Man at the Helm (24 page)

First, the niceness of Dr Gurly and the kindness of Sheela, who, it turned out, was a doctor too but not in the ordinary sense and who knew the audiologist who’d been so cross with us at Jack’s hearing test. Sheela described her as an old bag with no sense of humour. After a bowl of onion soup which was very dark in colour and tasted slightly of toffee, we had a big cheesy bread thing with olives on top and all sorts of bits of vegetable which were both raw and slightly burnt at the same time. And with that, a great big wooden bowl of leaves and chives. Then there was a chocolate mousse, which was one of the nicest things I’d ever eaten.

‘I hope the food is all right for you,’ said Dr Gurly.

‘It’s the nicest meal I’ve ever had,’ said our mother, which was probably true because there were only nice people in attendance and no one worrying about table manners and no meat and hardly any cutlery to speak of. Also, she hadn’t had that many meals – as such – since being divorced. Just peanuts and fruit.

‘The garden is beginning to come into its own,’ said Dr Gurly, and that gave our mother the opportunity to say, ‘Just you wait – soon there’ll be Mr Gummo’s alliums in the beds and Mexican fleabane all over the paths and steps.’

And it was a lovely thing to be able to say and all because we had been invited and she had remembered about them.

‘I want to get him to put in some blackcurrants,’ said Dr Gurly.

‘Yes, and to clear away access to the drains, which have been covered over the years,’ said Sheela.

The three women drank a bottle of rosé wine in the fat bottle and then another and were tipsy and amusing and our mother told Sheela that she was probably about to start a full-time driving job and therefore desperately trying to reduce the prescription medication she was taking. Sheela stopped being tipsy and went into professional mode, which was the right thing to do.

‘It’s great to hear you’re trying to reduce your medication. Well done. Are you doing it in conjunction with your GP?’ Sheela asked.

‘Yes, sort of, yes, I am,’ she said. ‘I was wondering,’ our mother went on, ‘how long it will take until I start feeling normal.’

‘Normal?’ said Sheela. ‘You mean functioning without the medication?’

‘Yes,’ said our mother, ‘normally.’

‘As a rough guide, I always say it will take as long to normalize as you were taking the medication,’ Sheela said. ‘So if you’ve been on them for a year, you’ll need a year.’

‘Like the reflection of a mountain in a lake,’ said our mother.

‘Well, yes, that’s a poetic way of putting it,’ said Sheela.

‘Anyway,’ said Dr Gurly, changing the subject, ‘Sheela and I wanted to get you all here and have a meal and say a huge thank-you for letting us buy your lovely house.’ And she raised her glass and we raised ours.

And Sheela said, ‘And you must come and see us whenever you like. You are very welcome.’

And Dr Gurly said, ‘Here’s to Maxwell.’ And I didn’t ask why she said that, I just knew he’d done something odd and didn’t want any details.

And I realized that moving from the lovely house was the best thing we’d ever done. In moving from that house, we were welcome there, more welcome than we had ever been even when we’d lived there. I think it was the first place we’d ever been welcome. And the mousse had been the nicest thing I’d ever eaten and Sheela the nicest person and our mother was going to be back to normal in around two years. Like the reflection of a mountain in a lake. It was a lovely evening and we walked back to the Sycamore Estate in the dark.

‘That was nice,’ said our mother.

‘Are they Libyans?’ asked Little Jack.

‘I think they are,’ said my sister.

We wondered if they’d ever ask us again, seeing as we’d eaten everything all up and our mother had talked about her pill problem. And just to put the icing on the cake, they did ask us – they rang up about a fortnight later and said they were doing a curry and did we want to come over. I don’t need to write about that because it was nice again and in the same sorts of ways and we were getting used to being welcome and that in itself was nice.

The day of our mother’s interview at Snowdrop Laundry Services dawned and she got dressed in sensible clothes, apart from her sandals. My sister criticized them.

‘What?’ said our mother.

‘Your feet don’t look like they belong to a van driver,’ said my sister.

In the end she wore a pair of Mr Gummo’s shoes, which were only one size too big and had accidentally moved house with us. And she went off looking like a van driver from head to toe.

The Snowdrop depot was on the Soar Banks industrial estate, some eight miles from our home. She attended at 10 a.m. and was gone for two hours plus. When she got home, she was no
longer the mother we’d always known, though I can’t quite say why. She was just different, like a toddler who’s been to nursery for the first time or a boy who’s been in front of a magistrate.

‘How did it go?’ my sister asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said our mother, taking off Mr Gummo’s shoes.

‘That’s the thing,’ said my sister, ‘you never do, unless it goes badly.’

‘They’re going to let me know,’ she said.

And then, at our insistence, our mother described the whole thing in detail with lots of ‘he said/I said’.

She’d had twenty minutes’ worth of talking with a man called Mr Holt, who was the traffic manager. Mr Holt had barely looked at her, and although he’d asked ‘myriad difficult questions’ – including some on the subject of driving – he’d not asked that most probing of questions, ‘Why do you want this job?’ It seemed to be understood that it was for money.

