Cockfosters Read online

  Then, once they had paused to check the departures board, they hurried over to the far platform where the next train stood in readiness, ticking over, waiting to take them back into town.

  Torremolinos

  There was some sort of commotion in the corridor, then a bed was wheeled into the space beside me. The man on the bed eyed me sideways from his pillow and I eyed him from mine.

  ‘You look a bit rough, mate,’ he said after a while.

  I thought, I could say the same about you, mate; that’s a nasty bruise you’ve got on your face. Instead, I croaked, ‘Not as rough as I was.’ Which was true.

  ‘What you in for then?’ said the man.

  ‘Triple bypass,’ I said. ‘They call it cabbage.’

  ‘Cabbage?’ he said.

  ‘That’s what the doctors call it,’ I said. ‘Cabbage surgery.’

  I felt tired and closed my eyes. I must have drifted off. When I came to I saw that the man was still watching me from his pillow.

  ‘All right then?’ he said.

  ‘Yes thanks,’ I managed.

  ‘Thing is,’ he said, lowering his voice so I could only just hear, ‘Thing is, I come in from next door.’

  ‘Next door?’

  ‘The Scrubs,’ he said, in the same low voice.

  This hospital’s beside the prison, I thought; of course it is. I was still coming down from my near-death experience. I had tubes coming out all over the place.

  ‘What are you in for then?’ I asked, seeing as he’d asked me.

  ‘GBH,’ he said.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ I said, a bit confused.

  ‘Eight years,’ he said.

  ‘You were stitched up?’ I suggested.

  ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So was I!’ I said. ‘That makes two of us. No I mustn’t laugh, ow, I’ll come apart.’

  At this point he started chuckling: hur-hur-hur.

  As I lay there trying to hold my insides in and not laugh, there came into my mind the terror I’d felt as a child when my father was reading to me one time, about a boy in a graveyard and a villain saying, ‘I’ll have your heart and liver out.’ Something like that.

  ‘Tell the truth,’ said the man, ‘I told ’em I was having a heart attack.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Look mate, do me a favour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me what it’s like.’

  ‘What, a heart attack?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. So I can tell the doctors when they get round to me. Then they’ll have to keep me in for tests.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and stopped to think about this.

  ‘I needed a break,’ he said.

  Fair enough, I thought; fair enough.

  ‘At first it’s like a finger,’ I said. ‘Pressing very hard in your chest so you can’t breathe. There’s a pain in your left shoulder, then it spreads, the pain, up your neck to your jaw.’

  ‘Your jaw,’ he said, stroking his stubble thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes. It’s like a vice. You’re being squeezed in a vice and it’s making you break out in a muck sweat.’

  I didn’t like to remember it.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Like a vice. Thanks.’

  He rolled his head on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling.

  ‘What’s it like then?’ I said after a while. ‘Next door?’

  He turned his big expressionless face my way again.

  ‘Boring,’ he said at last.

  ‘Tell them your old man died of a heart attack,’ I said. ‘Because it’s often something that’s in the family.’

  ‘He did an’ all.’

  ‘Play that up. And, sorry if this sounds a bit personal, but you’re quite big too.’

  ‘Twenty stone.’

  ‘That’s good. So if they ask, tell them you like fry-ups and salt with everything.’

  ‘Then I won’t be telling no lies, will I,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ I said, closing my eyes.

  I realised I was exhausted. I still couldn’t get used to this being me, this poor old creature on the bed, ribcage held together with wire, left leg heavily bandaged.

  The night before the operation, once I’d signed a form saying it was nobody’s fault if I died, and once the surgeon had told me my heart was the same size as a clenched fist; yes; how strange. So. Once they’d all gone, I was lying in bed looking at a beautiful tree I could see through the window where it was waving its branches slowly in the wind, and I thought about my life, all the nice things I’d done.

  Then afterwards, when I woke up, I had a big tube in my throat, which was something I’d been frightened of happening. I’d had a real dread of waking up to find myself on a ventilator with a tube down my throat. The nurse brought me a pen and paper and I wrote How long tube in? She told me, ten minutes. But very soon after that she took the tube out and I knew I could stop worrying.

  Next, though I don’t remember this, I wrote I’m so happy and tore the sheet of paper off the pad and gave it to her; and I kept on doing this, she told me, sheet after sheet, till it was finished.

  I opened my eyes now and saw my neighbour was still watching me.

  ‘Looks like you had a nice little kip,’ he said, almost tenderly.

  ‘I get tired,’ I croaked.

  ‘When they going to let you out then?’

  ‘Three days’ time. Hard to believe, but that’s what the nurse said today.’

  ‘You bin in the wars,’ he said. ‘You got to rest.’

  An image of the world at rest on a beach flashed into my mind, epic regiments of sunbathers like those terracotta soldiers from China – but lying down of course instead of standing up.

  ‘We’re on our holidays!’ I said, with a great big smile.

  I felt outstandingly happy; I felt like I was floating.

