Not a Good Day

Not a Good Day 

"The thirteenth, and a Friday too," Faye thought as she eased her
sandwich van into the morning rush hour traffic. Dawn was still
breaking, and she had to be down at Heathrow by nine to catch the shift
workers as they came out for their break. The M4 would be easy as she
would be going against the flow, but it would be nose to tail, stop and
start, all the way to the Chiswick flyover. She sighed and wished she
had some nine to five office job where all she would have to do would
be typing and filing. Surely the time would fly by until the weekend.
She could doze or read her paper on the tube, wear nice clothes and not
have to breathe traffic fumes all day, but ever since she had come to
London she had been unable to land such a plum job. She had never had
any secretarial training and supposed that now she would be considered
too old to start.
Back home she had worked in her father's shop, behind the counter,
making deliveries, stock control, whatever was necessary, until the
bust-up. Those had been the happy days, she thought to herself, staring
morosely at the trail of brake lights before her. She had loved making
deliveries along the coast road, seeing the changes in the seasons. In
summer the sun sparkled off the azure sea. She would stop at a
sheltered bend in the road and sit in the sun, listening to the skylark
above singing to the accompaniment of the sea lapping at the rocks
below. Even in winter when the storms came, the awesome force of the
wind driving the wracked clouds across the drama packed sky excited
her, even as the rain lashed and the gusts buffeted the van,
threatening to hurl it over the cliff's edge. But here the summer
brought grit in the air laden with fumes that made her cough, while the
winter brought a drabness relieved by occasional ice and slush. There
she knew the people she had grown up with, even some of the men on the
fishing boats out of Falmouth that she used to see from the coast road
as they made for the fishing grounds off the Scillies or further
afield. Here it was only the exiles like herself she felt a bond with.
The Londoners she had met she had found cheery but not cheerful, quick
to speak but difficult to really know. She picked people out by their
accents, and wondered what personal crises or circumstances had led
them to uproot and come to this huge, impersonal place. She felt the
city was like a sink, drawing people good and bad from all over. She
felt perhaps these people were in a holding pattern, building up their
resources for a return to where they came from, or on to somewhere
else, a kind of earthly purgatory; the thought made her laugh out loud.
But dimly she was aware that it was more of a quicksand, perhaps the
slough of despond - she laughed again at her own erudition; the great
city sucking in people who would never escape. She knew people who
bravely maintained their own identity, but of course their children
would all be little Londoners. She felt a desperate need to escape from
this desert of suburbia, these endless ranks of identical houses,
gardens, lawns, parades of moribund shops all the same, news agents,
grocers, selling uniform high priced tat.
Her occasional forays into the West End were like expeditions to
another country, there she felt like the country cousin she knew
herself really to be. There she loved to poke her nose into every nook
and cranny, root out the exotic and unusual. That was the real London,
the inner city demanded and received her homage, but out in the suburbs
she felt herself superior among people who couldn't decide whether they
belonged to the city or the country, neither one thing or the other.
She longed for a place where people could look out of their houses and
have the sea on one side and fields on the other. She knew these
suburbanites couldn't see the attraction of it, but that was real, her
house had those views, or rather her father's house.
Her mood changed as she hit the traffic piling up for the interminable
road works at the Park Royal crossing where the railway bridges still
caused a bottleneck. It could take her ten to fifteen minutes to get
through, then the road would be fairly clear down Hanger Lane as far as
Ealing.
Her father. She hadn't seen or heard from him since she came to
London. In fact, he was the reason she was there. They were true father
and daughter, as stubborn as each other, neither would back down, and
in the end seniority prevailed and she left. It had all been over her
younger brother Tony. He showed great promise at school and Faye
encouraged him to aim higher, take "A" levels and try for university.
After her mother's death she had taken over some of the running of the
household and felt that entitled her to a say in some of the decisions,
but her father was a man of the old school and wanted Tony to leave
school at sixteen and get a job, preferably in his shop. She had tried
to persuade her father but he had just told her "He'll do what I say,
I'm his father. Your Granddad started this shop and as soon as I was
old enough, I was working in it, and what's good enough for me will be
good enough for him."