Then Mr Holt had handed her a road map and said, ‘It’s Friday afternoon, you’re in Malby. You need to get to Markfield. How are you going to get there in under an hour?’

And she, being OK with a map and a straight talker, said, ‘I’d curse the person who planned the routes, then go via Enderby.’

‘You’re low on fuel in Loughborough and need to get to the Red Lion in Rothley,’ he said. ‘Where would you fill up?’

‘I have no idea.’ she’d said, ‘I tend not to let myself get low on fuel.’

After a few more map-reading and route-planning questions, Mr Holt had handed her over to Miss Kellogg, his deputy, who’d asked her to park a Leyland van while she watched with a clipboard. Our mother reverse-parked it beautifully but Miss Kellogg had asked her, ‘And how do you propose to open the back doors?’

Our mother hadn’t been able to answer – only, ‘I can’t.’

Miss Kellogg explained that a van driver’s back doors are his number-one concern. ‘It’s a case of “Can I get things in and out of my doors?” and you never reverse-park unless you’re done for the day,’ she said.

Then, after Miss Kellogg, she had another session with Mr Holt. He asked her to drive him to the County Arms and back in the same Leyland van. And when they got back to the depot, she didn’t reverse-park but went into a space nose-in.

‘Why didn’t you reverse her in?’ Mr Holt asked.

‘I thought I’d leave access for the doors,’ she said.

‘Do it again, reverse in, we’re done for the day,’ said Mr Holt.

So she did and, wanting to keep the van neatly tucked in and in line with the other parked vans, she bumped the wall. After that, Mr Holt spoke again, at length.

He told her she’d broken the law twice during the test drive, once when she’d turned into Canal Street – it being a no-right-turn junction – and once when she’d moved off on an amber light. Also, she’d failed to apply the handbrake on the small incline turning into the County Arms and had held the van on the clutch-bite.

This was the most serious of the three mistakes and a van driver’s Golden Rule, because although it wasn’t exactly law-breaking, in the sense of the Highway Code, the engine on the Leyland vans couldn’t withstand that kind of abuse on a daily basis.

‘These vans are over two tonnes in weight, they want to roll back. You must never hold them on the clutch,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’

And then he’d said, ‘If you work for me and I have to get your clutch fixed, you’ll have some explaining to do – are we clear?’

Mr Holt described the job. The main thing seemed to be just
getting it done and the van not breaking down, particularly not on account of the clutch, and if a driver could achieve that, the rest was easy. The worst thing – the thing to be avoided – was that the customer would be dissatisfied and switch to another laundry – God forbid, Advance Towel Services, who were their main rival with towels.

‘Who is your main rival with boiler suits?’ our mother asked, showing great interest.

‘Our main rival there is modern fabrics and washing machines and people doing their own.’

He told her the job was all about driving all over the county to shops, pubs, clubs and hotels, delivering and changing towels in toilets. Automatic roller towels, Turkish rollers, flats, tea towels, dust-mats and boiler suits. There were five set routes for each day of the week and each van had a driver and a boy. The driver and boy were expected to empty the dirty laundry at the end of each day and load the van ready for the next.

All in all, our mother seemed quite inspired by the interview and indeed the whole event and the marvellous concepts such as being done for the day and the bun stops, the payload and applying the handbrake, which she’d only ever used for parking and now knew it had this other crucial role.

Then, after her detailed telling of it, the phone rang and it was Mr Holt saying she had got the job if she wanted it just as long as she gave him her word that she’d use the handbrake. To start the following Monday at 8 a.m. She accepted and hung up the phone.

‘I’m a van driver,’ she said, and we celebrated with a little dance around her.

Our mother found waking up in the morning very difficult indeed and felt sick and miserable. Especially as it was dark and cold – two of her worst things. She’d set her alarm for 7 a.m. to give her thirty minutes to wake up properly and have coffee. It wasn’t that she’d never
been
up at that hour, just that she’d never had to
get
up.

The first morning my sister and I dragged ourselves out of bed an hour early and my sister went down to our mother’s room to make sure she was up. She wasn’t, then she was. Once we’d heard her clanging about, we went down in our nighties to offer support. We’d planned to make eggy bread to give her a good breakfast but, seeing us, our mother was extremely grumpy and didn’t want our support and was actually horrible to be with, much worse than usual, which was a bad start and disappointing.

‘Who put that fucking kettle on?’ she yelled, as it started its slow, whining build-up to the boil.

‘I was going to make you a cup of coffee,’ said my sister.

‘Do it in the thing,’ our mother demanded, meaning her coffee boiler. ‘I can’t stand the powdered.’

Then before the thing had the coffee ready, our mother made herself a powdered one and my sister stomped back to bed. And our mother was cross that she’d upset my sister.

‘Jesus Christ, why do you have to bother me, even at this hour?’ she said.

