Daddy Empire

Daddy Empire

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 9

Tom Bass

Toby’s red legs poke out of a pair of scratchy wool shorts and plunge into two brown cowboy boots. His cap pistol is strapped to his thigh and his hat is planted on his blond head. His rucksack holds a day’s ration of tea and sandwiches assembled that frosty summer morning and placed among the components of a kite.

Momma Empire and Noemi are panting behind their young scout. Poppy’s grounded at home for bad behavior, pouting.

Hedges, gates and walls conspire in a continuous maze. Cows and sheep are clustered together like letters. The colors intensify into a deep black hue in the succession of hills textured with bracken, woods, lakes and rock. Clouds box in the ring of sky.

Toadstools dot the earth. Momma Empire reports that hippies eat them to go purposefully mad. Toby smashes at some with his boots but Momma Empire puts a stop to it when she finds an oval of boletus in the turf at the roots of an oak. Everyone relaxes by the edible gnomes.

 “Oh my!” She puffs and swallows the sticky mouthful of saliva from the climb. “Oh my goodness gracious, it’s so remote.”

Momma Empire sucks on a Woodbine and knots her beat-up Aquascutum jacket around her waist; she cuts the jolly fellows out of the peat-like soil with an ivory penknife and secures them in a net bag.

Down the valley a dog is bolting after sheep, dashing from one terraced field to another after the running white dots. Smoke turns from a circle of caravans. The ritzy little town of Hay is directly underneath buzzing like an apiary.

Beagles and liveried huntsmen gather around the clock tower, children chalk the flagstones outside the library, a lanky woman strolls her three greyhounds, someone stands on the ivy ruins of a castle; a pair of binoculars glints like dragonfly eyes judging the potential for rain and bluster above the prone figure of the hills and its lover, Hay’s bluff.

The cool grass refreshes Toby’s legs. He sucks a few blades, and the grass adds to the debris of too many humbugs in his teeth. Sugar and more sugar. His fingers wheedle with a paper bag of lemon sherbets in his pocket.

“Give me one of those scarabs, greedy,” says Momma Empire.

Noemi reinforces the message. “Do offer, boy. You mustn’t be so selfish.”

The clouds are malignantly curdling together despite the sunny disposition of the day. Hail salts the air. Wind blows from the black hills and darts the rain into the pastures. Ferns whirl and dust the party with spores.

Momma Empire rambles on well ahead, testing her company. Toby lags and dallies, listens intently to the rain on his hat, fires his cap gun at the crows at his stomach stirs, really relishing a filet of steaming, flaky halibut instead of this long walk. A sherbet travels over his tongue and dissolves like a fizzy chip of fish.

Waist-high in the sizzling ferns a pair of field mice fall victim to Momma Empire’s eager eye. Their tails are looped through her fingers and they’re scrabbling up her wrist. She craftily smashes their dun heads on a stone and puts them in her pocket in a bit of newspaper. Soon she halts and puts the mice on a cairn. Falcons hover in the distance. She bids Toby to observe as the birds screech from the steel sky. Noemi’s horrified as the falcons glide away with the two tiny carcasses.

Rounds of marmite and lettuce sandwiches are divided on the high common. Noemi has already helped Toby assemble the red Mylar kite. Wind keeps the line taunt as he pays out the filament, wind runs through his jumper and hands into his blood. The kite darts in the sky and Toby joins the clouds fighting in the sky and scratching at the brow of hill.

They gain a macadam road. Dusk’s coming. The last beams of sunlight dapple the lane. The verge of town glimmers with lilac streetlights. The cottages emit odors of vinegar, bacon, cauliflower.

Momma Empire guides them to the Crown for some liquids. She orders whisky toddies in the cigarette-colored public room. A heavy man in a rumbled suit slouches into a glass of port. He chuffs about his navy Rolls-Royce. His remarks cross with those about the success of the new gardener or the excellent picnic hamper at St. Cloud or the strange, clairvoyant weather. Noemi eyes the menu and she too is thinking of scones or sponge, a morsel to perk her up. She argues for the door and Toby trundles after her, leaving Momma Empire to her intrigues and the boisterous publican who breaches another cask of ale to cries of “Aye, aye!”

That night the phone trills. Noemi answers between mouthfuls of marmalade and toast.

