Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [68]
At the desk, still staring at the e-mail, I’m going back, in film-strips and flashes: Tim and I walking home in the dark after the pubs closed, stopping at the bright-lit chippie off Longford Road. Undoing the tight-wrapped packet and eating the sodden fish and potatoes straight from the paper while watching The Young Ones in a room smelling of hot grease and vinegar. In 1989 we wore garbage bags and stood in the rain for hours before finagling our way into Centre Court of Wimbledon under creative pretenses. One moment we were sodden proles, the next we were seated within full view of a duchess. Tim got the better seat, but sadly he was spotted and bounced almost immediately. As the guards escorted him past me, we studiously avoided eye contact as previously agreed and I subsequently enjoyed the entire match. Edberg versus Mayotte, if my memory brackets are accurate. On the way home from Wimbledon well after midnight, Tim’s car broke down on the motorway. A late-arriving tow truck took us deep into the countryside and pulled inside a barn, at which point the furtive mechanic pinpointed a problem with the clutch and named a ransom for repair. With the same easy mumble he would use to request his fifth lager, Tim told the guy to bugger off and drove us home clutchless, his trucker-shifting not impeccable but serviceable, and hours later we lurched through the final traffic circle and herky-jerked to a stop in the driveway at dawn. Another of my visits coincided with the rise of electronic trivia games in the pubs, and our combination of wit—Tim’s in science, engineering, English sport, and culture and mine in fluffy minutiae—did not make us rich, but did regularly enable us to pay for lunch. How solid the pound coins sounded when the machine chugged them into the tray. We road-tripped to Wales and the Lake District, hiking for miles in the rain, sleeping in a damp tent, and stopping to eat in pubs where the patrons switched to Welsh upon our entry. Tim was a serial hobbyist—one year darts, another year winemaking, next year the curry club—with a tendency to immerse himself headlong (learn all the lingo, get all the gear) before abruptly moving on. During his competitive fishing phase I accompanied him to a canal-side tourney where he diddled at the water with an absurdly long pole and used a slingshot to launch maggot clusters across the channel as chum. Another time he joined a sporting clays club and took me on a round, reveling in our rare good shots by adopting the Queen’s English: “Jolly hockeysticks! Bag another grouse, Jeeves!” Oddly enough, when mimicking the Queen, Tim was quite understandable.
One very late night after everyone had been drinking with the exception of square, teetotaling me, I chauffeured Tim’s girlfriend home while Tim trailed behind on a moped he had resurrected from a junk heap. (Whether it is more dangerous to allow a sober-but-right-lane-imprinted Wisconsin rube to navigate the narrow roads and traffic circles of suburban Britain while attempting to shift a dodgy left-handed manual transmission with his nondominant hand at 2:00 a.m. or to yield the wheel to a tipsy native is a conundrum to be parsed another time—we were young and predictably senseless.) Tim had got through some lager, so I kept checking his one wobbly headlight in the rearview mirror. A kilometer from home, I looked up, and the light had disappeared. We circled back. Shortly our own headlights illuminated Tim, placidly pushing the moped along the dark street. As we drew nearer, I could see the bike was bent and badly scratched.
“What happened?” I asked.
Tim looked at me, a little blurry, but wholly unperturbed.
“I f’got t’balance,” he slurred. And then he pushed off into the night.
We circled again, caught up, drove slow beside him, and saw him safely into the house. When we left he was staring into the open fridge, contemplating a sandwich.
The sun is fully up and bright. It is early afternoon in Cannock by now, so I call Tim’s mother Sylvia. It was very hard, she says. He wouldn’t let us contact you