I was sunbathing in a deckchair outside my boy and his partner’s house. They don’t have a back garden, but they have a six-feet square unfenced plot of grass and mud between their front door, the wheelie bins and the road, and that’s where they stand and smoke and occasionally sit and socialise. That side of the house is a remarkable suntrap. Unfortunately the grass plot is overlooked on three sides by blocks of the tiniest, shoddiest council flats imaginable, the kind of flats the council reserves for desperate cases. Until I got used to the idea, it felt a bit public, like sunbathing on a roundabout.
But it was too lovely out to be stuck indoors. My boy’s partner had spread an old curtain over the mud and grass, and she and the baby were sitting on that. I’d taken the only chair — an aluminium-framed deckchair I’d given her for Christmas. Then she’d decided to get the paddling pool out and fill it with buckets of water from the hot tap in the bathroom. She had a hysterectomy two weeks ago — five kids by the age of 25 was enough — and she isn’t supposed to lift or carry. But she hates a fuss and came staggering out of the house with two buckets of warm water. Then she sat the baby naked in it, lay down on her belly on the old curtain, rolled herself another fag, and we three sat there at peace with the world as if we were on Brighton beach for the afternoon.
But soon our peace was interrupted by the arrival of a neighbour, her two young boys, and her mother. Under her loose and revealing smock, the neighbour was all bone, sinew and fading tattoo. The obese mother needed a new pair of trainers, an afternoon at the hairdresser and six months at the dentist. The two lads, aged about eight and nine, seemed similarly mute and emotionally numb.
Uninvited, the neighbour and her mother plumped themselves down on the curtain, ritually threw down the pouch of smuggled tobacco, and got rolling with yellow fingers. The two women seemed wary of me, uncertain of whether they had the right to speak to me, or whether I was capable of speech, and they scrupulously directed their chat towards my boy’s partner. Occasionally they’d yell at one or other of the boys, threatening to ‘tan’ their ‘arse’ for some unbelievably trivial offence, such as retrieving a squashed football from under a car, or looking over a fence. ‘Car! Car!’ they yelled at the boys as a car came around the corner.
To my surprise and embarrassment, one of the boys came over to my chair, pushed his way between my legs and laid on me, a gesture of mental exhaustion or desperation rather than affection. ‘Get off him! Get off him, you weirdo!’ yelled his mother. They didn’t get to see many men, she shyly explained, and they sometimes overreact when they do see one. The lad clung on tenaciously, and I had to shove him off with as much loving kindness as possible.
‘Car! Car!’ yelled her mother again at the other boy, who was in no danger at all from a slowly approaching Citroën Berlingo. It stopped at the kerb beside us, then rocked violently sideways, once, as the driver got out. If it was a man her boys were looking for, here now was a vastly more masculine-looking one. There was far more of him for a start. White shirt, black trousers, snakeskin belt and built like the proverbial. Well over six-feet tall, I’d say; the top half over a yard wide. Shaved head, not much neck. Assuming I lived there, he formally extended a shovel-like hand and gave a name that I recognised as my boy’s partner’s name. ‘That’s me,’ she said. The visitor said his name was Keith and he was a bailiff.
The neighbour and her mother looked up at him slack-jawed with admiration. Not so my boy’s partner for whom dealing with door-to-door debt collectors of every size, gender and level of commitment is second nature. ‘Oh, yes?’ she said. He said he’d come to recover unpaid council tax dating back to 2004. ‘You’ll be lucky, Keith,’ she said, utterly unembarrassed. ‘How much?’
Keith was unembarrassed also. Keith didn’t do fear or embarrassment, you could tell that straight away. They were a good match. He consulted his piece of paper. Keith did surprise, though. ‘Two hundred and four pounds,’ he said, doing a comedy version of scratching his head. ‘They don’t usually send me this far for a couple of hundred quid. And what’s your name?’ he said kindly to the small boy who was grimly cuddling one of his legs as though he were hanging on to the trunk of an oak tree. ‘Get off him, you bloody weirdo!’ chorused the neighbour and her mother.
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