Repeat It Today With Tears by Anne Peile Page A

working as a waitress I made reference to some vague problems I had had, over teachers. ‘But I will think about it, later on,’ I told him. I knew that if he could have found out about Oxford he would make me go. I also knew that I would be quite incapable, physically, of going so far away from him. One day when I was looking for my hairbrush the annotated copy of
Richard II
fell out of my bag.
    ‘Are you reading this, Susie?’
    I took it back before he could find my name and form number and date of issue in the front. ‘Yes, I did it at school. I liked it so much that sometimes I read it again.’
    ‘You are a funny mixture,’ Jack said.
    A few days later he was reading the paper and he made an exclamation of pleased triumph.
    ‘Do you know what, there’s going to be a new production of
Richard II
by the RSC, real landmark stuff, two actors taking it in turns as Richard and Bolingbroke. I could take you to see it, would you like that?’
    ‘Yes, I would, very much.’
    He never did. On the first night, when Richard Pascoe and Ian Richardson bowed to applause on the stage of the Aldwych theatre, my father Jack was already dead.
    Although my occupation in those months was ceaseless I never felt any fatigue. I worked and revised and sat my exams; I practised endless complicated deceits and I travelled miles backwards and forwards across the Thames bridges. In my father’s bed the passion and desire for him, in my body and in my head,was close to a kind of derangement. On the narrow mattress whole hours would pass when I was detached from the real world and from reason. I might have committed any crime for him. Truly, it was a form of possession. And yet I was never weary, rather, I was quickened and energised by that life I led. Perhaps it was the deep sleeps that I slept beside Jack, so cherished and safe-guarded as I was. He played me Ella Fitzgerald, and she sang ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’.
    Sometimes, if I returned home in the evening, I would find the flat filled by a gathering of Ron’s friends. In those days there was a structured hierarchy of London’s criminals; I expect that it may be different now. Lin had intimated that because members of her boyfriend’s family had served as lieutenants to the Brothers Kray, they enjoyed some standing in the underworld. I knew that Scottie the cat burglar was deemed to be a gentleman thief. I had myself heard him expostulate with righteous indignation over the report of a gang who had run down a policeman during a robbery. But among Ron’s associates there were criminals of the pettiest kind. These were minor thieves; they traded stolen goods from market stalls, some made a livelihood through illegalities in the motor trade, some organised poker games in lock-up garages on suburban alleyways where weeds grew up through the concrete.
    One night I had returned early from Chelsea to revise for my biology paper; biology and chemistry were the only sciences I liked, I detested maths and physics because I found them incomprehensible. The flat was full and smoky and noisy from Ron’s new stereogram. He and his friends were especially fond of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and also of Ray Charles; ‘Busted’ was being played. Ron broke off from singing along with it to call out, ‘Here’s a dolly bird, someone get her a drink.’
    I shook my head but he took no notice. I sat down on the floor beside the man I knew to be the quietest member of their group. He was called Tommy Sutton; he was a plumber by day and he lived in a road off the south side of the Common with his elderly mother. He was fair-haired and bearded and noticeably neat and softly spoken amid the rest of the company.
    ‘You look as if you find all this a bit much,’ Tommy said.
    ‘It’s not that, it’s just that I have an exam in the morning, biology O-level.’
    ‘Does your mum know?’ He nodded towards my mother who sat on the other side of the smoky room; she was watching