Temperama

Boy Wonders: Chapter 24

From one bridge, they rode to another: the Lea Bridge, straddling the river. As they crossed it, Jamie saw that Caroline’s barge was gone and he guessed that Edwyn and has BMW had vanished too. The guess proved right: the car park behind the Princess Of Wales was quite empty. Melvyn came to a halt there and he and Jamie dismounted. Removing their helmets again, they stood in the clear light of the summer’s morning and Melvyn asked his remaining son, “So why have we come here?”

“It’s just a spot I like,” said Jamie. “It’s peaceful here.”

And it was; at least, it was as peaceful as it could ever be. Few cars roared on the road and no nutters yelled. No cyclists or joggers on the towpath. Just the two of them, both crazy-eyed and weak with lack of sleep. Jamie felt strong, though, in a different way.

They went down to the river’s edge and waited for each other, looking into the depths. Jamie said to Melvyn: “What’s in the bag?”

“Oh, it’s just...” Melvyn looked away. “It’s nothing much.”

“It must be horrible,” said Jamie, “Missing Sean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” admitted Melvyn, focussing on the ground, the water, then the sky. And holding on to the bag at the same time. “Do you miss him?” he asked.

“Not really,” Jamie replied.

“No, well. You never got on, I suppose.”

“No.”

Melvyn said, “He wasn’t perfect, I know.”

Jamie held off. Melvyn reached into the bag. He produced the cardboard folder that Lisa had shown Jamie earlier; the Sean dossier; a work of wishful thinking fiction, as Jamie could now see.

“It’s just some stuff about him.”

“What sort of stuff?” asked Jamie.

“Oh, I don’t know...”

Melvyn opened the flap and let the sheaf of paper spring back against his thumb, just the way Lisa had done in Olive’s room.

“It was an accident, wasn’t it?” asked Jamie innocently.

Melvyn shuffled a bit, then sighed; a deep and damaged sigh that Jamie would remember till it was his turn to die. “I think it probably was,” he replied.

He had the folder in his hand now, holding it uselessly yet fatalistically, as though it were doing the holding; holding him.

“Go on, Dad,” Jamie said. “Get rid of it.”

Melvyn shrank from the words as though they were a physical blow. He put his spare hand to his forehead. A shudder took hold of him and he spoke with his face turned away.

“You do it,” he said.

***

For card and paper, it sank very easily. One second it was flying, the next it had slipped clean out of sight, beginning its long process of decay. Melvyn sat down and shook with surreptitious tears. Jamie’s mobile rang. He thought it would be his mother, but it was only his alarm.

“You’re Beautiful,” it sang.

It was the start of a new day.

THE END

Boy Wonders: Chapter 23

Jamie climbed on to the back of the motorbike and, as bidden, clasped his arms around his father’s waist. Melvyn had wheeled the machine down the short drive and then a few doors up the road so that when he gunned the engine it wouldn’t wake Olive or Evie. They were doing guystuff behind the ladies’ backs. For Jamie, the hair salon’s boy sweetie, this was a novel experience.

“Hold tight,” said Melvyn, “and lean when I lean.” His voice was muffled, his face, like Jamie’s, concealed under a helmet. Being cut off from each other in this way made being together easier. The waterproof bag rested against Jamie’s elbow, containing something flat he couldn’t see. The bike roared under him and they were away.

Melvyn hadn’t said where they were going. Jamie, though, had a feeling that he knew; a feeling confirmed as Melvyn followed in reverse the route Edwyn had driven earlier, the one Melvyn had walked. They rode quite slowly, though Jamie still felt shockingly exposed. Only as they entered Leytonstone and then cut away through side streets, back towards familiar yesterdays again, did he relax enough to become conscious of his father’s ribs under his fingers, to imagine the hurting beating of his heart.

They idled outside the old house: Melvyn gazed at it a while then drove away, finding his way to Mickey’s snooker hall once more. Its neon was switched off now. The police were gone from outside the corner pub. The streets were uninhabited. Jamie looked up and the sky showed him its first promise of dawn.

