The Day Tripper, page 20
Bernadette is waffling something about the Job Center and the allowances I can claim.
“Guilty plea,” I mumble.
“Sorry?”
“I pleaded guilty?”
Again, the funny look from her. She double-checks my file. “Absolutely.”
I think back to Mum visiting me in prison. She talked about a trial, how she’d given me the benefit of the doubt when I’d protested my innocence. “Let’s say I had decided to plead not guilty back then,” I ask. “I’d have got a longer sentence, yeah?”
“Assuming the court found you guilty, yes. They’d likely have been a good deal harder on you. There’s no need to rake over it now.”
I wave the point away as if it’s nothing. But that must be it: the first time round, I fought the case. And it seems I got a longer sentence for my efforts, in a much tougher jail.
Bernadette checks I have money for food and that I’m taking care of myself. She runs me through the services I can call on if I’m struggling. “Anything else I can help with before I go, darling?” she asks, breathlessly packing her files away.
“I’m cool,” I tell her, my mind too occupied to pay her much attention. “Actually!” I snap as she reaches the front door. “Are you...driving?”
She nods. “Parked around the corner.”
“I almost forgot to say. I’ve got an interview today. For a job. I mean, it’s probably pointless, but...”
She eyes me with a hint of suspicion. “You’d like a lift.”
“Only if it’s not...”
“Where do you need to be?”
“You know Beekenside Secondary? I know a teacher there. He’s put in a word for me.”
“What’s the job?” she asks.
“Just...maintenance.”
“Excellent. But you can hardly go dressed like that.”
“Give me one minute max,” I reply, dashing into the bedroom.
WITH EVERY HEARTBEAT
Dr. Defrates wears a smile that’s a touch inappropriate given that I’m telling him about the death of the woman I love. He faces across the playground as I regale him with the details of these past few days.
A game of twenty-a-side football takes place on the asphalt around us. “The joys of lunch duty,” Defrates had said when, ten minutes ago, a young chaperone provided by reception brought me to him. We are surrounded on all sides by the dull concrete school building. A chip-fat waft idles by from the canteen extractors. In the corners are those kids disinterested in the game—the small groups and the loners. Kindred spirits: those who’d never give away free time to sport.
“Careful!” Defrates shouts as a ball narrowly misses us and slams into the wire fence behind. “You were saying...?” He resumes his grinning into space, hands back in pockets, spreading his cord trousers wide like poles in a marquee. His posture is as ever: excessively leaned back, bulging tummy exaggerated.
“Do you mind me coming?” I ask him. “Sorry. There’s nobody else I can talk to about any of...this.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m delighted you’ve sought me out.” And he actually sounds delighted, just like last time.
Who the hell is this guy? I might get to the bottom of it, if only I didn’t have a thousand more pressing questions for him.
“Carry on,” he says. “Please.”
I bring him up to date: Holly, the accident, how originally I was in prison for much longer but now I’m free early. “What do you think changed?” I ask him. “Why is my life running differently? Why has it updated?”
“Updated,” Dr. Defrates says. “Very good turn of phrase. Like it!” I’d managed to forget how cryptic this bloke insists on being.
“I don’t know what I did to make the change.”
“Does it matter?” Defrates asks.
“I want to understand. I need to.”
“Up! Up! Up!” he shouts at a heap of kids, before a bundling has the chance to catch on. “I imagine,” he says, attention back with me, “you will have assumed a different attitude to something or other. Taken a new approach.”
“So what of that day when my mum visited me in prison? It’s supposed to happen in a few days’ time. But I’m not there. I lived that day.”
“It has—to use your term—updated.”
“So it’s gone? And what about those days when I woke up in that horrible bedsit? Are they gone too?”
“Nothing’s gone. Modified, perhaps. Adjusted to allow for changes you’ve made. Introduce a cause...”
I nod. “Get an effect.”
“Quite. Have we talked about how nothing is real until it is observed?”
“Yeah.”
“I can stand here and tell you exactly where that football is at any given moment. But if I turn my back, does it mean the ball can’t move somewhere else?”
“I get it.”
“My last sight of the ball is only that—its position when I was observing it. Whilst I’m not looking, it can roll away, explode, turn into a golden eagle. The fact that I was previously observing the ball is relevant only to me—it makes no odds to the ball itself.”
I smile. “This is like the great mystery of agency, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, agency! That slippery little customer!”
“All of time already exists, and yet we have free will. We can change things.”
“You’ve been listening. Jolly good!”
“So why,” I ask him, “do you reckon my prison sentence changed? Updated? Why did I plead not guilty when originally I pleaded guilty? I don’t get it.”
“A shift in attitude, I’d wager.”
“How so?”
“Tell me how you felt. After the accident?”
“What sort of question is that? I felt like I wanted to die. I couldn’t bear it.”
“So you felt...guilty?” His eyes glow with the word.
“Obviously.”
“Like it was all your fault? Like you’d make amends if only you could?” He moistens his smile with the tip of his tongue.
“Exactly that. But times it by a million.”
