No Waiting

Everyone who ever met him said it. Apart from his dead grandmother. She just thought it, but never said it. And although his ex-teachers and his current parents never publicly said it, they all privately knew it. They all knew that Mark Hart would do wrong. One hundred per cent certain.

He’d been in trouble before of course, but nothing as serious as this. He’d done some stupid things, but none as stupid as this. He’d done things he should have regretted, but a life of regret isn’t, is it? And Mark Hart didn’t intend to have any regrets. He wanted to be able to lie on his deathbed, wherever and whenever that was and say to himself, “I had a good go at that thing called life. I did what I wanted, to who I wanted and I had a laugh. That’s what it’s all about.”

These were Mark Hart’s thoughts as he sped past his old primary school. He glimpsed kids playing the playground his sensible shoes once knew – kids that weren’t even born when he was expelled two weeks before the end of his seven-year stretch there. He’d bitten a girl’s arm and drawn blood. The girl was called Natasha, and she’d asked Mark to bite her arm so he did, and it drew blood. So a screaming Natasha told a maternal dinner lady, who told an infernal teacher, who told an aloof headteacher, who told an indifferent Mr and Mrs Hart that their son was no longer welcome at her school. Mr Hart told the headmistress where she could stuff her school, and stormed home to tell Mark where he should stand. Then the unbuckling began.

Mark shifted uneasily in the front seat of his souped-up Ford XR3i, which he’d brought off a mate, no questions asked because they wouldn’t be answered. Memories of that belting always brought a grimace to his face - it was the worst of the many beltings he’d experienced at his father’s pleasure. He was convinced he was still getting twinges. He’d tried to tell his dad, through the lump-throat and tears, that the girl had asked for the bite and that he hadn’t meant to draw blood. But his old man didn't understand and was too busy enjoying himself.

Mark recalled the difficulty he had in maintaining anything but the vertical for several days after that leathering. Sure, he could smile about it now. Time makes those things seem more amusing than they were at the time. He could smile about the power his old man used to exert over him and his younger brother and sister, the fear that flooded the blood whenever that brown leather belt with its excessively ornate buckle slipped from his father’s hairy waist to be wielded in his father’s hairy hands.

In those days Mark’s father was so hairy he was scary. Grizzly Adams they used to call him, behind his hairy back of course. But the fear was gone now, gone like his father’s hair and dreams. Mark knew what he’d do if his father ever loosened his belt in anger again. One hundred per cent certain. But it would never happen. His father needed his belt more than ever these days to hold up trousers that were being forced towards his knees by the depression filled beer gut that had been steadily inflating since he lost a well-paid office job and gained an under-paid warehouse job. Life was causing his father to stoop, and his visible decline allowed Mark to tower over him and feel such superiority that he was almost tempted to buy himself a belt.

But Mark didn't need weapons. He knew that he was, in everything but name the man of the house. He could do anything he liked. He didn’t have to say please and thank you every five minutes, he could leave the dinner table without having to ask permission and he could swear in the house without a fear of a clip round the ear, and be noisy on Sunday afternoons without the danger of a belting.

“One of the advantages of growing up,” Mark said to his windscreen as he cruised through the second consecutive set of green traffic lights – a sight which was always pleasing. Mark had been talking to his windscreen with worrying frequency recently. He knew he was doing it, and that it was not something a cool lad of his age should be doing, but he put it down to being unemployed, being fiscally forced to stay in a deserted home most of the day while his parents worked their lives away in a world that didn’t matter, and his brother and sister studied their lives away for qualifications that would qualify them for jobs that didn’t matter.

Mark occasionally felt slightly embarrassed about the fact that he still lived at home despite having endured a quarter of a century, but he put that down to being unemployed as well. Besides, several of his mates, some of whom suffered good jobs were still poncing off their parents, waiting to feel secure enough to be able to afford real-world rent, or worse still the suffocating death that is the mortgage.

“Everybody seems to be waiting for something to happen. Why?” Mark thumped his dashboard, but it didn’t feel the pain Mark felt in his hand and his head, the pain caused by other people. Pointless people. There didn’t seem much point to most people. They drove too slowly, they showed too much consideration for other road users, they pressed buttons that made the traffic lights go red, they walked across zebra crossings when they could run, they drove buses that crawled up hills or always pulled out just as Mark was overtaking. They rode bicycles that lolled about in the wind and forced Mark to concentrate on what he was doing. They took driving lessons in which they drove within the legal speed limits and they waited in child-on-board hatchbacks for the traffic lights to turn green before pulling off, forcing Mark to wait. Mark despised waiting. His naive sister was waiting to go to university; his acned brother couldn't wait to leave school, his fat father was waiting to be able to afford to retire, his greying mother was waiting for his fat father to take her on that cruise he’d promised her on their last three anniversaries. All waiting.