There was no need for he and Melvyn to speak; they both knew the journey they would now re-trace. Yet as Melvyn took the turns he must have persuaded himself that Sean had taken on his way to his destruction on the bridge, Jamie began to feel the weight of the greater knowledge he’d acquired during the night: he knew that Sean had been the pursuer, not the pursued; he knew that Sean had been fuelled by the reckless rage of wounded pride.

This was Jamie’s secret, which only Tony and Donna and those cruel companions she’d been in the car with shared. It put power at Jamie’s disposal. As he and Melvyn dismounted next to the crucifix of flowers he’d watched his mother attach to the railings the previous morning, he agonised over how it should be deployed.

They took their helmets off and stood together, before the parapet. There was a second floral tribute: from Donna, Jamie guessed, although he supposed he’d never know. A minute’s silence passed, then Melvyn turned and looked down at the tunnel of road below. The waterproof bag still hung around his shoulders, and he touched it indecisively.

For a second, Jamie had a vision of his father falling: down, down, and smack into the pitiless asphalt below. Then he said: “Dad, there’s a place I’d like to go to.”

Boy Wonders: Chapter 22

Jamie was right about his father: he hadn’t gone to bed. On re-entering the house he found Melvyn in the living room still, but now standing, staring at his marine fish and with his socks back on; and his shoes. He seemed not to notice Jamie peering round the door at him and Jamie began to follow his first impulse, which was to tiptoe to the safety of his bedroom. Melvyn’s voice reached him as his foot fell on the bottom stair

“Jamie?”

The hopeful, whispered tone touched Jamie’s heart. He turned as Melvyn emerged into the hall. Each looked at the other, taking the moment’s temperature.

“You’ve never been out on a bike, have you Jamie?” Melvyn said. He was frowning, as though striving to comprehend the meaning of a great discovery.

“No,” Jamie replied. This wasn’t true: he’d ridden pillion with Sean once, accepting an offer that was really a taunt and a dare. He recalled dismounting at the end, pale and ashamed, and Sean laughing and yet acting like he’d done him some kind of favour.

Melvyn pushed his hair back and said, “I’m going out on mine now. You can come with me if you want - on the back. I won’t go fast.”

“I dunno,” began Jamie.

“Not far. Just...it’s a beautiful night. Roads are clear.” He looked sad, and added with a false laugh: “Nothing better to do on a Sunday morning.”

Jamie hesitated. He recognised that a gesture was being made; an attempt at healing a rift whose existence had never been declared but was, somehow, gaping there.

“You’ll be alright as you are,” Melvyn went on, and in this encouragement Jamie spied a desperation that made the offer impossible to refuse.

“I’ll just change me shirt,” he said, remembering earlier, on the sofa, with Shola.

He came back down three minutes later, pausing only to listen for his mother. There was no sound from her; no rescue. And Melvyn was waiting by the front door. Two helmets swung from his left hand and he had a waterproof bag slung over his shoulder.

“Come on he said,” freeing the latch. “Let’s go.”

Boy Wonders: Chapter 21

Jamie was more alive to the suburban emptiness of the still-hot night than he had been when arriving on Melvyn’s tail. It was like he and Lisa were walking on the moon. He followed her to her car, expectantly.

“He’ll go to bed while you’re out here,” she whispered.

Jamie doubted it. Melvyn hadn’t looked too sleepy. For once he’d seemed like man craving company and Jamie was pondering how best to avoid providing it. He wished Lisa wouldn’t leave.

“Got something to tell you,” she said, opening the boot. Jamie had felt this coming since they’d spoken by mobile earlier. He loaded her bag in for her.

“Jump in for a minute,” she told him, nodding at the passenger door. Jamie did as he was bidden. The internal light completed its automatic fade and Lisa said, “Nan told me a few things.”

“Yeah?” This set Jamie processing the few things he’d been told since leaving Shola’s: .

“Are you listening, Jamie? I’m so knackered.”

“Yeah. I am!” Jamie was chastened by his moment’s inattention. He depended on his sister and hadn’t thought about how pregnant women tire. “Sorry,” he added and tried to look fit for confiding in. He saw that adulthood was beckoning.

“I asked her about Nottingham,” Lisa said. “Like, why was Sean registered as born there? And she said, it was that Melvyn hadn’t really wanted Sean in the beginning. She said that after I was born, he’d gone into depression.”

