Page 9 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)
Ron, eyes firmly shut, is taking a little trip down memory lane.
He is remembering a very specific afternoon in the early seventies, when he had been engaging in some choice words with a young probationary police officer on a picket line in the West Midlands.
What Ron was doing in the West Midlands, he forgets.
What the picket line was for, who knows.
What he does remember is that after having a frank exchange of views with the officer, during which Ron questioned the officer’s parentage, and the officer had offered an alliterative take on his view of Ron as a cockney, Ron had goaded the officer into striking him with his truncheon.
There was a press photographer nearby, and Ron thought it would make a good picture.
The officer had demurred for a moment, so Ron then made an allusion to a shared romantic past with his mother, and Ron was struck, hard and clean, on the left temple.
Bingo. He heard the click of the camera shutter moments afterwards.
Ron had a very solid head in those days, and was fêted for his ability to take a truncheon blow and continue his business with the minimum of fuss, so this wasn’t uncommon.
It made him look a hero and the police officers themselves enjoyed it, so everyone was happy.
If Ron ever left a picket line unhit, he couldn’t help but consider it a wasted trip.
In fact, if anyone were minded to write a university thesis on the transition from wooden to aluminium truncheons in British police forces, they could do a lot worse than speak to Ron Ritchie.
He had taken a lot of hits to the head in the late sixties and early seventies.
He still had the odd scar, which barbers had to work around, but, other than that, no lasting damage had been done.
On this particular occasion, however, the officer had not thought that one hit was enough, and rained down four or five more blows on Ron’s head (aluminium truncheon, springier but more durable), and even Ron had felt the need to fall to the ground.
You never fell to the ground unless you absolutely had to, as a point of both pride and self-preservation.
As Ron curled into a ball and felt blood trickling from his temple into his eyes, he consoled himself that the press photos were going to be spectacular.
But, when Ron raised his head in the absence of further blows, he saw the officer swinging his baton at the press photographer’s camera, and then at the press photographer himself.
They were different times. Pluses and minuses.
Ron had picked a bad day to be a hero. The West Midlands Police were in no mood to let a large cockney with a West Ham tattoo lie about bleeding on their concrete.
Ron found himself half hauled to his feet by two other officers and dragged to a blacked-out police van, truncheons whipping the backs of his knees all the way.
Interestingly one of the truncheons had been wooden, and the other aluminium, making it a fascinating case study.
Ron had been thrown head-first into the van, now coughing up blood, and with the knee injury he now blames for walking with a stick when no one is looking.
After a drive of no more than a few minutes the van stopped, and Ron was dragged out onto a quiet country lane by all three officers, who then proceeded to aim kicks at his stomach and testicles until they ran out of breath, at which point they rolled him into a muddy ditch and went off for their lunch.
Although Ron understood the three officers had simply been doing their job in the best way they knew how, he was now in the middle of nowhere, face down in a ditch, caked in mud and blood, and bemoaning, not for the first time, that his testicles were not quite so damage-proof as his skull.
He had a date that evening, and, while a fresh scar would be useful, the state of his testicles would not.
Had he wept with pain? Ron thinks so. Could he breathe with three broken ribs? Well, yes, but not without feeling like he’d been knifed. Was the pain so excruciating that he’d begun to think that not breathing at all might be the lesser of two evils? He remembers that it was.
He doesn’t think about that ditch often.
About the physical pain a human being can endure.
But he’s thinking about it now, eyes tightly closed, curled up on his bathroom floor, with Ibrahim holding a cold flannel to the back of his neck.
He is trying to gauge whether his hangover means he is currently in more pain now than he was in that ditch.
‘It was a lovely wedding,’ Ron mumbles.
‘Do you think perhaps you drank too much?’ asks Ibrahim. ‘In retrospect?’
‘Got to toast the happy couple,’ says Ron. Could he open his eyes? Should he? ‘Rude not to. How did we get home?’
‘Mark drove us,’ says Ibrahim. ‘And I was helping Pauline put you to bed, but you insisted on sleeping on the bathroom floor.’
