He keeps a list of it all in a little notebook.”
“Timmy!” I can see he’s got Rosie going now. It makes you realise what your own family really thinks of you. They’d probably believe Sid if he said I had a couple of bodies under my bed. Luckily, Dad is upstairs with one of his turns – that’s when he turns over and says ‘fuck it, I’m going to stay in bed all day’. He’d probably run out and start yelling for a copper if he was here.
Sid holds an imaginary microphone under my hooter and puts on his lah-di-dah voice.
“Tell me, Mr Lea, when did you first experience the uncontrollable urge to steal ladies’ underwear that has made you the terror of S.W.12?”
“About the same time as I felt the uncontrollable urge to shove this bread knife up your bracket,” I say. “For God’s sake, Mum, you don’t believe him, do you?”
“Where did you get those panties from then?” says Rosie.
“I bought them—”
“—he’s dead kinky, too,” interrupts Sid, “Go on, take your trousers off and show them what you’re wearing. You never seen such—”
“Shut up!” I yell. “I bought them for a girl friend but they were the wrong size, so I thought I’d have a little joke.”
“You haven’t got a girl friend,” says Rosie.
“That’s all you know. I don’t tell you everything.”
“She must be a funny shape if they don’t fit her,” says Sid, holding up the knickers. “You could get into them, couldn’t you Rosie?”
“Don’t talk dirty and put those things down.” says Mum. “What I can’t see is why you didn’t take them back and change them if they was the wrong size?”
With everybody in the family a bleeding Perry Mason, I might as well give up. I should have told them that Sid put them there to start off with.
“They wouldn’t take them back because they were worn,” I say.
“You mean she had to put them on before she found they wouldn’t fit?” says Rosie.
“No, he did,” said Sid.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“I should hope not,” says Mum, “the very idea.”
It’s amazing how they go on treating you like a kid, isn’t it?
“It all sounds very fishy to me,” says Sid. “I reckon you’d better come clean and open those suitcases. If you took everything back and said you were sorry—”
“He doesn’t want to do that,” says Rosie, “Better to burn them.”
“Everybody’s going to see.”
“Not if he does it at night.”
“Look a bit funny, won’t it, having a bonfire in the middle of the night?”
“Why don’t you all wait till Guy Fawkes day and then get Sid to stand on the fire instead of a guy?” I say. “By God, I’ve never heard such a load of cobblers in my life. Can’t you see that Sid is having you on? There’s nothing under my bed except fluff. I wouldn’t have believed you could have thought so little of me.”
I knock back my tea and push the chair away from the table. They’re all a bit quiet now and Mum and Rosie are definitely looking guilty. I decide to blow my nose to show them how affected I have been by their unkindness and remove my handkerchief with a flourish. Trouble is that in my hurry that morning I have grabbed a hanky down from the clothes line in the kitchen and – yes, that’s right – it’s not a hanky, it’s a pair of Rosie’s drawers. I notice the expressions on their faces first, and honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Even Sid looks at me as if I’ve got blood running down my chin. A glance shows me what I am raising to my nose. Light blue, with a touch of grey lace round the bottom. I start to say something but it’s no good. Everybody is still staring at the knickers like they’ve started ticking. I throw them on the table and Rosie shrinks back in her chair. None of them will say a word. I start to speak again and their eyes slowly swing up to my face marvelling that they could have lived with me so long without suspecting. There’s no point in going on so I stumble out.
I don’t know what they say when I’ve gone but I do know that to this day the subject of underwear makes my mother wince and you don’t see any bras or panties hanging up in our back garden.
As the next few weeks go by I realise that there are quite a few Dorothys about, and I begin to be able to recognise the kind of bird who will be asking you to help her move the dressing table from one side of the bedroom to the other, five minutes after she’s opened the front door. She’s usually been married about seven years – take it from me, the seven year itch is no fairy story – and the last of the children has just begun school, so she’s suddenly got a bit of free time on her hands. Her old man is a dead end nine to fiver, and she’s as bored with him as she is with having nothing to do. She’s read all the stuff in the Sundays about wife-swapping and troilism and she reckons that not only must it be alright to do it but that she is the only bird in the world who isn’t. She’s also unlikely to have thrown it around much before she got married so she reckons she missed out there too, and is dead keen to make up for it. Her trouble is that until she’s done it a few times she’s liable to confuse her natural desire for a bit on the side with love, which can stir up all kinds of problems. Once a customer starts baking cakes for you, or slipping bottles of after-shave lotion in your pocket, you’re better off giving it a miss, believe me.
I remember poor Sid going through a very embarrassing period with this bird who started coming round the house and asking if he could do her windows. She was round there about once a fortnight which was bleeding ridiculous. Added to that, she’s always be walking past dressed up as if she was going to her old man’s funeral. Sid was scared to go out of the house and Mum was giving him the old dead eye. She had a bloody good idea what was going on. Luckily, Rosie had this job in the supermarket so she never twigged. God knows what she would have done if she had. How Sid got rid of that piece I don’t know, because he never talked to me about it, but one day I suddenly think I haven’t seen her for a while and that’s the end of it. Since the business with Viv, Sid has kept his activities very quiet and I think he regrets having opened his mouth that first time up at the Highwayman.
One of the most interesting things about the job is the opportunity it gives you to have a shufty at how other people live. Everybody likes having a poke round somebody else’s place to see what they’ve got. My old Mum for instance. Every time there’s a house in the street for sale she goes round there. She’s no intention of moving, it’s just that she wants to see what kind of wallpaper they’ve got and whether there’s an indoor kasi. She’s also potty on going round the nobs’ houses in the country and coming back and rabbiting on about their stuff as if it’s a dead ringer of hers.
“Little fireplace in the kiddies’ room,” she’ll say, “it had exactly the same tiles as our front room. Very similar, anyway.”
I’m a bit like Mum in a smaller way and there was one job about that time that really sticks in my mind. It was up by the common and one day I’m cycling along when this old bird comes running out holding a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head and waving a walking stick.