She grinned at Jamie, mock-bitterly. “That’s nice ain’t it? Anyway, it happens to some men.” She rolled her eyes up, and Jamie wondered if she was thinking about Garry. She went on: “So, anyway, they split up. She stayed with her auntie and uncle, in Nottingham. And that’s where she had Sean. Dad stayed down here, with Nan.”

Jamie pondered this then asked, “Why did she come back?”

“Because of me, according to Nan. I wanted my daddy. Sweet, eh? And because Dad felt bad and asked her. Nan thinks that why he spoiled Sean – cos he felt guilty about not wanting him. Course, I asked the obvious question.”

Jamie couldn’t figure what that was.

“Whether Dad was really Sean’s father.”

“Oh,” said Jamie, genuinely stunned. Such a thing had never occurred to him.

“Nan was a bit shocked by that question,” Lisa revealed, cheerfully. “But she said, no, Melvyn had never said anything like that to her. Though I suppose,” Lisa concluded, “that doesn’t mean Mum wasn’t, you know, getting it elsewhere.”

“Shut up!” said Jamie, meekly, with a weak laugh.

Lisa leered at him, fondly: “It’s a thought, though, baby brother.” She paused, to savour Jamie’s confusion. Then she added, more respectfully: “That’s sort of what the row was about, Nan says.”

“What, on the night?” asked Jamie, thinking of Tony and of Donna again, and the nmeless driver of open-topped sports car she'd been in who had driven on.

“I always thought,” said Lisa, it was row Sean had had with Mum, about going out or using the bike when he was too young, and Dad sticking up for him. You know, how he always did?”

Jamie nodded.

“Well, Nan says Sean wasn’t involved – not really. It was a row about him, but he wasn’t in it. It was only Mum and Dad upstairs, and Mum shouting, ‘You never wanted him in the first place,’ or something. And Nan was downstairs, at the old house, with Sean and she could hear them and she thinks Sean might have heard too, and that’s why he went out in a mood.”

Lisa left it there, and looked out of the windscreen. Jamie said, “And Nan told you all this tonight?”

“Yeah. Never told anyone before, she said. I think she’s had enough of everyone kind of letting it fester, and Dad with his conspiracy theories. She thinks maybe Mum and Dad have been thinking the same thing, but no one ever really wants to talk about it.” Lisa now looked at Jamie and said, “She cried a lot, Nan did. I think she’ll feel better for it though. Course, it could all be rubbish.”

Fuckin’ hell, thought Jamie. And now you’re going home!

Lisa said, “Makes you wonder why they had you, don’t it, Jamie?”

“No,” said Jamie, defensively.

“Well,” said Lisa. “Either you was an accident or they really, really wanted you. Maybe you should ask them,” she grinned.

“Yeah, right,” said Jamie, softly.

Boy Wonders: Chapter 20

The trio reconvened in the family front room: the father, his pregnant daughter and his remaining son. These last two contrived a display of fascination for the large tank of marine fish in the corner of the room so that Melvyn could put his shirt and trousers back on amid an illusion of privacy. The fish were his hobby, his only one. His motorbike, gleaming and powerful, stood in the garage encased in a tarpaulin like some grim monument to a smashed dream.

“Beautiful, aint they?” he said, quietly. He was announcing that he was fit to be looked at again and even available for conversation, though Jamie could not imagine what about. He knew so much more about Melvyn now than when he’d left everyone standing at the graveyard and adjusting was proving frightening.

Lisa said, “That yellow one’s new innit?”

“Yeah. Got it last week,” Melvyn said. He was seated at the front edge of an armchair, leaning forward, as if to show that he was penitent and keen.

Lisa stopped looking at the fish. She looked instead at Melvyn and said, “So, Dad, where have you been?”

Melvyn took his time answering that one. “Just walking,” he offered, uneasily. Lisa waited, and Jamie could see that the future grandchild within her already enhanced her authority. “I just needed to be on me own,” continued Melvyn.

Lisa waited again. Melvyn gave her a face full of beseeching resignation and when Lisa’s body language rejected it, he offered it to his bare feet instead.

Jamie observed all this still standing next to the tank of fish, the coloured shapes aimlessly floating, the water filter bubbling low: an enclosed world faking reality.

