Connery (Part 3)

The Big Idea

The first time I got the big idea, I was in La Rochelle and I was fourteen years old. It was a school trip and we had hardly any time at all. We had come down from the north in a coach, shouting, screaming, singing ‘Charlie Had a Pigeon’, being yelled at and then falling miraculously quiet for half an hour, before starting all over again. We crossed the English Channel in a ferry – Fiona Tingle was sick on herself – stopped at the coastal town and would soon be on our way back. It was hardly worth it but the idea of sleeping in France was beyond the pale. We walked around the town as a noisy and constantly shushed group, and we went for a meal in a restaurant with red paper tablecloths and the chips came in little wicker baskets and we went in the shops. We visited the harbour and the tower and the museum. We bought gifts for our parents and siblings and there were all these people. It was the furthest away, I’d ever been, and I was amazed to hear real American accents that weren’t on the TV and Japanese people speaking actual Japanese.

On the coach down to Dover, Martin Last mushed up an egg sandwich he had in a bag that his mother had given him. He mushed it up into a ball and ate it. I was so disgusted I wouldn’t eat egg sandwiches again until I was in my thirties. And even then… I was still Martin’s friend though. I just didn’t want to stand too close to him. He would always smell of egg sandwiches as far as I was concerned. I hated – and to this very day still hate – anyone being disrespectful to food. Mum wouldn’t let us watch Tizwas because she said it made her think of all the starving Africans with the big swollen bellies and always with the flies clustering around their eyes and mouths. ‘How can they stand them?’ she said. Taylor told her that the custard pies were made from shaving foam. She’d seen it done on Blue Peter. But mum said it was the principle of the thing. I wondered what an actual custard pie would taste like. The name made it sound delicious but shaving foam pie was just yuk and I was with mum on this one and felt Taylor deserved her slap this time.

We were hassled into a canteen called Café Rondeau which was on Rue Churchill by Mr. Lipman the Graphic Communications teacher and Mrs. Glove, the French teacher. The class collapsed into sleeve-chewing hysterics when Mrs. Glove couldn’t make herself understood to the waitress at the cafeteria. She complained of their accents being different – ‘incomprehensible dialect’ – and another younger waitress came out and spoke English to everyone. She had a wonderful accent and we were all almost instantly in love with her. She was probably only a couple of years older than we were, but she seemed amazingly sophisticated, with red hair in a long straight ponytail. She no doubt read novels and never squashed a sandwich into a ball and ate it for a bet. And she smiled happily. There was no edge of fear; no nervous tremble to it. It was like she was really, really, really relaxed.

Martin asked to see the note again and so I dug into the inside pocket of my bomber jacket and pulled out the green envelope. I unfolded it carefully as if it were made of some ancient parchment. I opened it and took out the small sheet of paper and smoothed it out very careful not to smudge it and then too late checking my hands weren’t dirty – they weren’t thankfully. I held it flat with my fingers on the corners so it wouldn’t curl closed.

‘Wow,’ Martin said. He read it aloud. ‘Best of luck Samuel, Roger Moore!’

He laughed and I nodded.

‘That’s amazing,’ he said. ‘And you saw him at the airport?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We were dropping off my Great Uncle Paddy. He was catching a plane.’

‘Irish?’

‘Was originally, but he lives in Canada now. He’s my mum’s uncle.’

‘Who’s your mum’s uncle? Paul Daniels?’ Gavin Steer sat down next to me with his arm thumping down across my shoulders and pushing at my chair with his hip. Gavin was huge, played rugby and hurt people. Nothing he liked more than kneeling on someone and spitting slowly into their faces, watching the drool dangle and swing before dropping. He was already half not coming to school and told everyone that as soon as he could, he would be joining the police. Gavin Steer as a policeman was a scary thought even then. You’ll be delighted to learn he ended up working in a supermarket. On the tills.

‘No!’ I said.

‘Paul Daniels!?’ Martin laughed as if it was funnier than the Two Ronnies; his laughter tinged with abject terror.

‘What’s this?’ Gavin snatched at the piece of paper and it was in his hand. I tried to get it back, but he slapped at my face hard and held me back as he held the piece of paper high and away from me. ‘Best of luck Samuel, Roger Moore!’ he read and then burst into urinary laughter, all the time his fingers carelessly poking at my eye and biting into my collar.

‘Give it back, Gavin,’ I said.

‘You did this yourself,’ he said.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘He met him at the airport,’ Martin piped up.

‘Shut up you Deacon,’ Gavin said. ‘You met Roger Moore at the airport?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was he wearing?’

‘A light blue suit. A white shirt and a red tie. He only had a small bag.’

‘Where was he flying to?’

‘New York.’

‘Where was he when you met him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was he standing on his own, sitting reading the paper, in a queue? In the Duty Free? In the bog?’

Just then our sandwiches came along with our Orangina and little bowls of crisps. Bowls of crisps? We looked at each other, wonderingly. We’d all ordered Orangina. It was something that you could only get in France and it had shone from our textbooks as a magical gallic drink. It turned out to be basically yellow Fanta.

‘Come on, Gavin. Give it back,’ trying not to plead as I pleaded.