But waiting was not a game Mark would play he thought, as he accelerated across a zebra crossing while an old lady waited in varicose vain on the pavement. Actually, Mark hadn’t seen her quivering on the kerb and he probably would have stopped to let her cross because he had nothing against old ladies. They weren’t a threat, they were a good source of income. Most of them looked kind and reminded him of his grandmother - the only person who ever had any belief in him. He remembered how, when he was young, she would let him do things his parents wouldn’t, like staying out until after dark on a school night or not having to eat all his dinner if he didn’t want to. But as he grew older, Mark could stay out late anyway, and his parents could no longer force feed him, so he and his grandmother grew apart. And when she died in a home where that thing happened a lot, Mark didn’t cry as much as he would have had she died when he was younger. But death wasn’t something Mark wanted to think about right now. Too close to home.

So he slowed to watch the mirror image of the old lady hobbling the zebra. He was one of the few to witness her struggle, the traffic being light at this time of day, one of the benefits of early afternoons in suburbia. That’s why Mark chose this time for his daily drive; it meant less waiting. Seeing the old dear fight to complete the simple task of crossing the road got Mark thinking about getting old, and about how much he didn’t want to. “I’ll be dead before then,” he said with conviction. But he couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain.

He accelerated away for an unnecessary length of time at first-gear volume and the old lady faded into the nothing that she had become. As he drove past countless small-time antique and furniture stores waiting to go out of business, Mark found himself thinking about his future. He didn’t like to, it was upsetting, but these thoughts happen when you’ve the time to let them happen. He wondered what he’d be doing in ten-fifteen years time. He had a good idea where he might be, which was where everyone who ever knew him predicted he would be, but he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain. Not about something like that. All he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t be slaving away in some small time furniture store waiting to go out of business.

He drove past his old secondary school and it got him thinking about his five year stretch there and the old teachers who made his life a misery. Most of them were dropping dead or dying now, but Mark imagined the ones that could still see well enough to read, scanning the local papers each week, waiting to find the words: “Mark Hart, 25” under a cliched headline about a serious local crime. That’s not what Mark wanted. Local papers were small-time, midweek fodder full of badly designed adverts and poorly written editorial. Mark wasn’t interested in anything small-time, because that meant you were waiting for the big-time. And Mark wanted the big-time now. He wanted national newspaper coverage, his photo-fit face on the national news. Nothing local. Local news for was kids, or those waiting for a big-time that would never happen.

And Mark knew he was destined for the big-time. Of that he was almost one hundred per cent certain. It was only a matter of, well, time. He’d been trying to forget about what he’d done, and what would happen when they found it. But trying to forget about what he’d done got him thinking about what he’d done and it inevitably got him thinking about girls. Girls in general, but Natasha specifically.

Mark had a good track record with the girls. He knew he was a good-looking bloke - his wing-mirrors told him that. So did the smiles he got from the female pedestrians he eyed up as he drove past them at kerb-crawling miles an hour. When he was younger he used to hoot these girls, but now he’d come to regard hooting as kids stuff, the practice of desperate immature drivers who drove decrepit Escort Mark II’s in search of something they hadn’t yet had enough of. So these days Mark merely turned up his stereo, wound down and elbowed his window, and enjoyed the view. Quite a few girls turned around, attracted by the thud of bass and drum emanating from a souped-up XR3i with a cool dude behind the racing wheel and speakers the size of big speakers on the back seat which prevented Mark from using that area for shagging. Mark invariably regarded the girls that turned around as slags. Those that didn’t he invariably regarded as tarts. The only variable was if they looked around and they looked beautiful. But beautiful women rarely looked around unless they were with a big crowd of uglier girls or with their bigger boyfriend. It was too dangerous for a lone beautiful woman to look around. Mark knew that and respected that, but still regarded them as a bit tarty. Not exactly fair nor politically correct, but it amused Mark and temporarily helped him forget about his state of unemployment.

