started to cry. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her do that before. She bawled like a baby and my head began to ache. I asked her to stop.

“Stop it, Mum,” I groaned. “Shut up, can’t you?”

Someone spoke: someone with an American accent. Then Mum and Albert, the vicar, Abney Park, everything, just dissolved into nothing. I opened my eyes. A woman was stumbling about at the foot of the bed. It was that dirty cow from Regan’s. She was naked, and rummaging through a pile of clothes. The next thing I knew, she pulled a baby out of the pile. It was screeching; its face was the colour of beetroot.

“Whose is that?” I asked.

“It’s mine,” Aileen answered.

The baby slipped through her hands and hit its head on the floor. I leapt out of bed; quickly dressed. I realised later that I was still completely drunk. The morning light hurt my eyes. I told Jack I’d been with Aileen right through the night and never even knew she had a baby.

“It was under them clothes all night long,” I told him. “And no sooner had she picked it up, than she let the little bugger slip right through her fingers onto its blooming head.”

By the time the
Queen Mary
headed out of New York Harbour bound for Southampton, it had finally stopped snowing. Jack and me were on the Observation deck. The Statue of Liberty was getting smaller and smaller in the distance. And, as Lady Liberty faded from view altogether, I said it was criminal pissheads like Aileen were allowed to have children in the first place. Jack said nothing at first. He just lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the Atlantic. But then, after he had mulled over what I said for a minute or two, he did speak.

“Let’s hope you didn’t put her in the family way then.”

Every cloud has a silver lining. I suppose that’s a cliché. But just because a phrase gets used a lot doesn’t mean it’s not true. Here’s an example: Jack and me got two years for demanding money with menaces. That was the
cloud
bit. But while we were doing bird, Jack in Wandsworth, and me in Pentonville, National Service officially ended. That was the
silver lining
bit. I never served a day for Queen and Country, which, according to Albert, was as it should be: “Enough of our lot have done their bit and then some for this sceptred isle,” he would say. Carol and me were married in the registry office at Camden Town Hall and moved into the prefab; Mum went to live with Albert; Jack bought The Edward. We turned the back room of the pub into an office, and began to build our empire in earnest. Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin brothers did a bolt from Alcatraz, Cassius Clay was crowned heavyweight champion of the world, and England beat Germany in the World Cup. I blinked and it was 1970. Carol still wanted children after losing the first one. And we did our best to have them. But it wasn’t to be; she got cancer and had a hysterectomy. Another blink and it was 1980. Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minster, Sid Vicious killed himself, and Carol and me bought a villa on the Costa del Sol. But we sold it the following year because Spain was too hot and no one spoke English. Then things started going pear. A customer caught the apprentice Albert had working for him fucking a goose in the back of the butcher shop while Albert was placing a bet in William Hill. A fight started, and a man ended up dying. Then word began circulating that the boy had been fucking geese and all sorts for months; business dropped off; Albert started drinking, and only opened up once or twice a week: preferring to spend most of his time in the bookmaker’s gambling his life away.

Mum worried herself sick for ten years. Then she had a stroke. The right side of her face and body became paralysed, and she had to go into a nursing home. She died on Easter Sunday 1988. Wallace followed her on October 19, 1989. It was the same day the Guildford Four were set free. By then, when Albert wasn’t in the betting shop, he’d be at his usual table in The Edward lost in his own thoughts and staring at the carpet. With Mum and Wallace both gone, his world fell apart. He hated being on his own in the flat, and never slept because ghosts tormented him in the dead of night and kept him awake. When I asked him who the ghosts were, he said they were boys he’d gone to school with that had died in the war; Auntie Val; Alfie Bath, and others. Carol and me decided it was time for Albert to move in with us, and I asked Dawn the Prawn to knock on the office door when he arrived at The Edward so I could tell him.

It was late November; had rained every day for a week, and was dark by 4:30 when I joined Albert at his table in the public bar. He was more cheerful than usual and glanced up at me with a “Hello chum.” I told him there was something I wanted to say, but he cut me off with a wave of his hand and said there was something he needed to say first. He had just that moment come from his solicitor’s. He handed me his will. I was his sole heir: the butcher shop and flat above were mine to do with as I pleased when he’d gone. I said the only place he was going was the spare room in the house with Carol and me. He reached into his pocket for a betting slip and placed it on the table: flattened out its upturned corners, and sat back with a sigh.

“If I could turn back time, I don’t think I’d have ever set foot in a bookmaker’s,” he said. “Perhaps then your mum would still be alive.”

