The Bridge

Right, I decided, that’s it. Over thirty fucking years poking about in other people’s pipes. Get out while you’re ahead. You’re not getting any younger and the competition’s harder all the time, what with the Poles and eastern Europeans. Not that I have anything against them personally. Well, I wouldn’t, would I? I’m a third generation immigrant myself.

Frank Easby’s the name. But don’t let that Yorkshire name fool you. I’m half Jamaican. Mum’s parents came over after the war. Dad was a white guy, a seaman at the port. Not that I remember much about him. He buggered off when I was only a kid and left Mum to bring me and Bruv up on her own. Can’t have been easy but she made a bloody good job of it. Kept us out of trouble – took the hide off us many a time – made sure we were properly fed and clothed and got to school every day.

When I left school I thought about going down the docks but in the event British Gas took me on as an apprentice. All credit to them, they taught me the ropes, and I stuck with them for – what – six years? Then I took a punt and branched out on my own. I got an old van, painted my sign on the side, The Humber Plumber, and put an ad in Yellow Pages. It was the early eighties, the – you know – stand-on-your-own-two-feet enterprise culture and all that. Things could only get better, it seemed, even in Hull. People were snapping up their council houses and doing them up. Lots of opportunities for a young and up-and-coming central heating engineer. 

Of course it wasn’t always easy. One look at my dreadlocks and some’d just slam the door in my face. Others would go all tactful and say the problem had sorted itself out or that their lad had come round and fixed it. But to me it was water off a duck’s back by now. I’m like that. Cocky, some say. Anyway I got by – in fact did better than got by. When the word got round that I knew my stuff and did a good job I had work coming out of my ears. The things I got to see, though! Weird places and weird people. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I could tell you. Oddly enough one of them came back and bit me only last month.

It was over thirty years ago, January 1985. Cold as a witch’s tit, what with the east wind slicing up the estuary. I got this message to call half-way through the morning. Some old geezer with a slurred posh voice. The usual story: his central heating system had packed up. No heating or hot water. Could I come round and fix it? Well, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing I said I’d try to fit him in before the end of the day. 

So at five o’clock I dropped by. His place was up on Newland Park, that big crescent above the university. A big old bald guy opened the door. I got the usual reaction: eyes popping out from behind his heavy black glasses. But he invited me in all the same. The system had completely packed up, he said. Nothing was working. ‘When did you last get it serviced?’ I asked, and got a blank look in return. So I took a quick dekko at the boiler. Old fashioned thing it was, a real museum piece, but I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with it. So I did the standard thing, went round all the rooms checking the inlet valves and knocking and bleeding the radiators. 

It was quite a nice place. Clean and tidy with none of that stale-sweet old person smell that often has me breathing through my mouth. There was an old bike in the hall with two pairs of cycle clips neatly looped dead centre over the cross-bar. A real belt and braces guy, I decided. Books, bottles and ashtrays all over the place but in neatly stacked. Upstairs though I got a bit of a shock. Opening one of the bedrooms I stumbled across an old dear lying on top of a great triangular mop of tangled grey hair. She looked like a cross between a broken rag doll and some shrivelled up old insect. For some reason the words ‘Moth Woman’ sprang into my head. At that moment she opened her eyes, saw me and let out a piercing shriek. Time for a sharp exit. Back downstairs I gave the system a power flush. It came out as thick and black as treacle at first but then ran clean and sweet and pure. Next, I switched the system back on, and it purred away like a dream. Just clogged up it was. Years of grunge – you get quite a bit of that.

The old guy was ever so grateful, made a little formal speech of thanks and asked if I’d like to join him over a drink to celebrate what he called ‘the resumption of normal service’. Now normally I never drink on the job. Health and safety and all that. But I thought what the hell, it’s almost the end of the day, why not? So I sat myself down and he poured me a monster scotch in a heavy cut-glass tumbler. 

‘It was your advertisement in Yellow Pages that caught my eye,’ he said. ‘The Humber Plumber. Quite clever that – but I should point out it doesn’t really work. It’s a false rhyme, you see. The “b” in “plumber” isn’t actually sounded. If it were, it would suggest you worked plumbing water, dredging the estuary perhaps.”

‘Nah, man, let’s leave it as it is. I don’t work in water – I walk on it.’

He smiled. ‘Anyway I’m deeply in your debt. Plumbing’s a total mystery to me – all those pipes and cylinders and stopcocks. Terrifies me. But then what doesn’t nowadays?’

I tried to think of something to say. ‘Quite a nice place you’ve got here.’