  ‘That’s right, mate,’ he said. ‘We’re on the Costa Brava. Hur-hur-hur.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ I begged.

  Part of me was horror-struck in case my wound opened up and my heart fell out. More, though, I was happy in a very basic way. These hospital beds weren’t exactly padded sun-loungers but on the other hand they were definitely above ground rather than below it.

  ‘Torremolinos!’ said the man in the next bed. ‘Hur-hur-hur.’

  ‘Give it a rest,’ I pleaded, holding my sides and laughing very carefully.

  Erewhon

  03:29

  Foolishly he had opened his eyes, and that was the time. Under four hours. He’d never get back. The straight-sided digits floated, gloated, lime green in the dark. That was tomorrow shot. Meanwhile Ella snored on beside him, oblivious.

  Within ten seconds he was as wide awake as she was deep asleep. No, they hadn’t started out like this but this was life now. What she couldn’t seem to understand was that it was hard, he found it very hard to run the house and look after her and the children as well as hold down a full-time job. It surprised him – embarrassed him, even – that she couldn’t seem to see this for herself. Didn’t she care? If he said anything though she got angry and walked out of the room.

  03:32

  Think about something else. The Performance Management Review coming up at school next week. Another teaching hoop to jump through. His line manager would be observing him formally and every single one of his students would need to be seen as having made exceptional progress during the observed lesson for him to get an Outstanding. He was breaking into a light sweat just thinking about it.

  He wanted to go part-time. That was what he was nerving himself up for. Dave Sweetland had agreed to a job-share if they could get it past the Head. Part-time would mean he’d be able to cook something other than pasta and help Colin more with his homework and generally keep an eye on him – he was worried about him – as well as do boring but necessary things like sort out the boiler and take Daisy to the dentist and get his marking done before midni
ght. It would make all the difference. But he would have to be careful how he approached Ella.

  It was so hard. If he got the wrong tone of voice she shouted and refused to listen. It was like treading on eggshells. Feminine pride. He’d have to present it to her as her own idea, that’s what he’d have to do. If he could somehow show her that her life too would be improved by it, then it might work.

  He cringed now, turning onto his right side, and curled into a foetal position. Whenever he said anything, she started talking about certain men at the hospital where she was Director of Facilities, working fathers who managed to do it all effortlessly and without fuss.

  She’d say, Money. But he was going to get ill otherwise.

  03:37

  Stop worrying. Count backwards from a thousand. Nine hundred and ninety-nine. That was another good worry, whether he’d done the right thing not to report what he’d been told at the last parents’ evening. Timothy Tisdall’s father had sat opposite him for the obligatory four minutes and with tear-filled eyes had whispered to him what he suffered at the hands of his wife; how his wife was a policewoman so knew not to hit him anywhere it would show; how he couldn’t report it and was begging him not to report it but how he had to tell someone and thank you for listening, it made him feel less alone.

  There was bit of pushing and shoving sometimes from Ella, but she didn’t hit him. Nine hundred and ninety-eight. Not nice to think how the overwhelming majority of men who were murdered were murdered by their own wives.

  03:41

  He’d better stock up on whisky. Ella’s mother was the next blot on the horizon. A bombastic, hard-drinking woman in her mid-sixties, she had recently divorced her long-suffering second husband and replaced him with a trainee barista a third her age. They were coming to lunch at the weekend and he was thinking of pasta; he was simply too busy and tired for anything else but Ella wouldn’t be pleased.

  It was hard, the way older women got better with age while men lost their sexual allure. It was an unfair fact of nature. Our skin is so much coarser, he reflected, prone to early furrows and open pores and sag; and then of course – unfairest of all – we go bald. Nobody really respects a man any more once he turns forty, particularly if he’s losing it on top.

  03:48

  And the media is so disparaging of men over forty, he thought; the way it zooms in on our paunches and spindle shanks, our pendulous earlobes. Another real worry was, he was developing turkey wattles. Ella had noticed it too – she’d called him jowly the other day, she’d pinched an incipient fold of flab while ostensibly chucking him under the chin.

  Why can’t there be some positive older role models for a change, he fretted. Wherever you went, images of young men in next to nothing were in your face, making you feel bad about your body. His route to work was tyrannised by giant posters of ripped abs, honed six-packs, buff biceps.

  In a pathetic attempt to fight back, he’d recently been engaging in a spot of newsagent guerrilla warfare. Now when he bought his paper he made sure to stick some of his pre-prepared Post-it notes to the naked boys on the covers of the women’s magazines – notes he had felt-tipped in advance with the words WHAT IF HE WAS YOUR SON?

  03:50

  Moving deeper into the forest of worries, his mind now fixed on Colin’s silence and pallor. He’d shown signs of shaky self-esteem from early on, his boy Colin, and now, at the age of thirteen, it seemed he might be flirting with anorexia. There was the other thing too, which was even more worrying, the cutting thing; but he wasn’t going to mention that to Ella yet.

