Because in those days I could have denounced my mum as a witch and had the very last laugh.
‘I think twelve of the best are in order,’ said my father, struggling one-handedly with his trousers.
And then he beckoned to me with his belt hand and I took a trembly step forward in the hall.
And lo.
I felt a certain something. It was something that I had never felt before. And, as such, it was something that I did not entirely understand at first. My initial thought was that it had snowed in the hall, but that someone had painted the snow. And I’ll tell you for why this was.
It was because, as I took that trembly and tentative step forward into the hall, I felt something soft beneath my feet. Where before, and for ever before, there had been bare floorboards, now there was a certain softness all in green.
‘Carpet,’ I said, in the voice of one exalted. ‘Praise baby Jesus, Mother, a miracle – we have a fitted carpet.’
‘And not just in the hall -’ my mother now raised her voice also ‘- but all through our poor but honest little home.’
‘All through…’ and my voice tailed off. All through? Picture that! At this time in my life I could not. And so I must have fainted. Dead away.
I awoke to find myself supported by my mother’s arms, upon the Persian pouffe beside the fire. I awoke with a start and then with a cough, for thick smoke appeared to fill the room.
‘Don’t trouble yourself about the smoke,’ said my mother, once she had teased me into full consciousness with a Bourbon biscuit dipped in sal volatile. ‘It’s only the offcuts burning in the grate. They haven’t proved themselves to be a particularly good substitute for coal. I think I will discontinue their use as soon as I run out of them.’
‘Offcuts?’ I said. And then, ‘carpet offcuts.’ And then I felt faint all over again. But I didn’t pass out again. Once wasn’t cool. Twice would really be taking the Mickey Mouse hat. And I didn’t want to do that.
I did a little squinting about and, true as true, we did have a carpet, too, right here in the sitting room. Same as the hall. Same green.
‘Billiard table green,’ I said.
‘Billiard table baize offcuts,’ said my mother. ‘The same as the stage clothes you are wearing. In fact, when you fainted in the hall we had a job finding you. You sort of blended into the carpet. As would a chameleon.’
‘Billiard table baize offcuts?’ I did a bit of gauging up and mental arithmetic. ‘I would say,’ I said, ‘that surely this front sitting room of ours would have a floor area roughly equivalent to at least three billiard tables. Surely these are very large offcuts.’
‘That is what the foreman said to your father,’ said my mother. ‘Before he sacked him, this afternoon.’
‘Sacked him?’ I said. ‘Oh dear, not again.’
‘No, he only sacked him the once.’ My mother was a stickler for detail.
My father was not in the room. For had he been, I very much doubt whether this conversation would have taken place.
‘Since you have known my father,’ I said to my mother as she now kindly mopped my fevered brow with a rum-soaked copy of Pirate Today, [7] ‘how many different jobs do you think he has had?’
‘It depends on what you mean by “different”,’ said my mother. ‘Many have been in the same line of business.’
I nodded and I gave the matter thought. ‘With different employers, then,’ I said.
‘Goodness me,’ said my mother. ‘I have long ago lost count. But forty or so years from now you will be able to “Google” him on the “Internet”. You can find out all about him then.’
‘Google?’ I said. ‘Internet?’ I said also.
‘Sorry,’ said my mother. ‘I was just having one of my visions. I have been granted the gift of prophecy, you see, from Northfields Pentecostal Church. Captain Lynch is schooling me in the technique.’
‘I’ll just bet he is,’ I said. ‘And have you had any visions, or prophetic insights, regarding him? Such as him discovering a lost city of gold, or suchlike?’
My mother shook her head and said that no, she hadn’t.
‘I suppose Dad’ll be at home a lot now,’ I said, with a degree of dread, if not in my voice, then probably upon my face. ‘It always takes him a long time to find a new job.’
‘Research,’ said my mother. ‘So much research.’
‘Right,’ I said, recalling my father’s research. ‘He always researches the various strengths of alcohol in the local public house, but never takes a job there.’
‘Not in a single public house,’ said my mother, once more the stickler for detail. ‘He does his research in many different public houses. He’ll do so much research in one public house that the landlord will urge him to go elsewhere, lest he over-researches.’
‘Right,’ I said. With the same inflection I had put into the previous ‘right’.
‘But no,’ said my mother, now applying vinegar and brown paper to my forehead, for she had read in a nursery rhyme that this was a timeless remedy. ‘He won’t be researching in public houses because he already has a new job.’
‘Already?’ I said. ‘But he was only sacked this afternoon.’
‘I know,’ said my mother. ‘What a world we live in today and no mistake. It must be this Space Age that they are all talking about. But a man knocked upon the door earlier this evening and offered your father a new job. And he took it, right there and then.’
‘Well,’ I said. And, ‘Well indeed. No, hang about,’ I then said. ‘Dad mentioned a travelling salesman and a gatherer of the pure. He hasn’t got a job shovelling up dog shi-’
‘No, no, no,’ said my mother. ‘Something quite different – your father has been given a job as a roadie for a rock ’n’ roll band.’
‘What?’ I said. And I said it loudly, too.
‘A chap in dark glasses who looks a bit like your music teacher gave him the job. He’s going to be the roadie for a band called The Rolling Stones.’
‘What?’ said I. And even louder now.
‘But let’s not talk about your father,’ said my mother. ‘Tell me, Tyler, what was your really exciting news that you mentioned just before you fainted?’
9
The Saturday that followed the Friday evening that had been The Sumerian Kynges’ very first gig was much the same as any other at that time.
My father was doing some home improvements. He was papering our sitting-room walls with billiard table baize and Captain Lynch had taken my mother to the pictures, because there was a film on about Jesus that my father wasn’t particularly keen to see.
I got up, then went without breakfast because my mother had apparently left early for the pictures so as to be first in the queue. Then I watched my father’s increasingly abortive attempts to paper the sitting-room walls until I could control my laughter no longer and had to rush to the toilet and be sick.
Which made me feel even hungrier. So I did what all lads of my age did and went off to the Wimpy Bar for lunch.
Wimpy Bars were the latest thing. They were American and therefore cool. They served a variety of foodstuffs that had never before been served upon these shores. And there were ice-cream desserts with names like the Brown Derby and the Jamaican Longboat.
How fondly I remember those.
I once found a pound note blowing down the street, which I considered was surely a gift from God. And myself and Neil Garden-Partee tried to spend the lot at the Wimpy Bar. And we really tried. We had as many burgers (with fries, as the Wimpy Bar’s chips were called) as we could pack in, then we laid into the desserts. And the milkshakes.
