Free The Right Man by Nigel Planer Page B

Doris. Had my father had a secret
lover called Doris? Or was Doris an acronym for an undercover organization of
ex-schoolteachers? ‘Dunstan’s Old Rascals Illicit Sex’? My grandmother’s name
was Mabel, my father’s sister was called Auntie Rose, so it couldn’t be either
of them. I know that my parents had been wanting a girl when my younger brother
Tony had arrived, so he’d been a disappointment from day one. Could Doris be
the name of the daughter they never had, and had my father put his
contraceptives out of reach of the bedroom in the superstitious belief that
their proximity to the empty Doris file would somehow enhance fertility?
    As I
moved on to his insurance papers, I lingered in my mind on the word ‘disappointment’.
There was no file under ‘D’ for this, but it seemed that my father’s’ life had
been a series of disappointments. Not least of all me. Giving up stability and
qualifications to go razzamatazzing with glitzy folk, sleeping with
fly-by-night actresses. Whatever next? He’d had such hopes for me as a child. I
had been the one to learn all his tedious skills. I was top in physics, his
subject, at secondary school. But then, just when he thought he’d got me right,
off I waltzed into the glamour.
    Plentax
is a large electronic components company, mostly involved in armaments. At the
time, I justified my leaving so abruptly with adolescent idealism, feeling
rather noble that I was turning my back on that happy band of men — and it was
almost exclusively men at Plentax — who design and make parts for the sonar
devices used in the search mechanisms of various types of torpedo. My own
personal contribution, long since computerized into redundancy, of course, was
to weld the miniature DC4 resistors on to ceramic plates, which formed part of
the microcircuit, which would cybernetically monitor the torpedo’s progress
through the water to its target. But really, I just couldn’t take the numbness
working somewhere like Plentax, where desensitization is as traditional as
soldiers marching in a parade ground, as necessary as medals for bravery. But
emotional numbing seems to be an essential part of earning a living, and I didn’t
know that in 1976.
    I
imagined, if it had been Liz that had died and not my father, what I would find
among the chaos of her shoe box full of memorabilia. Billets doux from Bob
Henderson? A diary splodged with tears and splattered with descriptive passages
of stolen afternoons with him, wet gussets and hard members like in some
magazine fiction? I couldn’t help but have the thought that Marc Linsey would
like that steamy stuff to find its way into the pages of poor Neil James’s nov.
I could feel a headache coming on. The neat left-right compartments of my brain
were jumbling; I needed vortex reinforcement.
    My
mother came in with a cup of tea for me. She put it on the desk. I thanked her,
even though it had milk and sugar, neither of which I take. I long ago gave up
connecting with her on dietary matters.
    ‘What
do you want me to do with his cricket things?’ I asked. ‘Shall I give them
away?’
    ‘Oh, you
keep all that, Guy, you’re a boy.’
    ‘I don’t
play cricket, Mum.’
    ‘Oh,
don’t you? Was that Tony? Give it to Tony then.’
    ‘I’ll
hang on to them for him. If I make a list of everything I find, then you can
tell me if there’s anything you want.’
    ‘Oh,
you’re just like your father, making lists. I don’t even want to come in here.’
    ‘That’s
what I’m saying. You can just tell me, and I’ll deal with it.’ I was trying to
make things easier for her.
    ‘Just
leave me a pair of his socks.’
    She
left the room. I was thankful my father hadn’t left a video message or anything
embarrassing like that. Definitely not his style. A pair of socks would be easy
and couldn’t give one any Californian-type messages of advice from the grave.
After putting various insurance policies and bank letters into my bag to