The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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outfit, an inflammable party dress shining like royal icing, red ribbons popping in and out of the hem to match her red patent slingbacks.
‘That’s enough,’ Miranda said, following her; she might have meant it for Sonia, but she was looking at Nick. He went.
It seemed to him that nothing had been settled, that it was just an idea of Jimmy’s, which had come and would go. Certainly, through all the arrangements for the next trip, he didn’t mention it again, or suggest that this might be Nick’s last. Nick was more nervous than he’d ever been: the guys out there, they knew him well and obviously thought his demeanour odd. It was almost as if, without him wanting it, his body was conspiring to bring this occupation to an end by crippling his boldness with the appearance of guilt. But he got back all right, and after the last stages had been gone through, the money safely logged and counted, Jimmy had brought the whole thing up again.
It was Miranda’s day off, and Jimmy asked Nick to come with him and Sonia (‘Don’t tell Miranda, and you, don’t tell Mummy about him coming with us, darling, and if you’re good I’ll buy you – what do you want most, darling?’) to, of all places, the zoo. It was a dank day, not quite raining but in its London way not quite not raining either; the air was heavy with moisture. Behind bars, the show-stoppers cowered, the lions flat out on their sides, like half-eviscerated carcasses on their way to being rugs. Even the polar bears, presumably used to worse than the gloom of a London November afternoon, had a disgruntled air, casting hungry eyes upwards.
‘I like them,’ Sonia said.
‘They’d eat you up in one gulp,’ Nick said humorously. He was not much good with children, who generally knew this.
‘Don’t go putting nightmares into her head,’ Jimmy said. ‘They wouldn’t eat you, darling.’
‘I know that,’ Sonia said. ‘He’s just being stupid, this man. I can’t listen to things like that, I can’t remember them, neither.’
‘All right,’ Nick said. ‘Fair enough.’
‘I’d like to have one,’ Sonia said. ‘I know you can’t have one, not in a house, but I’d like one, to have rides on, maybe, and you could put your face in his fur, sometimes I reckon.’
‘Yeah, that’d be nice,’ Jimmy said. ‘You ask your mum. Maybe she’ll get you one.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Sonia said. ‘I want to see the penguins now. They come from the same place as these polo bears.’
‘No, they don’t,’ Nick said. ‘They come from the other end of the earth. The polar bears live in the north, penguins live in the south.’
‘It’s a bit cold, isn’t it, darling?’ Jimmy said to his daughter. ‘Don’t you want to go and see some inside animals?’
‘No,’ Sonia said. Today she was in a heavily embroidered Afghan coat over a puffed and ruched red-and-green dress, more ribbons, but now sort of gypsy ribbons. Nick’s nightmare: that Sonia be abducted from his company, and he be obliged to describe her wardrobe to the police. ‘I think what I want is to see the penguins now, on their slides. I like their slides. I’d like to have a go on one, I reckon. I went inside once and I looked at the inside animals. And I liked the first one, because it was small and furry and you could put it in your sleeve and then it would look out at you and go—’ she gestured at her nose with her little fist in its fur mitten, making a small squeaking noise ‘– but then in the next case there was another small and furry animal and that wasn’t quite so nice. And the lady I was with’ – adult, drawling boredom – ‘oh, you know that lady I mean’ – normal voice – ‘that lady I meant, she made me go round every case in the inside part of the zoo, and do you know? Every case, it had in it a different small furry animal, apart from the ones where the animal was supposed to be hiding at the back. And I liked the small furry animals at first but after a while I got really a little bit bored of them all. But she made me go round all of them, and I think really they were all the same animal. They were quite sweet, but they weren’t very exciting. I think I want to see the penguins now and the real slide.’
‘I know what you mean, sweetheart,’ Jimmy said. He didn’t seem to have been listening, but Nick knew what she meant: the world was full of small furry animals with large eyes, and only the first ones you came across would you feel like putting up your sleeve. After that, you’d be wise to their small furry ways, and could step past their cases with a light step. He’d rather go and see the penguins now, too.
‘It’s all settled,’ Jimmy said, when they were at the penguins’ enclosure, watching their antic waddle.
‘Yeah?’ Nick said, not following.
‘The shop,’ Jimmy said. ‘The shop I was on about.’ The penguins hesitated: over their pool was a double slide, a double helix, and at the top of it they crowded, as if with empty bravado. It had once been white, but the paint was peeling, the concrete coming through in patches, the penguins projecting nerves. At the top, they jostled each other, as if trying to pick on one to shove down first. Nick had seen it before, and knew that as soon as one was sent down, the rest would follow.
‘Oh, the shop,’ Nick said. And then the whole thing was settled.
My God, Nick thought, the first time he saw it. There wasn’t much for him to organize: Jimmy was taking charge, dealing with everyone from the end of a phone. The hardware merchant had gone, leaving an interior prickly with shelves and pigeonholes, all painted the same unrenewed cream. The pigeonholes were still labelled ‘2½'', ‘60 watt’, ‘mortices’, the letters punched out white on those black plastic strips, now, many of them, peeling off and some littering the floor with a detritus of wood-shavings, nails, the screwed-up balls of newspaper used for packing. They would go: a florist’s would demand no extraordinary expertise – he’d been on a course, anyway, Jimmy’d thought of that. But the point was that the shop had to be run. It couldn’t be like little Sonia, upstairs with last year’s Christmas present, an eighteen-inch toy greengrocer’s with imperishable plaster-of-paris cauliflowers, pretending to weigh them out and demanding, as Sonia tended to, real money in exchange.
Nick wasn’t sure he was up to it. He’d never done such a thing. He’d been a waiter; he’d worked in bars; he’d tried more ambitious jobs, a bit of responsibility, a job in local government, which – you couldn’t lose that sort of job, his mum had said – ought to have done him. But it turned out you could lose that sort of job, if you were Nick. And then he’d bumped into Jimmy again, and his life had taken that particular nervous but lucrative direction. It seemed a lot to undertake, running a flower shop.
But without him having to do anything very much, the shop took shape. The workmen came and went, and Nick only opened the door and made them cups of tea as they tore down the shelves and sanded the stained and knobbly floor. ‘Dost a gnaw—’ one workman asked the first day, and broke off, laughing, when he saw that Nick did not understand even that. And he did not know. Nick did not know where – as it turned out he was being asked – the nearest hardware supplier was, this one being thoroughly stripped down and a drill bit needed. After that, whenever a decision was needed, it was to Jimmy they appealed; even the first time a dilemma arose, and they had to have been under Jimmy’s instructions in this regard not to appeal to Nick who, they knew, would be the shop’s proprietor. They kept a pile of two-pence pieces by the door, on the shelf, like a church’s cumulative charity; at least once a day, the foreman took the upmost half-dozen to the phone box to clarify things with Jimmy. Nick made more tea; there was, as yet, no working toilet and they had to nip into the pub at lunchtime or, after two thirty, piss in the yard out the back.
For a few days Nick hovered, an ingratiating smile on his face, then got tired of it, and took himself off. He started to appreciate, with unwelcome clarity, the overt diffidence about him that had made him so useful to Jimmy in the past. Though the diffidence would shortly become useful again, he had only really been aware of it when, as now, it made him risibly ineffective in the eyes of workmen. The area seemed appalling to him. The mincingly genteel tea-shop; the 1950s American-modern laundromat and Co-op; further back,