‘I’ll give it back to you, if you admit that you wrote it.’

Thinking back now, years having passed, water under the bridge, the clear eyes of maturity, I have to admire Gavin. He had a brutish cunning to him. If I wanted to preserve this most valuable of my possessions, I first had to render it valueless. So, I’d have it, but it wouldn’t be worth cuckoo spit.

‘Roger Moore wrote it and he gave me it,’ I insisted.

Gavin nodded, like I’d told him something he already knew and as he held me back with his arm, he scrunched the piece of paper up in his hand into a small moon shaped ball and put it in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully on it.

‘It doesn’t taste like Roger Moore,’ he lifted his glass and drank his Orangina, swirling it around before making a big show of swallowing and then finishing with an explosive ‘Ah!’ of deep satisfaction as it went down taking my autograph with it.

I picked up the fork from the table and stabbed Gavin Steer in the face.

Luckily, this was the eighties and the whole thing was filed under ‘an incident’. That’s how my parents were told. There was an ‘incident’ on the trip. The way Mrs. Glove described it, there was the quality of an accident. A scuffle and somehow some cutlery had got in there and someone slipped and before you knew it Gavin was standing horrified, blood streaming down his face and a fork waggling not quite deep enough to hold still in his cheek, but still deep enough to stay there, unassisted. It became that story almost immediately. It’s what they told the French doctor who happened to be in the café and helped clean the wound and put on a large plaster and didn’t seem to care what the explanation was. Gavin got pain killers and a pack of crushed ice and was supervised by Mrs. Glove the whole of the rest of the trip. She cared for him as if she cared for him.

Mr Lipman took me for a walk on the beach and away from the fuss. He held my shoulder straight from behind and shoved me forward, frog-marching me towards the waves as they crashed on the pebbly shore. I thought he was going to march me into the water and order me to swim back to England. But he stopped just short, close enough that an occasionally ambitious wave caused us both to do a little ignoble hop backwards.

‘What the bloody hell were you thinking Coleridge?’ said Mr. Lipman in that husky voice, he’d cultivated via woodbines and a tumour that would soon grow malignant and kill him, eating half his body weight before it did so. We’d have a raffle to send him to Lourdes, but it didn’t work. ‘This is the kind of nonsense I expect from a lout like Steer, but you, you’re a sensible lad. A quiet one. Bit weird. Has to be said. But you’ve got a head on your shoulders. What could have possessed you to do such a thing?’

I looked out at the water and it made me calmer. I wondered about trying to cry. I wondered if that would soothe Mr. Lipman, or just disgust him even more. He seemed to want to forgive me. He wanted the whole thing to get very small. Small enough that if anybody said anything about it, he could say something like ‘Oh, boys will be boys. I didn’t even think it worth mentioning.’ Now, I understand he was already thinking of parents and the headmaster and even his own reputation. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to take these school trips anymore. Would that matter? Was it worth the bother? Anything was better than work.

‘He started it sir,’ I said.

‘Of course, he bloody started it,’ he coughed and spat. ‘Gavin Steer is always starting it. Whenever ‘it’ happens, he’s close by grinning. I’m not dense boy. That’s his role in life. The role God has given him. He’s God’s little lout that the rest of us must put up with. And eventually the police will no doubt deal with him. But you… what about you? Is that what you want? Is this a future? You want people to think of you the way they think of him? Because let me tell you son, I don’t think you’ve got the stomach for it, Coleridge. There’ll always be another little lout. Oh, you all think you’re so big and tough, and you are until another one comes over and sticks a fork in your face. How would you like that? Eh? How would you like a fork in your face?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t what?’

‘Wouldn’t like a fork in my face, sir.’

Lipman had this way of not really understanding what a rhetorical question was. He’d push it until it was ridiculous. Must be an occupational hazard for teachers. Like the way they always had loud voices and bad hair. Always trying to explain things to children and teenagers, even when they weren’t talking to teenagers and children. I could tell, even then, that Lipman was worried about this more than he was angry with me. He made it clear that secretly he was happy that Gavin had got stabbed in the face and wouldn’t have minded doing some stabbing himself. But it was me he was worried about. It disturbed him because he had us all in our specific boxes and I’d just jumped out of mine and into a totally different box. One he obviously didn’t think I was suited for.

‘It’s so out of character,’ he said quietly to himself, shaking his head in irritated disbelief.

Mrs. Glove and Mr. Lipman had a conference outside the coach as we stared at them through aquarium big windows and the gravelly sound of rain started on the roof of the coach and windscreen and windows. Before we’d boarded, they’d forced Gavin and I to shake hands. I’d shown some reluctance but then copied Sean Connery’s firm grip. I noticed Gavin wince a little and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I suddenly realised he was scared of me. It was all I could do not to laugh in his face. Their story settled, Lipman and Glove got back on the bus and we drove back to the ferry terminal and across choppy dark waters to England with half the class being sick over the rails, stringy white sick that blew back onto their anoraks and trousers. Orangina and crisps.