The hall is sharp with her lonely quivering voice.

“John? Yes, John, yes, do come. The air is quite salubrious — too salubrious. There is an extra room. Yes, do come, when your fever’s over. But do bring a mosquito net and quinine. It’s Wales.”

Two round jigsaw puzzles occupy the table in front of the divan in the salon. One incomplete circle is the Birds of Britain; the other is Mammals of Britain. Each evening they snap together the two areas — limbs of snipe or wren, otter or stoat — fingering the odd pieces mixed together in one big slippery pile.

Suspended from the drawn curtains is a chromed glass globe. The radii and much of the fauna are missing.

“Wards off the evil eye,” Momma Empire says.

The polished surface records the solution to the mosaic of feather and fur. One of Momma Empire’s trophies from Africa, a leopard skin, winks at Toby, reminding him of his spooky nights.

Noemi brings elderflower cordial and a tray of glasses. She decants the tart musty liqueur.

Their faces are hard with the lines of alienation and mutual anger; it’s almost appealing. They do not say anything of tacit betrayal, but that is the mood as the conversation settles. It’s only when mother and daughter begin to idle on the topic of money that they enjoy talking.

Like a prisoner, Toby fits together the two puzzles that move the evenings of so many incomplete, unsaid words.

Toby stalls on the bridge, its blue paint peeling, the polished Wye below. Among the islets and long ribbons of river weed, extra degrees of speckled shadow, salmon and trout.

Momma Empire’s bulldozers down the path, Toby orbiting around her, Noemi warily keeps to the path fringed with brambles and nettles. Wild strawberries are nestled somewhere in the grass.

“You two walk,” Noemi says. “I’m going back to the house,” She’s calculated for this opportunity to rest.

Momma Empire shrugs, a Woodbine in her toad-like mouth, and turns into the foliage. She teeters along the bank of the river.

“Stay put,” she says.

A shape is breathing in the water.

Momma Empire dips into the Wye, incrementally lowering in her forearm, then waits.

With one lightening move she tickles a trout.

She booms in glee, dances on the bank for a beat and strikes the head against a stone like a match.

Soon her wicker bag sags with a few bloody brown fellows, not the minnows often squirming in Toby’s net. Momma’s cruel and malevolent, always picking at nature so she can have a fry up.

Noemi has arranged her hair, waxed her legs after the morning’s sunning session, her cleavage bowed to the rays in a grotto in the back garden.

Toby, impatient with the slow hot progress in the kitchen, catches butterflies on the buddleia and moths on Momma Empire’s fragrant tobacco plants. Excruciatingly bored, he pushes a shuttlecock in a match with gravity before turning into the cool house to spot the expected guest from the bay windows.

That afternoon the kitchen table is the consequence of Momma Empire’s bittern-like effort. She descales and deguts, leaving the heads and fins, setting them aside in a rub of salt and white peper. Noemi’s Elizabeth Arden perfume competes with the rooty scents of boiled cabbage and broad beans she’s been put in charge of, until she nods and Momma Empire poaches the squad of fish, the resplendent white-eyed trout placed on a bed of prawns, joined by a quasi-bouillabaisse as a rhubarb crumble slumbers in the oven.

Toby dashes from garden to house and back again, a puppy excited by the prospect of a visitor.

His suit bulges with bottles, pulling at his slacks and pulling his jacket. A twist of gold suspends his spectacles over his paunch. His tie is folded into his shirt.

Toby alerts Noemi from his post at the window and she jumps from the front door onto the flagstones calling after John Gallows before he vanishes into the pub.

“John, Sorry! John!”

His porkpie hat clop-clops across his heart when he turns to Noemi’s summons. “Have I got the right town? It is you?” he asks, holding Noemi’s shoulders.

He hugs her when she sweetly declares, “How lovely to see you!”

“Of course.” She exhales.

“Stand back, let me see you,” he says, pushing her away from his belly and squinting. She helps him up the three treacherous steps to the door and he puts an arm over her shoulder.

John strides into the kitchen and salutes Toby, two crowns and a set of stamps in his free hand.

“Two’s always better than one!” He kisses them. His breath smells like ink.

“Thank him.” Momma Empire needles.

