Tony Parsons - Stories We Could Tell

Mind you, Leon thought, she was a very big girl for nine.

He thumbed through the singles until he found something worth playing. ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record, and pulled the arm back for repeat play. Then, as the stuttering guitar riff came pouring out of the speakers, he set about destroying the rest of the singles. The Jacksons, Donna Summer, Hot Chocolate, Carly Simon and the Brotherhood of Man – all of them were thrown to their doom across the review room, all of them perished in a dramatic explosion of vinyl.

Leon was about to launch Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’ when the door to the review room opened and standing there was an elderly black cleaner with a Hoover in his hands, staring open-mouthed at the destroyed vinyl that littered the carpet.

‘What the goodness you doing in here, man?’ the cleaner said.

‘I’m doing the singles,’ Leon said, his face burning with embarrassment. ‘I was just about to clear all this up.’

Watched by the cleaner, Leon got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the smashed records, his mouth fixed in a smile that he hoped showed solidarity, and some sort of apology.

‘I hope you like curry,’ Terry’s mum said to Misty.

‘I love curry,’ Misty said. ‘In fact, my father was born in India.’

Terry shot her a look. He didn’t know that Misty’s dad had been born in India. It seemed there were a lot of things he didn’t know about her, despite being together since Christmas.

Misty and Terry and his parents crowded awkwardly in the tiny hallway. Misty was making some rapturous speech about the glories of the Raj and something Kipling had written about the correct way to cook chicken tikka masala. Terry’s parents smiled politely as she babbled on. His father took her photographers bag. Terry noticed that she had unclipped her pink fake mink handcuffs, and stuffed them in the bag. It was her first visit to his home and everyone was making an effort. Misty had turned the charm up to ten and Terry’s dad had put his shirt on. Terry’s mum had prepared a special menu and Terry hadn’t brought any of his laundry home.

They entered the front room where an old film was blaring from the telly in the corner. For a moment it commanded all their attention. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were runaways from a chain gang, a white racist and a proud black man, still handcuffed together.

‘The Defiant Ones,’ said Terry’s mum. ‘He was lovely, Tony Curtis.’

‘I’ll turn that thing off,’ said Terry’s dad. That was a sure sign that royalty was visiting. They never turned the TV off until it told them to go to bed.

‘What was it that Truffaut said about life before television?’ Misty said, her lovely face frowning with concentration.

‘I don’t quite recall, dear,’ said Terry’s mum, as if she had been asked the name of Des O’Connor’s last single, and it was on the tip of her tongue.

‘Truffaut said that before television was invented, people stared at the fire.’ Misty looked very serious, as she always did when relating the thoughts of one of her heroes. ‘He said that there has always been this need for moving pictures.’

They all thought about it for a while.

‘Cocktail sausage?’ said Terry’s mum, holding out a plate of shrivelled chipolatas bristling with little sticks. ‘Take two, love. They’re only small.’

Terry thought it was so strange to see Misty parked on the brown three-piece suite in the front room of the pebbledash semi where he had grown up. When Terry was small, his father had worked at three jobs to get them out of rented accommodation above the butcher’s shop and into a place of their own, but he knew that what was a dream home to his mum and dad must have seemed very modest to a girl like Misty.

There was flock wallpaper and an upright piano in the corner and a wall-to-wall orange carpet that looked like the aftermath of some terrible car crash. There were matching pouffes for them to put their feet up on while they were reading Reveille (Mum) and Reader’s Digest (Dad). Misty perched on the middle cushion of what they called the settee in what they called the front room about to eat what they called their tea.

Strange for all of them. Front room, settee, tea – it even felt like his parents spoke a different language to Misty.

Terry’s dad stared bleary-eyed at the dead TV, a cocktail sausage on a stick forgotten in his hand. He had just woken up, and was getting ready for another night shift at Smithfield meat market. Even if he had been more awake, small talk wasn’t really his thing, unless he was around people he had known for years, like the men at the market. But Terry’s mum could have small talked for England. She busied herself in the kitchen, conversing with Misty through the serving hatch, like a sailor peering through a porthole.

‘I do like your frock,’ Terry’s mum said, her eyes running over the white dress and down to Misty’s biker boots. ‘It’s a lovely frock.’ She passed no comment on the biker’s boots. ‘Would you like chicken or beef curry, love?’

Misty almost squealed with delight. ‘I can’t believe that you’ve gone to all this trouble!’

But Terry knew that the curry was no trouble at all. His mum would just drop the bag of Birds Eye curry in boiling water for fifteen minutes. He knew that wasn’t the kind of curry that his girlfriend was expecting. He knew she was used to real Indian take-aways.

Waiting for tea, Terry had the same sinking feeling, that preparation for humiliation, that he had once felt after PE in the junior school when Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers. Unable to locate his missing pair of grey shorts that were stuffed behind the urinal (thanks, Hairy) Terry had made the long walk into the classroom, fully dressed apart from his trousers.

‘Please, miss…’

The rest had been drowned out by the mocking laughter of thirty eight-year-old children. That’s how he felt waiting for his mother to serve them their curry. Like Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers in the toilets all over again.

And the funny thing was his mum was a good cook.

When Terry had been living at home, tea (Misty would have called it dinner) and Sunday dinner (Misty would have called it lunch) was always meat and two veg, with a nice roast on the Sabbath.

Apart from Sundays, the meal was always consumed in their favourite chairs, the toad in the hole or shepherd’s pie or pork chops and their attendant soggy vegetables wolfed down in front of Are You Being Served? or The World at War or Fawlty Towers or Nationwide or The Generation Game .

‘Nice to see you, to see you – nice!’

But something had happened since Terry had left home. Now it was all convenience food – Vesta chicken supreme and rice, Birds Eye Taste of India, ‘For mash get Smash’ – spaceman food, dark powders or a solidified brown mass that required either the addition of or immersion in boiling water.

When Terry was a boy, his mum had baked bread, and it was the most wonderful taste in the world. The smell of a freshly baked loaf or rolls had made little Terry swoon. Now his mum no longer had time for all that business. Terry’s dad blamed women’s lib and Captain Birds Eye.

But his mum had pushed the boat out tonight, or at least as far as the boat would go in these modern times, and Terry loved her for it, even though it seemed he never had much of an appetite these days.

They sat themselves at the table that was usually reserved for Sundays and Christmas, paper napkins, folded into neat triangles, by best plates, the prawn cocktails in place. A bottle of Lambrusco had already been unscrewed.