Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

The security and handsomeness of the estuary town drew outsiders. It also, less admirably, persuaded those outside its historic boundaries to appropriate its name. Some way up the A-road towards more urban settlements, there were lines of yellow-brick suburban houses, a golf club, a vast pub on a roundabout offering Carvery Meals to the passing traffic on a board outside. In its car park feral children romped, and, fuelled on brought-out Cokes and glowing orangeades, ran up and over the pedestrian bridge across the A-road. They had been known to shy a half-brick at lorries passing below. There was an extensive and spreading council estate on either side of the traffic artery, surrounding the Hanmouth Rugby Club grounds; it provided a flushed and awkward audience to the field’s gentlemanly battles, over a leather egg, mounted for an afternoon, a drama bounded between two dementedly outsized aspirates.

All these things, encouraged in the first instance by estate agents, had taken to calling themselves Hanmouth too. They, however, called it Han-mouth, to Hanmouth’s formal scorn and comedy. It was one of Miranda Kenyon’s conversational set-pieces, the speculating about where the boundaries of Hanmouth would end. On the whole, Hanmouth thought little of the despoiling and misspeaking suburbs that surrounded it and had taken on its name. Though they poured right up to the gates of Hanmouth, they were obviously the city’s, Barnstaple’s, suburbs, not Hanmouth’s. Hanmouth could never have suburbs.

In these suburbs and estates, men washed their cars on a Sunday morning; kitchens faced the front, the better for wives doing the washing-up to watch the events in the street; children kicked footballs against the side of parked cars until bawled out; support for local or national football teams was made evident in displayed scarves, emblems stuck in windows, flags flown from the back of cars; and, at seven thirty or eight o’clock on weekdays, a ghostly unanimous chorus of the theme tune to a London soap opera floated through the open windows of the entire suburb. There was no reason to go there, and Hanmouth knew nothing much of these hundred streets. It was in the early summer of 2008 that an event in these suburbs, whatever settlement they could be said to belong to, rose up and attached itself to Hanmouth, and could not be detached.

No one in Hanmouth proper had ever heard of Heidi O’Connor. Unless she cut their hair, and then they still wouldn’t know her surname. She did her shopping where no one hailed each other or equably compared purchases, in the Tesco’s on the ring-road. She was not one for going to the pub for social reasons or any other, even to the roadhouse on the Hanmouth roundabout. She would have said she found it ‘common’, a word most of Hanmouth would have been astonished to discover a Heidi O’Connor knew or attached any particular meaning to. She had four children, Hannah, China, Harvey and Archie, from nine down to eighteen months. She lived with Michael Thomas, a moon-faced reprobate seven years younger than her. The four children, two with a version of Heidi’s white-blonde hair, two with a dark, thick, doglike scrub on top, were said to get on with their ‘stepfather’, as Micky Thomas generously termed himself when events made a definition necessary. He was the third such ‘stepfather’ the children had known and the eldest two could remember. Only Hannah could remember, or said she could, her proper father and China’s.

With four children at twenty-seven, Heidi’s existence had its circumscribed aspects. She rarely went into Barnstaple—the opening of a new shopping centre represented an unusual outing. She and Micky and the four kids, walking up and down the glass-covered streets of the mall where municipal jugglers and publicly funded elastic-rope artists played with the air for one afternoon only. Here and there, Heidi and Micky said to each other that it was nothing special, really, letting the kids run in and out of the shops. Barnstaple, in general, was Micky’s territory. He went in every Friday and Saturday night; he stayed out till three or four, returning huge-eyed and off his face, as he would say the next day. Saturday afternoons he spent in Hanmouth’s pubs, often drinking until it was time to pick up Heidi from the salon. He waited outside on the pavement for her; he’d had to be spoken to sharply about coming in and wandering about before half five, picking up bottles of conditioner and tongs and putting them down again. He was a familiar figure in Old Hanmouth, as he called it; he was a well-known figure at the edges of the dance floors of the little nightclubs of Barnstaple, his moon face expressionless under a CCTV-defying baseball cap. He would often sell you a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Heidi thought herself too old for that sort of thing. She spent most of her time indoors when she wasn’t working at the hair salon in Hanmouth, where most of the customers were over seventy, but all right, really. She’d always said at school she wanted to be a hairdresser, and though Hannah and China coming unexpectedly had interrupted the HND, she’d made an effort, bettered herself, finished her course when she was twenty-two, and got a job here, where she worked now. Her dream was to open up a salon of her own, she said; maybe even in Hanmouth. It could do with some competition, something a bit more up-to-date. A bit less blue-rinse, she would say, though she hadn’t done a blue rinse in her life, only heard of them on comedy sketches. ‘I don’t know how she stands them,’ Micky would say to his mates and his associates when Heidi was in the kitchen, talking about the widows and retired woman civil servants of Hanmouth. ‘Them old punters. Smelling of wee and asking for your blue-rinse perm.’ Heidi herself didn’t mind them, or Hanmouth. She didn’t think too much about it. The pay could have been better, but the tips were generous, and it got her out of the house. Micky made money in his own ways. Those own ways came and went, but were a useful backup at any rate. And every Wednesday and Saturday they played the lottery. If you asked them what their ambitions were, they would both have said that they aimed at a future where an exponentially large sum of money landed on them, unearned and undeserved, and proved inexhaustible, however long the pair of them lived. It was sweet that they didn’t seem to think, for the moment, of a future where undeserved and enormous money would rid them one of the other.

Her childhood sweetheart she’d never married, though he’d given her Hannah and China, and he might be in London by now. Harvey’s dad was the one she’d married, and never again. At the end, in the middle of one of those staircase-shaking rows, he’d said he was going to emigrate, to Australia or Canada, and had gone on saying it, with varying degrees of calmness or rage, until one day he’d just disappeared, never to be seen again. (Heidi supposed she was still married to him, all things being considered.) His name was Marcus. She remembered what he looked like, but what had really remained with her from that marriage was Harvey, of course, and Marcus’s half-sister Ruth—they’d had the same father, but Marcus’s mother had been from Bristol, Ruth’s from Barnstaple. The father was where they’d got the black half from. There were fifteen years between Marcus and Heidi, thirteen between Marcus and Ruth. Ruth had always been the same stern-looking girl with cropped hair touched with grey, though she was only two years older than Heidi. At the wedding, with Hannah only just old enough to be a little bridesmaid in peach, China still a baby in Heidi’s mother’s arms with a terrible rash across her face, Ruth’s constant frown hardly cracked. Some old uncle of Heidi’s with a red carnation in the buttonhole of his grey suit and the red-veined nose all Irish drinkers got in the end had leant over to Heidi’s mother and said he was a handsome lad, but he, he was old-fashioned, he supposed, and thought it a shame, his lovely niece who could have had her pick marrying a half-caste like that. And Ruth had abruptly turned round—people said, ‘So she turned round and said,’ but Ruth really had turned round, as swift as a whip in flight—and said, ‘That’s my fucking brother you’re talking about, you stupid old cunt. His name’s Marcus.’ There was no answer to that. The old uncle, who had only been invited because Heidi’s mother was soft-hearted, mumbled something about no offence being meant, nothing personal, because he was an old man and set in his ways and could see she was half-caste too and nothing wrong with that. Mixed race; Heidi knew you didn’t say ‘half-caste’ any more, thanks to Ruth.