The Life of Lee (32 page)

Although it was pretty dark, fortunately a street lamp directly outside the house dimly illuminated the room. I spotted an envelope that lay on the kitchen cabinet with Heather’s name on it. I picked it up and handed it to her. It was from her father. He had gone and, unbelievably, the house had already been sold. That was it.

The note didn’t really offer much in the way of an explanation, only that he had gone off with Denise and that Heather’s belongings were in the garage. Her
brothers had flown the nest, too. That ghastly night in Scarborough would be the last time we ever saw him. I mean, I know I’m funny-looking, but I didn’t know I was that bad – sorry, I was just trying to lighten it up a little.

As you can imagine, Heather not only was distraught then, but has been completely devastated ever since. As people always do in those situations, she blamed herself for her father’s apparent Reginald Perrin disappearing act. I was mystified by the whole thing. He had just vanished; it was like a magician’s trick, but for real.

I was only eighteen years of age and was hardly capable of peeling a banana. So I was nowhere near able to comprehend what Heather was going through emotionally. She cried lots for weeks and weeks. Most nights, we simply lay in the darkness of our back room on two separate camp beds pushed together, and I held her as she cried herself to sleep.

But Heather is a very strong woman – she comes from a long line of beautiful but tough women. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the fact that all her relations come from the East End of London, smiling through the Blitz and all that, but she has never once spoken about how she really felt about her dad just taking off like that so soon after her mum’s death. Perhaps one day, when she’s ready, she will.

Luckily, though, what Heather and I have in common is an intrinsic belief that once you’re down, the only thing is to get up and, not only get on with it, but fight harder than you did before. I don’t think it’s a choice one has. When you’re up, there’s only one way you can go, and
that’s down, down. But it’s also true that when you’re down, there’s only one way to go, and that’s up.

I’ve always said that if we have enough money to eat and pay the rent, then everything else is a bonus. I truly believe that, because growing up I witnessed it every day as Mum and Dad struggled.

There was no other answer but to get on with it. We had a baby on the way, and we had to find somewhere to live.

For the next few weeks, Heather set up camp in the back room at my parents’ house in Billericay while we both looked for work and somewhere to live. Art college, let alone a career in art, would have to be put on hold for now as it was all hands to the pumps. There were more pressing problems at hand than trying to contemplate my navel. We desperately needed to get our act together immediately.

The great news was, Heather was an all-round brain box and was GCSE’d up to her big brown eyeballs. Plus, she had already worked as a secretary in London. She landed the first job handed to her by the Job Centre, working for an import–export company near Southend-on-Sea. It wasn’t highly paid and she hated it because her boss was one of those bullies who liked to shout at the staff. But it was a job, after all, and we needed it right now.

I, on the other hand, had no qualifications whatsoever, apart from a first-class honours degree in being a halfwit. It was pretty obvious that I had devoted my whole life to studying how to be a full-wit, but as Heather explained, ‘That doesn’t get you anywhere in this world, Lee,
wandering about with your head in the clouds being everybody’s mate.’

‘Well,’ I argued, ‘it didn’t do Gandhi any harm.’

We had a bit of money saved from working in Scarborough, so we could get by for a couple of weeks, but after that we would be reliant on what Heather was bringing in. I was willing to do anything as long as it paid, so I set about finding work anywhere I could. I registered at the Job Centre and would trawl through the local papers’ back pages looking for vacancies. I didn’t care what it was – I just went for it.

Increasingly desperate, I went for a turkey-plucking job after a fella sidled up to me outside the Job Centre in Basildon and surreptitiously told me about it. ‘Twenty-five pence per bird,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘The more birds you pluck, the more money you earn.’

I immediately jumped at the chance. These sorts of offers don’t come along every day, I thought. I couldn’t believe the idiot was just throwing his money around like that. I said to him, ‘So it’s up to me how much money I earn?’

‘Yep,’ he replied, ‘your future is in your hands.’ I didn’t tell him, of course, but this was ticking all the right boxes for me. My small brain was already planning how to make a fortune. The way this fool is talking, I reasoned, well, I will surely be a millionaire in a couple of days. With the number of those simple, bollock-chinned, floppy-washing-up-glove-headed birds I get through, I’ll be strolling around the Ferrari showroom by lunchtime. I mean, how hard can it be to pluck a turkey?

