Saddam
Who would ever have guessed it – hallowed ground as a hotspot for meeting girls? It was rare enough to see anybody on those church visits; the occasional grieving widow perhaps, loitering at the grave of a loved one; a few people now and then using the path through the cemetery as a cut-through. But a lone young woman up for being propositioned? Never in a million years.
Certainly nothing could have been further from Daniel’s mind that Christmas afternoon. Women hadn’t really been on the agenda for some days. True, he’d been keeping his eyes peeled down at his local, but more out of habit than necessity. The Millwrights has been known to land the odd catch, but always small-fry, never anything classy like Gulnaz. And one always has to be so careful where to trawl. Fishing in the wrong waters is a sure-fire way to land yourself a bottle in the neck.
That much at least was unlikely in a churchyard.
In any case, working at Greenalls guaranteed enough rich pickings to ensure he need never rely on either the Millwrights or Old St. Bart’s for a date. The great thing about Greenalls is the way the eligible ones stand out a mile. Obviously those with boyfriends are a nonstarter; two girls together holds out more hope, but the way they choose plants is critical. If they’re not particularly fussed about each other’s choices then the chances are they’re just friends out together. If they keep close to each other and wrangle over every specimen then Daniel knows he’s likely to be looking at eligible flatmates – less chance of them being attached. As for women on their own, much can be learned from the plants they’re checking out. The girl choosing fruit trees is likely to live in a big house with a loaded husband, the one buying cheap indoor plants probably has no garden and only a pokey little apartment like his. Cacti are a particularly good sign; women love them, men hate them. Rival phallic symbols, apparently.
From there it all comes down to judging faces, searching for that expression of uncertainty, that niggling doubt about a plant’s fitness for purpose, that need for professional endorsement. On spotting a distressed damsel wavering, say, between a palm and a fern, Daniel might roll up his sleeves, grab something heavy (such as the nearest pot or grow-bag), and chance by with a smile and a helpful, ‘Alright there? If you need any advice, just ask.’ On a warm afternoon he might even go so far as to pass through a water-spray en route, just to help the sweatshirt cling a little closer. Shameless. But women do like their men a little rough around the edges. Catherine had her Heathcliff, Lady Chatterley her Mellors. And the garden centre has certainly won him a healthy physique and a strong tan. No three-times-a-week enslavement to the gymnasium for Daniel. In the past year or two the natural blonde highlights from the sun have also helped disguise the insidious advance of grey.
If the initial contact elicits a response then he can proceed to stage two: ‘The Confidential Confession’. By offering advice he’s violating a company policy, and he really wouldn’t have stopped to talk had the customer not been so plainly in need of help. However (between the two of them), if she needs any more gardening tips or manual labouring he does do private work as well and has a card right here in his pocket. In fact, he’s free the next day if she wishes him to help with choosing the right location, planting out or feeding. Daniel prides himself in never telling lies. But truth doesn’t necessarily have to mean the whole truth. It truthfully is against company rules for unqualified staff to give horticultural advice to the public, for the simple reason that trained staff are on hand over at the customer services desk. And Daniel does do private work, indeed really could come over the next day, albeit at the expense of a day’s wages and a bollocking from the head of HR. As for soliciting customers for outside work being a no-no: absolutely the case. A dismissible offence. Mum’s definitely the word – his special offer to a special customer.
Stage three he calls ‘The Sensitive Man’. On a first date, go for the snog and the fondle, but pull back as though he is the one being pressured to go further. Never sex on a first date. But his greatest pleasure would be to invite her over the next day for a meal. This is the one high-risk moment. He can spring-clean all day, fill the rooms with the most stunning plants, courtesy of Greenalls, lay on the finest wines and serve a gourmet dinner, and still that flat of his will look and smell like shit. But he’s Heathcliff, remember. The labouring man. So it’s on with the fresh bedding, a shower, a smart shirt casually buttoned, the lagers stashed away in the cupboard and the Chardonnays racked up in the fridge. And finally – a winner every time, sure-fire fast track to the bedroom – Daniel’s own creation: chicken casserole with root vegetables in a mushroom and white wine sauce…
…Which he watches now splattering forkful by forkful into the kitchen bin.