“Well, it seems to me that a man who felt like that would probably do all he could to atone for his sins. Would you not agree?”
“Sure. But—”
“I’m hypothesizing, of course,” he says. “But let’s say that this time around, in the aftermath of this tragic accident, you are full of remorse, where originally your response had been anger, an insistence on placing blame on other people involved in the collision. And this new attitude of contrition colors your every interaction with the police, the courts, et cetera.”
“Interesting. You think that’s it?”
“It takes a certain maturity, it takes strength, Alex, to own up to one’s mistakes. To surrender control.”
There’s a shout of “Sir! Sir!” from twenty meters away. A football is rocketing toward us at chest height. Dr. Defrates raises his right leg behind him. At the last instant he turns on his left heel. His stained suede Hush Puppy meets the incoming ball, which leaves his toe in a curling arc. It’s a piece of one-touch play worthy of a pro. At the far end of the playground the goalie is as surprised as I am, the net bulging hard behind him within a half second of the ball leaving Defrates’s foot. An almighty cheer goes up from both teams, scores of kids running past and high-fiving this thoroughly unathletic-looking man.
“I think you will have made a series of better choices,” he says, unmoved.
“Erm, that was quite a goal, mate.”
He nods as if he’s already forgotten about it. “You understand me?” he asks.
I smile at a bunch of nearby kids who laugh as they reenact Defrates’s star turn. “I guess so.” The last time I met this guy, I’d recently learned of Holly’s death. I was racing to clear my name, to have someone to blame. Desperate to be in control. Was it that sort of attitude that landed me a long jail sentence? Can a change in perspective have such profound effects?
“There’s something you need to understand,” he says. “You’re asking me what it is that you’ve done to make this change. What were you expecting the answer to be, I wonder? That you’d done something minutely different? Walked a different way, crossed someone’s path, triggered a change in time’s trajectory from an inconsequential act?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You’ve seen too many movies, young man.” Trademark patronizing grin. “Time doesn’t hinge on the small details. Change is not effected by a misplaced foot here, a flap of a bird’s wing there.”
“I guess.”
“You’re heard of the butterfly effect?”
“Sure. The theory that a tiny movement of a butterfly’s wing in the past can have a massive effect on future events.”
“Precisely. And I believe that theory to be utter cobblers.”
“Okay.”
“Change, Alex, comes about from a commitment to making a difference. To deviating from the path of history.”
“Walking into the headwind.”
“Exactly!”
The playground deflates as the bell sounds for the end of lunch. I nod at Defrates. “Life doesn’t hang on the small stuff.”
“Indeed. And this life you are leading—it has the potential to update further. Make a change for the better, you see the difference. Just as you have with this early release from prison. Make more good changes, you might reap more benefit. Commit to making real difference, those changes may begin to add up.”
“To a life better lived?”
“You can but hope.” He traps an errant football beneath his foot as the kids file past us. “It’s perhaps not as much effort as it sounds.”
“Constantly pushing against the weight of history? It sounds like effort.”
“Good decisions lead to good decisions, just as bad decisions beget more bad decisions. Worth bearing in mind.”
I can only hope he’s right. Because I may have made this one small improvement, but I’ve achieved little else. Still, on the day I experienced immediately after the crash, I was living in my car, skint, boozing, fucked. My shortened prison sentence, my more comfortable flat—they are something. If a change in attitude yields a result—a real, tangible result...
“What the fuck is this all about?”
Defrates gives me the same admonishing look he no doubt reserves for students’ bad language. “It’ll come to make sense, I dare say.” He turns on his heel, begins a slow walk toward the building.
“Will you just tell me everything you know?”
He wears a look of hurt. “I am helping you at every step of the way. I don’t have all the answers.”
“You’ve got a lot of them.”
“And that is why you came to find me today.”
“It was you who came looking for me the first time. Eclipse day ’99—remember?”
“Aren’t you glad I did?”
“Who are you, Dr. Defrates? Who are you, really? Things don’t...add up with you. You know too much about me, about what’s happening.”
He raises a palm. “One thing at a time,” he whispers. “Please.”
My pulse is quickening, but I stop myself being any firmer with him. He’s right: I came here because I need him. Without him, who do I have? I don’t know who this bloke is and what he’s withholding, but I believe every word he has told me.
“Look, I totally appreciate your help,” I say, in sight of the gates now. “But I want my life back.”
“This is your life, Alex,” he replies.
“You know what I mean.”
He sways his head side to side, like it’s me who doesn’t understand.
“I want to go back. To before all this...shit started.”
“You show me any man, Alex, and I’ll show you someone who wants to go back to when they were twenty and falling in love.”
“Okay.” I’m tiring of the discussion.
“Perhaps you’re luckier than you realize,” he tells me.
“Lucky? Yeah, all right. How do you figure that?”
“Oh, we’ll see,” he says, patting me amiably on the back at the gate. “So long, old friend.”
Back on London’s streets, I can’t possibly be far from a pub. I’ve a thirst-on for sure. But it feels like habit today, not a raging need that’s capable of dragging me against my better judgment. And I’ve no hangover to feed; a year inside has at least served to keep me away from the sauce. There’s twenty quid in my wallet, from where I don’t know. But I have no clue where more will come from once that’s gone.