The answer is: bloody hard.

I took up my allotted position beside a large hook hanging from the shed roof by some old rope, alongside twenty to thirty other pluckers. We all stood in front of our own ‘money hook’, as I liked to refer to it before I had even got going. We had a couple of minutes before it started, and most people went out for a fag. But I used that time to have a go at getting friendly with the goofy kid at the next hook to me. His teeth protruded from under his top lip at such an angle, you could hang your coat on them.

Amazingly, he said he was married with three kids, but he looked no older than sixteen. That was about all I figured he had going for him, as if you saw him, you’d think he’d just climbed off the porch in
Deliverance
. He kept looking around the shed at everyone else, sharing a bit of a crafty chuckle with them and pointing at me.

‘We got a new one ’ere,’ he announced. I half-expected him to take out a banjo and start strumming.

The birds arrived via a sort of waist-high wooden trap door that was lifted and tied up by our ‘shed runner’, George. To call him docile-looking would be an understatement – this bloke looked like a younger version of Worzel Gummidge, but with his stupid head on.

With his big walloping Wellington boots, his mad white spiky hair and his one long eyebrow, George would cheerfully lumber around the straw-strewn shed, checking that we were all plucking the birds in the correct manner. The birds were hung upside down from the hook in front of us and we would have to tear the feathers away from them as fast as possible. I stood there at my hook, frantically plucking. I ripped away handful after handful of feathers,
revealing the white goosepimply skin beneath that reminded me of my legs when in swimming trunks. It was truly gruesome work.

I found George’s little quality-control visits difficult and unsettling, as his eyes weren’t exactly in tune with one another. When he stopped to talk to you, they would dart independently around in their sockets, as if a fly was constantly buzzing about the inside of his head.

I tore at my bird, the pound signs popping up in my head. But, after about a minute, it became blatantly obvious it was going to be more difficult than I’d first thought. I took a quick look around the shed. Everyone else was going great guns. I realized I was amongst professional pluckers here and I was way out of my depth. The people around me were tearing the feathers off these creatures as if the birds had flown through a jumbo jet’s engine on take-off. The woman across from me was already on her third bird, and I hadn’t even finished the intricate bit around the bird’s arse.

It reeked enough in that shed to melt nasal hair, and I couldn’t get the smell out of my head for weeks. I still can’t eat turkey. I even got queasy when Sir Bernard Matthews used to come on the telly and coo, ‘Bootiful!’

It was the end of the day and, if I’m honest, things hadn’t gone well for me. I’d only managed to pluck two turkeys, and so I was taken off into a quiet corner of the shed and informed by George that my services would no longer be required. I had to face it, the money-making world of turkey-plucking wasn’t for me.

I was left with something, though. For days afterwards, the smell of turkey was still on me, and everyone I met
either started sneezing or began to have breathing difficulties right in front of me. At night time, I would lie alongside a puffed-up, sneezing, wheezing Heather. Her allergies going nuts, she would banish me to sleep in the bath in a sort of isolation block. Although she was angry at me because we had no money, I think she was willing to let it go because she couldn’t suffer this turkey-induced allergy any more.

As George told me, eyes rolling around like lottery balls, I just wasn’t fast enough. He was right – I wasn’t cut out for it. The others? They were just amazingly quick. One hefty woman in the shed could get a petrified turkey to practically undress in front of her just by looking at it. I, by contrast, was still on my first bird when George rattled his big triangle for lunch. So, on average, I would have been earning roughly fifty pence a day. That, by my reckoning, would make me a millionaire turkey-plucker by the time I was … dead. And my bus fare to the farm was sixty pence, so I would actually be paying to turkey pluck.

Interestingly, during lunch as we all sat around on bales of hay in the shed next door, I noticed that all of the other pluckers had brought in turkey sandwiches. I mean, not only would you think they might have had enough of turkey, but also they were eating turkey in front of turkeys.

Now that just ain’t right.