‘Think so? I loathe it. It’s anonymous and ugly and that frontage positively squints at me. Then there’s that treadmill of a garden. As soon as you rake up one lot of leaves another one takes its place! ’

‘But a good neighbourhood.’

He harrumphed. ‘More tradesmen living around here than you can shake a stick at. Half the houses have got white vans parked in front of them at night’

‘Careful, man, I’m a white van man myself.’ Then I laughed. ‘Well, a black white van man to be absolutely accurate.’

He smiled again. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to give offence.’

‘None taken, I’m sure.’

Time to change the subject. ‘So how long have you lived in Hull?’ 

‘In a spiritual sense, forever.’

‘You must like it here then?’

‘Like’s not quite the right word. Let’s say it’s my mirror, my match – the emptiness, the flatness, the cut-off-ness … and that sense of the encroaching sea, dark and cold and going on forever.’ As he said that, he went all dreamy and detached. Like he was watching himself from a high window walking in the distance. ‘Nothing, like something, happens everywhere,’ he added.

That stumped me. ‘You some sort of academic then?’ I asked. ‘What do you teach?’

‘Teach – God forbid! As if you could teach those young oafs anything. All they care about is pop music, pot and screwing. And spare me the groves of academe while you’re at it. All those mindless articles, the nit-picking, the CV-padding and the vanity. All those faculty wives and dinner parties. Having to sit next to some bitch who’s read nothing but Which.’

‘So what are you then? Or were you?’

Let’s say, I’m a scribbler and a paper-shuffler – a kind of super-clerk.’

‘What, like Clark Kent in his day job. Superman nine-to-five?’

The old man rolled his eyes. ‘I wish! Anyway I’m on my way out. Health problems. The skids are under me. The VC’s been measuring me for my coffin for some time. Wants to get a younger, cheaper man in. Or woman.’ He lit a cigarette and let out a cloud of smoke.

‘Will you miss it?’

‘Yes, I suppose I will in a way. It was boring and irritating but it kept my mind off things. Got me further down the road – down cemetery road.’

Another tank stopper. I looked round the room. Next to where I was sitting there was a great stack of paper and I glanced at the top sheet. It was a scrawled list of cricket scores – runs, overs and the names of players – Bradman, Richards, Sobers, Lara, Truman and Boycott. Coming from the West Indies I know a thing or three about the game and it dawned on me these were imaginary all-star teams. These guys could never could have played together on the same team. The old man must spend his time playing fantasy cricket, jotting down reams of non-existent scores, runs and overs, game after game, day after day. He eyed me uneasily. ‘It helps pass the time,’ he muttered.

Against one wall were piles of old discs. The old man gave me the nod, so I went over and took a quick look through them. Big old heavy shellac things they were. Blues and jazz musicians from yonks ago – Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington.

‘Your sort of thing?’ he asked.

‘Why – just because they’re black. Nah, that doesn’t follow, man. I’m into current stuff. Reggae and that.’

‘Reggae?’ He looked baffled. 

‘You know, like the Specials AKA and Bob Marley.’

‘Marley – wasn’t he the chap who’d died in Christmas Carol?

‘Nah man, reggae, you know like Desmond Decker and the Israelites. “Get up every morning, same thing for breakfast.”’

‘Well, I can relate to that. Nowadays it’s always a large whisky in my case.’

 ‘Anyway you’re not short of reading matter,’ I said, staring round the shelves. I went over and pulled out a book, a thin black-bound volume. It was a book of poems. The old man stood behind me and peered over my shoulder. ‘Ah, the young Kingsley bum. Such a funny, sweet, soft-shelled boy when I first got to know him. We used to bounce bon mots off one another all the time at Oxford. Rehearsed them secretly in advance. That was before he got lucky … and rich and angry.’ He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘We grew apart. Still exchange letters but … Maybe I was jealous’

I put the book back. ‘Read these all these have you?’

‘Once. Not now. I’ve got glasses as thick as bottle bottoms. Anyway, books are a load of crap.’

‘Things that bad, are they?’

‘Worse. Everything and everywhere, worse and worse. The strikes, the IRA, the lefties and the bla …’ He stopped himself.

‘I wouldn’t not go down that road, man, if I was you. We all know where it ends: Dolfie and his merry men having a Nazi party.’

‘But, God, just look around you. You can’t miss it: the country’s been going to pot for years. Literally. You know, there isn’t a day that passes but that I thank God for Maggie. The one bright spot in my old age … you know, I thought all that had gone forever – the discipline, the effort and the self-denial. Yes, the saintly Margaret is definitely up there in my holy trinity of austerity alongside Scrooge and Sir Stafford Cripps.’

‘You’re missing out the dark side – the cuts, the unemployment and the deprivation.’

