Dawn shrugged. ‘Who cares about sexy any more?’ she said. ‘It’s a whole new century, baby. Un-sexy’s the new sexy.’ I didn’t know what to say to that.
The kids thrived through junior school and passed the eleven-plus without a hitch. But going to grammar school seemed to change them in ways that made them less and less like people I might reasonably want to hang out with.
They spoke better than we did, knew more about Maths, Geography and History, and occasionally even corrected our grammar. Perhaps it was just my insecurities about my own lack of further education, but it often felt as if they considered themselves superior. Sometimes I worried they were actually ashamed of us.
‘Oh, don’t be so stupid, Daddy!’ Lucy would say, dismissively, if I dared to voice an opinion. I missed her calling me ‘Dad’. I wondered when that had changed.
‘It’s just adolescence,’ Dawn would say when I mentioned Lucy’s dismissive tone. ‘Don’t worry.’
One day, at Dane Court’s parents’ day, Lucy introduced me to her friend Cecelia’s father. She’d been nagging us to authorise a sleepover and her introduction was intended to facilitate a ‘yes’.
He shook my hand and his palm was clammy and limp. His face was shiny and blubbery, as if he’d maybe used so much skin cream his head had swollen, and his blue suit looked top-end but outdated. To say I didn’t take to him instantly would be an understatement.
‘Edward,’ he said, ‘but my friends call me Ted. Jolly good to meet you.’
I thought I remembered his face from somewhere and said so.
‘I don’t think so,’ Ted said, thoughtfully. ‘But anything’s possible, old chap.’
‘Work, maybe?’ I offered, thinking,Old chap? Who the hell actually says old chap?
‘I doubt it, I’m a pilot,’ Edward said.
I’d decided ‘Edward’ suited him better after all – we were never going to be friends.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What line of work are you in?’
‘I’m an electrician,’ I replied. ‘So maybe not. Unless you had a rewire a few years back.’
Edward shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I think I must just have one of those faces.’
* * *
‘I wish you wouldn’t say that,’ Lucy said on the way home. ‘I was mortified.’
‘Say what?’ Dawn asked, stretching to look back at our daughter.
‘Electrician!’ she said. ‘It’s so embarrassing.’
‘Embarrassing?’ Dawn repeated, sounding shocked. ‘How the hell is being an electrician embarrassing?’
‘Cecelia’s dad’s apilot,’ Lucy said.
‘And?’ I asked Lucy, glancing in the rear-view mirror. ‘He’s a pilot,and?’
‘Oh, forget it,’ Lucy said. ‘There’s no point.’
‘Being a pilot’s cool,’ Lou said. ‘D’you think he’ll take us up in his plane?’
‘No! Doh!’ Lucy said. ‘He flies big 747s and stuff,stupid.’
Dawn looked at me and shook her head in apparent despair, and I drove on in silence for a bit. But then she said quietly, ‘I suppose you could say business owner if you wanted to. You haven’t been an electrician for years.’
I thought about it as I drove, but ‘business owner’ didn’t work for me. It crossed my mind that, in some strange way, changing fromelectriciantobusiness ownerwould be like our move to Joss Bay. It would dissolve some essential part of my being and I’d be left looking in on myself the way I looked in on that house. I’d be left wondering who I was.
No, I was Rob, anelectrician from Margate, and I was proud of it.
I didn’t feel uncomfortable all the time, though – and, if I’m being objective, not even most of the time.
