Paperboy (35 page)

The Last Star in the Sky

‘IT’S NOT A
very nice job for you, dear, but I just don’t feel up to it,’ said my mother, pointing to the wardrobes. ‘A few old grey suits, it’s hardly worth calling the Salvation Army. Even they must have standards.’ She had delayed clearing out Bill’s clothes until I could get down to Kent and do it for her.

I looked at the cupboards. After years of being hard up and filling their little house in Westerdale Road with utility furniture, I was surprised to find that she still bought cheap, wobbly wood-veneered wardrobes. Material things had never meant much to Kath. She treasured books more than household items. She wasn’t one for nostalgia. Finally left alone, she seemed quite content now, although there must have been regrets.

‘Maybe we’ll find something exciting tucked away. Evidence of a double life,’ I teased her.

‘Oh no, dear, we were far too ordinary for anything like that. Your father didn’t bother to tell anyone we were moving from Cyril Villa, and not one person even tried to get in touch with us. Nobody really knew we were
ever
there. Sometimes I wonder whether we existed at all. The English can be such chimerical creatures when they choose to be.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘Nice use of “chimerical”, by the way.’ My mother laughed.

After Steven and I had both left home, our parents had sold the rambling old house where no repair had ever been completed, and the building had become an old people’s home. The oddest thing was that they decided not to take anything with them to the new bungalow except my mother’s ‘best company’ crockery – not a single stick of furniture, no clothes other than the ones they wore, hardly any mementoes or family photographs, most of which they left behind in boxes in one of the empty rooms. They simply stepped out of one life and into another. I admired that, even though I did not quite understand it. Across the years, my father had been governed by a set of obscure, unworkable principles, like a kitchen appliance for which the instruction booklet had been lost.

‘I don’t want to help you, it’s too depressing,’ said Kath, heading out of the room. ‘I’ll be next door if you need me.’

‘Did he mention me at all?’ I called back.

‘Just once, after he came out of hospital. He said, “I don’t suppose I gave Chris any reason to love me.”’

‘He really said that?’

‘He knew he’d never get around to telling you. He felt he’d left it too late for that sort of thing.’ It was typical for our family to have set a time limit on a declaration of feelings.

There wasn’t much to sort out. A couple of distinguished-service medals that had belonged to my grandfather, some cheap tie-pins and tarnished cufflinks, tobacco tins of odds and ends, insurance policies, a spectacularly ugly musical box made by William, and a couple of
blown-up
wedding photographs. As I looked at them I found myself wondering: had my grandmother really been such a monster? Long after she had died I discovered why she always wore her black boots. One was built up to hide a short leg. Life could not have been easy for her, so perhaps the only way to survive was to be tough. Families often resented an interloper, so it was likely that Bill’s sister Doreen, who had been closer to Mrs Fowler, would have been wary of my mother, with her refusal to join in the small talk and her stuck-up manners. The alliances and enmities were all so subjective, but they still coloured how we felt about the past and affected who we were in a variety of subtle and unexpected ways.

There was one wedding photograph I had never seen in the house before. It showed my father standing next to a handsome, muscular young man dressed in the kind of smart grey suit that Bill was later to adopt. He was being handed his wedding ring, but there was something about the pose that was too private to be entirely comfortable.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, wandering into the lounge to show my mother the picture.

‘Oh, that was Jack, your father’s best man. He doted on you. We used to call him your Uncle Jack, although he wasn’t a relation. Those two used to be inseparable.’

‘I’m surprised I don’t remember him.’

‘He died when you were little. Bad lungs.’

‘He’s very good looking. Far more your type.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’

‘You didn’t tip your hat at him, then?’ I joked.

‘No, Jack wasn’t interested in the ladies, not in that way. He was a confirmed bachelor. Your father was fond of him, and took it very badly when he passed away so early in life. They knew each other from work. Jack collected antique glass. He had a flat in Bayswater. Your
father
would always stand him a beer or two. They were thick as thieves.’

‘Did you go to his funeral?’ I asked, a faint question nagging at me.

‘No, and neither did Bill. His mother wouldn’t let him. She’d heard something, you see, and put her foot down. It wasn’t mentioned in those days, you just avoided certain people. You probably remember how she could be.’

A shadowed piece of my father moved into the half-light.

‘He burned my poetry book,’ I said.

‘Well, he had a thing about poetry, he didn’t think it was manly. That was his mother’s doing. They lived their lives along very strict lines. There were things that were appropriate for a man to like, and things that weren’t. I fought hard for him, but I knew I’d lose out either way. She tore her son into a terrible bundle of contradictions. She tried to make him stay away from Jack. You don’t know what it cost him to get married at all.’

She paused in the doorway, unsure if she should say anything more.

‘He didn’t understand you, Chris. But I think perhaps he was envious. On the night before he died, Bill and I sat in the garden – he felt too hot in the house – and we had the oddest conversation. He pointed above the trees to a distant star – he always had incredibly good eyesight, even at the end – and asked if I thought there was life on other planets. I told him I didn’t know. “What if we were living on the last star left in the sky?” he suddenly asked. “We’d be all alone. It wouldn’t matter any more what anyone else thought of us.” Well, I could hardly be expected to think of an answer. I wasn’t prepared for him suddenly showing signs of curiosity or regret. Then I remembered what he had been like when we were courting, the wild ideas, the plans for the future.’