All the time and money he’d wasted for this moment, the deliberation in the shops, the painstaking preparation of food, the meticulous effort of transforming his flat and sprucing himself up. True, when he’d dropped her off at the old people’s home it had been a somewhat cool goodbye Gulnaz had given him. But when he went again to pick her up she seemed altogether happier. His lines were well rehearsed by then: how tired and hungry she looked, how much he wanted to express his gratitude for her support at the hospital, and how dinner tonight was on him. Yes, she made all the excuses about early starts, having some leftovers in the fridge that needed finishing, not wanting to be any trouble, but none of that had fazed him in the least. He’d been expecting it, and was ready with the slightly hurt look and the admission that the surprise treat was one he’d lovingly prepared himself.
But it still didn’t cut the mustard. “I’m sorry Daniel, I really must go home,” she’d insisted.
“Okay, I guess it’ll keep twenty-four hours,” a slight note of panic rising in his voice. “Tomorrow, then.”
“No. I think we should leave it.”
“Then how about…”
“Please just take me home. It’s complicated.”
But it wasn’t complicated at all. It was very straightforward. So straightforward in fact that Daniel could summarise it in three simple words.
Fucking Doctor Prentice.
Having dropped her, again on the street corner at her insistence, he’d driven around aimlessly for a while before crawling home to confront his Air-Freshened, Toilet-Ducked, Ajaxed charade of an apartment. Every nook and cranny mocked his presumptuousness: the flowers on the window ledge in the loo, the CDs laid out in playlist order, the tastefully chosen lighting. And there, at the heart of his audacity, the casserole, waiting by the stove for its final mouth-watering blast, the potatoes peeled and salted in the pan, the kitchen table laid. To have sat down now to all this alone would have been to court his own inadequacy, to eat humble pie, to swallow his pride. ‘Stuff it,’ he proclaims into the mouth of the waste bin as the last of the sauce slithers down inside the lining. Food greedily accepted, the mouth slams shut with a cymbal crash – Daniel’s cue to leg it to the Millwrights for an absolute hammering.
The Millwrights’ magic formula? Cheap, reliable beer and no-nonsense food. It’s what has kept Daniel’s local from going the way of so many pubs. If they ever did close down the Millwrights then God knows how he would cope. It’s the ideal downhill stroll there and meandering uphill stagger back. The throb of chatter and music, even the blast of stale smoke and armpits that rushes to embrace him at the doorway, makes blessed relief from the flat he’s just evacuated. Bar duty tonight is in the hands of Gorgeous Gail. He’s pleased. The two of them had a brief fling a few months ago and somehow they’ve managed to stay friends. At this moment he could do with a friend, someone he can trust, who won’t lift him up only to drop him from a great height, even if he can’t exactly confide in Gail about another woman.
The usual crowd are busy in the games room; Jerry, his boss from the garden centre, Threadbare and Bladder from the pool team. These guys could be suffered for a laugh and a bit of lounge bar philosophy but God forbid, not for anything personal. Daniel cases the haze-filled room and makes a pledge to keep recent events strictly
to himself. But it only takes the odd, ‘Good Christmas then, Daniel?’ and a couple of double scotches to drive a coach and horses through that resolve. Before he knows it, he’s propped against the bar, relating his woes like some Film Noir antihero. Somehow, in telling his story – a story that should have every jaw in the pub hitting the carpet – he manages to cheapen the whole affair into a hybrid of schlock horror and soppy melodrama. Far from drawing a crowd of spellbound spectators, he succeeds only in pulling in the regular losers, backslappers and huggers who are already into their own stories half way through commiserating with his. Daniel finally drifts away into his usual corner with a large whisky, a beer and an assortment of crisps. A jukebox to his left is busy pumping out the latest number one. The sound mixes drunkenly with that of two self-absorbed fruit machines placed opposite, and all of this plays as background to a widescreen TV on the wall in front of him, whose silent images dance a surreal dance to the incongruous and discordant music. As he watches, footage of the capture of Saddam comes on screen. The song lyric asks, ‘What if I told you it was all meant to be?’ Along the foot of the screen runs the headline confirming the verdict to uphold his execution. ‘I wanna know that you will catch me when I fall,’ sings the disembodied voice. No-one’s going to catch you, mate, Daniel mutters. They probably won’t even cut you down, just leave you swinging till you rot.
