Knowing that, she tried to prepare him. He wanted a pet. They’d talked about it.
‘We can’t have anything,’ she’d told him. ‘We haven’t the money for it.’
‘I could get a paper round.’
‘For how much? A few pence? A couple of shillings? We haven’t the room for a dog.’
‘We could have a cat.’
‘There are too many roads around here,’ she’d said, shivering. A cat would never survive.
‘A mouse then. In a cage.’
She didn’t want mice, or rats, or anything else. Animals cost money. You had to feed them, and clean up after them, and he’d lose interest in it and then it’d be something else she got lumbered with. When the holidays were over and he was back at school he’d forget about it.
The bus driver was in a good mood and stopped short of the stop so that she wouldn’t have so far to walk. She thanked him and heaved her bags out into the afternoon air. It was winter, and the air was becoming colourless and frigid. In some houses the Christmas decorations were up. She thought it was too early for that. It was still three weeks until Christmas; too early even to think about it. She wondered what he’d want this year. Everything, probably, and a cat thrown in too.
You couldn’t have everything. Not even her mother had everything. Visiting her now, in her dusty old house with the cobwebs clustered wherever she could no longer reach, that was clear. You couldn’t have everything. Her father had died, worn out looking after her mother, and her mother lived on in a house she could no longer keep clean. The neighbour’s cats popped in for food and a chat. In her mother’s trade – if it was a trade – cats were a given. When she dragged her son to visit his grandmother he’d be half afraid, half annoyed. Her husband would not go at all.
It took her a while to rescue her door key from her coat pocket, weighed down as she was by her shopping. Entering the house she knew at once that something was wrong.
Her son’s voice, for one thing. It was too lively, too animated, and he shouldn’t have been talking at all. There was no one to talk to.
She put the bags on the floor inside the front door, and of course one fell down and unleashed groceries.
Someone answered her son, and the chattering continued.
They were in the front room. Perhaps it was the television. She didn’t think there was anything on, but they’d watch anything. Everyone said so.
She opened the door and looked in. Her son sat on the sofa, with an orange kitten on his lap. It was sparring with his fingers.
‘Where’s that from?’ she asked, going in.
‘I wanted one,’ he said. As though that was an answer. ‘Gran always says if you want something hard enough you can get it.’
‘Gran says a lot of things she doesn’t mean,’ she said unconvincingly. He was young enough not to notice that. The kitten looked at her. She didn’t like the way it looked. It was perhaps too orange. It was perhaps in not quite the right dimensions.
She noticed that there was someone else in the room, a ragged little boy in ragged little clothes. A friend of her son’s, she thought, although you’d have thought his mother might have dressed him properly before letting him out.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ asked her son, and when she turned to look at the new boy there was no one there after all.
She turned back to look at her son.
‘You don’t want to listen to your Gran,’ she said carefully, because this might all be reported back and there were things in that dusty old house of her mother’s that were all the worse for being neglected for years. ‘She doesn’t know everything. You can’t have everything you want.’
He looked doubtful at that.
‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘That isn’t your cat. Now just take it back where you got it from.’
He looked at her. He looked at the strange orange cat. He did something – and she couldn’t even have said what it was – and the kitten vanished, poof, gone.
‘And don’t do it again,’ she said, hoping that he’d take notice. And then she unpacked the groceries and made them a nice stew for tea.
I
Who is Les Herbie?
The question seemed to answer itself. It was the headline at the top of the page of the issue of the Pensnett Chronicle I was reading over the shoulder of the man in the seat in front of me. We were on the 256k bus, Dudley to Birmingham via Christ knows where. The 256k bus has vague timetables and glum drivers.
Les Herbie was a columnist in the Dudley Star, not to be confused with the Express & Star. Les Herbie wrote a sometimes-irreverent and often-rude column. No one knew who he was. No photograph accompanied his column. He didn’t make personal appearances. He didn’t do publicity. He’d picked up a readership of young people, bright people, not the usual Dudley Star share of the demographic. The Chronicle had nothing like him, and so they ran daily articles failing to discredit him.
He was a reporter writing under an assumed name, they’d claim. He was a rich boy slumming it in Dudley. He was the man who wrote the horoscopes expanding his remit.
The man in front of me turned the page. I didn’t want to read any more of his paper; I had one of my own. I was young and bright; I had a copy of the Dudley Star. I turned to Les Herbie’s column.
They took my car away.
Let’s quantify that. Let’s pin it down flat and dissect it.
They took my car away. So now I have to flag taxis or walk. Let’s not talk about buses. Let’s not go near buses. Buses are not an option.
There are some advantages to not having a car. I have time to think, while I’m waiting for the taxi.
They say, they always say, that it’ll be there in five minutes. They’re liars. That’s the only reliable part of the business, the fact that it starts with a lie. After that it’s all fiction. Everything – the route, the fare, the language, the glumness with which they take the tip – is subject to change. Only the time the taxi turns up is not subject to change. It is change. It’s the thing itself.
While I’m waiting I write my column, which is why it’s all about taxis. But not buses. I’m not going near buses.
I do have a car. I’m not dependent on public transport. My car developed a noise, and it’s gone to the garage for a few days. Maybe three, maybe six, maybe August, they couldn’t narrow it down. It’s only what they do for a living. You wouldn’t expect them to know how long it’d take.
While I’m waiting, if I’m not writing my column, I’m thinking about costs. A journey by taxi costs me too much a mile. But I save money on not buying a car, or taxing it, or handing out cash to the constables at speed checks. I don’t have to take the taxi to the garage. I can have that second drink.
That’s not counting the gaps. Time is money. My time has gaps, now. There’s the gap between calling the taxi and the taxi turning up. There’s a space between wanting to go somewhere and setting out.
It’d be worse if I was going by bus. On the bus, you pay less in cash, but they take the remainder out of your soul. Plus you need to buy new clothes, afterwards.
The gaps add up. I write half a column,