Cutting Edge

Twenty-two

Calvin heard his father’s footsteps overhead and leaned on to his left side, wondering if he was about to come downstairs. But the steps carried on towards the kitchen and Calvin relaxed and made himself comfortable again on the bed, drawing down hard on the spindly roll-up to keep it alight. Trouble with dope, especially stuff as good as that, the lingering sweetness of the smell; one move of his father’s towards the stairs and Calvin would have been across to the door that opened out into the garden, wafting in air, spraying aftershave around like it was going out of style. “One thing,” his father had said, “and one thing only. You bring home girls, I don’t want you bringing them down to your room. And I won’t have you smoking dope. Not in this house.” Calvin had nodded, agreed, not pointing out to him that was two things. What did it matter? It was like school, you said yes and carried on doing what you liked. Calvin had reasons to remember school: endless afternoons of woodwork and skiving cross-country runs, and kids who’d yell at him across the playground: “What’s the matter with you, Calvin? Not got the balls to be a real nigger!” Real niggers were black. Calvin, son of a Bermudan father and a Nottinghamshire mother, was a shade of light coffee. “Hey!” the black kids would shout. “You ain’t one of us!”

They were right. Calvin wasn’t one of anybody.

Closing his eyes, resting his head back, he could see his room as clearly as if his eyes were still open. Three of the four walls were painted matt black, the fourth, the one with the window, deep purple; the ceiling was dark blue, the color of the night; when all of the lights were extinguished he could lie on his back and stare up at the formations of stars and planets he had stuck there, iridescent and sparkling. The cupboard and the chest he had painted in white-and-black diagonal stripes; a black metal trolley held his stereo tape deck, record deck, amp and tuner. The cover draped over the bed was shiny black, fake silk. He had bought it in the market with the money his father had given him the day he was accepted for City College. He hadn’t given him anything the day he’d quit. Not even a good shouting. When that had happened there had been other things on his father’s mind.

There were no pictures on the walls, no posters. Only, in white letters he’d cut out himself, high above his bed, the name: Calvin Ridgemount.

The tape came to an end and clicked off. Calvin stubbed the last quarter inch out into a tobacco tin and slid it beneath the bed. Any minute his father would call down, asking him if he wanted anything to eat. He slid off the bed and straightened the cover; one thing you couldn’t say about his room, you couldn’t say it wasn’t neat.

One of the differences Calvin had noticed in his father since it had happened, his father had taken to cooking. All the while they’d been together, a family, the only times he’d as much as entered the kitchen had been to fetch a cold can of Red Stripe from the fridge. He hadn’t even carried out the plates after eating, not since Calvin had been big enough to do the job for him, Calvin or Marjorie. Marjorie was Calvin’s sister, four years younger. It had seemed a long time before she had been able to manage more than the water glasses, Calvin having to take the remainder on his own.

Now, twice a day, three times on a Sunday, his father would fetch proper meals to the table. Nothing fancy, experimental, but none of that ready-to-serve, chill-cooked, out of a packet, out of a carton, out of the tin. Today, from the smell of it, it was onions, fried almost to a crisp till the sweetness came and all but went; sausages, too, fat ones, speckled with herbs, Lincolnshire. Though Calvin had a friend worked nights in a factory in the city, swore they were made right there.

“Hungry?” his father asked.

“Not very.”

His father spooned chickpeas on to one side of a plate, two sausages, then thinking about it for a moment before adding a third.

“Dad.”

“Yes?”

“I said I wasn’t hungry, right.”

“That doesn’t usually stop you,” his father said, although all that home cooking barely showed and Calvin, in his T-shirt and jeans, was still lean as cured bacon.

His father lifted the frying pan over the plate and tipped out half the onions, giving the pan a helpful shake. Finally, a thick tomato sauce distilled from several pounds of ripe tomatoes and molasses.

“Here,” his father said, passing the plate across to the breakfast bar where they usually sat to eat. “You might need this.” He took the small, straight-sided bottle of Tabasco sauce from the shelf and set it close to Calvin’s plate. “Give it a little spice.”

Then he went back to serving himself.

A perfectly good dining table in the living room, a picture window that looked right down across the park, and nine times out of ten they had their meals in the kitchen. Sixteen years they hadn’t been able to get his father in there, now it was the devil’s own job to get him out.

“Good?” Calvin’s father asked.

“Mm,” Calvin responded through a mouthful of sausage. “Umnh.”

His father had taken up cooking, but he hadn’t any time for recipes. Making social security and his small disability pension stretch to feed the two of them took a special kind of enterprise and effort. He would spend up to half of each day wandering around the local shops, take the bus down into the city or up to Arnold, picking up stuff and feeling it, never seeming to notice when shopkeepers or stallholders told him to keep his fingers to himself. Once or twice a week he would get up at five and go down to the wholesale market at Sneinton, there and back on that old bike of his, pedaling home in laborious low gear, towing a little wooden trailer behind him-little more than a vegetable crate with wheels-loaded full of potatoes, cabbages, whatever was cheap and in season.

“You know all the colleges have started back now?”

Calvin grunted.

“I thought you were going to get yourself enrolled again?”

“I am.”

“When?”

“When I know what course it is I want to do.”

“And when’s that going to be?”

“I’m still going through the booklets, in’t I, prospectuses?”

“A little late, ain’t it?”

“Takes time, I don’t want to make another mistake.”

“No danger of that.”

Calvin set down his knife and fork. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never enrol, no chance you’ve got of dropping out.”

It wasn’t worth arguing. Every so often his father would nag him about it, he would stall and before long the matter would be forgotten. They would get back to what now seemed to have become their lives. Meals together, a couple of beers of an evening watching old films his father would rent on video. Operation Petticoat. That Touch of Mink. He could never understand how his father could watch such garbage, laugh at it. Still, it didn’t matter. Around ten he would go down to his room and lie back on the bed, headphones on his head. David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen. Calvin knew what he was supposed to play was Soul II Soul, New Kids on the Block, Niggers with Attitude. Crap like that.

Mouth still full, he pushed his plate aside.

“You haven’t finished.”

“I’ve had enough.”

The local paper came through the front door and the flap of the letter box snapped back with a crack. Calvin fetched it through into the kitchen, unfolding it to show the front page.

“Seen this,” he said, pointing at the headlines: NURSE’S GRIM FIGHT FOR LIFE.

His father nodded gently and slid the paper away. “What you left, I’ll put in the refrigerator. You might fancy it later.”

Fifteen minutes later, Calvin was ready. He’d pulled a sweater over his T-shirt, black running shoes on his feet. A canvas bag hung from his shoulder, rested snug against his hip.

His father was at the sink, finishing the washing up.

“Right,” Calvin said, opening the front door.

“Where’re you off to?” his father asked.

“Out.”