Mike had found it entertaining that some of his colleagues had stated their intention of becoming gardeners until the recession lifted; apparently the only requirements were an empty head and a desire to develop your muscles. Others had said they might be forced into teaching. Mike, at forty-five, had no idea what he would do. First he had to lose everything.
Billy patted Mike on the back, saying, not without an element of patronisation, ‘I like you sometimes, Daddy. But I want guitar lessons. So first I’ll need the guitar and the amp, like Tom has.’
Family life could appear chaotic, but theirs was finely organised, with every hour accounted for. As well as attending private schools, his sons had, as far as Mike could recall, tennis, Spanish, piano, swimming, singing and karate lessons, and they frequently attended the cinema, the theatre and football matches. Like most of his friends and acquaintances, Mike’s debts were huge, worth almost two years’ income. But he had always considered them — when he did consider them — to be only another outgoing. Somehow, sometime in the mid-1980s debt stopped being shameful and after 1989 there appeared to be general agreement: capitalism was flourishing and there was no finer and more pleasant way to live but under it, singing and spending.
Mike pushed his plate away. After supper he liked to retire to his room where he was studying Stravinsky, listening to his work piece by piece in the order of its composition while reading about the composer’s life. Once a fortnight he and his pals held a record group, playing music to one another. Recently an irksome sculptor in this gang had looked straight at Mike and mockingly referred to ‘the cult of money’, calling his profession and its office ethic ‘fundamentalist’, because ardent belief was paramount and doubt discouraged.
The sculptor held the condescending and false view that the imagination was only active in art. Mike had been furious but unable to dismiss from his mind the damned man’s remark with regard to how he lived his life. He wondered whether he’d become hard and, like the sculptor, incapable of thinking his way into others’ lives.
But he did reckon that the desire of the public to see bankers as thuggish, voracious philistines was simply the wish to separate the banking system from the rest of society, as people would prefer not to think of abattoirs while they were eating. Nonetheless, like many people, Mike had also worried whether the present catastrophe was punishment for years of extravagance and self-indulgence; that that was the debt which had to be paid back in suffering. Yet how could his family be considered despicable or guilty of this, when all they’d asked for was continuous material improvement?
Mike wandered across to the dishwasher, dropped in the lump of detergent, shut the door, tapped the start button and the world went black. The clock on the cooker stopped, its bright digits stuck on four round zeros; the microwave halted in mid-turn. All sound was suddenly suspended, apart from a dog barking in a nearby garden.
Out of that moment’s nothing the little boy’s voice called, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad — do something!’
Mike fumbled in a drawer for a torch, crossed the house and was eventually able to follow the beam down the rackety wooden steps into the basement. But in his stockinged feet on the slippery stair, he slipped and lost his footing. For a second he believed he was crashing onto his back and would break his neck. How easy it was to fall, and how tempting it was — suddenly would be best — to die!
Grabbing the rail, he steadied himself, took some breaths — smelling gas and rotting cardboard — and padded down to the concrete floor where he stood surrounded by paint cans, broken children’s toys, a decade’s worth of discarded purchases and bags of credit card receipts.
There in the semi-darkness, gripping and ungripping his fists, he wondered whether he might go mad with fury. He knew he would be shut out now from the company of those he knew and liked, becoming a sort of ‘disappeared’. He fantasised about informing the national newspapers of the idiocy and corruption in his office, betraying those narrow-minded fools as he had been betrayed. Failing lack of universal interest in that, he’d buy petrol, break in, burn the place down and see how the bastards liked it. But how long would he hate them for, and what effect would such extended hating have on him? Would he die of cancer? Like others he had actually believed he was an exception and would be spared!
Finding at last the little lever which made everything work again, he pulled it. There was a surge and their awful world started up once more with its humming and vibrating.
On his return to the light he couldn’t believe Tom had resumed murdering dark-skinned people in some sort of Third World landscape.
‘Turn it off right now!’ he shouted. ‘That’s enough!’
‘Bugger off.’
‘Tom please, I beg you. Go and do your homework. The world’s a filthy rough place run by jackals and murderers. You need to be prepared, if such a thing is possible!’
‘Leave me alone! Don’t ever talk to me again!’
Mike grabbed the boy and pulled him up out of the chair by his blue school shirt. ‘Do what I say sometimes!’
‘Fuck off, evil old man, just die! I’ve been wanting to do this all day!’
‘I never spoke to my father like that.’
‘Mum says you did.’
Tom was taller, stronger and fitter than Mike; for fun he sometimes put his father in a headlock and pulled him round the room.
‘Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!’ Mike yelled at the boy. He ripped the controller from Tom’s hand and threw it down. Tom lurched from his chair and made as to head-butt his father; Mike pushed him back in the chest and Tom stumbled and fell onto his backside. Mike swore again and then switched off the TV.
‘What’s going on? Is this good parenting?’ His wife, who appeared to dress in diamonds and gold when at lunch with her friends, came in wearing tracksuit bottoms, an old T-shirt and thick glasses, with white slippers she’d taken from a hotel. ‘Are you all right? What’s he done now?’ she said to Tom.
‘I think he’s broken my arm,’ said Tom, rubbing his elbow.
‘Your father’s mad,’ said Imogen.
‘He refused to turn off the game,’ said Mike. ‘He shows me neither love nor respect.’
‘How could he?’ she said. ‘It’s too late! You’ve spoiled and neglected him, you ridiculous, foolish man. And now you expect him to obey you!’
‘He tore my button right off,’ said Tom.
‘And who will sew it back on?’ said Imogen, staring at Mike.
She worked for a charity three days a week. Inevitably it was poorly paid, but she was the family conscience and Mike knew it was important to appear generous. Unlike some of his friends, he didn’t want a woman who worked as hard as him, a woman who was never at home.
Billy, who Mike wished wouldn’t grow up, but wanted to suspend at this age for ever, reiterated, ‘Stop arguing and tell me whether we’re definitely going to get my guitar on Saturday!’
‘I know I did say we would,’ said Mike. ‘But I’ll have to think about it.’
‘You were in a band. What were they called?’
‘The Strange Trousers.’
‘What a stupid name for a band,’ called Tom, who was now texting furiously.
Mike said, ‘So is the name of your group, Sixty-Nine, when you don’t even know what that is.’
‘I do. And you haven’t had a sixty-nine for years, old man, and never will again.’
‘Wait until you get married.’
Imogen said, ‘You promised Billy a guitar, an amp and a microphone, so now you have to deliver.’
‘Just call me the Delivery Man,’ said Mike. ‘That’s my name. But even you might have noticed there’s a financial crash taking place.’