I pick up my pace, almost jogging. I reckon I’m half an hour from my new flat at this pace. I’ll grab my guitar. On a day like this, I might make forty quid, and still make it back indoors for my curfew.
Good decisions, after all, lead to good decisions.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 | AGE 38
Hey Brother
Friday evening, crowds drinking outside bars on the sunny side of the street. The clink and burble, the air easy with blue cigarette smoke and forgotten stresses. My forehead is warm where I’ve caught the sun. I walk with the pleasant exhaustion of someone who’s given themselves fully to their work. My guitar case is heavy with over a hundred quid in coins and fivers.
I can scarcely remember enjoying playing as much as I have today. With a steady audience generous with their hard-earned, I was vibing like the performer I once was. So what that my repertoire includes nothing from the past eighteen years? Fleetwood Mac and the Smiths and Nirvana felt as fresh today as the Thames that glittered alongside me. It was a four-hour stint that kept my mind away from my crime and what is lost, even if playing Buddy Holly was out of the question.
Home, I order myself. Never mind stopping for just the one.
I pick up my pace. People talk about the devil on their shoulder, but my demon lives right in the middle of me. Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile. But I’m showing enough resolve for him to shut up. Not that he’s beaten, merely clever enough to save his energy for when I’m weaker.
Home is the same small flat as yesterday, albeit more cluttered; it’s been five years since my release, and finding myself in the place gives something close to comfort, something like hope. An hour’s walk from here; I wonder if I can be the sort of man who gets in and cooks himself dinner, watches a chat show.
I turn a corner, a street where it’s mostly shops and not hostelries, no longer listening to other people enjoying themselves. Outside a Marks & Spencer, two store detectives wrestle with a shoplifter, pinning him against plate glass. I’m drawing level on the far side of the street when I recognize their prey.
“Jazz! Mate!” I shout, weaving across the road with my amp trolley rattling behind me. “What the hell’s going on?”
The burly man holding him loosens his grip, suddenly giving consideration to what is reasonable force.
“I done fuck all,” Jazz says, trying to prize an arm away from his chest.
The other guard rifles through Jazz’s sports bag, producing a couple of family-sized shepherd’s pies, a fistful of tikka wraps, biscuits, a four-pack of beers.
“I paid, you dick. Go ask, yeah?”
“In a bit of a hurry for someone with nothing to hide,” the guard says.
Jazz kisses his teeth. The duty manager joins us on the pavement and bags up the goods. “Police have been called,” she says.
Jazz glares at me with wide eyes. It’s okay, I mouth. I’m struggling to believe how much he’s changed. His features are recognizable enough: same razor-sharp sideburns framing his round face. A little over a year has passed since the day I ate dinner with him and his poorly granddad, when he was studying for the last of his GCSEs. He’s seventeen now. Sure he’s filled out a little, grown into those gangly limbs, but that’s not why he seems like a different person. It radiates from him: he’s angry, life-hardened. Those eyes that had sparked with energy are a door into the dark now.
“Keep your shit, then,” Jazz says, huffing through his nose. “Just put it all back. I don’t care. Go on, get your dirty hands off me.”
“Don’t work like that, kiddo,” the guard who unpacked his bag says. He moves close behind his colleague.
“How much?” I ask. “For these bits?”
“Don’t get involved,” the guard tells me.
“How much?” I repeat, louder this time.
“You get on with your own evening, sir. If you do want to buy something...” He gestures toward the open doors where shoppers pretend they aren’t watching this unfold.
Jazz stares at me. For a moment, the defiance and the bluster is gone, replaced by the fear that I’ve seen too many times. Panic, almost. No longer resisting the efforts to restrain him, his hand falls to his side. His fingers fumble around his waistband. The guard glances downward, and Jazz freezes.
“If I pay,” I snap, grabbing hold of the guard’s arm, “no crime has been committed. Everyone can go back to their evening. Hardly a police matter, is it?”
I’m ignored, my hand firmly removed. But Jazz has seized the brief distraction, hand slipped behind his belt. Metal glints for an instant. My and his eyes meet. I understand why he’s going for that knife.
I barge between the two guards. “I’m paying!” I shout. “Come on, take my money! What’s wrong with my money?” The restraining I receive is ham-fisted, no more than a few slaps to the arm whilst they focus on not letting Jazz loose in the scrum.
“Sir, please!” one shouts.
I raise a hand. Hold the other low and lean into Jazz. A strip of warm steel is palmed to me. “All right, all right,” I say, stepping clear. “Keep your tits on.” I give Jazz a stealthy nod, knowing he had no intention of attacking when he reached for the knife, just needed it off his person before a search.
Bursts of distant siren fill the London air as they always do, but forty minutes pass before an acceptance settles over these two guards and their manager that the police have better things to do. I try not to look smug when eventually they accept my offer. I take Jazz’s bounty to the checkout, grabbing us a couple of Cornetto ice creams while I’m there.
