Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [142]
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way as a schoolboy would be filled with a mixture of thrill and dread when planning some transgression. This, he thought, is how criminals must feel as they travel to the scene of the crime: hearts racing, mouths dry, every sense at a high pitch. And what he was proposing to do was, for him, almost criminal. He was planning to paint Bertie’s room, unilaterally, without consultation, in complete defiance of Irene’s wishes. It was she who had chosen the existing colour-scheme, opting for pink because of its alleged calming properties and its refutation of the culturallyconditioned assumptions about the preferences of boys. Boys don’t like pink, was the conventional wisdom. Well, we would soon see about that! There was no reason why a sensitive boy, a boy brought up to eschew the straitjacket of narrow gender roles, should not approve of pink.
Stuart knew that Bertie did not like his room – or “space” as Irene called it – to be pink. He had told him as much and had also said that as long as his room remained pink he could not possibly invite any friends to the flat, not that he had any friends, of course.
Stuart had listened sympathetically to his son. “But you must have some friends, Bertie,” he said. “What about that boy, Tofu?
Isn’t he your friend?”
Bertie looked doubtful. “I’m not sure about him,” he said.
“He may be my friend, but I’m not too sure. He keeps asking me for money and food – he’s a vegan, you know. I think that he may like me just because I can give him the things he wants.”
“Some friends are a bit like that to begin with,” said Stuart.
“But then they change after a while and become real friends –
friends who like you quite apart from anything you can do for them.” He paused. “And what about that girl, Olive?”
Bertie shook his head. “She thinks I want her to get lockjaw,”
he said. “And I don’t. I don’t want anyone to get lockjaw, Daddy. I really don’t.”
Stuart smiled. “Of course you don’t, Bertie!” And then he had thought: but do I want anybody to get lockjaw? – and he had decided that the answer was that he did. There were public figures, and one or two so-called singers, he thought he would 300 Stuart Paints Bertie’s Room
like to get lockjaw, which he imagined was the only way, even if somewhat drastic, of getting them to keep quiet. But such thoughts were uncharitable.
Now, climbing up the stairs to the flat in 44 Scotland Street, Stuart looked at his watch. Irene would be out, he thought, as she was taking Bertie to his saxophone lesson and they were both going to an extra yoga session after that. They would not be back until well after seven, which would give him a good two hours in which to paint Bertie’s room. It was not a big room, and paint-rollers covered a lot of wall in a very short time. By the time Irene and Bertie returned, then, they would be faced with a fait accompli.
He let himself into the flat. To verify that the coast was clear, he called out to Irene. There was silence; just the ticking of a clock and the humming, somewhere in the background, of a fridge. Stuart deposited the tins of paint and the paint-roller in Bertie’s room and then went to change out of his office clothes. He knew that Irene did not like him to leave his clothes lying on the floor, and so he tossed his shirt down onto the bedside rug and threw his dirty socks into a corner. As he did so, he thought of Terry, and of how proud he would have been of him to see this. He was sure that Terry left his clothes on the floor of his flat; mind you, being a relationshipfree man, Terry would not have had anybody to object to the practice.
Once changed, Stuart went back to Bertie’s room. He moved around the pink walls, taking down the pictures which Irene had pinned up. A poster proclaiming the merits of Florence, the periodic table, a picture of Mahler. He sighed as he took them down and, on sudden impulse, rather than fold the periodic table away for putting back up once the new paint had dried, he tore it up and tossed it into the wastepaper