‘Bed of kings, the bathroom floor,’ says Ron. He decides he will open his eyes, but it is a mistake. The world tips over a cliff and keeps rolling. He closes his eyes, and vows to never open them again. ‘Is Pauline still here?’
‘Making breakfast,’ says Ibrahim. ‘I’m assuming you won’t be joining us.’
‘Just a couple of eggs,’ says Ron into the floor. Will he die? If so, please, God, make it quick. ‘With Worcester sauce. And a bit of bacon, and there are sausages in the freezer. And mushrooms if we’ve got them. And beans. You have a nice time at the wedding?’
‘A lovely time,’ says Ibrahim.
‘Why aren’t you on the bathroom floor, then?’
‘Mainly because when Paul’s uncle suggested doing J?gerbombs at three a.m. I politely declined.’
‘Clever,’ says Ron. ‘That’s why you and Pauline are okay.’
‘Oh, Pauline had the J?gerbombs too,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Some people can just take their drink, can’t they?’
There is a ring on Ron’s doorbell. Pauline calls from the kitchen, ‘I’ll get it. Is he still alive?’
‘He is,’ says Ibrahim. ‘So I lose the bet.’
Ron hears Pauline talk into the entry phone and buzz someone up. The last thing Ron needs is company. Who is it? Joyce? Ron’s memory clears enough to remember Joyce drinking J?gerbombs too. So it won’t be her.
‘Jason to see you,’ Pauline calls. Okay, that’s not too bad. Jason’s seen worse.
‘Shall we tidy you up?’ Ibrahim suggests.
‘Jason won’t mind,’ says Ron.
‘I might just pull your trousers up though,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Sorry to be so formal.’
Ron gives a mute nod and feels his trousers being hoisted. Probably for the best.
Ron knows that he’s not going to be able to move any time soon, or even open his eyes.
How is he going to have breakfast? Cross that bridge when you come to it, Ronnie, old son.
At this precise moment Ron is very aware that he is a lucky man to have Pauline and Ibrahim at his side.
Comatose on a bathroom floor is not the sort of trick you can pull too often.
Collapse on a bathroom floor after a wedding and that can be quirky and charming; collapse on a bathroom floor every Friday night, and you’d soon find there’s no one around to cook you breakfast and pull up your trousers.
So they’ll indulge him for this one day, and he’ll make it up to them.
At some point Jason and Pauline can help him up and plonk him on the sofa, where he can eat bacon and eggs and watch daytime TV with the curtains drawn. Someone, probably Ibrahim, can cover him with a duvet and let him take a six- or seven-hour nap. Then they can all forget today ever happened.
As Ron lies there on the floor, he feels beached and harpooned, hopelessly waiting to be rolled back into the sea. But he has lived a life, and has been through worse.
Ron hears the front door to his flat open and waits for Jason to come in and mock him. What should Ron say? ‘Should’ve seen the other guy?’ Yep, that’ll do.
But instead he hears a squeal of surprised delight from Pauline, and then small footsteps racing towards the open bathroom door.
A small hand pushes the door fully open.
‘Grandad!’ says Kendrick. ‘It’s me. What shall we do?’
Kendrick. The single greatest human being on the planet, sure. But a human being that requires a huge amount of energy at all times.
‘Why are you on the floor? What are you looking for?’
There will be no duvet for Ron today. No gentle nursing back to health. Sometimes you simply have no choice but to drag yourself out of a muddy ditch and walk four miles on battered legs.
Ron summons every ounce of every pound of every stone of spirit in his body, sits up and smiles at his grandson.
‘I told Ibrahim that if you put your ear on the bathroom floor you could hear trains. He didn’t believe me.’
‘And could you?’
‘Yeah,’ says Ron. ‘Uncle Ibrahim was wrong.’
Kendrick looks at Ibrahim.
‘Unlucky, Uncle Ibrahim. Okay, if you’re finished in here, we should probably play Lego.’
Ron gets to his feet. An act that takes so much force of will he doesn’t even stop to wonder why on earth Jason and Kendrick might be visiting his flat on a Friday morning.