Baby Steps

“Take it nice and slow,” says the warder who is escorting Barry to the high security prison. “Baby steps!” His voice isn’t really unkind. It’s just the kind of thing that prison warders say. Force of habit, Barry supposes, as much as anything else. As if he had a choice, shackled as he is! He wonders if he could risk saying, “Well, I could hardly break into a jog, could I?” But he doesn’t particularly want to say it anyway. The warder steers him up the steps of the van, and perhaps he thinks he is helping, too. At any rate, Barry mutters, “Thank you,” and though the warder doesn’t say anything along the lines of “Don’t mention it” or “You’re welcome,” the grunt he gives in response doesn’t seem hostile. He wonders if he is being given any credit for his guilty plea. The judge acknowledged that had saved trauma for the victims, but it did not incline her to leniency. He doesn’t hold it against her. He’s not exactly a “hang ‘em, flog ‘em” type, but his views on crime and punishment have never been that liberal either.

     He’s the only person in the van, and thinks he prefers it that way. His Dad had a van, he remembers. He was a builder, and a well-respected local tradesman. He never had any aspirations to call himself an interior designer or anything of the like. He was content to be a builder.

     Barry has never been particularly keen on plants and flowers, though he’s had cacti and an odd Yucca plant in his time. But now he suddenly thinks of what he will never see again, or at least, not until he is a very old man and his sight may have faded, and he may have forgotten it ever mattered. He thinks of the almost unnatural sheen of lilac against a blue morning sky, of the jewelled colours and of the fragrance, and he thinks of tulip fields and lavender fields. He’s never been much of a drinker, but he thinks of the cold beers he may never drink again sitting out in the sunshine, or in a cosy pub with a blazing log fire. He’s not a religious man, and has never gone overboard about children, though he has a soft spot for his nephew Carl, but he thinks of children at Christmas, singing carols with their faces, innocent or mischievous or both rendered ethereal by the candlelight. 

     These are the kind of things I CAN think of, Barry realises. They hurt, but it is a hurt that is bearable and can perhaps sometimes be soft and at least bittersweet. These are the kind of things I can let myself think of, or at least not be afraid of. These are the kind of things that people would understand, even if they said it served me right I would never experience them again, and the truth is, I don’t disagree with them!

     His Dad has stood by him in a gruff, undemonstrative way. He has never said in so many words that it is possible to hate the sin and love the sinner, but Barry hopes he is thinking it. Nor has he said “It’s a blessing your Mum wasn’t alive to witness this,” but Barry fears he is thinking it. His Dad has promised to visit. Barry knows it has already had a bad effect on his business, even though people are at pains to say that he’s a thoroughly decent man and the sins of the children shouldn’t be vested on the parents.

     People will probably get over it, or will have something else to talk about, and the business will pick up again, Barry thinks. But he knows that even is that is true, so far as many folk are concerned, Dad will always be Barry Brompton’s father, yes, THAT Barry Brompton!

     The odd thing was, not that long ago he had grown closer to his father than he had ever been. He realised that he probably wasn’t an easy child, and certainly wasn’t an easy teenager, and it was a gesture of trust and loyalty for his Dad to take him on in the business after he’d been sacked from the hardware store. Well, they hadn’t said “sacked”, they’d said “let go” but it amounted to the same thing. 

     Unlike his Dad, Barry wasn’t a natural builder. He wasn’t good with his hands, and he wasn’t careful, and he wasn’t patient. But he reached a stage when he could be trusted with the simpler tasks like constructing a simple, low wall, or mixing cement, or putting paste on wallpaper. His Dad often said that was strictly speaking a decorator’s job, not a builder’s, but he wasn’t hung up about things like that. He could turn his hand to most things. He didn’t touch electrical work beyond just fitting a plug or the like, and though he wasn’t averse to clearing a patch of weeds if someone wanted a shed putting up, or hacking a path through bramble when he was renovating an old property, he avoided gardening. But he could turn his hand to most other tasks. He prided himself on doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. Sometimes Barry thought he would scream if he heard that phrase again. He was pretty sure his Dad, who was a modest man, didn’t mean to be smug, but it grated on Barry. Sometimes he mouthed it behind his Dad’s back, deliberately contorting his face.