Again and again they repeat the fuzzy clip of that once untouchable dictator being hauled from his hideaway pit. The moving writing says he’d survived on Mars Bars. No wonder he’d lost his teeth, if that wasn’t the handiwork of some off-camera Marine. The haggard face distorts further through the base of Daniel’s glass as the last of the pint slips down. Like ripples on a lake. Like the guy at the cemetery. Jesus, that’s how he’d looked last night as he lay there in the half light. The cheeks, the rings around the eyes, the furrowed skin, unshaven. It was true what he’d told Gulnaz: unthinkable for that man to have been Alex. How could an armour-plated, coiled spring of a nine-year-old who did everything at a hundred miles an hour ever turn into such a vile bag of bones? The TV answers back at him. Perhaps by spending years in hiding, surviving on Mars Bars.
Four days to go before the execution. “Oh, I can't believe it’s happening to me,” bewails the singer. His father would have had a thing or two to say about that: ‘Should have taken the bastard out when we had the chance back in ’91.’ The twins’ opinion on the subject would have followed the next day at some hastily convened schoolyard rally, a trifle corrupted in the telling: “That dick traitor, ‘Sodom The Same’, our dad (who runs the Navy) says we should have asked him out, soon as we got the chance!”
And he could imagine his mother sitting sewing, her measured response ready for when their father was beyond earshot, ‘No good ever came out of vengeance, boys. It just leads to more violence.’
And he ponders what Gulnaz’s attitude would be. Her face swims before his eyes. Probably the same as his mother’s. She was too saintly to want to see anyone harmed, this nurse whose calling was to save lives – good lives and bad lives. What an angel. Big innocent eyes. Ah, but she had done harm. Done harm to him. Made him think she would like to be wined and dined and have some fun. Why did she come onto him like that only to brush him aside? What about feelings, commitment? That’s harm done, alright.
He needs another beer. With a chaser. He staggers as he stands and knocks into the table. Goolnazz’s… Gullnazz’s… Gulnaz’s fault that he’s doing this to himself. She’ll be sorry when they find him in a gutter somewhere. Let guilt blind those big innocent eyes. She can bloody well look after Alex. And keep her tosser doctor friend.
The barmaid initially refuses him more drink, but he shows her he’s on foot, turns out his pockets to prove no car keys. “And for Pete’s sake Gail, it’s Christmas!” he pleads. Suddenly he wants to run his hands all over her breasts. Again.
Saddam in battle gear now. A meeting of his war cabinet. Slow motion – all his fucking family round a table. A brute like that, would Gulnaz really shed a tear for him? And she being, what? Arabian, Irabian, no, Iranian she’d said. Her lot were against the Iraqis, he’s pretty sure of it. Now the TV is showing village streets piled high with dead people. A woman, face down on her doorstep clutching her baby, bodies in rows on their backs. Unseeing, half-closed eyes. They look so like those poor sods laid out in the hospital. Those wards were bloody morgues too. The screen is too blurred to read. Halbaji or something. Kurds. Hadn’t she said her father was one of them? Lebanon Kurds. Lemon Curds. He giggles then frowns. Someone who could gas his own people like that, surely even she would want rid of such a monstrous piece of shit.
Look who’s talking: fellow piss-head, piece of shit George. Daniel George salutes Saddam Hussein, two losers receiving their long overdue comeuppance. Who’d bother with a jerk like Daniel when they’ve the likes of…?
“Alright Daniel? One for the road, mate?”
Jerry has found his way to the bar and is already getting a round in. With him stands a bloke Daniel doesn’t recognise, but to whom he takes an instant dislike. A big bruiser with a soft blubbery face – like a baby crossed with a Sumo wrestler. Ugly fucker. The way the guy stares at him is unsettling, as though any minute he’ll either get a fist in his face or a cock in his arse. It seems prudent not to stare back.