  Whereas Daisy, at nine, knew exactly what she wanted and it definitely didn’t involve self-excoriation. She was obsessed, already, with the most brainless computer games, all about domination and detonation. She needed ferrying round for miles at weekends for her competitive yoga, which she was taking to County level – there was talk of trials in Birmingham, Ella was very thrilled. Not that he resented this for a moment; he was proud of her too, of course he was, and he was able to get on with his marking while he waited outside various sports venues for the necessary hours. But it would have been nice to get a thank you once in a while.

  He really must stop bleating.

  What a loser! No wonder Colin’s self-esteem was low with him as a role model.

  Was he managing to be a good father to him? That was what really worried him – him and the other dads. They all agonised endlessly about whether or not they were good fathers.

  04:04

  His heart was very slow, wasn’t it? It felt like it was labouring up a hill. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Now it was racing! Something must be wrong. He wasn’t overjoyed about still being on the Pill.

  All four of his grandparents had died of strokes or heart attacks, but Ella couldn’t tolerate condoms. They muffled things, she said.

  04:08

  While he was getting undressed last night she’d had the cheek to say, ‘Those pants are getting tired.’

  ‘They’re not the only ones!’ he’d flashed back, the worm turning, keenly aware that it wasn’t just his pants that were being criticised.

  Afterwards she had rolled off him and fallen asleep with a snore.

  04:13

  He knew he really should think about his own satisfaction as well but somehow it was so much easier at the time to concentrate on gauging her levels of interest and to adapt himself to what worked for her. The trouble was, he himself needed some patience and encouragement, he found it really didn’t work for him without at least five minutes’ foreplay.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, get it up and get on with it,’ she’d snapped at him the other night – though, to give her her due, she had apologised soon afterwards. Still, he couldn’t help resenting her impersonal demands for sex; her obdurate refusal to talk, ever. Then there were her smothered belches, the semi-stifled farts she seemed to find so hilarious, not to mention the mulch of underwear she left in her wake or the state she left the bathroom in on a nightly basis. It was like the stables at the end of the world once she’d finished with it.

  04:21

  A bird had started up outside, and light was looming round the edges of the curtains. He closed his eyes without much hope and began to count apples on an imaginary tree.

  04:22

  No, that was no good. Try the one which made him tired just to think about, the one where he was climbing the steps of a spiral staircase which he saw was endless.

  He knew Ella watched porn online. That was why she was so late coming to bed – ‘Just checking my emails.’ She didn’t know he knew and he wasn’t going to tell her, but there was the evidence on her laptop when he tapped into it – Loaded Lunchbox, Bollocks ’n’ Bunfights, all those fit and perfect men.

  He understood the arguments: it’s completely mainstream; everybody looks at porn; it’s just another way of relaxing. But something in him protested against it.

  ‘Don’t be such a MascuNazi,’ Ella said if he ever said anything. He hated it when she called him that. But it’s important that we get more men out of prostitution, he’d been saying; that we get more men into Parliament. ‘Of course it is, darling,’ she’d replied indulgently.

  To be fair, she did sometimes listen to him rant on about the injustice of the system. She even agreed with what he said, which was after all based on facts, incontrovertible. But she had no interest in changing it. Why would she when it worked so well for her?

  04:30

  He could see how he had to come last in the family pecking order. Something had to give and it wasn’t going to be Ella. And he couldn’t bear it to be the children.

  He minded that she rode over him roughshod, that she made all the big decisions, the ones about money and hours, without consulting him. The last thing he wanted was to be accused of being shrill, though, and anything he said to contradict her did not go down well at all.

  04:33

  It all made him feel rather depressed. Which accounted for the chocolate he squirrelled away
round the house. A good woman is hard to find, he was in the habit of reminding himself as he broke off another row of Fruit & Nut. This didn’t help shrink his paunch one bit, but he had to have something.

  04:42

  ‘Is it just that women aren’t as nice as men?’ he’d blurted out at the last book club meeting.

  ‘They’re certainly more ruthless than us,’ Mike had said, looking pensively at his fingernails. ‘The real difference seems to be that they’re able to compartmentalise. They can cut off. And of course they’re more ambitious.’

  ‘I’d be ambitious too if it was allowed!’ Dave had laughed.

  They had all laughed at that.

  ‘It’s the famous old triple conundrum,’ Dave had continued. ‘You can have two out of three but not three. You can have the woman and the job, or the woman and the children. But you can’t have the woman and the job and the children.’

  ‘Why not?’ he’d persisted. ‘Women don’t have to choose! Why can they have it all and not us?’

  ‘That’s life,’ Dave had shrugged.

  05:11

  It was about power, really, in the end – but he’d never thought of himself as a political person. Ella wouldn’t talk about it. She wouldn’t put herself out to talk to him, or to listen to him either. ‘Childcare?’ she’d yawn if he asked her for a couple of hours off. ‘That’s your job. Just do it!’ She’d say it in an ironical way – obviously! – but even so he’d find it difficult to laugh. She was big on irony; she frequently got irony to do her dirty work for her. Then she’d accuse him of being humourless.

  He could feel rage bubbling up in spite of himself.