Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [22]
“No.”
“I see.” Roake shifted a knee and opened a drawer. “There’s a form to fill in, of course. Always a form.” He put sheets of stapled paper on the desk but left his hand resting on them. “There’s a waiting list, as you’ll appreciate.”
“Is there?”
“Oh, yes.”
The way he said it started something cooking inside George.
“How long’s this waiting list?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. It’s not so much the length of the list. More a question of when a house becomes vacant and which families on the list have priority. According to the number of children, and so forth. The quality of their present accommodation. Amenities. That sort of thing. There’s an assessment process.”
George clasped his hands together and stared at the linoleum between his feet.
After a moment or two, he said, “D’you mind if I smoke?”
“I’d rather you didn’t, actually.”
George nodded, slowly, and without lifting his head said, “I’ve been in the British army for fifteen years. I came out a month ago. I survived Dunkirk. With seven other blokes and only a Thompson submachine gun and a rifle between us, I marched two thousand Italian prisoners out of Benghazi. I had dysentery and had to stop the whole ruddy column every time I needed a shit. I was at El Alamein, and a German 88 hit the unit next to us and the blood came down on us like rain. In forty-six, when the heroic ruddy conscripts came home to parades and free beer and women, I was sent to Palestine. I was sitting with my mates in a bar a hundred yards from the King David Hotel when the bloody Irgun blew it up. We spent forty-eight hours digging stinking bodies out of the rubble. The flies were unbelievable. I’ve come home to a . . . a hovel I share with the wife and our three-year-old son and her evil mother. It’s got no running water, no light, and stinks of paraffin; the roof leaks, and we pay rent to a ruddy farmer who lives in a manor house and owns half the flamin’ county. It’s like I’ve fought a war and ended up living in the Middle Ages or summat. What does the G stand for?”
“Pardon?”
George leaned forward and tapped the nameplate. “G. ROAKE. What’s the G stand for?”
“Oh, right. It’s Gordon, actually.”
“Give me a new house, Gordon. I fucking deserve it.”
Roake rested the lower part of his face in a cup of skeletal fingers.
“Yes,” he said, “you do.” He slid the form across the desk. “Fill this in, Mr. Ackroyd. I have to tell you, however, that, of itself, national service does not give you any special advantage.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No.”
George folded his arms and sat back in the chair.
“How about you, Gordon?”
“Sorry?”
“The war. Were you in it?”
There was a sneer in the question.
Roake blinked at him through his spectacles.
“Yes. However, unlike you, Mr. Ackroyd, I didn’t see a great deal of action. I spent almost three years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Well, labor camps, to be accurate. In Burma, mostly.”
“Ah,” George said, embarrassed, enduring that familiar feeling of being outranked and outflanked. He cleared his throat. “That would’ve been tough, I should think.”
“Yes,” Roake said, “I think it would be fair to say that. Of the one hundred and eight men under my command, only eleven survived. Not all of us are glad of it.”
He held out the form.
“Fill this in, Mr. Ackroyd. I’ll do my best for you.”
“Thanks,” George said, adding, out of habit, “sir.”
It took George almost a month to deliver the form back to the town hall. For reasons he did not want to share with himself, he had decided to keep it secret. He filled it out, carefully and only slightly mendaciously, at his bench at Ling’s during the second week of his work there. Then, when he thought it was done, he discovered that he would also have to produce his marriage certificate and Clem’s birth certificate. He had no idea where these were and could think of no plausible reason to ask. So in stolen moments he hunted through the nooks and crannies of Thorn Cottage. He found his marriage certificate in the front room, his mother-in-law’s dark museum.