“Thank you, John Gallows,” Toby repeats. His eager fingers rub the shapes of the silver jubilee coins and the pedigree bullocks.

Gallows stoops for a kiss. His cheek is smooth, sallow.

“John Gallows says John Gallows! So welcome! Now, turn your attention to the champagne!” Gallows unwraps and unwires the bottle. The cork ricochets into the fruit bowl. A cool aromatic cloud appears in the room.

Noemi runs for glasses and cheerily declares, “To dear friends.” She dusts the flutes slowly. “To old times together and apart.”

No one answers until he shakes out the champagne. Gallows’ jowls sink into his face, wanly floating on his shoulders sprinkled with hair.

“The country is where I’ll be and the country is where I’ll stay!” he exclaims.

The flutes clash together.

“Don’t patronize us, John. It’s remote, not the city.” Noemi glares from under her set hair. The champagne is swiftly disappearing into Noemi’s glass and she appears to be getting smaller as her ire rises. “Bloody Wales.”

“No one said it isn’t.” Momma Empire bends from the cooker.

“What are you doing then?” Gallows hackles are up.

“When I got divorced they said that.” Momma Empire cleans her station.

“For Christ’s sake, mummy, everyone knew about the divorce. I knew. They knew.” Noemi sniffs, self-pity. “Even the sheep.”

“Then why’d you come, dear?”

“You’re wrong, John. Yes, wrong. We’re not that smart. But you and I both like being strangers. We’ll never admit it, of course. Maybe Mummy likes it that way too.” Noemi swallows her champagne.

The cuckoo clock breaks the downward spiral, allows time for trivial remarks to redress the conversation.

Gallows poses on the edge of a Chippendale chair with his hands on his knees. He fidgets in his pockets — a nip of Armagnac to warm the belly, a last Benson and Hedges between his prong-like fingers.

Momma Empire defuses the bile, cheering, “That’s the way!” She rhinos in the kitchen for the meal. In concert with John a fag dangles from her mouth.

“You could also light the fish,” Toby says.

“Wonderful, dear.” Noemi twists his ear.

“You do get in the way,” Momma Empire hisses. She dodges around Toby with the last piping dish. 

Gallows busies himself with uncorking a black burgundy; he splashes some on the tablecloth, and Noemi tut-tuts as the bottle tours the wide table set with silver and Wedgwood. Finger bowls and bone plates arm each place. Wine and water glasses rest on their coasters. The candlesticks are primed. The fruit bowl has been rejuvenated. Cheese is warming on the sideboard. Toby is high with anticipation of eating. John nudges him and whispers, “Remember, lad, you’re to hold a woman and a bottle by the waist. Not the neck.”

Toby is drooling when Momma Empire divvies it up.

“Mine’s like a penis,” Toby says.

“A very tasty willy it is,” replies Gallows.

The women hiss.

“Very amusing, lad.”

Various comments and moans follow.

Gallows wafts his hand, masticates, pauses. “What are the parameters of modern life, aside from this jolly trout?”

“I’d say money,” ventures Noemi, dissecting a bean. “Money and England. That’s bloody important.”

Momma Empire coughs. “Fags. Can’t live without fags, not me.”

Toby gambles. “Chips? Crisps?”

“You don’t know a thing, do you?”

“The boy’s not a connoisseur. Work on that.”

“Don’t be too clever, boy, whatever John says.” Momma Empire kicks him under the table.

“The four parameters are the workday. The office. The computer. The boss.” Gallows wiggles in the leather. “We don’t imagine it this way when we come. But come we do. We imagine our talent will be put to use.” His trout cools on his plate.

“That’s obtuse. Who gives a damn anyway?”

Gallows stammers on about deadlines and interviews, the price of paper and labor, reviews and revenue and circulation. He dismisses them all with a discursive hand. Their mouths molt to a digressive Rhone red until Toby has collected together what he wants to say.

“This world is like a program we would never watch, or a book we would never read, or a newspaper we would never buy, a world where we will never be comfortable. You are always alone.”

“Very grown up!” Momma Empire’s surprised that anyone related to her could be wise.

“My children can’t think like that.” John shrugs. “Eat less fish, boy, it makes you too smart.”

“Bollocks!”

“Mummy!” exclaims Noemi.

“I say bollocks!”

“You’ve a lovely life ahead of you, child. Your mother could never in a million years come up with!”

“You’re always — ” Noemi stamps her foot.

“Me.”

John clops his hat on the table and he summons everyone. “Have courage. Saying no gets you somewhere. Say no.”

Momma Empire feels she must reply to the tabloid man. “It’s a funny old world. I don’t like it. It’s alien to us. There’s no reconciling it. You can’t adapt. The younger, fitter, smarter replace you. You fall to the wayside —”

“I don’t know anything about it,” interrupts Noemi, “I’m not an artist.”

Gallows quivers on the edge of his seat. “You’re either in or you’re out. Most of us are out — the nature of newcomers. Work at the sub-editor’s desk, not high enough to get the flack, but neither low enough to be a hack.”

He says this with grim flourish, wiping his mouth and dashing his napkin onto his plate. His wine tumbles and he fawns at the table, then warms an entire bottle of Armagnac with gusto over a candle, low and hushed.

Some finds its way into Toby’s glass as he says goodnight. Upstairs he breathes the wisdom of Gallows’ visit — vanilla, butterscotch, tobacco.

The wind blows on the slate tiles of the leaning Hay house, the slick gray tiles howling like reeds, humming with the low frequency of the earth, the fish tumbling above the bed, around the room and through the walls into the bleak churning sky.

Kneeling at his trunk of relics, Daddy Empire passes Toby his crispy commissions.

“Under three regents I served the crown,” he says with dash. His hands dive into the trunk like darts, scoring epaulets with double stars, bully hats and an armful of common pictures.

“What’s the job of the monarchy?” Toby asks searchingly. Cheekiness colors his voice.

“That’s daft, boy. The monarch doesn’t have a job,” Daddy Empire says. “Don’t be indignant, son. She’s an honor to the nation.”

Toby scratches at the coconut-scented gel erected into spikes. One of Daddy Empire’s army hats balances on the arrangement. He’s the fink with a line in army surplus. He rubs the curled black and white photographs removed from the sacred confines of the trunk. Daddy’s on assignment wherever it’s hot in the Empire.

Daddy Empire toys with his pipe, scours out the tar with a feeler, packs his cassis tobacco, and slyly waits for Toby to respond to the stacks of pictures where he’s so prominent. His pipe jabs from his mouth in most. He sometimes poses with a white bull terrier. His staff seems pleased to have him. But Toby’s reverently thinking of the documentary on the Sex Pistols on fuzzy ITV, which hardly reaches the cottage lounge where they spend the evenings. He rummages in a pocket for a sherbet lemon somewhere in the lint, leaves and scales.

The trunk is a bank of glory — hundreds of photographs of him in the field, in hotels, in the company of men, at the Red Fort, bivouacked in inhospitable terrain, in uniform, in dress, at the service of the majestic. The pictures make the man.

“Have you been in here, boy?” He’s puzzled. Who has edited the contents of his trunk? He scratches at his sweep of white hair.

Shib-shib.

Shib-shib.

His wife circulates in the kitchen where it’s warm, her slippers moving with uncanny determination.

The sleeve of the armchair slips to the carpet, saturated with cat and dog hair as Toby wiggles downward.

Daddy Empire pulls on his pipe, kneels at the relics again and tries to interest Toby in his career in engineer corps. But the television is heating up and Sid Vicious is shouting through the one speaker. Sid pierces his ears with safety pins and carves his belly with razors. There’s much to admire. But grandfather changes the channel to a sheep dog competition.

Daddy Empire’s wife shuttles in from the kitchen. Many large moles cover her face. She smells like menthols. Shib-shib sound her slippers, shib-shib. She unfolds the television trays and delivers the poached eggs.

Toby eats and watches the dogs, not Sid. He attacks the rashers and black pudding and fried tomatoes, still pungent like the vines. They’ll bake potatoes in the ashes of the coal fire between breaks to salt slugs in the garden.

In the morning Daddy Empire puts Toby to use.

Collect the coal. Check the hens for eggs. Mow the lawn.

Grandfather lords over the telly: a cricket test match.

And Toby devises a coiffeur for the lawn’s green head. He hunts around the cottage, eating the wings of butterflies and tasting flowers for nectar. Cows loam over the hedge, crows cry in the trees. No croquette today.

Grandfather rises once from his armchair to fetch his gun and fire at the birds. The crows disperse at the sight of the shiny thing, the peppery shot wasted.

During the test lunch, when the telly has reverted to choirs and quizzes, they play darts in the barn. Next to the dartboard is a deep freeze. Daddy Empire lifts the coffin-like lid and points to the arsenal of salmon, trout and even a pike, the fish staring with their strange clairvoyant eyes.

“Concentrate, boy,” he tells him, turning his attention to a new game of 501.

He hikes up his moleskins and shows off his ankles, blue with varicose veins from too much rugby, poking out of his suede boots. He sets aside his anxious pipe and land lung, cuffs his shirt over his cardigan and dabs his fluke-like mustache with ear wax extracted with a dart. The first thuds around double twenty to open the game.

Toby rehearses his subtraction and keeps a steady hand on his three salmon-like darts, just keeping up.

Eventually grandfather flinches and flubs on double-one so Toby wins by default. Toby celebrates his victory in a tin of boiled sweets, the prize.

Once the old man retreats to the cottage, Toby tosses the ball for Boy, Daddy Empire’s shepherd dog, likely another of his faithful servants. Boy tirelessly fetches the ball from the lane spliced with grass over the wet ferny common, from which they invariably depart in search of fish.

Cherry pipe smoke curls out the window. Daddy Empire revs up his scabby red Volkswagen bus in the barn. Flies orbit his fishing cap. He beckons and Toby becomes another object in the Wanderbaum-scented interior. He hums in hope about the reservoir. He boasts about his catches, the battles on the banks, but Toby reckons the reservoir’s good for only eels or a carp.

Grandfather guides them into the mountains. Toby’s smile illuminates the orange van, complete with a bed and its comforts.

That night, grandfather takes up the mattress. His legs and chest blend into an enormous teat of hard belly. At his best he disguises it with a velvet jacket, a red cotton shirt, a hot pink velvet bow tie, and piano-sized pants and cummerbund, but tonight he snores in his pajamas under the canopy buffeted by wind. Toby hardly sleeps in the bellowing drum. At dawn he manages to issue a war whoop when he shits down a bank like a sheep.

“You’d like to ride a pony?” He prepares the rods, slips them out of their sheathes, slots them together, threads on the reels, draw out the lines, knots the carefully selected lures from an aluminum box and knits the hooks into the cork handles of the poles. The reservoir is touched with whitecaps.

“Not really.” He knows. Once grandfather finds out how much it costs he’ll back out.

After two days lost in the misty mountains, camping among the keeps and cairns of the Celts, fishing in their lakes and reservoirs, Toby is as cold as a pebble.

On the way home Daddy Empire insists, “The Towy.”

His wicker gear and olive oilskins sag with tuck as he tramps along a footpath at the edge of fields of fluttering, emerald shoots populated by rueful cattle. Refuse rests high in the branches from high water, more frequently a place for Toby’s miscast lines. Snags lie in the tangles of shadow and turbulent pools whirl along the tawny river.

Toby sloshes to the edge of a pool dotted with gadflies. The game is underwater, just above the fragrant gravel.

Fish are jumping underneath the decrepit railroad bridge where deep water lies. The weedy railroad cuts through the valley already in amber shadow, the sun shining on the highlands. There is damp silence, the wild river, a filigree of otter runs and heron depths. Somewhere down the line, far in the distance, the local train shrills heavy with a cargo of students, miners, teachers. Oily magpies caw in fields.

Salmon and sewen surge beneath the Towy’s surface, leap in fast, kinetic arcs. They strike at the gadflies hovering over the cool, still water under the bridge. The booms rebound under the bridge’s trellis. Silhouettes of muscle and grace travel in the aspic-like air. Gravel and rocks bubble into the water from the rusty line above. The fish do a strange demolition — launching at the swarms of flies, whistling like mortars. Then splashdown.

Toby eagerly wades in the vicinity, following grandfather’s lead, but with a snag, he breaks the line and must clumsily tie a new fly. He takes the opportunity to jam a chocolate in his mouth and a hook in his finger. Daddy Empire works the scroll of his cast.

The fish thump again and again. Rock and sand plunk into the water.

The thick, waxy line whirls above when Toby returns to ply the waters. He tiptoes deeper yet gets no closer, his flies drifting on the surface, wet, untouched, uninteresting, unnoticed.

Grandfather retreats for a pipe, a think and sandwiches. He breaks open his hazelnut chocolate bar on his belly. Toby crunches a creamy, nutty piece while disregarding the dirt aftertaste of the liver, horseradish and beets.

“I’ll get a cup of tea.” Daddy Empire mutters, winded. The gusts that come with the low sun are redolent of brackish tides and estuary mud.

More flashes register under the bridge. Gravel spills. Two carriages chug around the near curve when the force aggregates — bits of bank are caving in. The earnest train rolls on a sharp toot of its whistle and the carriages move onto the first span.

They wave from the bank.

The pylons and structure fail as the train crosses.

A terrific roar makes them jump.

The trusses are gone.

Gravel and chunks of concrete, carriages and passengers stir in a screaming, thrashing vortex of water and limbs. Thunder percusses over the bruised valley and the second carriage is sucked over the brink to a chorus of laughs and screams.

They sprint to the wreckage, tea forgotten in the field, grandfather’s breath coming in waves when they arrive at the stony shore. Fish jump at the foaming perimeter like uncertain victors. Toby deploys the landing net and catches hold of fingers and toes like fry. Grandfather wades out and reaches for survivors. He cuts his leg open in the debris and his blood mixes with the others as they are pushed downstream by the pig iron and water. Toby runs down the bank, willows and nettles lashing his face as he leans from the shore like a bramble, hooking tumblers of swift current, stunned fish and human debris.

Pants issue from his diaphragm. Grandfather’s collapsed on the bank. A few survivors have scrambled from the wreckage. Some people are swimming and bleeding among the wreckage. Other fishermen run to the shore and respond to the cries. A farmer arrives on his tractor, then roars away to a phone.

The first bodies are brought to the shallows, wan skin, contused wounds, tallow bones.

“Llewellyn?” a stunned woman asks. “Seen him?”

A brawny man emerges with a body down the shore. He opens the mouth and clears back the tongue and props up the torso and delivers a stream of breath.

“Can you please?” cries another woman in the vicinity, staggering on two soft ankles towards the man coughing on the corpse, directing him to another wet silent person.

Toby too finds himself clearing tongues and reviving the nearly dead as he was taught in swimming lessons.

Then come the sirens, the volunteer emergency personnel, on the opposite bank.

A bewildered blue shape appears to be the train’s driver.

The first bandages, disinfectants and painkillers are distributed from two meager first aid kits once a copper struggles them over the Towy in a kayak. CB radios check-check from the police cars. The police, their lips, eyes and fingers, move in disbelief — looking, counting, reporting, realizing. More emergency services appear, medical personnel diffusing from the cul-de-sac where the lane ends.

Toby and Daddy Empire lean against the Volkswagen hedged in among the flashing vehicles, both almost as exhausted and shocked as the victims, a few of whom emerge intact along the tourniquet-like river. A helicopter ominously beats at the air. More cars are arriving and people don’t even ask. An ambulance leaves soon after the helicopter touches down in a nearby field. 

He welcomes the nourishing assistance that comes with triage: the tea and biscuits served by a chesty wife. Daddy Empire’s tuck is missing. Words congratulate them on their bravery.

They make their statement later and then the local official asks them to leave. But Daddy Empire’s heaving and crying about the mangled people. He can’t go anywhere. He can’t admit that he too is a casualty on that evening. Age has snatched away his courage and youth.

Somehow Toby persuades him to start the orange Volkswagen. He grinds the loose clutch, works the pedals and finds a way out for the bus, but it’s Toby who steers the bus to the entrance to the cottage barn once they’ve passed onto the lane.

He navigates grandfather’s heavy body into the cottage.

Shib-shib move the wife’s slippers, shib-shib.

Daddy Empire settles into his chair, lights a pipe and waits for dinner in the light of the cathode ray, not mentioning a word.

Toby goes to the barn to recollect. Food and television seem distasteful, even dishonorable on such a day.

The darts play on the plaid board and the fish swim in their frozen box.

Like a flame, Daddy Empire rises from next to the hearth. His newspaper dangerously crenellates close to the fire. He breathes his pipe odor over Toby’s lapel as he repeats the steps to a bow tie, standing behind his grandson.

“Not so easy as a cravat,” he says, pointing to his own loose knot.

They stand like spoons neatly in a drawer in front of the mirror over the mantle. Daddy Empre fiddles the tie with his inky, nicotine fingers. Toby hasn’t learnt the loop-loop-knot; his forte is folding handkerchiefs. The grooming is complete for his weekly class in ballroom dance.

Daddy Emipre is visiting America. He’s keen to find marmots barking along the continental divide and to catch rainbow trout, but he’s also old, tired and not himself. Toby leaves him to a crossword and the television.

He pecks Noemi goodbye in the kitchen. Noemi insists he eat. But Toby doesn’t want pork chops, onions or cabbage. He bobs away but she rushes after him with a chop wrapped in foil. He stuffs it in his pocket and adjusts his bow tie.

Noemi gives him a sloppy wet kiss to prove she’s his mother when Molly picks him up in her Datsun, tooting outside on the driveway. Toby smooches Molly’s hand there on the gear knob; its ivory length is bitter with rosin from the bow of her cello. She adjusts his look from proper to something more scruffy and teenage-like.

Toby’s greasy hair rubs against the window that holds the darkening city and its boulevards. He tries not to sweat before dancing but Molly keeps edging her hand onto his thigh. She parks under the swaying streetlights and she kisses him on the lips and pulls him around her waist. It takes a minute to walk into the warehouse emptied of books. It reeks of spines and print, covers and guts.

Miss Ross ushers them through the door, but it’s Mister Chips who gives Toby a brush on the cheek, whispering, “We’re expecting you two.”

The pupils circulate next to the table of sodas looking for optimum partners, someone looks and rhythm, not an easy combination. The boys slot the girls, and the girls sort the boys, everyone temporarily forgetting the criteria for dance — posture for poise, grip for cues, steps for accuracy — in deference to body and charm.

Molly and Toby press together as the needle falls on the records. They are the other aloof couple in addition to Miss Ross and Mister Chips who pause to correct steps. They ignore the clumsy feet filing by, hardly following their demonstration. Toby’s heart beats next to Molly’s. Her tongue might slip in his ear and wisps of incoming beard tickle her neck before they unclasp at the halt of the waltz.

When she takes Toby back home in her snub-nosed Datsun, Molly murmurs solutions to Calculus homework. Her pelvis still dances against him, and he feel its sultry imprint as she offers the solution to deriving the volume of a curved surface. Toby wants to loiter over her body but he is too uncomfortable and starts a complicated yes-no, despite the lust. The mysterious hunger in Molly’s eyes makes him very nervous and it is with reluctance that he turns inside the screen door blushing with Molly’s last words:

“Next time, I dare you take off my underwear.”

There’s a big greasy stain in his blazer pocket from the chop. It’s already late in the house. Daddy Empire snores, his bellows smelling of curry paste, his body oddly glowing like the cathodes in the tiny iridescent black and white television.

It’s at breakfast when he roars back to life.

“I’ll not have you whoring and dancing, lad. No harlot is going to sleep in your bed. I’ve seen that Molly of yours and she’s no good!”

But it’s dancing with Molly that Toby likes, swinging his hips through the bookish dust of the warehouse. No one knows that a malignant lure has hooked his insides and it will reel him to the heavens like a fish.

The blue scrawl of Daddy Empire’s letters ceases, as do the seasonal packages of caps, digital clock pens, and uniforms and guns for Action Men.

Toby will pour his ashes into the nearby river.

Shib-shib grimly smokes a menthol.

The leaden urn is extraordinarily heavy. The ashes fall into the swirling pool of red water in a gray column.

Toby might want to swim in less acrimonious and ephemeral times but this is not the moment as the tail of the ashes disappears into the maw of the afterlife.

He taps on the back of the urn to make sure nothing is left. Noemi throws in a head of daffodils. Shib-shib stubs out her fag in a mossy stump.

There’s no priest or official of the church of any kind.

Toby is a young committed atheist; nonetheless, he seeks a word or music or ritual that could somehow make it more acceptable that Daddy Empire’s dancing on the river bottom, meal for beloved fish.

Up next: Lions Live Here