     He wonders how long the journey will be, and asks the other warder (he hadn’t noticed at first that there were two of them) who’s sitting in the back of the van with him, though his legs, of course, are not shackled. “About an hour, I reckon,” he says. “Sorry if you need the gents!”

     Up until now that thought hadn’t occurred to him, but now he has a nasty suspicion that it might. Still, the warder, even if that, too, was force of habit, said “Sorry”. He is still being treated like a human being and knows that, some people would say, is more than he deserves. 

     His Dad was, as he put it, well chuffed to get the job of putting the extension onto Mrs Drake’s house. At first Barry had been sarcastic, saying that he hardly thought she needed one, but his Dad had simply said, “Ours not to question why, lad. She has the proper planning permission, and I know from jobs I’ve done for her before that she’s a good payer and doesn’t stint on the tea, so that’s all that need to concern us!”

     Dad seemed positively pally with Mrs Drake, but in a way that irritated Barry. She called his Dad Paul, but never invited him to call her Carol. Sometimes it seemed as if she was the lady of the Big House in Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs and he was her servant – oh, a trusted servant she respected and was fond enough of, but decidedly further down the social ladder. And it wasn’t as if her house, Beechwood (to be fair, there was a beech tree in the garden, it wasn’t entirely fanciful) was some grand stately home. Her kitchen didn’t even have a microwave and she didn’t have satellite TV. 

     The two of them never hit it off. Mrs Drake had a way of prefacing things with “Would you just mind” that made it plain it was still an order and not a request, dressed up in polite language or not. Would he just take his shoes off before stepping onto the lounge carpet, of course she understood they got muddy, and maybe a pale-coloured carpet wasn’t a good idea. Would he just mind turning the radio down, only the tiniest bit. 

     He supposed, reluctantly, that none of the requests were unreasonable as such, but the combined effect, and the manner in which they were made, got more and more irritating. And it was as plain as the nose on your face that though she had a certain condescending affection for his father, she saw him as some vexing lower life form,   “She thinks she’s Lady Bloody Muck”! he exclaimed to his Dad. 

     “She has her little ways like we all do,” his Dad said. “Just let it drift over you.” 

     He would be very glad when the job at Beechwood was over, he thought. At least, he thought that until Mrs Drake’s daughter Melinda came home from university for the summer vacation. 

     On the surface, Melinda wasn’t Barry’s kind of girl at all. He had a weakness for petite brunettes, and she was tall with red hair. True, he liked girls with some intelligence who could talk about more than make-up and some stupid soap on TV. But not being of an intellectual turn himself (he hadn’t been a poor pupil at school, but when it came to matters academic he was happy to settle for average) normally he certainly wouldn’t have been attracted to someone who was doing a PhD and could have read for England. He didn’t disrespect girls, and certainly didn’t want one who was “easy”, but wasn’t sure he wanted one who was difficult, either! Yet here she was, this tall girl with chestnut hair who loved learning and didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he was well and truly smitten. She had a way about her that was every bit as haughty as her mother, but somehow, on her, it was classy. He would probably never have used the word “wooing”, and Melinda would certainly not have appreciated it, but he would have to take this slowly. Baby steps, he thought, baby steps. 

     His Dad, who could be surprisingly perspicacious (or perhaps Barry wasn’t as subtle as he thought!) had noticed it. “You’ve taken a liking to Melinda,” he said. An expression like “fancy her” wouldn’t have seemed right, and his Dad seemed to recognise that, too. Mind you he did fancy her. Something rotten! 

     “I might have,” he said, with a nod to nonchalance.

     “Well – just be careful, lad.”

     “You think I’m not good enough for her? Is that it?”

     “Don’t put words in my mouth. You’re my boy, and you’re good enough for anyone.” Well, that was loyal, Barry supposed, and would have been touched if he believed it. Or more to the point, if he thought his Dad believed it. 

     Anyway, Melinda seemed to be melting! 