Lisa said to Melvyn: “Dad, you’ve got to give it up sometime.” Again, Melvyn said nothing. “You’ve got to move on, Dad,” said Lisa quietly.

Melvyn looked up at her, mouth pursed, then looked down again.

“Right, I’ve got to go,” Lisa said. “Jamie, give us a hand out with me bag, eh?”

Boy Wonders: Chapter 19

The sight of Melvyn’s saggy boxer shorts revolted Jamie, as did the slight but tragic hang of his belly over their waistband and the flop of his hair across his eyes. Normally, he held it back with gel. Amid the low lights and aged furniture he looked like he’d arrived from some time warped youth culture movie where the styles never aged, only the people wearing them. Still, with all that had happened in the past ten hours or so, Jamie was getting used to the sight of his father’s fragility: the graveyard, the streets of Leyton and now here, close to his mum.

With Lisa, it seemed, the same was truer still.

“What happened to you, then, Dad?” she asked him levelly as he stood there, daft with surprise. Jamie could see him struggling to regroup mentally. His body language gave him away.

“What are you two doing here?” he said eventually and a little too loudly.

“We was talking to Nan,” Lisa said. “Keep your voice down. She’s only just gone off.”

Jamie shrank back into the upholstery. He was grateful for the cover Lisa had given him for being there but he was also alarmed by her bold tone.

“She’s alright, is she?” Melvyn asked.

“She’s alright, yeah. A bit upset.”

It seemed to Jamie as though Lisa deliberately left a space in the conversation so that Melvyn could stumble into it. And he did. “I was just checking on her,” he said, defensively, but his eyes were on the sideboard as he spoke.

“Mum’s asleep too,” said Lisa, unnecessarily.

Melvyn said nothing: Jamie sensed he had pretended not to hear.

“Anyway,” said Lisa, getting up. “I should be going home.”

It was a comment designed to force a general exit. Jamie rose too, but neither brother nor sister made to leave. They waited for Melvyn to go first and when he did so it seemed to signify some shift in the power balance between the three.

Jamie, though, had only the smallest sense of being a beneficiary. Lisa had said she was going. He now faced dealing with Melvyn on his own.

Boy Wonders: Chapter 18

“This is where he hides it,” Lisa whispered. “In here, with Nan. I mean, in that cupboard over there.”

She nodded across the room towards a sideboard that had been at Olive’s old house too. It held infanthood memories for Jamie.

“She probably had that when he was little too,” Lisa remarked, as though reading Jamie’s mind.

She produced a piece of paper from the folder and had half handed it to Jamie when, from her bedroom, Olive cried, “Not like that, Melvyn, that’s not right...”

Lisa raised a hand for Jamie’s silence – not that it was required. So quiet were they both that Olive’s return to steady breathing was clearly audible to them. At last, Lisa released the piece of paper to her brother. It was a letter. “It’s from Tony’s solicitor,” Lisa mouthed.

Jamie looked at it, but although he could read the words they weren’t in a language he could understand. “It’s telling Dad to leave off Tony,” Lisa whispered in his ear. “He’s been hassling him, see. Going an’ seeing him and asking questions about Sean and what happened. And look, here’s one from the police.”

Again Jamie gazed at the text, but divining its meaning was beyond him: it was all too much for his wrung-out mind. “What it is,” Lisa said, “is they’re warning Dad off. He’d been hassling other people too: the man driving the car what Sean collided with. He stopped and tried to help him, you know?”

Yes, Sean knew.

“And there was this other car behind him,” Lisa went on. “He stopped too. He said, and the one what hit him, that there’d been this other car on Sean’s side of the road and it hadn’t stopped. But neither of them could identify that car – not even the colour let alone a make and number. Just that there was three or four people in it, and it had its top down. That was all at the inquest when they decided it was an accident. But Dad got it in his head that this car, well the driver, was to blame, and that’s why it didn’t stop.”

She put her thumb to edge of the sheaf of papers in the folder, bent it back and released it like a flicker book.

“It’s all here: maps and letters and pictures of cars...He’s obsessed. He can’t accept it, that it was all an accident. Sean was trying to overtake on a bridge. Well...” She shrugged. “Stupid thing to do, aint it?”