When he did think about his state of unemployment, Mark took solace in the fact that although many of the men he sped past during their lunch-hour wore expensive suits and bored even more expensive wives, few had the kind of eyes girls went for, the kind of eyes Mark saw in his rear view mirror. Even so, he still liked to hide his assets behind shades whenever it wasn’t raining. All part of the image. Part of the distance he liked to put between himself and other people. Pointless people. People who had funny shaped heads, monobrows, or bad teeth and crooked noses. People who would never make the big time because they didn’t look right. Mark knew he looked right, but never said anything about it. He just enjoyed reflective surfaces and reaped the rewards.

Thing is, Mark hadn’t done much reaping lately. Hadn’t felt in the mood. He still caught birds eyeing him up down the pub on Friday nights while he was out drinking the drinks his work-tired mates bought him, and of course Mark eyed these birds back. But he knew they were all waiting for him to make the first move, and Mark was too cool to be making first moves. First moves were for weak, desperate men who drove decrepit Escort Mark II’s. Strong men like Mark drove Ford XR3i’s and gave women a bit of the eye, never a smile, but maybe a lash of the tongue if they were lucky enough to get near enough to speak to him. Strong men never made the first move. They didn’t have to.

Mark made all his moves in his XR3i. It was his ideal woman. He could rely on it to be there, to do what he told it, when he told it, and to go where he wanted at the speed he wanted. The only thing he could find wrong with it was you couldn’t bite an XR3i like you could bite Natasha. To this day, Mark couldn’t figure out why Natasha had wanted him to bite her in the first place. He put that down to her being a girl. Still, that bite had been a great ice-breaker between the two during their five-year stretch at the same secondary school. Natasha got interested in Mark thanks to that bite. She used to show him the scar and swear she still felt twinges. So they went out for a while on the strength of that scar and those twinges. Mark told her it was symptomatic of the kind he bloke he was. He didn’t give first kisses. He was into first bites. Natasha liked that and let him kiss her all over, and bite her in certain places. Mark liked that and let her do whatever she wanted.

But the going-out led to the staying-in and then the splitting-up. Inevitably, Mark was forced to stop his woman. Red lights. Bloody red lights. They always kill passion. Mark was beginning to worry about the frequency with which he was thinking about Natasha. He knew he had to forget about it. It was only a bird after all. He had to convince himself he hadn’t seen her for ages. Not since they split up. But he knew where he could find her. He could go and see her anytime he liked. It was out of the question of course. It would be a dangerous journey back in time. There’d be a lot of waiting around.

“No way.” Mark shifted his woman into a wheel-spinning first gear but the lights didn’t change for him. “I ain't going to be made to wait around by any bird or by these bloody lights.” At the first hint of amber he flipped his foot off the clutch and spun his woman left, a left she’d turned so many times before it didn’t feel like a turn anymore so Mark didn’t indicate. He was in the left-hand lane, where else was he going? And anyway, indication was for kids, the elderly, the weak, or the lost. Mark wasn’t a kid anymore, he was young and strong and he and his woman knew this tarmac intimately, its undulations, its white-lines, the pot-holes to avoid. They knew this area like the back of the hand he’d used to... The secluded lanes, the groping lay-by’s, the shagging fields, the soft deflowering fields. No. Mark didn’t need to think about driving these roads, so he cruised them and found himself thinking about Natasha.

He couldn’t believe the bloke she’d started to go out with after she’d chucked him for being too possessive and too demanding. Mark thought Natasha was too possessive and too demanding but he didn’t chuck her. Chucking was for the kids playing the playground his sensible shoes once knew. And the bloke she was seeing instead - talk about pathetic. Natasha must have known that. OK, so this bloke had a good job and his own house. Big deal! Soon Mark would have a better job and a bigger house. But Natasha was fed up with waiting for Mark.

The XR3i hung another left and coasted the cul-de-sac that led to home. It had been good to get out of the house for a while. See a bit of the world. It had been an OK drive, but Mark had had better. He hadn’t seen many girls and it didn’t feel so good still having Natasha on his mind. He’d come on this drive to forget about her, to remind himself that he’d washed his hands of her. But it was taking a lot more washing than Mark had anticipated. Natasha had gotten under his fingernails, and she was clogging his pores and messing with his mind. It was proving difficult to stop thinking about her, knowing that although he could still see her anytime he liked, she wouldn’t look as good as she used to. One hundred per cent certain.