‘Ah yes, deprivation. Deprivation’s been to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth. I said that once or at least I think I did.’ 

But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. ‘She’s just a hard-hearted bitch the way I see it.’

The old man closed his eyes and smiled in a slack dreamy way. ‘But a very attractive one all the same. I often dream about her. We’re in bed together, her blue eyes and blonde head on the pillow next to mine, you know, on the point of doing it. But we never actually … achieve consummation, as it were. Something always seems to get in the way. The story of my life.’ 

He lit another cigarette ‘Tell me, Mr Easby, do your parents still live in Hull?’

‘My mum does. Dad buggered off when I was nipper.’

He mused. ‘Ah, yes, they fuck you up, your mum and dad.’

‘No, not my mum she didn’t. You’re well out of line there. She was a real tower of strength. Did her best for us. What was so wrong with yours then?’

‘How to describe them? Father was a town clerk and a fascist – make of that coupling what you will. Took me on trips to Germany before the war. He liked things in their place. Kept a small statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece. Perhaps that’s where I get my views from. Mother, well, she was there all the time and a very long time it was too. A bit like being trapped in a tightly tailored suit of sandpaper. Whenever I visited her she’d say, “It’s raining.” “I’d say, well what do you expect? This is England after all.”

‘Got any kids?’

‘Lord, no. Life’s been hard enough as it is. All those invasions into one’s time and space. People wanting to visit you all the time. Like that damned John Wain – plagues me like a mosquito. Or perhaps in his case the word “louse” is the more appropriate designation. Then there are the endless inroads into one’s money. They will keep sending me these bills! Bills, taxes and weekend visitors – life’s three great unavoidables. Oh, and death too of course. One must never forget about death.’

‘But it’s not as if you’re all on your own. Who’s that lady in the bedroom – her upstairs?’

He savoured the phrase. ‘Her Upstairs – you know, I rather like that. It’s a bit like that old northern expression – what was it: Her Indoors? Only up a rung or two on the social ladder perhaps.’

‘But you’re married?’

‘Involved would be the better word – in a semi-detached kind of way. The nearest to a close relationship I could ever manage anyway. Which was never very near. But then why waste good money and time on women, I used to say, when you can wank off into an old hat and have the rest of the evening to yourself?’

‘Miserable old son of a bitch aren’t you?’

‘No, simply the less deceived.’

‘Maybe she didn’t want marriage with you either.’

‘You know, you could be right there. Perceptive aren’t you for a central heating engineer.’ 

‘Any time, man. It’s not just pipes I poke around in. But I ought to say sorry. I may have given her a bit of a shock when I barged in on her. She didn’t look at all well.

‘Yes, poor Bunny, she suffers terribly. In pain all the time. I look after her as best I can. She’s just a shadow of the woman she once was. When I think how she was when I met her all those years ago in the common room in Leicester. So young, so poised, so self-possessed … Of course Monica and Kinglsey couldn’t stand one another. He sent her up in that novel of his. Even used her real name. I made him change it. Oh dear, how badly I’ve treated her over the years. There’s a lot of violence, deep-down, in love, don’t you think? And in sex too, that goes without saying.  

Silence. Then the old man seemed to brighten up a bit. He pulled out some photo albums and invited me to take a look. I flipped through them.

‘Hey, man, some of these are really good. Artistic like. Maybe you should’ve have taken it up for a living. Is this one the old lady upstairs when she was young? Quite a looker in her day – in an academic kind of way.’

His eyes lit up. ‘Especially when she wore her pink lace lingerie to please me. With those black stockings and suspenders too! Oh, those stockings and suspenders …’

‘Careful, man, you’ll cream your jeans if you don’t watch out’

‘Jeans – something I’d never be caught dead in! Flannels, though, flannels are a different matter, I might well cream my flannels. In fact I think I have more than once. Pissed in them too. But as far as I can recall I’ve never shat in them. Standards, you know – one has to draw the line somewhere.’ 

‘Quite a few of you in here.’

‘Who else would there be? It’s not as if there are troops of people lining up in my life waiting to be photographed.’ He looked at one of the photographs and stroked his bald head. ‘If only I still had as much hair as you! Do you think your … what do you call them … dreadlocks would suit me?’

‘Er, not really.’ I carried on looking at the photos. ‘No disrespect, but you’re not exactly an oil painting are you?’

