Читать книгу Playing Dead - Jessie Keane - Страница 18

Chapter 12

1960

‘What you need, my boy, is an arsenal,’ Rick Ducane told his son over and over again.

Frances was thirteen when it first occurred to him that his father was . . . well, more than a little screwy. He missed his mother. He couldn’t talk to his father about anything.

When they’d come back to England, Rick had become a bitter recluse. He’d bought a house called Whereys, an old red-brick Victorian pile with a big cluster of barley-twist chimney pots soaring high above its gabled roof. It was impossible to heat – Frances always felt cold there – and it was deep in the Kent countryside, miles from anywhere. Secretly, to himself, Frances called the house Where-The-Fuck, Kent.

He could still remember that wild night when his mother had been drunk, reeling, strange men drinking on the sofa, cavorting naked with her in and out of the bedrooms in the house; and then the next thing, Dad was home and there were police and ambulance men and press swarming over the place like ants.

That was the last time he ever saw his mother. Now, all he had in the world was dear old Dad, and Frances strongly suspected that Dad was Looney Tunes. Had a screw loose. Was barking mad.

That worried him.

And this thing his dad had about weaponry. He’d built up a vast collection of arms. A bayonet knife that – he never tired of telling Frances – he’d taken off a dead Nazi during the war.

‘Rigor mortis had set in,’ said Rick. ‘Had to break the bastard’s fingers to get it off him.’

Nice, thought Frances.

There was also a Prussian officer’s dress sword. And guns, he was a maniac for guns.

‘People will try to hurt you in life, people will pull you down,’ he told Frances.

Yeah, you got that right, thought Frances. No one could ever hurt him as his dad did, mocking his efforts at amateur dramatics, saying he didn’t have ‘the ear’ when he attempted accents, telling him that stardom was a false mistress and would always break your heart, grudgingly listening to Frances’s readings of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and then telling him that his diction was poor, that he didn’t ‘enunciate’ or ‘project’ enough.

Oh, Frances knew he could never be the star his dad had once been. He knew he was lacking. But he tried hard, and he hoped he could get somewhere – with or without his dad’s blessing. And it would be without, he knew it.

‘So what you’ve got to do, son,’ said Rick, his eyes wild with enthusiasm, ‘is protect yourself. Get a store like I have. Because if you’ve got anything worth having, people will resent it and try to snatch it away from you. Friends, colleagues – even loved ones. You can’t trust a living soul. You understand?’

Frances nodded. Sure he did. He understood his dad was cuckoo; he understood that all right. He understood that he was always delighted to get back to school, away from the crazy old coot. He understood that he preferred to huddle in his freezing-cold bedroom listening to Elvis Presley crooning ‘It’s Now Or Never’ on his Dansette, rather than spend time with him.

Jesus, he so missed his mother. There was no way he could tell Rick that he was getting these feelings for boys and not girls. Maybe his mum would have understood, maybe not. All Frances knew was that he had to keep his particular sexual leanings to himself. He’d read Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and knew Wilde had been put in the slammer for consorting with men; and if any of his friends knew or even suspected he was homosexual, he knew they wouldn’t be his friends for much longer.

Now it was a dreary Saturday morning, raining hard, and Frances was dreading the weekend to come, closeted here in the backside of fucking nowhere with his dad when he would rather have been somewhere – anywhere – else.

But he couldn’t escape. Dad had said he had something to show him, something exciting, and Frances had thought, yeah, big news, another fucking handgun.

But it wasn’t a handgun this time.

Maybe a sword then?

No. His dad’s eyes were dancing with merriment as he made Frances guess, over and over, as they trudged out to the workshop. Frances saw that his dad had hung a horseshoe over the door. Rick saw his son looking at it.

‘For luck,’ he told him with a grin. ‘Go on then. Keep guessing.’

‘A Buffalo Sharps?’ hazarded Frances. His dad had enthused about the rifle; it could pick off a target a quarter of a mile away.

‘No. I said. Not a gun.’

‘What then?’ asked Frances, slightly intrigued despite himself.

His dad was going to give him a demonstration of something he’d picked up during the war, he told him. Something really exciting.

‘Come on then. What?’

Frances was smiling so hard his jaw was aching. And his dad said he was a bad actor? He thought he was good. After all, he acted as if he could stand the loopy old goat. And he couldn’t.

Frances had already decided that once he left school he was off, back to America. He was half-American after all; he loved it there. But his dad’s dire warnings about the toughness of Hollywood had penetrated, and his mum had been desolate and lonely there, he knew she had; so he’d decided he was heading for New York, and Broadway. Just as soon as he could.

‘So come on,’ he said to his dad. ‘Give. What is it?’ Like he cared.

Dad winked. ‘Explosives,’ he said, and showed him a box full of . . .

Oh shit. Were those live grenades?

Yes. They were.

It was then that Frances really knew his dad had flipped.

But it wasn’t going to happen to him. No way. He was sane.