Patrick Thompson - Execution Plan

I looked at him.

‘Are you scared of them?’

‘I’m scared of nothing. ’

Despite his claim, he gave the ducks – a couple of mallards – a wide berth.

‘You’re scared of ducks,’ I said. ‘How are ducks going to hurt you?’

‘You’re scared of mirrors,’ he said. ‘That makes more fucking sense does it? Where are the trees? We’re in the countryside and all I can see is shops and a river. Where’s all the nature?’

‘All directions. You have to walk to it.’

‘Where are we, the middle fucking ages ? No one walks anymore. Even you don’t walk. We’re in the nineties now, nature wants to get its arse in gear.’

‘This is their house.’

Dermot checked it out.

‘Looks alright,’ he said.

Tina let us in. She was wearing a loose flowing thing from the Gap. Roger was dressed in a collection from French Connection, as usual. He didn’t look anything like a lecturer; all of the other ones I’d encountered were of the leather-elbow-pad variety.

They’d painted the inside of their house the colour of gentlemen’s studies in old films. It looked warm and amber, with a density of light you almost had to push your way through. Tina went in for rugs with a lot of dark red in the patterns. Carpets were pointless as you couldn’t get them upstairs quickly enough when the river came in unannounced. They seemed to have a lot of dark wood furniture, until you looked more closely and realized how little there was. A table with four ladderback chairs, a cabinet with a small television (they only had terrestrial channels, and only four of those), a small chest of drawers with framed photographs on the top. There was no sofa, no armchairs, nothing that’d take a lot of hoisting up the stairs when the Severn started getting too lively.

I’d seen the kitchen on previous visits and I knew that all of the cupboards were mounted at head height, well above the high-tide mark. They kept the fridge/freezer on the upstairs landing and the washing machine in a spare room upstairs. The small electric oven could be manhandled up the stairs with the help of the neighbours. Even after everything had been moved above the high water mark, the house was uninhabitable until the water level dropped. There would be no electricity until the river stopped having its fun and got itself back where it belonged. The presence of three feet of water dropped the temperature by several degrees, and the water wasn’t clean.

In the film Titanic , when the sea finally pops in it’s a nice fresh shade of blue. It looks chlorinated. The floodwaters in Bewdley were the colour of shit, not without reason.

It all seemed a lot of trouble to put up with for the sake of living somewhere picturesque.

Dermot settled himself into one of the ladderback chairs.

‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘Got a touch of the Sherlock Holmes to it. Sorry, we haven’t been introduced, our Mickey doesn’t do manners. I’m Dermot, a friend of Mr. Aston here. I know you’re Tina and you’re Roger, and you knew him when he was a student. Did he have any manners then?’

‘No,’ said Tina. ‘He was hopeless. Wouldn’t hold a door open for you, wouldn’t offer to carry things.’

‘It was 1983,’ I said. ‘Men weren’t allowed to hold doors open. It was sexist. It was politically incorrect.’

‘And that died a death, didn’t it?’ asked Dermot. ‘Now we’re right back where we were before all that. Still, kept us on our toes for fifteen years.’

‘We’ve had plenty of things doing that,’ said Tina. Roger arrived with an open bottle of wine, an aged French one. The name meant nothing to me. No doubt he’d had it breathing somewhere. Roger knew his wines. If they’d lived somewhere less prone to going subaquatic, he’d have had a cellar. As it was, he had racks in the attic.

‘What sort of prices do places go for round here?’ Dermot asked. Roger told him while Tina set out place mats and cutlery.

‘I hope you’re not a vegetarian,’ Tina said.

‘Not fucking likely ,’ said Dermot. Tina smiled genuinely; Roger smiled tolerantly.

She’d done a game terrine with tiny new potatoes and fresh garden peas in some sort of mint dressing.

‘This is what the middle class have for tea is it then?’ asked Dermot. ‘Any more wine?’

Roger looked uncomfortable at being tagged as middle class. Tina didn’t seem to mind.

‘Only the ones with good enough cooks,’ she said. ‘The rest of them make do with takeaways. What do you have then? Fish and chips? Kebabs? Tripe and onions?’

‘Aye, pet. And we have cabbage on Saturdays as a treat.’

‘What do you do?’ Roger asked Dermot.

‘Nothing really. I don’t have what you’d call a trade. I pick up jobs. You can get by like that.’

‘Nothing longer term? What about pensions?’

‘Bollocks to pensions. I’m too young for pensions. That’ll all sort itself out.’

Tina raised one eyebrow, her code for a good point being made. I was in a private pension scheme because programming jobs weren’t lifelong. Sometimes they lasted as long as the project. Sometimes the projects were canned and the programmers got their cards. Besides, there were always people headhunting from other companies.

Roger took a sip of wine to allow him time to compose himself. He couldn’t have been five years older than Dermot, but managed to look twice his age. He had grey creeping in at his temples and a touch of middle-age spread at the waist, but it was more his attitude. He was like a father. Dermot was cheerfully playing the part of an unruly child, and Tina and I were the well-behaved children watching the show.

Except that Tina seemed to want to spar with Dermot.

‘So you’re working class then?’ she asked. ‘Only we thought that they’d gone. Everyone has an office job now. And if you don’t actually have a job, you can hardly be called working class, can you?’

‘I was born working class,’ said Dermot.

‘I doubt that,’ said Tina. ‘I really doubt that. There were lots like you at college, kids who pretended to live on the frontline. What were they doing at college then? Advanced scaffolding techniques? New movements in welding? No, they were doing media studies and art classes.’

‘Being working class is a state of mind ,’ said Dermot.

‘I thought you were born into it.’

‘It’s a state of mind you’re born into. It’s a way of being.’

‘That’s Zen Buddhism, I think you’ll find. How many of your jobs involve any manual labour? Excluding things like manually writing on paper with a pen, or manually sitting at a desk.’

‘Enough. When I met him,’ Dermot pointed at me, ‘I was working in a burger van. Cooking burgers. And kebabs. That was manual.’

‘But it wasn’t exactly foundry work. You just come across as a middle class white boy doing lowlife jobs to make yourself more interesting.’

‘You don’t know anything about me. How can you sit there judging me when you live in this fucking cottage? You’ve never been to the real world.’

‘I could ask Mick what he knows about you. He’s known you for a while, hasn’t he?’

‘He doesn’t take a blind bit of interest. As long as he’s getting along with his own life, that’s all he thinks about. I don’t think he’s ever asked what I do.’

‘No,’ said Tina. ‘He’s not like that. Are you, Mick?’

The two of them looked at me.

‘I don’t like to intrude,’ I said. ‘I don’t like to pry into people’s business.’

‘You don’t want to know about them, more like,’ said Dermot. ‘I mean, you’re more remote than these two and they live in a cottage in the fucking sticks. You live in Dudley. Do you know any of your neighbours?’