Jamie nodded: “Stupid, yeah.”

Lisa took the letters back from him, replaced them in the folder. She said: “I better put this back where I found it.”

Jamie wanted to ask her if Olive knew that Lisa had the folder, but he kind of knew the answer anyway. Lisa returned to his side. She thought for a bit then said: “Listen, I’ve got some other stuff to tell you...”

This, though, was going to have to wait. There was an adjoining door between Olive’s sitting room and the main house. It creaked slowly open. Through it came Melvyn, dressed only in his underwear.

Boy Wonders: Chapter 17

Jamie padded after his father, feeling fearful and absurd. He didn’t look back at the BMW until Edwyn had completed a three-point turn and the sound of the car’s engine was receding. He watched its rear lights disappear then hurried on a little more before hanging back as Melvyn approached the house and stopped in the porch to burrow in his pockets for his key. He found it, used it and closed the door behind him. A light went on in the front room.

Jamie had his own key but it was useless to him while Melvyn was still prowling around the house in God only knew what mood. Then he noticed Lisa’s car parked on the road. So she’d stayed. On a whim he tiptoed round to the side of the house, where Olive’s granny flat was attached. It had its own entrance and Jamie hunkered down beside it as he sent Lisa a text.

I am outside nans

Within seconds she was at the door, pulling it half open and saying, “What the fuck are you doing out there?”

“He’s back,” Jamie said.

“I know. I heard him come in. What’s goin’ on?”

“Where’s Nan?”

“Asleep. Did you come back with him?”

“No. He arrived just before me.”

They hissed these exchanges while stepping softly through to Olive’s sitting room. Already they were as one in dreading Melvyn joining them there.

“Sit down,” Lisa said. Jamie did as he was bidden, taking one side of Olive’s dowdy two-berth sofa. His sister dropped slowly on to the other, breaking her descent with one hand, steadying her bump with the other. She wasn’t so far gone but, as Jamie could see, she was tired. “You smell like a whore house, by the way,” she remarked.

Jamie would have blushed at this but Lisa wasn’t looking at him as she spoke. Instead, she was rooting down the side of the sofa. She came up with a blue cardboard envelope file. “See this?” she said, turning to her little brother now. “This is his famous dossier.”

Jamie looked blank.

“Remember?” said Lisa, impatiently. “I told you about it in the car earlier, when we was outside Micky’s. It’s all about Sean and what happened.”

“Oh, right,” Jamie said, just about remembering.

Lisa flapped the file under his nose. Her voice dropped even lower. “I’m telling you, our dad's a fucking nutter.”

She opened up the file and reached inside.

Boy Wonders: Chapter 16

The streets were quieter now, though not so quiet as Edwyn was until he’d negotiated the Whipps Cross roundabout and, in the process, made a symbolic exit from urban terrain. As if in celebration he remarked, “It’s a beautiful night.”

Jamie was huddled behind him, feeling sticky almost everywhere. The time was ticking up to three a.m. Would anybody be awake when he got home? If they were, what would he say to them?

“I said, ‘It’s a beautiful night,’” Edwyn repeated, more loudly.

“Oh. Yeah,” Jamie replied.

“Beautiful night for driving in a beautiful car.”

“Hah, huh,” Jamie managed, uncertainly. Car conversations were not his forte. He gazed at trees crowding the roadsides where moments ago houses and shops had been. He thought of dead bodies and wolves. He allowed Donna into his head only in flashes, inspecting one impression, one revelation at a time, as and when he could stand to contemplate them.

Edwyn crossed a surprising cattle grid and went straight on at the north circular junction. He made no further attempt to strike up a conversation and Jamie felt that he had failed. He was being given a lift and to have mustered a few pleasantries would have signified his gratitude. At the same time, though, a corner of his mind was certain that Edwyn would shortly murder him.

“Where to here?” Edwyn inquired as they arrived at South Woodford’s main drag, a short promenade of shops beside a pond.

“Uh, turn right,” Jamie said. He was almost guessing, and it galled him to recognise that he knew so little of his own neighbourhood; that he was indeed still a child who relied on others to guide him. He scanned the approaching residential junction in an agony of nerves about which one led to the road he lived in. And that was when he spotted Melvyn, walking slowly thirty yards ahead.

