20. There’s Always Somebody Worse off than Yourself

ere’s always somebody worse off than yourself

‘Dead?’ Jimmy said.

It could not be true. He must have misheard. Jimmy felt he must be either stil dreaming or too drunk and exhausted to understand English any more.

e sob that came over the receiver in reply made it clear that he had not misheard. And Jimmy didn’t need to understand English either. at sob would have meant the same in any language. Guttural, abrasive. Not the sort of sound you would expect to hear from a woman, even in deep distress. It was a shocking sound, a kind of gagging belch rather than a sob. Harsh and abrupt and ugly, as if Lizzie was in the process of hacking up her whole insides.

‘Lizzie, no,’ Jimmy said. ‘Not Robbo.’

Another great bark of pain. Like the hiccup of a very drunken man. Jimmy wondered if she was actual y being sick.

‘He crashed . . . his bloody . . . his bloody . . . He crashed his . . .’ Lizzie was trying to speak, but for a moment her convulsions defeated her.

‘Wolseley?’ Jimmy heard himself saying. ‘Churchil ?’

‘Ye-e-e-es,’ Lizzie wailed, ‘bloody Churchil .’

Her grief sounded more conventional now. More like the grief that an actress might conjure up, not burping and intestinal but a more recognizable, panting, tear-soaked misery.

‘He crashed his bloody car.’

Churchil . Robbo’s beloved Wolseley. e car he had always stuck with despite his ever-increasing wealth.

He couldn’t have died in it.

‘Are you sure he’s . . . ?’ Jimmy heard himself saying. ‘I mean there’s no chance that . . .’

It was stupid, of course. Lizzie wouldn’t have been hiccuping and burping her agony into his phone at three fteen in the morning if there had been any hope at al , but Jimmy was struggling to nd a response.

How had it happened? How could it have happened? Robbo? Fucking dead.

In fact Jimmy already knew how it had happened, or at least he strongly suspected that he did.

Robbo had been driving pissed. He always drove pissed and they’d al been nodding indulgently over it for years. ‘Not pissed but merely over the limit,’

Robbo himself always insisted, believing himself, as al drink drivers do, to be perfectly capable of handling a car on the amount he had imbibed.

‘It’s not as if I’d ever drive shit-faced. I admit I drink drive but I strongly disapprove of drunken driving,’ Robbo would say.

And it was true that he tended not to drive actual y shitfaced. At least he hadn’t since his university days, when on one memorable occasion he had parked his old Mini in the hedge outside the shared house. But like many people, he drove a bit pissed. If he’d had a few pints he’d stil take his car. What was more, for twenty years he’d got away with it. He’d never even been stopped.

‘e trick is to drive normal y,’ he’d say. ‘It’s the idiots who crawl along and indicate a mile ahead of time that get pul ed.’

Yes, thought Jimmy, he’d always got away with it. Until now. If only he’d been caught and banned yesterday.

‘e bloody fool must have gone out to get some fags,’ Lizzie said, clearly making an effort to sound normal.

Jimmy could picture the scene perfectly. Lizzie had gone up, leaving Robbo to channel-surf and have a nal Scotch and he’d run out of cigarettes. Of course he had run out of cigarettes, he always ran out of cigarettes, because unlike Jimmy he never stocked up on great boxes of duty-free when he travel ed. Robbo would buy one packet at a time because he was always about to give up.

Now he never would give up.

‘He must have swerved to miss something because he drove slap into a wal and wrote off the car. He died . . . he died instantly.’

‘Oh my God,’ Jimmy said, involuntarily picturing the scene and adding without real y thinking, ‘he must have been tanking it to write off Churchil .

ose old Wolseleys are made of steel.’

‘e police reckon on sixty- ve,’ Lizzie replied. ‘I don’t think . . .’ She was struggling again. ‘I don’t think he wanted me to know he’d gone out. ank God the street was empty. Nobody else was involved. e wal col apsed.’

‘Oh Lizzie. Lizzie,’ Jimmy said, his own eyes l ing with tears. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

‘Yes. Yes. anks, Jimmy,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, I’l hang up now . . . I just wanted you to know. I have to think, you see. I real y do have to think . . . You know, about what to tel the children.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course . . .’ Jimmy said. ‘If there’s anything . . .’

‘I know, Jim. Absolutely,’ Lizzie said and for a moment she seemed almost normal. ‘Oh and Jimmy?’

‘Yes, Liz?’

‘Don’t worry about that loan. Seriously. I’m stil going to arrange it in the morning.’

‘Lizzie! Please, don’t even think about it,’ Jimmy protested. ‘Real y. I mean, please.’

