immediately, rather than wait until five. This was assertive, but not unduly so. He had arrived at work early that day and in terms of hours he was well in credit. So he left the office and made his way to a hard-ware store that he had walked past on numerous occasions but of which he had never taken much notice. It sold paints and paint brushes, he knew, and it was bound to have what he wanted
– a large paint-roller and two tins of matt-finish white paint.
He bought the supplies, thanked the shopkeeper, and began the journey home. He felt excited and anxious – in the same
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way as a schoolboy would be filled with a mixture of thrill and dread when planning some transgression. This, he thought, is how criminals must feel as they travel to the scene of the crime: hearts racing, mouths dry, every sense at a high pitch. And what he was proposing to do was, for him, almost criminal. He was planning to paint Bertie’s room, unilaterally, without consulta-tion, in complete defiance of Irene’s wishes. It was she who had chosen the existing colour-scheme, opting for pink because of its alleged calming properties and its refutation of the culturally-conditioned assumptions about the preferences of boys. Boys don’t like pink, was the conventional wisdom. Well, we would soon see about that! There was no reason why a sensitive boy, a boy brought up to eschew the straitjacket of narrow gender roles, should not approve of pink.
Stuart knew that Bertie did not like his room – or “space” as Irene called it – to be pink. He had told him as much and had also said that as long as his room remained pink he could not possibly invite any friends to the flat, not that he had any friends, of course.
Stuart had listened sympathetically to his son. “But you must have some friends, Bertie,” he said. “What about that boy, Tofu?
Isn’t he your friend?”
Bertie looked doubtful. “I’m not sure about him,” he said.
“He may be my friend, but I’m not too sure. He keeps asking me for money and food – he’s a vegan, you know. I think that he may like me just because I can give him the things he wants.”
“Some friends are a bit like that to begin with,” said Stuart.
“But then they change after a while and become real friends –
friends who like you quite apart from anything you can do for them.” He paused. “And what about that girl, Olive?”
Bertie shook his head. “She thinks I want her to get lockjaw,”
he said. “And I don’t. I don’t want anyone to get lockjaw, Daddy.
I really don’t.”
Stuart smiled. “Of course you don’t, Bertie!” And then he had thought: but do I want anybody to get lockjaw? – and he had decided that the answer was that he did. There were public figures, and one or two so-called singers, he thought he would 300
like to get lockjaw, which he imagined was the only way, even if somewhat drastic, of getting them to keep quiet. But such thoughts were uncharitable.
Now, climbing up the stairs to the flat in 44 Scotland Street, Stuart looked at his watch. Irene would be out, he thought, as she was taking Bertie to his saxophone lesson and they were both going to an extra yoga session after that. They would not be back until well after seven, which would give him a good two hours in which to paint Bertie’s room. It was not a big room, and paint-rollers covered a lot of wall in a very short time. By the time Irene and Bertie returned, then, they would be faced with a fait accompli.
He let himself into the flat. To verify that the coast was clear, he called out to Irene. There was silence; just the ticking of a clock and the humming, somewhere in the background, of a fridge. Stuart deposited the tins of paint and the paint-roller in Bertie’s room and then went to change out of his office clothes. He knew that Irene did not like him to leave his clothes lying on the floor, and so he tossed his shirt down onto the bedside rug and threw his dirty socks into a corner.
As he did so, he thought of Terry, and of how proud he would have been of him to see this. He was sure that Terry left his clothes on the floor of his flat; mind you, being a relationship-free man, Terry would not have had anybody to object to the practice.
Once changed, Stuart went back to Bertie’s room. He moved around the pink walls, taking down the pictures which Irene had pinned up. A poster proclaiming the merits of Florence, the periodic table, a picture of Mahler. He sighed as he took them down and, on sudden impulse, rather than fold the periodic table away for putting back up once the new paint had dried, he tore it up and tossed it into the wastepaper bin. Then, with the walls bare, he opened the first can of paint, poured it into a tray, and dipped in the paint-roller. Then he set to work.
It did not take long to cover the walls with the easily-applied white paint. Stuart worked feverishly, oblivious to the spots of
paint which were appearing on Bertie’s carpet. From time to time he looked at his watch, and listened for any sound from the hall. But no sound came, and he continued with his work until the entire room had been transformed. No pink was to be seen. It was gone. Now Bertie could bring any friend home and he would never suspect that anything was amiss.
When he had finished, Stuart tucked the empty tins and the painting equipment into a cupboard. Then, having made a not altogether successful attempt to clean the paint off the carpet, he returned to the main bedroom and changed. The paint-spattered clothes he tossed to the floor in a heap. Then he went to the kitchen and poured himself a large whisky.
There was the sound of a key in the front door and voices.
“And remember, Bertie,” said Irene, her voice drifting in from the hall to the kitchen where Stuart sat. “Remember that you’ve got extra Italian this week. That nice story about a little Italian boy who . . .”
There was a sudden silence. Stuart looked into his empty whisky glass. It would have been reassuring to have Terry with him at the moment, he thought.