“There’s a pool game on, if you want in,” Jerry says.
It never quite made sense to Daniel why he’d been recruited onto the pool team; his ability was middling at best. The invitation came soon after he’d delighted his mates by coining the nicknames Threadbare (a corruption of the name Freddie Bayer, in honour of the guy’s perennial woollen jumper) and Bladder (so-called for his friend Colin’s ability to go seven pints without a slash). For Jerry, a nickname never really felt justified. Daniel accepts the scotch but declines the game, mumbling that he’s off home straight after this. The Millwrights, he’s decided, is too public a place for wound licking. And a walk might do him good.
He’s almost reached the foot of Cooper’s Hill before realising that Sedgefield Court is the other way. But his legs keep right on going nonetheless. Down past the chippy, across the Texaco forecourt, and over a low wall into the road beyond, the units chasing each other around his bloodstream in a frenzied relay race, spurred on by the cold night air. All rational thought is fast ebbing away. Pure adrenaline now. Daniel has a nasty feeling he knows where he’s being led. Heading for trouble and regret. Oh no, no, no. It might take forty, maybe fifty minutes to reach the place where he’d picked her up. There is still time to stop it. Don’t go there. She already thinks him a loser – but to see him like this, and the scene he is surely about to make. Dr Smart-arse, poncey Prenthesis… Princessth… Prentith! can bloody well watch out. A loose cannon right arm sends a waste bin clattering across the pavement. At once the contents tangle themselves around his feet in a feeble rugby tackle; someone shouts from an open window; his shoe skids on a chip: everything at hand fighting to bring him to his senses and avert disaster.
On the road where she’d been standing he counts seven shops, four padlocked, two shuttered and one heavily barred: blatant league tables for the value of the goods within. Handy ram-raiders tip. Somehow he’s made it here without changing his mind, without getting lost and without even falling over. He’s also failed in that time to come up with anything resembling a plan. Where does she live – is it even on this street? But hey, he must follow his heart, okay? He will open his arms and call up to her like Romeo summoning Juliet from the balcony: ‘Juliet, Juliet where f’rart thou. Let down your hair’; confess his feelings for her; tell her what her little smile does to him, compliment her on her shapely bum; sort this out with Doc George Clooney, man-to-superman, right here and now on the street.
Thank God for the police car that appears as he’s about to scream out their names. And thank God for Daniel’s instinct to mingle with the shadows at such moments. Otherwise he might have seen something he really didn’t want to be s
eeing in this state. He might have seen a light coming on in an upstairs window over the jeweller’s, four doors along from where he now cowers. He might have snatched a glimpse of a woman’s silhouette before the curtains come together, a woman he’d have recognised at once. And he might have had to witness the figure of a male, his face hidden but his body visibly undressed to the waist, crossing the room behind her as she stands. As it is, by the time Daniel has emerged into the light once more, the curtains are closed and the room is in darkness. Nothing to draw his attention at all. And with the patrol car safely out of the way, he finally does the sensible thing and begins snaking his way homeward, that plaintive chart song echoing through the street.
“What if I told you it was all meant to be?
“Oh, I can't believe it’s happening to me.
“I wanna know that you will catch me when I fall.”
Getting home is a disjointed memory. After a pee in someone’s garden there’s a blank, after which he wakes to find himself between two dustbins, so numb and stiff with cold that it takes several minutes to crawl free. Re-emerging onto Cooper’s Hill, he finds it all but empty; those still around simply ignore him. Sedgefield Court is also quiet. Only an inebriated Santa Claus waits to accost him from behind the neighbour’s front door, his face beaming malicious goodwill. ‘Ho, ho, Merry Christmas’ flashes the sign, the swollen red nose answering, the eyes lighting up to complete the cycle. Daniel makes a dive for his door. Nobody else sees him enter his apartment. Once inside, the pervading smells of cleaning products, aromatic flowers and half-cooked chicken utterly deck him. He only just makes it to the toilet before being sick.