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stanzas diary synopsis and guide

  
only part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently available

The Trainor Diary: Feb 4 to Feb 6

Wednesday, February 4

MOSELEY

Moseley is probably the kind of area of Birmingham you want to live in if you’re not from Birmingham. It has listed buildings — proper old ones — an eighteenth century pub & a street of big detached Edwardian townhouses that were the first ever to include built-in garages. Not that it’s actually genteel or anything. It’s also the suburb of Birmingham in which you want to hang your belly out in the sun if you’re a snoring old wino or where you go to be schooled in the ancient wisdom of illegal horticulture by a frazzled acid-head picking her feet on a flaky bench.

This is because the people of Moseley pride themselves on their unusual liberalism: there’s a Jewish primary school, for example, with a majority of Muslim pupils. & they take their local-colour just as seriously. A man once wandered stark naked round Kwik Save four days in a row, filling his basket with washing powder & fabric conditioner & walking out again, before anyone decided it was strange enough for them to consider alerting the authorities.

They say a ley line runs straight across the High Street, which might explain the endurance of indigestible health-food shops & the lingering aroma of sandalwood, emanating from those emporia of vaguely eastern smells & bells, that drifts around almost every corner. Where precisely the lay-line goes from Moseley into the surrounding area, no-one else in Birmingham has ever bothered to find out. Imagine Glastonbury with Balti Houses. In neighbouring Kings Heath, we invariably refer to it as Muesli.

It should have come as no surprise that this was where Hannah lived. I was strangely ill at ease however, arriving on foot, passing through such blithe, familiar surroundings with the autumn sun making little effort to heat my back. Her drive was hedged with hawthorn rather than the usual privet. That was classy. A careworn fuchsia sat hunched over the bonnet of an Austin Se7en with a flat front tyre. Tired blooms snivelled at the dew clinging to their stamens as the breeze went by.

It was one of those ‘imposing late Victorian villas’ that had been converted into flats for a better class of students & young professionals. I stepped into the porch. She opened the door before I’d had time to decide which one might be her buzzer.

“Sorry... I was up half the night...” She looked endearingly rumpled. She was wearing white cotton pyjama bottoms, a plain green T-shirt & leather flip-flops, & was in the middle of the laborious process of wrapping a bulky camel-hair overcoat around her as if she was about to go out like that & fetch the Sunday papers. There was a crease in her cheek. She rubbed the mucus from her eyes, “heating’s packed in... been here long?”

“No. I never even got to ringing the bell.”

“Doesn’t work anyway,” she said.

She smiled weakly rather than plumping for a handshake or a kiss & turned away, thrusting her arms almost up to the elbows into the deep, clownish pockets of the overcoat. I followed her towards the hall. Her front door was at the bottom of the stairs. There was no window in it. No way could she could have seen me in the doorway from inside the flat.

Thursday, February 5

She padded in. She was smaller than I remembered, softer, less beautiful perhaps but somehow prettier for it (it was the lack of makeup, probably, I’ve still never got used to that): “shut it behind you, will you... fancy a coffee? I can’t show you the study just now, Sambo’s asleep under the desk. I sometimes wheel him in there in the buggy when I can’t get him off. He seems to like it.”

It really was quite cold in the kitchen. I accepted the coffee. I normally don’t drink the stuff — it makes me jittery — but I needed something to warm my fingers. “Would you like me to take a look at the boiler?” I offered.

“Goodness gracious, are you a plumber too?”

“No, nothing so prestigious. I could take a look though anyway.“ There’s nothing like fixing things to get you in a woman’s good books. I had a boiler in Glasgow that sometimes overheated. You just had to stick your finger up it to get it working again. Besides, a bit of strategically-placed facial grime never went amiss. I sat down without being asked. She was spooning coffee into a stovetop cafetiere.