“Can you let me out here, please?” he asked.

“Uh-huh,” replied Edwyn, mildly. He caressed the BMW to the kerb.

“Thanks,” said Jamie, already half out of the door and stooping low.

Boy Wonders: Chapter 15

All through Donna’s story, Jamie sat passively: it was partly through his fear, partly due to his situation’s utter unreality. He was trying to show that he was a good boy.

“So what do you do?” Donna asked, after a while.

“Oh,” Jamie began. Jarringly, he was no longer the trusted listener to a dark tale with which he felt an abstract connection. Now he had to respond to a conversational banality: a greater challenge by far. “Not much,” he said.

“Are you still at school?”

“Well, I might go back. Depends on my exams.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I might do hairdressing.” He held his breath.

“That’s nice,” Donna said.

“I’m learning. In the West End.”

“Not much like your brother then,” said Donna.

“No,” Jamie agreed, while automatically wondering, for all his dislike of Sean, whether being so different from him was a good thing.

Donna waited for him to speak again. He failed. She half rose, straightened her skirt once more, sat back down and said, “Don’t you want to know how I know Tony, then?”

“Yeah,” Jamie replied, but gave the word the intonation of a question. Did he want to know? He supposed he must; and Donna seemed to want to tell him.

“Let’s go up, shall we?” she said. Donna led the way off the barge and back on to the towpath. There was moonlight and stillness and the grumble of cars on the bridge. The water lay off to their left, indifferent and yet, in Jamie’s head, somehow laying in wait.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Donna said. “Him at the side of the road, dead. The others didn’t mention it much, not even my friend. But I went back to the snooker hall a few weeks after. I found Tony and we talked.”

As Donna spoke, Jamie watched the toes of his trainers. She described three or four meetings: confession sessions. How Tony had wished he’d got hold of Sean and stopped him from chasing the hard man who had humiliated him. How Donna had wished she’d been able to stop, as had the man driving the car that had hit Sean and the one who had been coming up behind but too far back to identify the car she was in. She’d thought of going to the police, but been too scared. And what would there have been to tell?

“I didn’t know the blokes we were with that night,” she said. “Not, like, properly. I didn’t know where they lived. And they never told us their real names: Napper, was what the driver called himself. They were criminals. We never went to their houses, just hotels. I stayed away from them after that night. And my friend, she’s moved away. I haven’t heard from her for quite a while now.”

They’d wandered back up to the pub car park. Jamie saw Caroline, leaning against the side of the BMW, next to the open driver’s door. Edwyn’s head was silhouetted by the internal light.

Donna said, “The thing is, you see, I do think it was an accident. No one else to blame. Like what they said at the inquest, right?”

“Right,” Jamie confirmed, though he didn’t actually know for definite. Had his mother told him that? In fact, he couldn’t remember what she’d told him.

Donna looked at him, arms folded. “You know why I’m telling you this, don’t you?”

Jamie said nothing. He hadn’t really thought about it, no.

“It’s cos I think someone in your family should know what actually happened. I know about your dad and..."

“What about him?” Jamie hadn’t forgotten that Melvyn was out roaming. And he remembered something else: that conversation with Lisa at lunchtime about Sean being born in Nottingham.

“About him hassling Tony,” Donna said. “Didn’t he say?”

“Oh yeah, yeah.” Jamie said, vaguely. Tony’d made that comment about Melvyn in the street earlier – about him doing his head in.

Donna surveyed Jamie more closely, as if checking he was awake. “I don’t want your dad hassling me,” she said.

“No no, I won’t tell him,” said Jamie, nervous again. Donna meant business.

“He’ll have a hard job finding me,” she said. “I mean, I might not even really be called Donna, might I?”

“No,” said Jamie, obediently.

Donna – or whoever she was – relaxed a little. “Edwyn’ll take you home,’ she said, more gently. “South Woodford aint it?”

“Yeah,” said Jamie.

“Go on then.” She nodded towards the car. Jamie walked towards it and Caroline opened the rear passenger door for him.

“Goodnight,” she said, as Edwyn set the engine purring.

“Goodnight,” said Jamie, as it began to sink in that Donna knew where he lived.