On the coach, the story was already being repeated and elaborated on as some of us dozed and some of us read and the rest of us talked and shouted and laughed. ‘Charlie had a pigeon,’ was not sung anymore. There was a weary solemnity, interrupted by the occasional fit of giggles when Mrs Glove farted in her sleep. Power had been redistributed. Tenderly holding onto his bandage, Gavin sat ashen-faced next to his mate – Daryl Cotter – but Daryl ignored him and talked to Jenny Blackthorn across the aisle. I was a nutcase. A loony. Not to be liked, not to be befriended, but certainly to be respected. I hadn’t done what most kids our age do in a fight. I hadn’t gone all wet faced and snotty screams. The blood had stayed wherever it is blood stays and hadn’t rushed into my face, turning it into a burning traffic light. I hadn’t shrieked and I hadn’t cried. I’d been cold. Cool, even. Cool. And I was big remember. Big for my age.

 At school, Tuesday morning, there was a trip to the headmaster’s office, but it wasn’t much more than a stern chat.

‘I heard you were provoked, and I have taken that into account,’ said the ex-sergeant major, Mr. Caneely. ‘Sorely provoked as I’m led to believe. But as this seems to be an isolated incident and Mr. Lipman assures me that it is quite out of character, I believe we can draw a line under the whole affair.’

Gavin’s own parents were scared of him and I began to detect this invisible truth around me that secretly everyone had wanted to hurt Gavin in some way. He had been taken down a peg or two, got what he deserved, Daryl Cotter told me as he broke his millionaire’s shortbread (we called caramel slice at the time) in two and give me the bigger half. He’d had it coming. The twat.

The only person who got even slightly angry about it was my mum and that was just because she always got angry when she had to deal with the school. It got to the point what with her shouting and Irish fury that they were apologetic to her about having to have at least a cursory discussion of her son’s involvement in the ‘incident’ at La Rochelle.

But none of this relates to the idea I got at La Rochelle. This is all something else. Interesting for its own sake, no doubt, but also, in a manner of speaking, a diversion, a distraction. Sorry. Maybe it’s the medication they give me here. Sometimes it makes it difficult to focus.

The idea had occurred to me earlier in the day. Long before I’d stuck a fork in Gavin. We had been walking around the seafront towards the aquarium – there was an aquarium which was where I had got the idea of the windows in the bus being the same as the tanks in the aquarium – and I was noticing all the people from all the different places and looking out at the curve of the harbour I was also taken by the familiar immensity of the sea. I had an almost physical feeling of location. I could feel we were significantly south of Slatecross and Feather Lane and Barrow and Hampton Rock. And there were all these other people. Crowds. All of them had come from different places, many of them from many, many, many miles further away than I had come. Thousands of miles and different hemispheres even. It was like a map in an Indiana Jones film but there were loads of arrows as all the people traversed the planet to come here, near me. And I didn’t know any of these people. And none of them – outside of our school party – knew me.

I started looking at these people. Properly looking at them. Not as a crowd. Not as a group. But as individuals. People with specific hats on and anoraks, jumpers and coats, people eating chips out of a cone of paper, or taking a photograph of the historic panorama. People with cold sores and plastic bags dangling from their wrists, hunchbacked by rucksacks and haltered with camera straps, mouths messy with food and eyes bleary with happiness and confusion, uneasiness and the latent urge to go home or back to the hotel for a lie down. How different this place was; how the same. People with small children, attached to them like different animals. People with glasses and sunglasses. People with sunglasses worn over their normal glasses. People with the desperate helpless cheerfulness of holiday makers. People with walking sticks. People who held each other’s hands, put their arms around each other. Held each other’s elbows. People who stopped to look at something. People wafting themselves with postcards as they looked at the rack to choose more. Because it cost so many francs for 10. And do we really need ten? People asking other people about currency conversion. People who bought giant pencils and clothes with the name of the place on it, and mugs and ashtrays. People who had cars in the car park, or coaches idling somewhere waiting for them. Or hotel rooms gaping in their absence. There were some children and some young couples who were on their honeymoons but mainly there were old people. Prosperous people enjoying their retirement.

I wouldn’t have thought that then. All I saw were adults at large in the world with nothing particular to connect them to the place. Nothing around them to hold them secure. They could float off into the sky like one of the large novelty helium filled balloons that were being sold on a stick at one of the stalls on the sea front. Their faces wore smiles and watery eyes. Open and naively hopeful of enjoying something, but not sure what or why. Strangers who were lost in the world and holding onto tickets and passports and secretly wanting to return. But their homes were oceans away.

I’m concentrating on the Americans and Japanese because it was a large American man with his shirt tucked in and bulging above his trousers and his camera dangling from his neck and bouncing on his belly and the sunglasses were just lenses that he had clipped onto his regular glasses and which he had tilted up because of the skies so dark with waiting rain that it seemed more like six o’clock in the afternoon instead of the ten o’clock in the morning it actually was. He took out a notebook and a pencil, licked the nib and started to take notes. He stopped and sat on the bench on the promenade, crouched into an apostrophe, and I watched him, waiting for Martin to tie the shoelace of his trainer.

And this was the idea.

I could kill this man and if no one saw me do it then no one would ever know it was me.