Starting Over

When we came downstairs the porridge had gently bubbled to that perfect consistency of creamy thickness that I liked.

Lara came in from the garden, holding something in her right hand. A cigarette butt. She threw it at me. It hit me in the middle of the chest, just where I always felt the tightness. A spitfire, my dad would say. She’s a little spitfire.

‘Do you know what that is, George?’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘That’s another nail in your coffin.’ She sat down at the breakfast table and covered her face with her hands. Ruby and I looked at each other and then back at Lara. ‘Thanks a lot, George,’ my wife said, her voice muffled by her hands. ‘Thanks a bloody million.’

Then we ate our porridge.

Rufus was still at the bus stop.

I stopped the car on the other side of the road and opened the window. He looked across at the car containing his father, his mother and his sister, and seemed to cringe, and looked away. There were a few other kids from his school at the bus stop, but he didn’t seem to be with any of them.

‘Do you want a lift?’ I shouted, the rush-hour traffic roaring between us.

He tore his eyes from the pavement and screwed up his face. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear.’ Other kids stared across at us.

I looked at Lara in the passenger’s seat. ‘What could I possibly be asking him? What else could I conceivably be asking the kid?’

Ruby leaned forward. ‘What’s the capital of Peru? If God really exists then why is there so much suffering in the world?’ She sat back with a chuckle, smiling wearily at her big brother scanning the street for a sign of his bus. ‘He wants to get the bus, Daddy.’

She was right.

So we left him at the bus stop, and took Ruby to school – right up to the gates. We were still allowed to do that. She even gave us both a peck on the face, without first checking who might see.

She really did make me smile all the time.

And the smile only faded when she fell into step with one of her classmates, and I saw her moving her skinny hips from side to side as she hiked up her grey skirt. She had started wearing her white school socks above her knee and it was not a good look.

‘Young lady,’ I called.

She turned, raised her plucked eyebrows, and gave us a little wave of the hand that could have meant anything. Okay. Goodbye. Bugger off. But the hemline on that grey school skirt did not go any higher, and that felt like the most I could ask for.

Lara touched her watch as we eased back into the slow morning traffic. ‘I’m going to be late,’ she said.

I hit a switch on the dashboard.

‘No, you’re not,’ I said.

I swung the car to the wrong side of the road as the siren began to wail, watching the oncoming traffic pulling over at the sight of the two blue lights that were flashing inside my grille, and everyone hearing me long before they saw me, and all of them getting out of the way.

Life the way it should be.

‘You know you shouldn’t do this,’ Lara said, sinking into her seat with embarrassment, but laughing at the same time.

I smiled, happy to make my wife happy, proud that I could get her to work on time, and looking forward to the moment when I was alone at last, and lighting up the first one of the day.

two (#ulink_daa4987d-2b1d-5ea5-82b8-26384c845b33)

Just as Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, so the police have endless terms for the copper who never leaves the station.

Station cat. Canteen cowboy. Shiny arse. Clothes hanger. Uniform carrier. Bongo (Books On, Never Goes Out). Flub (Fat Lazy Useless Bastard). And an Olympic torch (yet another thing that never goes out).

And despite the light show that I had put on for Lara, that was me. A shiny-arsed canteen cowboy. Or at least, that is what I had become.

I was third generation. My father and grandfather were both coppers. Unfortunately, policing wasn’t the only thing that ran in the family. So did heart disease. Health issues, a man with glasses called it, not an expression that my grandfather or my father ever had to hear. So despite the dodgy tickers that ran in the family, the old boys never suffered the humiliation of being a shiny-arsed station cat.

But that was another time.

When I got to the station, I went straight to the parade. This is the part of the day that the cop shows get right – a room full of men and a few women, most of them in uniform, all of them drinking the first caffeine of the day while listening to an Onion – onion bhaji, sargie, sergeant – also known as the skipper – talk them through the shift ahead. At the back of the room I saw someone watching me. A heavy man in his forties wearing a cheap suit, grubby white shirt and a tie as lifeless as a dead snake. My old partner, Keith, now in the company of some bright-eyed young boy who was actually taking notes. Keith grinned and lifted his Styrofoam cup in salute, spilt a splash of tea on his chin, cursed and wiped it off with the back of his hand. Then, stifling a yawn, he looked back at the Onion.

‘Might seem a long way off, but already we need to start thinking about Carnival weekend. I have before me the official figures –’ the Onion was saying, turning a page of his notes ‘– and I know you will all be enormously relieved to hear that, according to these statistics, last year’s Carnival went off without a major incident.’

Disbelieving groans from the crowd. The Onion glowered at them from under thick eyebrows, playing it straight.

‘There were six stabbings, forty-eight robberies, and a medium-sized riot around the Boombastic Dancehall Sound System when it was asked to reduce the volume at 3.45 a.m. Happily, the environmental health officer who asked them to turn down the Bob Marley –’ mocking jeers from some of the younger officers ‘– is expected to be out of hospital within a month. The council tell us that the loss of his spleen will not prevent him carrying out his duties. Fortunately, and rather wonderfully, none of these incidents were Carnival-related, so citizens should feel free to bring the wife and kiddies for this year’s fun-packed extravaganza.’

Keith’s new partner busily wrote it all down. I watched the Onion’s briefing, feeling like a man with no fruit and nuts in a knocking shop.

I didn’t know why I came here every morning. No, that’s not true – I knew exactly why I came. As the Sergeant went through his shopping list of stolen cars, burglaries, muggings and knife crime, it made me feel as though I was still chasing the wicked, still part of the war on crime, and still the man I wanted to be.

But when the parade was over, I went up to my desk, forbidding myself a glance at my watch. If I could only stop myself from looking, then the time would pass more quickly. So I lost myself in checking MG3s – reports that officers make to the Crown Prosecution Service, who then get to decide which naughty people to prosecute, and which naughty people to pat on the head and release back into the wild.

When I looked over the top of my computer screen Keith was standing there, dabbing at the tea stain on his shirt.

‘Fancy running a few red lights?’ he said.

Keith’s young partner was waiting in the passenger seat of their car. He looked up from his notes with a shy smile as Keith stuck his head in the window.

‘DC Bailey and I are on an undercover operation all day,’ Keith told him. ‘So sling your hook.’

The young man got out of the car with a bewildered look. ‘But – but what am I supposed to do while you’re undercover with DC Bailey?’

Keith erupted with exasperation. ‘I don’t know, do I? Go and do a bit of face painting. Do what you like.’

I slipped into the passenger seat and settled myself. It felt good. Keith eased himself behind the wheel, red-faced and muttering about a lack of initiative among the younger generation. We left the kid standing in the car park, staring after us with a wistful look.

Out on the road, Keith pulled out a couple of packets from under the dash. Zestoretic. Amlodipine. He pushed out a pill from each and washed them down with a swig from a can of Red Bull.

‘Goes a treat with your blood-pressure medication,’ he smiled.

‘We’re getting old,’ I said. Keith was forty-two, five years younger than me, although he looked as though he had even more miles on the clock. ‘In fact, we are old.’

Keith just laughed and pulled out a packet of cigarettes with a skull on the front. Then with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on his high-tar snouts, he pulled his car on to the wrong side of the road and really put his foot down, as if he was trying to outrace someone.

We came across a woman crying.

‘Pictures of my children,’ she sobbed. ‘It had all the pictures of my children.’

‘Someone thieve your phone?’ Keith said, and when the woman nodded, he motioned for her to get in the back of the car. ‘Hop in, love,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll get your phone back for you.’