“It wasn’t your gambling that saw her off,” I told him back. “It was all more complicated than that. She buried things away inside her that didn’t want to stay buried anymore. That’s all it was, Albert. You’ve got nothing to reproach yourself for.”

I got up to get us a drink. Albert called out to me when I was at the bar and said what it was he’d wanted to tell me.

“You were always the son I never had,” he said.

“Silly old sod,” I mumbled.

Dawn smiled and poured two whiskeys: doubles. I picked them up and started walking back to the table. But no sooner had I started than something stopped me dead in my tracks. It felt odd; the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and, for a few moments, I didn’t understand what it was. Then I glanced at Albert. He was leaning back in his chair; his head slumped slightly forward. And he had this peaceful expression on his face. And I knew what it was I had felt. I knew what it was that had made my hairs stand on end. It was Albert. It was Albert as he moved through me on his way to wherever it was dead people went.

The dead deserve a jolly-up. Or maybe only some of them do. But The Edward shut its doors to the public and held a private little celebration in memory of Albert after people had paid their last respects to him at the crematorium in Golders Green. He’d been buried in the Jewish cemetery although there was nothing Jewish about him, other than he’d married one: Auntie Val. But the Rabbi at the Dunstan Road synagogue had been quite persistent about it, saying his congregants would consider it a great honour, since so many of them, and their descendants owed Albert their lives. One after another came up to me to say it had been Albert who made possible their escapes during the war, whilst others, friends and neighbours, found themselves in the gas chambers. I had always wondered what Albert did with all the money he made on the black market. He certainly never spent it on himself. The Rabbi said, “If humility is royalty without a crown, then Albert was a prince amongst men.” Albert had financed the liberation of a dozen families from Nazi-occupied Europe without any of us ever knowing about it.

“I couldn’t serve in the military because of my phlebitis,” he had told me, but he did his bit against the Third Reich all the same.

Frankie Abbott said the day Albert died was a sad day indeed.

“Pigs arse,” I snapped back at him.

Frank was manager of William Hill on Kentish Town Road, and if he was sad at all, it was only because Albert failed to gamble his entire life savings away before he died.

“But he won it all back,” Frank protested. “Every penny he ever lost and then some!”

Albert had backed a winner. Dawn the Prawn said a cashier in the bookies told her the head office had even tried to sack Frank for having taken the bet in the first place.

“Albert put £22,000 on a boxer at 11-1,” Dawn said. “And even paid the tax.”

When I went into the office later, I saw the betting slip Albert had taken out of his pocket sitting on my desk. I sat down and thought how odd it was that some people died broken-hearted whilst others died content. I picked up the betting slip and closed my eyes. I could see Albert placing it on the table: could see him flattening out its upturned corners. And I could hear what it was he had mumbled to himself after telling me that I was the son he’d never had.

“I got it all back, Harry. I won it all back.”

Uncle Albert backed a rank outsider named Chilly Doyle to win the middleweight championship of the world, and Chilly Doyle had done it by knocking out Leroy Dancer in Atlantic City.

The wind started to drop off, but the clouds had darkened with the threat of rain. London always seemed so bleak in the grey afternoon light. I was still standing on the edge of Bray and could move no further without falling off. For a few minutes I listened to the sounds of boys playing football on the patch of grass 220 feet below me. I heard somewhere that images flashed before your eyes when you died, and wondered what images might flash by mine when I hit the ground. Jack and me, and those with us had contributed more than our fair share of pain and misery. I make no bones about it. And fate appeared to have no trouble in getting retribution for those things we’d done: by the time Jack discovered he had cancer, he was already riddled with it and had less than a year to live. The poor bastard couldn’t even wipe his own arse for the last six months. Hymie Stump had found religion while he was inside and had decided to go straight when they released him. But a week before his parole date, two other prisoners strapped him to a mattress, doused him with lighter fluid, and burnt the poor zealot to death. Ronald Taylor got life imprisonment for battering a child molester and then drowning him in a canal. In HMP Full Sutton, he somehow got septicaemia and his kidneys failed. Then he got meningitis, and endocarditis, and left the land of the living within a week. Jimmy King built up a nasty crack habit that got away from him, and was shot dead by a drug dealer on the White City Estate. Kelly Day left his nightclub one afternoon never to be seen again, although word was some Albanians fed him into a mincer. Big Pat also went missing. But then workmen from the water board found him ten days later. He’d somehow got himself wedged in a sewage pipe after a break-in and had drowned. And lastly, Frankie Toast went to see Arsenal beat Juventus in Turin, and got stabbed to death by four Ultra fans for the Submariner on his wrist and the 140 Euros in his wallet.