29. Kilburn’s Answer to Gordon Gekko

Every evening after returning from the Job Centre, I’d pick up a copy of the
Evening Standard
at the train station. The back pages always had an extensive job section. Most of the jobs required highly skilled personnel, but there were always one or two where they wanted someone to make the tea. That’s all right, I thought, that’s how it works; you make the tea for a couple of years, prove yourself and they might give you a proper job.

Even though I knew by the time I’d paid out for the train fare for the interview in London, it wouldn’t be worth my while, I was determined not to sign on the dole. I saw that as just wrong and I would always make the effort to go to the interviews. I knew Heather was working her arse off, and we were very anxious to move out of Mum and Dad’s back room into some place where we could not only be properly together but also make room for the baby.

So I wanted to show her I was doing all I could, even though it was soul-destroying going for job after job after job and getting nowhere. The trouble was, at every interview I would go for, there were twenty, sometimes thirty others all way more qualified than me. It was like you had to be Picasso just to make the tea at an art shop, and you can imagine what sort of weird shit that would be.

After being rejected by yet another interviewer in London, with the morale well and truly sucked out of me, I was determined to return home to Heather with at least something. So I took the Tube over to Kilburn in North London after reading a small ad in the
Evening Standard
’s ‘No Qualifications Needed’ section that had caught my eye earlier. After all, I was already wearing my faithful Oxfam suit that I’d had since college. I’d got quite a bit of wear out of the poor thing, and it was starting to beg for mercy.

I was also sporting a pair of shoes I’d bought as part of my bar uniform in Scarborough. After a whole season’s worth of mileage hiking around the back of the bar and now all the traipsing about London looking for a job, the soles of both shoes had sprouted holes. I had temporarily managed to mend them using a puncture-repair kit and, to my artistic credit, that was working very well, for now.

I am an eternal optimist, a dreamer and, as you will know by now, a bit gullible. That can be mistaken for stupid – all right, I accept it, I’m eternally stupid.

Which is my excuse for why I got involved in such an obvious scam. After walking for miles from the Tube station, the soles of my shoes feeling a bit thinner with every step, I eventually found the door I was searching for in a parade of pretty grim shops. It didn’t look like what I was expecting. It was squeezed between a laundrette and a betting shop, but the discoloured notice taped to the inside of the grubby glass panel did tally up with the advert in the paper. I held it up to compare the two: ‘Financial advisers urgently required. Apply within. No qualifications.’

‘That’s me,’ I said to myself. For a moment, I caught my reflection in the dirty glass door. With the suit I was wearing, I looked like Poncho the Clown, not a financial adviser. However, I was determined to give it a go. I entered the door and climbed the steep steps. The thick nylon red and yellow stair carpet was all lumpy, with bits missing so it showed the wooden floor beneath. The air was thick with the eye-watering, tangy burn of cigarette smoke from the bookies downstairs. That hung with me all the way up the wonky, narrow stairwell, which was decked out in the finest woodchip wallpaper. This, I thought, is like walking into Lompa Lompa Land.

As I got closer to the top of the stairs, I could hear the muffled sound of what appeared to be chanting of some sort. There was a moment when I wondered if I had the right place because as I reached the top it was like a scene from
Alice in Wonderland
, as the walls and ceiling suddenly closed in on me. I was now standing on a landing in a small sort of box at the top of the stairs that was so tiny I was unable to even lift my arm with the piece of newspaper to check where I was. My nose was pressed up against a single purple door with a sign taped on it that was very difficult to read. There wasn’t enough room to pull my head back and focus on the lettering without banging the back of my bonce. However, I was just able to make out the words: ‘Sales conference in progress.’

The chanting was a lot louder now and was definitely emanating from the other side of the door. I thought about waiting where I was, not wishing to disturb a sales conference. I didn’t know what that meant, but I realized it sounded very important. No one I knew had ever been
to a conference. That was something you only saw on the telly – ‘The Prime Minister is at a peace conference,’ that sort of thing. But here I was just about to enter – through a somewhat battered, dirty, old purple door, granted – a sales conference. Wait till Heather finds out what I’m up to, I thought.