Jim Crace - All That Follows

“I knew your father,” he says, too softly, to her back. He says it again, and takes his beach cap off, more embarrassment than formality, before she has a chance to turn round.

Although it’s damp and cold, they sit outside in the Woodsman’s yard, on a short timber bench, their shoulders touching or their elbows clashing when they lift their drinks: his prudent “regular” measure of wine and the defiantly large, liter glass of beer that Leonard has reluctantly bought her without challenge from the barman, even though she looks, and is, underage. Despite the tobacco ordinances, she smokes, an edgy and unbroken chain of roll-ups from a tin, as she justifies that morning’s “snitching” on her father: “What am I supposed to do? Sit back and watch it happen on the television? There’re hostages. He’s taken hostages …”

“There’re guns!” adds Leonard, and he is unexpectedly roused by the effortless drama of the phrase. He’s keen for her to know he’s on her side, that (as he says, striving for effect) she has been “a mensch rather than a snitch.” Emboldened by alcohol and being far from home, he is airing for both their benefits a more truly daring version of himself. What is there to stop him? As far as this young stranger is concerned, he is an unmarked canvas that he can color in any way he wants. “Guns,” he says again, and then adds a line that, even as he says it, seems lifted from the tritest gangster movie: “He’s armed. He’s desperate. He could do anything … so we should do something. Yes?”

“Well, yeah. That’s what I said to Mum …” (Here she imitates her mother’s evidently apprehensive voice.) “She said, ‘Be sensible. Don’t get involved.’ Well, let’s be honest, that’s never on the toolbar, is it? That isn’t me. I always get involved. Feet first. She always got involved when she was my age. So she says.”

“She was an activist.”

“My mum, the activist? Not nowadays she’s not. She’s … what’s the opposite?”

“A dormouse,” Leonard suggests.

The teenager laughs. “Just a pinch more lively and opinionated than a dormouse.”

“A rightist, then?”

“No, not that. She hasn’t changed her mind. She’s more, you know … a smolderer. All smoke and no fire? She’s shouting at the TV news all day but doesn’t even vote.”

“A sofa socialist.” It’s Francine’s nickname for her husband nowadays.

“A sofa socialist. That’s it. Pass the velvet cushions, please.” She mimes a yawn onto the back of her hand.

“She was a firebrand, actually,” Leonard says. “She really was. We both were. Once upon a time. Red Nadia.” In fact, for a moment, earlier, he expected to discover that her mother was Maxie’s female comrade in the hostage house.

“Is that you now, a sofa socialist? Or are you still the activist?”

“I’m still ready,” Leonard says. Not quite a lie. Ever since his teenage years he has been ready for the fray — politically, at least. Where other boys had sports or girls or evening jobs, little Lennie immersed himself in his music, or in protest groups, his meetings and his high hopes for the world. “One has to throw one’s pebble at the wall,” he adds, a modest phrase he’s always liked.

“So let’s get ready with the pebbles, then.” She high-fives him, and Leonard responds a little clumsily, sending wincing pain into his shoulder. Then they sit awkwardly and silently for just a shade too long. Too long for Leonard, anyway. He has to speak. “I hope I haven’t lost the fire.” He is rewarded by an entirely unguarded smile that can mean anything: that she finds him laughable, admirable, embarrassing, dishonest. But he is charmed by it, and by her openness. Again they sit in silence, staring at the back wall of the pub. This silence is no longer cumbersome. The teenager is thinking, even nodding to herself.

“Yeah, what you said is right,” she says finally. “He’s armed. We should do something because he could do anything . That’s great, you know? Do it, do it, do it now.” She drums her knees and sings. “ Yup, Davey Davey, do it now . You know that Jo Bond song? I’ve reached the beating heart of you / But I won’t fall apart for you / Unless you do it now, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum . That’s almost how it goes. I’ll send it to your cell if you like. Great track.” She drums on her knees again. “Want one of these?”

Leonard used to smoke, and to validate himself a bit with her — and with anybody watching from the rear windows of the busy bar; they must seem an ill-matched pair — he takes a cigarette, his first since both he and Francine gave up three years ago, despite the assurances printed on low-risk brands that nicotine in moderation might protect the smoker from dementia. He feels self-conscious in her company. She’s noisy, odd, and unpredictable. And she is the curl-up-and-nestle sort who sits too close and touches people when she talks to them, a hand spread lightly on his arm, to show support or sympathy, a finger prod to acknowledge a joke that does not quite deserve a laugh. She’s still unfledged and gullible, blurtingly self-confident, both at ease and twitchy. Uncalculating, actually. Only a kid after all, and behaving, physically, as a teenager might behave, perching at a tram stop with her mates.

Leonard is not blurtingly self-confident, except on rare nights with the saxophone. But he is old enough to be her father. He could have been her father, if things had worked out differently in Austin. He was besotted, briefly, with her mother, after all. Anyway, he’d rather be mistaken for her father than for — his current apprehension — an older and inappropriately attentive man sitting far too near to this too trusting, this underage girl. Her groper boss, perhaps. Her ancient grooming predator. So it might appear to anybody catching them wrapped together in a veil of smoke. She certainly is close to him. The bench is short, of course, but it’s too late to move to another bench and his own elbow room. That would seem standoffish — sitoffish, actually — and shy, both of which are timid attributes and not consistent with the man who has just promised that none of his fire has been lost. He’ll stay. The cigarette, the much-missed fellowship of nicotine, he thinks, provides an alibi. He’ll try to let the roll-up burn down between his fingers, not put it to his mouth. Still, he can’t prevent the cough. Her smoke and his are overpowering. She puts her hand on his, as if to stay his cigarette. “Don’t finish it,” she says. He is infantilized by her. He lifts his cigarette, inhales. He clears a strand of tobacco from his lips with his tongue. He is determined not to cough again.

Sitting next to Maxie’s daughter on the bench is the closest Leonard’s got to intimacy of any kind, carnal or otherwise, for many weeks. Of late, his life has shrunk by stages. Age, routine, and common sense plus the adhesions in his rotator cuff have combined to frustrate most fleshly pleasures, not just sex. He has been drug-free and loosely vegetarian since his thirties, but now he is a dieter as well, a resister of alcohol, chocolate, dairy, modified foods, and whatever produce is currently targeted as unsafe or unsound. In his household, shopping is a morally burdened expedition; cooking is a series of ethical quandaries. Dietary self-defense has turned every meal into a combat zone. He does his best to be a “naught percenter,” as health-conscious citizens are called. Naught percent sugar. Naught percent salt. Naught percent saturated fats. Cholesterol has become for him a grave and present enemy. Certainly he does more these days to combat sticky deposits in his own bloodstream than any failings in the body politic. He is more regularly engaged by the struggle to keep below seventy-five kilos in weight than by any dogma or belief. And while it has become a simple matter to exile his aspirations for the world to the back of his mind, his ambitions for a trimmer waist or a lower pulse are never far from the front of it.