‘We thought you’d like some company,’ I said.

‘When have I ever wanted company?’ she said.

So I stomped off back to bed too. And soon we heard Gloxinia’s engine revving and then trailing off as our mother drove away for her first day as a van driver at the Snowdrop Laundry.

‘She’s gone,’ I said to my sister in her bed.

We said how much we hated her and hoped she’d get the sack and so on. Then we fell asleep and then we were up again having Weetabix and, to make things worse, Jack had to have his with Blue Band and some diabetic jam I’d stolen from my father’s house because the milkman had skipped us.

When we got home from school, my sister said we should all tidy up the best we could and have everything nice for when our mother came home because she’d be shattered. We agreed and my sister started to make a macaroni cheese but found the milk never had come. So she switched to macaroni with tomatoes and cheese and Little Jack – lovely Little Jack – ran all the way to the shops on his own and bought a bottle of milk.

When we heard Gloxinia pull into the drive we all lined up, like the kids from
The Sound of Music
, and our mother surprised us by coming in the back door. We followed her into her bedroom.

‘How was it?’ asked Jack.

‘Unbearable,’ said our mother. She took off Mr Gummo’s shoes and flopped onto the chesterfield which was in her bedroom and had become her bed.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘It just went on and on and with endless little things you have to do,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ we wanted to know, but our mother was too tired to speak and just waved us all away and lay with her eyes closed for a while. My sister made her a cup of coffee and then she had a bath and went to bed and we didn’t see her again for
the rest of the week, except for the odd moment when she came in and dished out chicken legs and tubs of coleslaw.

She’d started buying the chicken legs from supermarkets on her travels and giving them to us in a bit of kitchen paper for dinner. I quite liked them but my sister obviously didn’t, her being an ongoing vegetarian, and she thought we looked all caveman-like eating them with our hands and would have preferred we’d tackled them with cutlery, but our mother said not to make any washing up now she was working. Our ex-father’s lectures on the importance of table manners had made an impression on my sister and she’d begun to sound like him.

‘You’ll never get a promotion if you eat like monkeys,’ she told us, not that we knew what a promotion actually was, even though we’d had the same grisly warning plenty of times.

Our mother had a two-week probation period at Snowdrop Laundry, during which time she had to arrive bang on time and be shown the ropes by Miss Kellogg, the deputy. Miss Kellogg, who’d done a small part of the interview, was quite nice but very particular about every little detail and munched on porky scratchings, which was worse than our sister having to see us gnawing on chicken legs because Miss Kellogg would often get a pig’s bristle stuck between her teeth and have to pick at it with a corner of her fag packet.

After the two-week period, though, our mother was free of Miss Kellogg and the porky scratchings, and in charge of the van and the van boy – the very nice and hard-working Deano. Also, she was able to chuck Mr Gummo’s canvas shoes into the hall cupboard and switch to her own shoes. The van driver’s job entailed driving to various venues across the city and county, as previously discussed, and exchanging dirty roller towels for clean ones in the toilets and cloakrooms. The best part was the bombing around in the van with the radio on or talking about
plays (which Deano could do, up to a point, having studied English Literature A level for a year) and the worst part was the actual going into the toilets. The men’s toilets especially, being the worst bit of the worst bit and a bit of a shock to our sheltered mother.

She hadn’t had much experience of men’s toilets, having attended a girls’ boarding school and then marrying and only really knowing our father and Charlie Bates, both of whom had obviously been quite fastidious in the toilet, standing or sitting, and either never dripping or splashing or, if they did, wiping it quickly up so she never saw. Now it was beginning to seem as though they weren’t the norm, and the norm being to pee all around the toilet, splashing every part of the fixings and floor while scratching the pubic area and shedding hairs. To make it worse, it didn’t look as though the splashings got wiped up very often, and they would congeal into syrupy orange droplets. Our mother’s flip-flops became untenable (her word) and she decided to go back to Mr Gummo’s Dunlops.

Once she’d got used to it and settled down in spite of the early mornings, the grumpy killjoy of a boss and all that urine, she quite enjoyed it. She seemed to have just enough fun with the van boy during the driving part to make it bearable and ditto the banter of the van drivers during the laundry-sorting part. She didn’t enjoy the three calls she had in our village but got used to them quickly enough, and Mr Terry the butcher was always very pleased to see her and I thought it funny that after rejecting him man-on-the-helm-wise on account of his blood-soaked aprons, there she was every Thursday tiptoeing across his sawdusty floor and heaving seven of them into the van plus a smeary roller and two tea towels.

No one at Snowdrop minded that she was posh, they actually liked her for it and found it charming and funny, and no one made
hurtful comments about Vogel’s – what a disgrace they were going bust and so many people losing their jobs. They managed to avoid the subject by talking about other things, such as the news and funny customer stories.

She never liked the chaos when she got home, though, and still hated the kitchen. On the plus side she had neither the time nor the inclination for writing the play.