Had she read his mind?

Had she realized that in the midst of his absorbing the terrible, heartbreaking news of the death of one of his dearest, probably his actual dearest friend, the thought of the promised loan had crossed his mind?

Jimmy hated himself for it but it was true: one tiny part of him had listened to the tragic story and asked, what about us now? He had suppressed the thought instantly, of course. What was more, he had not deliberately summoned it, it had arisen despite him and he hated his subconscious for being so base.

Of course he never would have said it and now that Lizzie, either clairvoyant or just genuinely sel ess, had brought it up, he tried to reassure her.

‘Please, Lizzie. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. It simply doesn’t matter at al .’

‘No. No. It does and I wil do it. It’s important. Life goes on. You’re in a spot. Robbo was your mate. Of course he’d want . . . he’d want . . .’

For a moment she could not continue.

‘Lizzie, please. Don’t, it’s not important,’ Jim protested gently.

‘It is. I’l arrange it tomorrow or certainly this week.’

Lizzie hung up.

Jimmy agonized about whether to tel Monica that night. He didn’t want to.

He knew how devastated she would be, but what else could he do?

Unless she was asleep.

If she was, he’d leave her be, but if she was stil awake she would certainly want to know why Lizzie had cal ed. One thing was sure, Jimmy was con dent that his darling Monica’s distress would not be sul ied by any secret thoughts about a lost loan. Her grief would be pure and it would be absolute.

He went upstairs.

For a moment relative peace had returned to the family bedroom, but not, it turned out, the peace of sleep, merely the peace of convenience. In order to calm the children (and shut them up) Monica had al three in bed with her.

Lil ie was on the breast despite the fact that her next ‘control ed’ feed was stil an hour away, Cressida was having a cuddle and Toby was stretched out, legs and arms al over the place, slowly nodding off.

is was of course contrary to every rm boundary that Jimmy and Monica kept setting themselves and then breaking. ey were official y control-feeding Lil , control-crying Cressie and getting Tobes used to sleeping in his own room. Al these things had seemed so important an hour or two earlier.

‘Sorry,’ said Monica, and the exhaustion in her voice was painful to hear, ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘It’s ne,’ Jimmy whispered, sitting down on the end of the bed. ‘It’s OK.’

A icker of confusion crossed Monica’s face. Jimmy knew she was trying to remember what had happened and why he had left the bedroom. Sometimes Monica was so tired she forgot her own name.

‘Mon,’ he said, not knowing any better way to say it than to just say it,

‘Robson’s dead. He crashed his car on a bloody fag run and got himself kil ed.’

Jimmy hadn’t expected that he’d be the one to break down rst but suddenly he found himself weeping uncontrol ably. Shedding more tears in a few moments than he had shed in the previous twenty years. He had not cried once during al their current troubles, even when Monica had been in bits. But he cried now. He cried and cried as he told Monica what he knew about the tragedy that had befal en their friends.

Strangely, astonishingly, Monica did not cry. Later, on re ection, Jimmy concluded that the revelation of a nightmare so close to them but so in nitely worse than the one they were living through themselves gave her strength.

Perhaps it put things in perspective for her, perhaps it provided a kind of grim (and unsought) comfort in that it became blindingly clear that in her own life things could be a whole lot worse.

For whatever reason, as Jimmy broke down Monica pul ed herself together.

She didn’t even seem tired any more. Instead she rang Lizzie straight back and said she was coming over.

It was the right thing to do. Monica always understood that kind of thing.

Lizzie needed help. She just hadn’t wanted to ask.

Monica got up, went downstairs, put a coat on over her stained nightie, grabbed the keys to the Range Rover and was gone.

Half an hour later Jimmy found himself where he had found himself on so many desperate and zombi ed pre-dawns before – stretched out on a bean bag in the family room watching omas the Tank Engine with Lil ie in his arms, Cressie on her little folding sofa and Toby asleep on another bean bag. Cressida loved omas the Tank Engine just as Toby had done before her (and secretly stil did), although he was now too old to admit it. His favourite engine was James.

Jimmy, on the other hand, had come to loathe omas the Tank Engine because its repetitive style was driving him slowly insane. What was more, Ringo Starr’s lugubrious delivery of the narrative, which at rst Jimmy had thought rather charming, had long since lost its appeal. He never would have believed he could wish any Beatle to shut up, but after years of omas the Tank Engine Jimmy wished Ringo would.

And so, as omas and James went up the track (preparatory to coming back down the track), Jimmy lay on his bean bag and thought about Robbo and al the terrible changes that the previous nine months had brought into their lives. How had it happened? How had it al gone so wrong?

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