The Domino Men

Chapter 2

The first thing you should know is that no one in my family had ever liked my granddad much. I was always the exception. My mother’s opinion was typical and may accurately be gauged by the way in which she broke the news.

“The old bastard’s dead,” she said, trying to sound somber but unable or unwilling to remove the last few crumbs of glee from her voice. Then again, more firmly this time, not bothering to suppress the smirk.

“The old bastard’s dead.”

He was in a pub when it happened. Nowhere flashy or picturesque, just another link in a chain, one of those places with the decor of an airport waiting lounge and the ambience of an NHS dentist. It was four weeks from Christmas, the stores were oiling their tills in readiness for the season of consumption and when I picture what happened I always imagine “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” or “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” echoing tinnily in the background.

The old bastard stood at the bar, clasping a pint, flirting with the barmaid, grandstanding for the regulars. Well into his seventies, he looked even older — puce faced and rheumy eyed, his nose stippled with smashed capillaries, those good looks which in his youth had magnetized the attentions of more women than he could count now barely discernible beneath the palimpsests of hard living, old age, regret.

Granddad had a way of drawing people into his orbit, a talent for acquiring an entourage. After he retired to devote the rest of his life to booze, the quality of his hangers-on underwent a vertiginous decline until by the end it was only the deadbeats who flocked to him, the idlers and the dropouts, the skiving masters and the loafing champs. They were the kind of human jetsam who wash up in the pubs the moment its doors are unbolted and stick at their stools throughout the afternoon, their natural habitat the post-lunch lull, the boozy quiet before the suits trample in. My story started for me at just this time of day, when men like my granddad rule the pub. It began in the hour of the pensioner.

He started to tell a joke, something corny which began, in his favorite formulation, with that whiskery triumvirate of comic stand-bys — an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman. It is a source of endless regret to me that he never got as far as the punch line. I often think that if he had then everything might have been different.

Granddad collected bad jokes, had even written a few of them in his time, and he would have been spinning this one out, hamming up the details and relishing the accents. The courtiers chuckled along with him, sufficiently beered up even at that time of the afternoon to laugh at almost anything, tugged along by the promise of another drink once the joke was done, because Granddad — despite his casual treachery and deceit — could always be relied upon to stand his ground.

This, then, as near as I can reconstruct it, is the joke that he told. As things turned out, it was to be his last.

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman are summoned before the Queen. They stand there at Buckingham Palace, lined up before her, gawping at the finery of the place like a trio of slack-jawed yokels on a daytrip. The Queen has a commission for them — a kind of favor — and she asks if there’s anything they wouldn’t do for her. It’s the Englishman who steps forward first. “Nothing,” he says. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my Queen.”

“Nor I,” says the Irishman.

“Nor I,” says the Scotsman.

To which the Queen replies: “Would you kill for me? Would you maim and hack and slit for me?”

The witnesses agree that it was at this moment that my granddad’s mood changed completely. It was as though all the good humor had been vacuum-pumped from the room.

He winced. A shadow passed across his face. Everyone swears blind that this is what he said next, his voice quaking with emotion: “This is not a joke. This is a secret.”

Another wince. Or rather, an expression which began as a wince before growing into a spasm and was well on its way to becoming a convulsion when he pitched forward on his stool and sprawled face-down in the sticky carpet. His companions gaped blearily at him. One or two even wondered whether this might not be part of the fun and were starting to wish that he’d hurry up, get back on his feet and order another brace of drinks, when it became apparent that this was more than play-acting. A murmur of disquiet. A small but noticeable sobering up.

A stranger stepped forward from the back of the pub, where he had been sitting, silent and unobserved, nursing a lemonade with a couple of similarly unobtrusive friends. In a flat, prim voice, he told them that he was a doctor and asked, politely but with the air of someone used to an attentive audience, whether he might be of some assistance.

He wore a dark, old-fashioned suit, a skinny tie and a grubby white shirt with a peculiarly high collar, and he looked completely out of place in that pub, absurdly, embarrassingly incongruous.

No sooner had he appeared than one of his companions, dressed, so far as anyone could tell, in exactly the same quaint way, abandoned his lemonade and trotted up beside him.

Without the slightest trace of emotion, he announced that he too was a doctor and wondered aloud whether he could help to alleviate the situation.

Then, with the woozy logic of a recurring dream, a third stranger, identically attired, strolled up to the bar to casually announce that he’d trained at Barts and that his services were unequivocally at their disposal.

Everyone shuffled back, too befuddled to do much else, as the strangers knelt beside Granddad like the magi turned up by mistake at an old folks’ home.

The first of them rolled him onto his back and reached for his wrist, groping for a pulse with forefinger and thumb. After a few seconds, he announced that Granddad still lived. It was only then that any chink of emotion entered his voice. The entourage told me later that it sounded like disappointment.

As the second man speculated about a stroke, a heart attack, an embolism, the last of the strangers took a handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket, wiped his brow and suggested that someone call a bloody ambulance.

When Mum told me this story, I stopped her here, my heart cartwheeling in hope. “You told me he was dead.”

I could hear the sneer in her voice. “Well,” she said. “As good as.”

There’s something more you ought to know. Each of those men, each of those so-called doctors, spoke with a different regional accent, each so pronounced and distinct as to be immediately recognizable.

Those men were walking stereotypes. They were a bad joke.

They were an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman.