My Fair Man

She lay in the bath and thought about the ways in which she might be able to help Jimmy. She needed to establish what kind of education he had and obviously – professionally and personally – she wanted to know about his family and his upbringing. Then she could begin to find out if there was any latent talent in him that might be encouraged. Claire was masterminding his physical transformation, which would begin the next day with a massive shopping expedition. But that, as today’s brief clean-up had proved, wasn’t going to be a particular problem. Hattie had felt rather gleeful, earlier on this evening, when Jon had rung to ask what was happening. It had given her some pleasure to tell him – out of Jimmy’s earshot – that not only was the bet on but also that they were now even more confident of winning.

She let the water out of the bath, put on a deep-pile towelling robe and made her way back to the kitchen to make a drink. As she filled the kettle at the sink, she heard a sudden noise behind her that sent a wave of fear through her.

‘Oh Jimmy, you frightened me. I thought you were asleep.’

‘I was outside having a tab,’ he said, a look of shock and wonder on his face.

‘Oh my God, my mask,’ she laughed, realising how ridiculous she must look. ‘It’s a strange female ritual that probably has primitive roots. Neanderthal woman daubing her face with mud …’

He looked at her quizzically with his perfect blue eyes and she felt even more uncomfortable.

‘Would you like a drink? I’m making some tea.’

‘Aye, OK,’ he said, watching her curiously.

‘Tell you what, why don’t you make the tea while I clear this stuff off my face? Then we can sit and talk.’

He nodded and she went back into the bathroom to rinse the dried mask from her skin and put on some pyjamas so that she would be properly decent beneath her robe.

When she returned he was sitting on the sofa with a pile of his things beside him and Rex lying protectively at his feet, growling. On the table there were two mugs of tea and a packet of cigarettes.

‘Eee, man, that’s better. Ya look reet pretty again.’

Hattied blushed unexpectedly and pushed her wild, curly hair back off her face in a gesture of unaccustomed vanity. She went over and sat next to him, Rex’s growl turning to a low hostile moan, whilst Jimmy shuffled through his possessions.

‘Your man doon’t like me or Rex, does he?’ he said.

‘No really, it’s fine. Toby will get used to you.’

He smiled at her and again she pushed the hair back from her face. She picked up her mug of tea – which was so strong the milk had turned it orange – and sipped from it.

‘Do you think I could have a cigarette?’ she asked, glancing covetously at the packet.

‘Eee, man, in here?’ he said, with a gleam in his eye.

‘Why not?’ she said with a smile. ‘Toby’s asleep.’

He gave her a cigarette and took one himself and they sat smoking together in a manner that Hattie found, well, almost clandestine.

‘Tell me about your things,’ she said, drawing on the cigarette as if it were some dangerous narcotic.

‘Just stuff from back home.’

‘And where exactly is back home?’

‘Meadow Well.’

‘Is that near any town?’

‘It’s the estate, Meadow Well …’ he said, clearly amazed that she didn’t know of it.

‘Is it near Newcastle?’

‘Naa, hinny. It’s in North Shields. Must be six or seven miles away from Newcastle.’

‘And do you have a family?’

He was silent and reflective for a moment. Then: ‘There’s me mam and me brothers …’

‘Have you got a picture of them, Jimmy?’

He began to sort through the pile beside him and eventually picked out a couple of photographs and passed them over to her. The woman could have been aged anything from thirty-five to fifty-five. It was difficult to tell because her face was hard and quite starkly made up, and her luridly red hair was very tightly permed. Round her neck she wore a gold cross and three or four other chains. She had none of Jimmy’s beauty. In one picture she was standing by a beach with the sun in her eyes and in the other she was dressed up with a flower in her lapel, perhaps for a wedding.

‘And your father?’

‘Never knew me dad,’ he said, blushing slightly.

‘Your brothers are older than you?’ Hattie asked.

‘No, me brothers are younger. Me mam had me when she was seventeen.’ He paused for a second. ‘She said me dad was a Norwegian sailor. She met him down The Jungle on the fish quay. It was love at first sight. Only he never came back …’

A Norwegian father would probably explain the astonishing blue eyes, the pale hair and the big, muscular body, Hattie thought as she looked from the pictures of his plain mother to Jimmy’s own startling face.

‘And your brothers? Are there photographs of them?’

He began to search through his pile of pictures and eventually produced three separate photographs. His brothers – five of them, aged between about four and seventeen – had the same mean, cold expression as his mother, although none of them looked quite like the other. It was possible, Hattie thought as she studied the photos, that they all had different fathers. And not that unusual, she supposed, nowadays.

Jimmy himself appeared in one of the pictures. It must have been taken when he was about twelve years old and he looked, surrounded by his rough and rowdy siblings, as if he were a changeling. Which of course she supposed he was. The family group was standing in the front garden of a run-down, grey, pebble-dashed house surrounded by inner-city litter – car tyres, bits of old metal, abandoned toys and disintegrating black rubbish bags. To the right of the picture it was possible to see the next-door house, which was blackened by fire and boarded up. It was the kind of place that Hattie had seen in newsreels and documentaries on urban decay but had never glimpsed at first-hand. One or two of her friends lived in small ‘worker’s’ cottages – two-up, two-down, in places like Wandsworth, where the outside privies had been turned into conservatories – but with her own privileged background she had no experience of the kind of deprivation Jimmy was showing her.

‘Do you miss them?’

‘The littleun. He’s nine now. I miss him a lot,’ he said.

‘Fourteen years younger than you?’

He thought for a moment, screwing up his eyes as if making a difficult calculation. ‘I suppose …’

‘How did you get to that doorway that night? Why did you leave your home and your family?’

He sighed and looked at her as if to say that the reasons were too plentiful and the story too long and painful to tell.

‘Me mam got a new man and there was no room. Wha aboot you, like? What aboot ye family?’ he said, clearly trying to deflect her from any further discussion of his own origins.

‘I have a family, a sister. You might have heard of my sister, Arabella.’

‘Is she famous, like?’ he said in tones of awe, offering her another cigarette which she quickly took.

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