     She accepted invitations to go to the cinema with him (and it was gratifying that she liked action movies, though not the ones that were too violent, and not that chick-flick nonsense) and to go for a drink with him. Even what she drank seemed just right. Somehow, Barry couldn’t quite come to terms with girls who downed pints, though he determinedly told himself that wasn’t the main reason he had finished with his previous girlfriend Lena, though it didn’t help. But he also had a decided contempt for what he called silly drinks, that came with daft names, in bubble gum colours. Melinda had a glass of wine, or if she didn’t fancy alcohol, a diet cola. She didn’t need to diet, of course, but liked the taste, so why not? They disagreed about politics, as he inclined to the right and she inclined to the left, but in neither instance was it particularly extreme, and anyway, who wanted to spend much time talking about politics?

     Of course he had never thought that Mrs Drake hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t stand her, but didn’t under-estimate her. He became complacent thinking that either, credit where it was due, she realised her daughter was a grown woman and she couldn’t interfere in her love life, or more likely, that she would be back at university before long and it would be a case of out of sight, out of mind, so she wasn’t going to risk antagonising her daughter. 

     It turned out he was wrong on both counts. She bided her time, and waited for one morning when his Dad wasn’t at Beechwood, as he was attending a friend’s wedding. He had been left to do some weed-clearing, something he could be trusted to do. This wasn’t really part of the work on the extension but as his Dad and Mrs Drake agreed, it would “show it off” better if the garden were tidied up a bit.

     She didn’t say anything about the radio or his shoes or the like. She came straight to the point. “I want you to keep your hands off my daughter.”

     “We can’t always get what we want!” Perhaps that wasn’t the wisest thing to say, and perhaps he wouldn’t have said it if his Dad had been there.

     “I’ve obviously not made myself plain enough. That was just a turn of phrase. I’m not asking, I’m telling!”

     “I think you’ll find Melinda disagrees.”

     “Melinda still doesn’t know her own mind. For all her brains, she’s quite immature in some ways. Maybe I’m to blame for that – I’ve been over-protective. But I certainly don’t intend her throwing her life away. I’ve time for your father. He’s a good worker, an honest man, and doesn’t take liberties. I’ll be frank, I was never happy about him bringing you along, even before this business. But let’s get this straight. This is going to stop, and stop now. Melinda is entirely – what’s the expression? – out of your league.”

     Sitting in the prison van, Barry realises that as much as what she had told him, those three words what’s the expression had made him snap. Though not, he would have thought, particularly attuned to nuances, he couldn’t miss that one. She was demeaning herself by speaking his lingo. She was pretending that she would never have used such an expression to someone she thought was good enough for Melinda. She was driving her point home by stooping to such a vulgar phrase.

     As he had said in court, he was too angry to think out the consequences of his actions. But he didn’t know if he would have cared anyway. He had heard the expression “seeing red”. He didn’t see red. What he did see was Mrs Drake’s smug, snobbish face, seemingly enlarged and distorted. Somewhere, his Dad’s principle that there was nothing more loathsome than hitting a woman still stuck. But he would probably have done far less harm if he had struck her. He pushed her roughly to one side, and she cracked her head on the rockery. He could still see the look on her face in his mind’s eye – not fear, but surprise and loathing. Then her face seemed to lose expression altogether.

     There was a witness – Mrs Bradbury across the road. The irony was that she was no especial friend of Mrs Drake’s, and would have had at least some sympathy for Barry’s point of view. But this changed everything. 

     Barry, who hated Mrs Drake, and who wasn’t religious, prayed desperately for her to pull through. She didn’t. And now he was sitting in a prison van, being taken to spend years, decades, in a world without flowers and without cold beer, and without the sound of children singing.

     And without Melinda. I will not cry in front of the warder. He tries to think of his childhood instead, and it had been a happy one. He had been a bright and quite winning little boy, though given to sulking on occasion. He had been a talker before a walker, which wasn’t surprising, as both his father and his mother were the same. 

     His Dad had captured that special moment when he did, at first clinging onto his Mum’s arm, and then breaking free of her, take his first steps. They still had the photo. A slightly plump child, in that time between being a baby and a toddler, wearing a little pair of jeans and a blue and white striped sweater his Gran had knitted for him, a serious expression in his eyes, but the hint of a triumphant smile on his lips. 

     And beneath the picture, in his Mum’s handwriting, two simple, proud, loving words.

     Baby Steps.

     And then, he weeps.