She started to tell him "But the world's different today, Dad, things
have changed." But he cut her off, wouldn't see it. So she had sent off
for the application forms for Tony herself, and when he was accepted
for a degree course showed him the letter so that he could see Tony had
a real chance to improve himself. Her father had slowly read the
acceptance letter, his face darkening until it was purple with
rage.
"You did this?" he thundered, "You went behind my back."
He had taken off his belt and tried to whip her, but she was a strong
girl and managed to slip from his grasp and escape. Since that day she
hadn't seen him, only seeing her chance the next day to slip into the
house to pack a few things while he was out on lifeboat practice.
She was abreast of Gunnersbury Park now, snarled up in the queue for
Chiswick roundabout. The clutch was heavy, and her left leg always
ached by the time she got onto the A4, and then there was usually
another queue for the lights.
She had come straight to London where she had an old friend from
school, but when she arrived she found her friend cosily shacked up
with her boyfriend, and after a few nights grudgingly allowed to sleep
on the sofa, she had to scour the papers and news agent's windows for a
room of her own. Joining the bedsitter brigade had been a lonely and
frustrating experience, with meter troubles and lecherous landlords,
and she had to move at short notice a couple of times before she found
her present place, where she at last felt sort of settled.
But her thoughts often returned to Penlee and the happy days. Despite
his temper, her father was really a good man. He was a disciplinarian
and expected to be obeyed, but he was a good provider and a pillar of
the community. He had been a member of the Penlee lifeboat crew since
his youth, and as a small girl Faye had spent happy hours playing round
the slipway or watching her father and the other crew polishing brass
and mending ropes and equipment. She had looked up to her father then,
but even then there had been a distance between them. When Faye was
little it had been her mother who had supplied the emotional warmth,
and when she had died her father had seemed to retreat even further,
and Faye herself had taken over some of her mother's role, keeping
house and looking after Tony. After the bust-up Tony had indeed gone
into the shop, but not gladly, and Faye had heard that within a year he
had got into trouble with the Police. She knew that could never have
happened if he had been allowed to go to university, and she longed to
go back, as if somehow she might be able to draw Tony back into the
family and mend fences with her father, so that all might be again as
it had once been.
Her father's calm, measured manner as he served customers came before
her eyes as she waited at the lights on the A4, waiting for the slip
road up onto the flyover. He never lost his temper with customers, they
were his bread and butter, he would intone, after they had left, having
bought their bread and butter. Faye smiled. That was the nearest he got
to cracking a joke. She wondered if he had changed. Was he taking good
care of himself, or was he going down to The Pirate's Rest every night
for company. Whatever, the whole of Penlee would know of it, you
couldn't hide anything in a small place like that. If only she could
see him.
She was running down off the elevated stretch, about to hit the three
lane M4 proper now, just about on time. She switched on the radio for
the news. "Good morning, the news headlines. The Pound hits a new all
time low. Cholera breaks out in war torn Bosnia, and disaster at sea
here at home."
"All doom and gloom", she brooded, switching off mentally as the news
reader went into details of the economy and the current situation in
what had been Yugoslavia. Alarm bells rang when the phrase "Off the
coast of Cornwall" cut into her consciousness, then "In heavy seas last
night the Penlee lifeboat capsized on its way to the aid of a French
trawler. The crew were rescued but are all in hospital in Falmouth
seriously ill from exposure."
Faye didn't need to hear more. She checked her fuel gauge and did a
rapid mental calculation. Two hundred and fifty miles or thereabouts.
She would have to stop for petrol, but if the traffic wasn't too bad,
she could be there in about five hours. Her eyes were brimming now.
"Hold on, Dad," she sobbed, and put her foot down. Heathrow's shift
workers would have a long wait for their sandwiches.