“Can’t, I’m afraid.” She snapped the pot shut & put it on the hob. “It’s upstairs in a locked cupboard. I’ll have to get the landlord out. Anyway, we should get down to business. I can fill you in on the background while we’re waiting for his majesty to let us have the study back. Have you got a pen & paper?”

I did. They were already on the kitchen table. I’d actually forgotten to bring anything with me when I left my mom & dad’s, but I’d stopped at a newsagent on the way & bought a fibre-tipped signature pen, an A to Z & what at the time I’d thought was a rather cool-looking large black notebook. As I opened it for the first time & leafed through its pages, I realised it was a 2004 day-to-a-page diary. It was September. They couldn’t possibly be selling diaries for next year already. I turned as nonchalantly as possible to the ‘Notes’ section at the end & unlidded the pen.

“Amrit was never going to take to fatherhood that easily,” she began, rather too professionally, I thought, “I knew that from the start. His own upbringing was far too strange. When he found out I was pregnant it must’ve brought it all back to him. Not that he wasn’t already obsessed by the whole question. But if I’d known just how obsessed... well, what would I have done exactly?”

“Until he was twelve, Amrit thought his name was Martin, the son of a bus driver from Druids Heath called Leon Higgs & his rather more middle-class wife, Carla. But then Leon Higgs died & Martin’s whole life-view was given a sudden smack in the teeth.”

“How did he die?” I wanted to knock her off the prepared spiel. She took it in her stride.

“He had an asthma attack during a thunderstorm... never had one before. It happens more often than you’d assume, apparently. I think he was trying to fix a leak in the garden shed & fell off the roof... Don’t laugh.”

Friday, February 6

“Anyway, what’s important is that the legal processes surrounding the death — the reading of the Will & so on — revealed to Amrit not only that Leon had never been married to his mother, but wasn’t even his father. In fact, Amrit had never even been adopted because of objections on Carla’s part. Seemingly, she wanted to keep all knowledge of Amrit’s real father from her child & she was prepared to go as far as defying her partner’s wishes to do it. Leon had wanted her to tell him anyway but had respected her decisions about how to raise her own son.

“But then, one day, precocious little Martin suddenly reads the headline on the front of his mother’s Guardian out loud — Nixon to call OPEC’s bluff, or something.”

The coffee pot began to make that gargling sound that struggles out of Jabba the Hutt when he gets throttled with his bondage gear by Carrie Fisher in a bronze bikini. She got up & took it off the heat, then poured the thick black stuff into two mugs & brought them over.

“His mother was so shocked that she went round collecting up all the documents in the house that had anything to do with Amrit’s father: his letters, photographs & so on, & even documents that revealed Amrit’s name (including his Birth Certificate) & she threw them in the leaf-burner in the garden. Leon, on the other hand, reacted by rescuing a photograph of the man as a teenager in Uganda. He put it in a wooden box that contained his own childhood toys — dinky cars & a draughts set & so on — with a short letter explaining who the man was in the picture. Most importantly, when he came to make a Will a few years later, he specified that the box should be left to “Amrit, the son of Carla McGrath & Sanjit Singh.”

“But surely she would have checked the contents of the box before she gave it to him.”

“She may have done, or it might have slipped her mind. Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to take it out; maybe it was Leon’s dying wish that she let her son know the truth. Besides, she’d also have to keep the Will secret too. & you simply can’t do that. Whatever happened, Amrit ended up with the box containing the letter & the photograph. But it took him years to fill the gaps in; his mother refused to have the subject mentioned. There were plenty of details he would never be able to recover.”

“She wouldn’t talk to him about it, even when he knew the truth?”

“No. Well... no, she lied to him at first. Unfortunately the letter gave away very few details & failed to say how Carla had also managed to keep most of the story from Leon. It just said something like: “I’ll always be your dad, Marty, but the man in the photo was your dad too, before I ever was. You should ask your mother to explain.” I suppose he thought she wouldn’t have a choice if Amrit confronted her with the picture. Anyway, it was her story, not his.”


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