Last weekend I was at my son’s Christmas school fair. The school fair was taking place in the old
covered market. It was on the spot where
the pet store used to be when I was young, with kittens and puppies in cages
and so on. There were perhaps ten,
eleven trestle tables set out with things the kids had made – jams, cakes, clay
pots, one kid had made a catapult. What
anyone else would consider bric a brac.
My son hadn’t really wanted to go, but his teacher insisted, and so did his mother – my wife, and so did I. In the end the fair passed off just fine, no
tears, tantrums, and most of the jams, cakes etcetera actually sold!
It was when I and some of the other parents were helping
pack away the various tables, chairs, surplus goods into cardboard boxes that
this interesting thing happened. My son
was with me at the time, wrapping left over slices of rum cake in paper towels
to go into the Tupperware my wife had supplied.
My wife. I told her
what I am about to tell you over dinner that night, when the kids were upstairs
but she didn’t really take in the meaning of it – we had just had an argument
about something else, probably my getting a new job with better working hours,
and she was preoccupied with that.
So, this drunk comes up to me, or at least that was my first
instinct – that he was a drunk I mean, smelly, perhaps threatening, you get the
idea. He’s around five feet six, seven,
quite sturdy. I’m six feet three, also
quite sturdy, so I wasn’t intimidated, but I did have my son with me. Anyway, he’s
wearing a blue bobble hat, a large backpack and he’s cradling a can of special brew in
a brown paper bag. ‘Merry Christmas’, he
says to me in a thick voice. ‘And to
you’, I say, and go back to my packing, hoping my son hasn’t noticed and the
drunk will leave us alone.
‘Merry Christmas’, I hear him say again, and then he says
something about Whitney Houston. Whitney
Houston! Still, I ignore him, continue
packing. Then my son speaks up, ‘Daddy’,
he says, ‘I’m done’. And he is, all the slices of rum cake are wrapped and tidily placed in the Tupperware, he’s also
put the lid on. ‘Good’ I say and sweep
my son up in my arms, protectively I guess.
Now, however, the drunk has latched on to me, he thinks in
his addled mind that because I have stood up I am going to engage him. Of course, I’ve other ideas, but I also know
my wife won’t be here to pick us up for a half hour, and something in me tells
me we’ll be stuck with the drunk until then.
My father always used to say to trust your first
instinct. He had this catch phrase, ‘the
more you think the more you stink’. But
standing in front of this drunk, who had just wished me ‘Merry Christmas’, with
my young son in my arms, I was torn between an immediate desire to tell him to
clear off, and what I tried to suggest to my wife was some kind of innate compassion.
Sure, I felt a bit sorry for him at that moment, but it was
nothing like what I felt when he started telling me his story.
He was from Romania . He had come over with his English wife to
start their new life together, only for her to meet someone else, perhaps even
someone like me, and tell this guy to get lost.
In between sips of his beer he told me how he was ‘finito’, ‘caput’ – I
think that means finished in Romanian, I don’t know. And that he had a broken heart. Whitney Houston according to this guy also
died of a broken heart. He put a rose in
the local church when he learned of her death, or so he said. Lit a candle and all!
My first wife, I should mention at this point, left me out
of the blue. I remember for two, three
years I felt bad, low, unable to move on.
Difference is, I had a job, money, and friends. Perhaps in that order.
Because here’s what our conversation left me thinking - that
people have to be useful human beings.
This Romanian, we chatted until my wife turned up, my son in
my arms half listening. He had been
kicked out by his wife, lost his job at the same time, had been roaming the
streets for a month, would spend Christmas doing the same thing. He showed me some photos of his past life, a holiday he had been on to Venice ,
pictures of him standing on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, sitting in a
gondola, all of the touristy things. He
also told me he had been a soldier in Bosnia .
When my wife finally arrived, she took my son and began
packing things into the car. I had a
lump in my throat I have to admit. I
could see this proud man was helpless, heart broken, caput as he kept on
saying. I didn’t know what to do, how to
be useful. I tried to remember the name
of a hostel in town someone I knew had been involved with to tell him to
go to, but couldn’t. When it was time to
leave, I gave him a note, told him to buy some dinner for the night. After everything he had told me it felt like
a token gesture.
And then, as I turned to leave, he asked me this. He asked me what my telephone number was so
we could talk again. I knew this was
impossible. I knew my wife would be wary
of someone who to her was a drunk – smelly, threatening – becoming involved in
any way with us. So I lied. Said I didn’t have a telephone. And we parted.
While my wife was cooking dinner over the gaslight stove
later in the evening I realised why I had lied.
This man could not be of any use to me in my life. And I could not really be any use to him, at least outside the old covered market with my young son in my arms, at least as things were. We would not, perhaps never, be able to develop
a mutual friendship, unless his misery turned to something better.
Or so it seemed then, and so it seems today.
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