The Fowler Family Business. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ at the cherry – never knowingly says no.’

      ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Henry, meaning ‘no’.

      ‘Your choice.’

      And here Stanley did one of his party tricks. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and turned a standing somersault. A man, obediently pushing his bicycle from the end of the pedestrians-only rusty old girder bridge gaped in astonishment then scooted with one foot on a pedal before mounting the black Hercules with calliper brakes. He has never been traced.

      Henry Fowler, the only living person to have seen him, described him as ‘quite old, wearing an old man’s cap, sort of unhealthy looking, and he had this kitbag thing which was all mixed up with his cape – he had a cape like a tarpaulin and it was all bunched and sticking out funny because of the kitbag; he had cycle clips, and very big feet’.

      Unhealthy, how? A sort of creamy yellow complexion. Waxy, you might say, very like some laid-out corpses. Henry Fowler, who often helped out around the family business which he would enter when he left school next summer, was well acquainted with such.

      Stanley clapped his hands in self-applause, grinned madly, made Charles Atlas gestures and saluted the horizontal cape which was now astride its saddle and peddling unsteadily in the direction of the allotments. He marched from the pavement on to the rusty old girder bridge with Henry (as usual) trailing behind him. The bridge was just wide enough for three persons to walk side by side without brushing its sides, which were sheer metal sheets – those of average height had to jump to get a sight of the distant track below, a sight which would thus be retinally fixed. The bridge was lavishly riveted, the rivet heads stood proud of the metal like dugs. Each side was topped by a horizontal parapet, eight inches wide, also sewn with rivets. The flaked paint was a history of the Southern Railway’s and the Southern Region’s liveries – dun, cow brown, algae green, cream, battleship. There were crisp islets of rust, ginger Sporades which shed flakes among the puddles on the threadbare macadam of the walkway.

      This is where flowers would be left for Stanley, for years to come, left to die.

      The Croney family never forgot their Stanley who, larky as ever, climbed on to the parapet and walked like a tightrope artist until his smooth heel slipped on a rounded rivet head, until he stubbed his foot against an uneven joint, until he overcompensated when the friable rusty surface had him stumble, until he dropped those fifty-five or seventy or hundred feet to the cinders beside the shiny tracks below.

      ‘You ought,’ Stanley is now speaking his penultimate words, to the top of Henry’s head which is at the same level as his feet, ‘you really ought to come. You don’t want to worry about your wols. Everyone gets them.’ Henry’s acne, miniature crimson aureola with milk-white nipples, were his shameful secret. They were for the whole world to snigger at when his back was turned but they were, nonetheless, still a secret because they had never been mentioned – not by parents, not by brusque Dr Oxgang, not by bullies. Their existence was confined to the bathroom mirror. Now Stanley had lifted them from that plane. He had ruptured the compact between Henry and his reflection. Henry was overwhelmed by hurt.

      ‘Just squeeze them. That’s what I did,’ counselled Stanley, picking his way among the rivets.

      Henry’s cutaneous ignominy turned to destabilising anger, to a rage as red as those aureola (let’s count them: how long have you got? No, let’s not bother), to a churning indignation. By what right? The words ‘wols’ and ‘squeeze’ echoed in his head. Friendship was suspended, blotted out. He felt a momentary resistance to his hand, he walked on, not noticing the depth of the puddles, aware of a bronze streak across the perimeter of his sinistral vision like a light flaw, deaf to the mortal howl because of the thudding clamour in his head. At the end of that moment he became aware of the absence of Stanley’s feet a few inches above him. He had gone from A (the bridge’s mid-point) to, say, D (the worn metal steps at its end) and arriving there had realised that he had no memory of B and C.

      That’s when he ran, with his coat inflated by the wind. He ran to the parade of single-storey shops. He noticed how the pediment above the middle shop had lost some of its dirty white tiles, how it was an incomplete puzzle. That shop was a florist’s. There was a queue of macs and handbags which turned in unison to gesturing Henry. He stepped out as soon as he had stepped in, his nostrils gorged by funeral perfumes.

      The next shop was all dead men’s clothes and their repulsive cracked shoes – you can never get the sweat out of leather, that’s undertaker lore, family wisdom. Closed, anyway, gone early for lunch, said a note taped to the door’s condensing glass. Which is why he hustled past two new hairdos with jowly flicks coming out the door of Giovanni of Mayfair and slithered down the chequered corridor flanked by the stunted cones on the heads of women who would be visitors from the Planet Kwuf. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy,’ he panted: Henry knew Jimmy Scirea because Jimmy advised the family business on dead hair and how to dress it.

      Henry was all agitated. Jimmy had never seen him even mildly agitated, had always considered him a calm boy, so this was unusual. Even so Henry controlled himself enough to act with what his father counselled, with all due decorum: no ears were sheared by the sharpened scissors of the high-haired apprentices who augmented the numbers every Saturday.

      They were not privy to Henry’s brief conversation with Jimmy, and Carolle the receptionist was used to Jimmy mouthing ‘Say goodbye’ and making a gesture with a flat hand across his throat when he needed the phone. There was no panic. She told her new love Salvador that she had to go and handed the apparatus to Jimmy and to the pimply boy whom she had thought at first must be the son of one of the ladies under the driers. She couldn’t help but hear the name of Stanley Croney, the beautiful boy, the cynosure of every hairdresser’s receptionist’s eyes.

      Henry’s face was puffy, sweaty, tearful. There was a film of salty moisture all over its manifold eruptions, there were greasy rivulets between them like the beginnings of brooks just sprung from the earth. He rapped impatiently on the phone’s ivory-coloured handset and glared at it as though it might be faulty. He took against a fancifully framed, pertly coloured photograph of a hairdo like a chrysanthemum. He spoke, at last, in urgent bursts as though his breathing was asthmatically impaired. There was a flawed bellows in his chest.

      He declined the receptionist’s offer of water. He detailed the circumstances with cursory precision. He listened intently, told the ambulance how to get to the bridge. He was calmer when he made his next call, to the police. He used the words ‘larking about, having a bit of a laugh’. He rather impertinently added: ‘Remember the traffic lights are out by the station there.’ He put down the phone, sighed, wiped his face with a paisley handkerchief, thanked the receptionist for the use of the phone and thanked Jimmy Scirea who was putting on an overcoat. Henry seemed surprised that the hairdresser should follow him from the salon. The hairdreser was in turn surprised that Henry, instead of hurrying back to the site of the accident, should amble across the road to Peattie’s bakery to buy a bag of greasy doughnuts which he began to eat with absorption as he made his way back to the bridge. He covered his face with sugar. He inspected the dense white paste. He thrust his tongue into the jammy centre. He ate as if for solace or distraction just as a smoker might draw extra keenly on a cigarette. When they reached the bridge Jimmy Scirea hauled himself on to the top of the side to look down at the body below. Then he tried to loosen a cracked fence pale to gain access to the embankment. Henry shook his head and said, with his mouth full, extruding dough, ‘Don’ rye it. Don’ bother. Bleave it to them. Too steep.’ He stuck a hand in his mouth to release his tongue from his palate. ‘Ooph – bit like having glue in your mouth but they’re very tasty. Think I’ll get some more later. Yeah definitely.’

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