Untitled 6

With the tea poured, Terry took out his pouch of tobacco and started rolling a smoke.
Ray always has a copy of the Daily Mail and carried on with the crossword he hadn’t managed to finish on the bus.
Rob sat down and said nothing, staring at the steam coming from the mugs on the table.
‘Select, six letters,’ said Ray.
‘Choose,’ replied Rob.
‘Nice one, lad,’ said Ray, etching in the word with his tongue out.
‘Any more?’ said Rob, pleased with himself.
‘Here you go, it’s the last one,’ said Ray, peering at the small-print. ‘Lens, as a way of looking at things, nine lett...’
‘Objective,’ replied Rob in an instant.
Ray looked down in disbelief. ‘You know,’ he cried. ‘I think it fits! Nice one, lad. How d’ya know that, then?’
Usually, in response to such a question, Rob would elect to lower his top lip down and over the bottom lip as if to leave it there and just nod, but with the elation of knowing the answer, he decided to tell them. It was only Ray and Terry, after all.
‘It’s French for lens, objectif. Heard it on an old film,’ he said in a careful way.
Terry wasn’t interested in crosswords.
‘What d’ya wanna know French words for, Rob?’ he barked. ‘They’re a bunch of thieving bastards, those frogs are. Got no backbone at all. I mean, look at Wenger, he knows his footy but he don’t know how to make men of his players, does he?’
Rob’s face changed accordingly as the top lip made its way down and over his mouth to rest on his bottom lip.
As an act of doing something for the sake of it, he went for a sip of his tea to get out of the question, but it was still too hot to sip and he winced.
Perhaps he’d keep quiet about the films he loves. Too much bother, he thought.
‘I love the old British war-time films, I do,’ said Ray, spotting Rob’s discomfort. ‘Takes me back to when I was a kid.’
‘Yeah, well, those days are long gone now, chef,’ said Terry. ‘The streets are the front-line now.’
‘You keep saying that, Terry, and it’s beginning to worry me,’ said Ray, looking over his specs to watch for Terry’s reaction.
‘I only say it coz it’s the truth, chef. They’ve got us programmed. We’re born to lose.’
Terry often does this with his first roll-up of the day. Getting angry and deflective was just his way.
It’s not anger aimed at Ray or Rob, and is probably best aimed at himself on a subconscious level, if only he’d look there, but as far as Terry was concerned, the system was sufficiently at fault in every way as to conceal his own failings in all areas of his own life.
He’s always had a massive chip on his shoulder, which strengthened his aversion to seeing that the real reason he’s so in debt was because he drank and fished it all away.
The government may be bad, but he’s in no way different. He’s as much a part of the problem as they are, and that’s just how the government likes it. With the continuation of his malaise, he would continue to drink and fish, putting money back into the economy, remaining reliably hopeless and fearful of any real change.
Terry hadn’t become close to Emerald, an absolute peach of a baby, because of the way he himself had been brought into the world. Emerald scared him. He couldn’t look after her because he himself had not been looked after at her age. He couldn’t look her in the eye because he hadn’t the will to break the cycle of harm.
Guilt weighed heavily upon Terry but he could do nothing to change his ways.
The anger he felt for the system was justified, but its impact on his own life was limited compared to the waste he laid at his doorstep. He held the system responsible for why things would never change for him (they all had something to complain about down the pub) but never did anything about it.
He therefore never saw the problem for what it really was.
Having had a difficult birth, which evened out into a half-decent childhood, he’d never truly suffered as Rob had, starved of food in front of his brothers for whole weekends, never allowed to play outside with the others, even in the little back garden.
Rob and Ray said nothing after Terry’s little outburst.
They knew what the real problem was, but telling him then would have been of no use at all, especially with his temper on a Monday morning.
All three had seen or heard of injustice on a daily basis all their lives. All three were sick to the back teeth of ‘talk’, ‘debate’ and ‘change’. None of those things had ever actually changed things a jot for the better.
It was just ‘talk’, ‘debate’ or ‘change’; a broken matchstick ship meandering back and forth in a dirty old bottle full of grime.
‘Right,’ said Ray once he’d finished his tea. ‘Time to make a start on that ivy.’
As he got up, he flicked Rob’s lapel and gave him a smile.