‘No argument there. Every morning all I see staring back at me out of the shaving mirror is an enormous egg sculpted out of lard. My body – what an engine of misery it is now! Once it was something I could always rely on. A machine, always there, always got me from A to B without fail. And the seat of some of my greatest pleasures too. The mouth, the belly, the cock, the anus – all the dark and secret places. But now it’s an instrument of torture. A rack specially reserved, designed and tailor-made for me alone. I’m deaf as a post. Grossly overweight. Can’t walk or swallow properly. Deep down there must be something wrong somewhere. The doctors won’t tell me anything. They’re past-masters, absolute geniuses, at avoidance and obfuscation. They say I should cut down on the drinking and smoking but at my age they can all go to hell.’

‘You still take the odd drink then?’

‘Take’s not the right word. I’m half-cut by noon, totally blotto by bedtime.’

‘Why do you do it then? I mean, let yourself get into these states? You’re an intelligent guy.’

He shrugged. ‘A bulwark against reality, I suppose. But then again maybe not. Maybe the opposite: connection not separation – the connection I’ve never managed to achieve.’

He paused and lit another cigarette. ‘You know, you walk through the university and you see them in couples walking round. Arm-in-arm, long hair and, yes, jeans, and there’s no question but that he’s fucking her. I missed out on all that. The sixties and all that jazz. Too late for me. Yet I must have been young once. At least I think I was. The frightening thing is that I can’t remember exactly what it felt like. The past I can’t feel and the future terrifies me.’

‘The thought of dying?’

‘What else? Every night I lie in bed awake before dawn thinking about it and waiting for the light to come creeping under the curtains. Waiting for another day to begin. Yet people behave as if it isn’t there all the time. They go on taking foreign holidays, joining choirs, collecting stamps … writing poems. He closed his eyes. ‘Ah, the old fools, why aren’t they screaming?’

‘So no life after death then?’

‘I’m not sure in my case there’s even been life before death! No, après moi, le néant. Sheer nullity – emptiness, void, nothingness going on forever’

‘But it was the same before you were born and you’ve lived happily enough with that.’

‘Yes, but then everything was just waiting for me to arrive, getting it all ready for me.’

‘That sounds a bit self-centred.’

‘Solipsism’s the word I think you’re trying to edge your way towards, Mr Easby. But self’s the man, I always say.’

‘No God then?’

‘What Him Upstairs? The father figure in the clouds with the long white wavy beard? Come off it. Religion’s something dreamt up by others to keep us sane and in the middle of the brightly lit highway. All the same, I don’t altogether reject religion. I do quite like visiting churches. Empty ones when the dusk is drawing in. And cemeteries too. Yes, I’m definitely fond of cemeteries, especially neglected overgrown ones.’ He went all vacant again. ‘Fields reclaimed by weeds and grass and time.’

‘You sound depressed, man.’

‘It’s my native element. I’m the deep sea diver into melancholy, sluicing it up for public consumption. It’s the cold dark ocean floor that I plumb, the wrack and rocks and ooze I make my realm. If you yanked me up into happiness, you’d probably give me the bends.’ He began humming softly under his breath, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies. Full fathom five … then added:

“I grow old among dreams,

A weather-worn marble triton

Among the streams.”

Yeats wrote that. He was a god to me once along with Lawrence, believe it or not. When I was young and green and watery. Life, it’s just a process of long progressive desiccation.’ 

‘You should get out more, man. Make an effort. Travel. Go abroad. Wouldn’t you like to go, say, to China?’

‘Only if I could come back the same day.’

‘Well, I can see that could be a problem. But you could afford to. It doesn’t look like you’re short of the odd bob or two.’

‘But they will keep sending me these bills! Each one a minute subtraction from the fullness the universe owes me. No, but you’re right. I’m comfortably enough placed. Year after year I’ve banked my screw. But you can’t be friends with money, can you? You can’t make love to it, can you? Can’t screw your own screw, so to speak? No, it just lies there. Like a reproach. It is intensely sad.’

With that he levered himself out of his armchair, got to his feet, nearly fell over, then tottered off down the corridor. A long drumming sound followed, broken by a series of explosive farts. ‘That’s better,’ he said, plonking himself back in his chair. ‘Now that looks like a dead soldier,’ he said, peering at the whisky bottle. I wonder, could I possibly prevail on you? He gave me a quick cunning look. ‘Persuade you, say, to nip out and get me another bottle of Bells. I’m none too mobile myself nowadays as you’ve no doubt noticed. I’ll reimburse you of course.’ 

Well, what could I do? It was getting on, but I felt sorry for the old guy and so I agreed. I went off in the van and eventually found an off-licence. When I got back he struggled to his feet gain, clasped the bottle with both hands and made me another of his little formal speeches. ‘I really am most deeply in your debt. Most kind of you. Now, have another drink.’  I was probably already well over the limit, so I held up my hand but he went ahead anyway and filled my glass to the brim. ‘You know, I’m really enjoying this. I rarely get the chance to meet someone in the ordinary swim of things, so to speak. In fact anyone at all nowadays. The dark, the isolation, the pervasive and non-specific feeling of unwellness – it’s all so … terminal. But I’m sure it’s been a great bore having to listen to an old fart like me droning on and on.’