I thought of my father standing in the darkness on Blackheath at the age of seventeen, firewatching as phosphorescent bombs left angel-trails across the night sky. The distant glowing fires that turned the air around him acrid, the warning shouts from indistinct figures, the rumours and stories of death and dying. It must have seemed like the end of life, just as his was starting. His mother had told him to remain at home, where it was safe. She had been frightened of losing her only son. No wonder he had been so afraid to take any chances after that. He had been barely more than a child himself when war had broken out, and had remained the same age ever after.

That was why he always stood at the window
, I thought.
He was imagining life among the stars, thinking of what might have been
.

‘I suppose he thought he could get away from his past. It would have been an escape for both of us. Except that it could never happen.’

‘He couldn’t leave her.’

‘Of course not. He needed her to feel reassured about himself, and she played on it. I think at heart he was a good man, but he wasn’t a good husband. Lord knows he tried hard enough. I have to take my share of the blame as well. I should never have married him. Whenever he saw you and I conspiring together, it must have made him feel worse about his own mother. I suppose he thought I was doing the same thing to you.’ She sighed, rising to make a fresh pot of Brooke Bond. ‘I loved him in my own way. You can always find a way to love someone if you understand them. I’ll miss him. Well, there you are. What’s done is done.’

It was the last word she had to say on the subject.

35

Accidental Examples

MY OLD SCHOOL
friend Simon was getting married, and wanted me to be his best man. After a whirlwind romance that lasted a mere twenty-two years, he and his intended, Kate, threw caution to the wind and rushed into betrothal, perhaps because their children had shamed them into tying the knot before somebody died.

It took a lot to get me down to Somerset. In the intervening years I had rarely been spotted outside the M25.

‘So,’ I said when I arrived at Simon’s front door, horrified to find mud and what appeared to be some kind of horse ordure on my newly purchased Prada boots, ‘I hear you finally became a custom car designer.’

‘And you became a writer. Didn’t you start with horror stories?’

‘Yeah, no matter what else I write, satires, drama, social comedies, that’s what they’re going to put on my tombstone.’

‘I can’t believe how many books you’ve written. And yet nobody I know has ever heard of you.’

‘Well, occasionally I get lucky, but mostly I’m mid-list.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’m one of the legion of writers out there who get respectful reviews and a steady readership, but never tap into current chattering-class obsessions.’

‘Sounding a bit bitter there, mate.’

‘I’m very happy,’ I promised him.

‘From what I’ve heard, your stuff’s just too weird. We’re ordinary families down here. We like our Harry Potters and Jeffrey Archers.’

‘I thought you would.’

‘I was sent a newspaper cutting about you. Those crazy elderly detectives you write about, Swan & Vesta.’

‘Bryant & May. I write the Bryant & May mysteries.’

‘Yeah, those are the ones.’ He grinned. ‘Bryant & May? Quite a match, eh?’

‘Right, haven’t heard that one before.’

He leaned forward, lowering his voice, looking very serious. ‘Look, you might have to tone it down around here. The locals aren’t much struck on Londoners with weird ideas, especially ones who reckon they’re creative.’

That sounded familiar. I smiled to myself. When my first published tale featured the end line
Vengeance sits on the left hand of God
, I realized I had written a horror story just like the ones I had read as a child, although there were no ghouls or ghosts in it. For years, fiction had remained something I did in my spare time, like building galleons out of balsa wood or repairing clocks, an alternative to watching television. Now it was my livelihood. When people meet me, the first thing they usually ask is ‘What have you written that I’ve read?’, a question which presupposes some level of psychic ability. For the record, the second question is always ‘Do you write under your own name?’ because an amazing number of people think authors’ names are made up.

‘You could probably shift a lot more books if you wrote like Jeffrey Archer.’

‘Probably.’

‘Still, I guess you’re just grateful to be published at all. I mean, who reads any more?’

Novels, I was told by one publisher who had rejected my work, were commodities sold like tins of biscuits, and the sweeter the taste, the more you could sell. But to me, the most important thing was that they had to contain fresh ingredients, not recycled ideas from other people. I realized now that my mother had been trying to tell me this for years; I had simply not been listening to her.
¹

Still, I had delayed. I had been afraid to try, and risk failure. I remembered my father angrily snapping off the volume dial on his transistor radio while listening to
Movie-Go-Round
because an actor had said that performing required an act of courage. Courage, said Bill, was still working on the roads at sixty-five, spreading tar even though you knew it was giving you lung cancer, as his own father had done. Courage wasn’t mincing about on a stage or fiddling with a pen.

But in a way that Bill could never understand, it was. For years I was sure that if I failed as a writer, there would be nothing else left for me. If I could not achieve the one thing in life I tried hardest to do, it would be tough living with the loss of my dreams. How many people set out to change their worlds, only to find themselves in a state of perpetual downward revision and disappointment?

Over the years my list of favourite books had changed. These days it contained peripheral novels, tomes that fell outside the critics’ canon of greatness. High on the list
was
Keith Waterhouse’s
Billy Liar
, because Billy’s story acted as a warning and a reminder to me of the path not to take.

It took me years to build up the courage, but I finally stepped on to the train of opportunity that Billy Liar had let pass, and attempted my own novel. The size of the task dawned on me when I entered my flat and saw that it had turned yellow – the lounge floor and all the windows were covered with scribbled Post-it notes, like the exposed ramblings of an unsettled mind.

The main thing was not to think about the task in terms of success or failure. Writing came naturally, but writing well did not. It was like speaking a foreign language: you could never afford to stop concentrating for a second.