‘No, not at all, man. A nice change to talk to someone educated.’

So we chatted on, even ended up laughing and joking if you can believe it. Finally I got up to leave. ‘Well, I’d better be off now. Thanks for all the drink and the talk. Can we settle up before I go? It’ll be £20 for the call-out, £20 for the power flush and £7.50 for the Bells. Cash would be best.’ (Why involve the taxman if you don’t have to? I always say.) 

It was as if a steel shutter had suddenly slammed down. A look of terror and suspicion immediately filled his eyes.

‘That much? Good God, the price of everything nowadays! Alright – but I can’t pay you right at the moment. You’ll have to send me a properly made out invoice.’

‘But it might be easier if you …’

‘No, out of the question. I can’t pay now. I simply can’t. You’ll have to post me your invoice.’

Difficult old bugger, I thought, but he seemed to be digging his heels in so there was no point in making an issue of it. We shook hands and I left. First thing next morning I did what he asked, made out a bill and posted it off. Then I heard nothing. Weeks went by and not a bean. It shocked me. I had him down as a mean bugger but not a welsher. So when I was next in the neighbourhood I made a point of calling by and knocking on the door. No answer, so I hammered some more. A neighbour threw open a window and popped her head out. ‘He’s not there,’ she yelled. ‘In hospital. Very ill.’ Then she lowered her voice. ‘It’s cancer we think. They say he polished off the remains of bottle of whisky in one go and that finally did for him.’

So that’s that, I thought, heading back to the van. I’m out nearly fifty quid. You live and learn. Well, I won’t get caught like that again. Then I came over all ashamed and guilty, especially as I might have had a hand in finishing him off. Poor old bugger, I thought, switching on the engine. What a way to go …’

*

Time passed. All the rest of that winter I was up to my ears dealing with frozen pipes and, inevitably, burst ones when it got warmer. Why can’t people take the time to lag their pipes? Then a surprise. One fine spring morning a parcel arrived out of the blue. Opening it. I found a bottle of twenty-year old malt, a cheque for £47.50 and a letter from the old man’s solicitor. He’d died in hospital the December last, it said. But before he’d died he’d made a point of asking for the enclosed to be forwarded. So the old man had remembered after all. And there was something else in the parcel: an odd little poem, just four lines long, something about needing to reach out. I remember wondering where he’d got it from. It’s still stuck there, stapled to the carbon of his invoice, yellowed now and fading. 

You know, retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A bit of a drag to be honest. All the time in the world and with nothing to fill it. You ought to get an interest, a hobby, my kids kept telling me. Get stuck in, get involved, get re-connected. Well, I tried various things: evening classes learning French, even bought myself a metal detector. Nothing grabbed me. Finally I got into genealogy – tracing my roots here and back in the West Indies as far as I could. That took me into history and reading and buying books about it. It was when I was in the bookshop in the city centre that I got the shock of my life. 

There it was, the enormous egg sculpted in lard staring back at me from the cover of a book. ‘Britain’s best loved post-war poet’ said the blurb. So I bought it along with some other books about him and began to work my way through them. 

Not my sort of thing but what he’d written grew on me. His poems were easier to understand than I’d expected – selfies, I decided, rather like those snaps of his only cleverly put together in words. And they definitely chimed with the man I remembered: a miserable old git at odds with life. Not to mention very non-PC in a lot of the stuff he wrote to his pals. Maybe his parents really did fuck him up. Toilet-trained him to death perhaps. ‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’, he calls himself in one of his poems. Either way he ended up blocked. Clogged, conflicted and afraid – and the more so as he aged. 

At the back I came across the four lines he’d sent me. They were the last verse of a poem he’d written to mark the opening of the Humber Bridge:

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,

As all lives do, reaching that we may give 

The best of what we are and hold as true:

Always it is by bridges that we live.

Reading it again in that bookshop, I felt cheered. But then I wondered: did he really mean it? Or was it something he felt he had to say, an official announcement as it were? Or even something that he was trying to convince himself of – something he needed to declare simply to keep putting one foot in front of the other? ‘What remains of us is love’: he wrote that too. But, beyond himself, did he ever really feel it? I wonder. Wanting to reach out, break through, but torn and doubting, I don’t think he ever truly crossed that bridge. But do any of us – completely? And maybe that is why we treasure him so much.