by Luke Brown
‘I’m pleased to hear it.’
I shoved Emily’s gin and tonic towards her.
‘You’re Mr Wright’s son, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘He taught me English. God, we used to have fun in that class. Worked him right over. What happened to him?’
‘He had a breakdown, left us, moved to Liverpool, then died of a stress-related heart attack.’
‘Er, right. Good one. Ha!’
‘No, he did.’
‘Right. Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. He were a laugh. Much better than the other cunts we had.’ He stood up. ‘I should probably—’
‘Was that why you gave him such a hard time?’ I said.
‘Give over. We were just having a laugh.’
‘I remember watching TV when a brick came through the window. “Sorry, Mr Shite,” someone shouted. He said he recognised the voice. Was it you?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘He was actually trying to do his best for you all.’
‘So? It were his job. He were paid to do that.’
‘Come on, Paul,’ said Emily.
‘I just want you to remember he was a good man; he was a good teacher; he did his best for you.’
‘He were the one with a decent job, a decent salary, long summer holidays. If he weren’t tough enough, it’s not our fault.’
‘Decent job? Teaching here? Fuck off.’
‘All right, all right. Chill out, pal,’ Wozza said. ‘Don’t start something you’ll regret. I’ll see you later, my lads are over there.’ And he left, turning to give me the hard stare as he walked away, except he clipped a table as he did and stumbled. His mates started laughing and I turned away. If he caught my eye now he would have to fight me; that was the rule.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Emily.
‘I’m fine. Just don’t look at him.’
*
I knew Wozza and his friends were staring at me without having to look up.
‘What’s Andrew doing while you’re away?’ I asked, moving my chair so I had my back to them.
‘Oh, he’ll be enjoying himself. Going to all the dinners and drinks parties I don’t want to accompany him to.’
‘This must be the best time of the year for him. No teaching.’
‘Yes, just his PhD students through the summer.’
‘He’s quite involved with them, isn’t he?’ I said.
‘I suppose so. What do you mean, involved?’
‘Friendly. Like the one who came to your launch and his talk. I’ve seen him with her a few times.’
‘Chloe. She was at my launch? I don’t remember seeing her. Yes, she’s his biggest fan. And you’ve seen them together elsewhere?’
‘Oh, in the shop. And then walking down the street later, going into a hotel.’
‘A hotel?’
‘A hotel bar, you know. It would have been the bar. The Hoxton – we go there sometimes after the pub shuts.’
‘You watched them go into the bar.’
‘Yeah, I was heading there myself. I even had a chat with him at the bar. This was before I’d met him, but I knew who he was.’
‘You’ve never mentioned that.’
‘What was to mention?’
‘Right. And they were doing work?’
‘I couldn’t say. I wasn’t spying on them.’
‘OK. Really. A hotel?’
‘A hotel bar.’
‘And you saw them leave.’
‘I saw them leave the bar area.’
‘The bar area.’
‘To go outside, I presume.’
‘You presume.’
‘Well, they must have done. They went somewhere.’
‘Right. Do you want another drink? I certainly do.’
‘Yes, please.’
*
I needed the toilet. I went upstairs and stood in front of a urinal. When I heard the door open I didn’t look up.
But I could feel someone looking at me. I finished, zipped myself up and turned to face Wozza, who was standing between me and the door. I nodded at him, wandered to the sink, washed my hands and walked over to the dryer.
‘You’ve been here ten minutes,’ he said, ‘and you start slagging me off straight away. Slagging me off for what I did twenty year ago.’
‘Yeah,’ I said and turned to face him.
‘A lifetime ago. Do you want me to tell you about my life twenty year ago?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘Trust me about that.’
‘You can if you want to.’
‘Don’t be soft. I came up here to leather you.’
‘I wondered.’
He walked forwards and I fought the urge to cringe away. He took my shoulders in his hands and I waited for his head to descend and break my nose.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About your dad. He were all right, thinking about it.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
He nodded. Then he turned and walked out. I turned the dryer on and rubbed my hands together. I could see my reflection in its chrome. This face that people didn’t seem to mind at first: my friendly face, my mixture of Mum and Dad stamped over me. I had been told I looked young for my age.
My hands were dry now. I could believe in general that we were all formed by our past, fed by the soil in which we’d been planted, but I still hoped that if I remained alert I would find a way to be an exception to the rule. I looked at my face again and then I smashed my head against it.
*
My nose had stopped bleeding by the time I got home. I had held my bloody sweater to my face on the walk back, while Emily stroked my back and said reassuring things.
When we got in I washed my face again and opened a bottle of wine my mum might have been saving for Christmas. I poured a glass and took it into the front room and lay on the plush white carpet and imagined it blotting red through. Emily was in the bathroom and I shouted through for her to help herself to wine in the kitchen.
The woman next door was shouting at her children.
I closed my eyes and took careful sips of wine.
‘You’ve got me wondering if it’s safe to stay here,’ she said.
I opened my eyes. She was standing in front of me in her jeans and walking jumper and socks, holding a glass of wine.
‘I might have gone to Cornwall,’ she said, taking a seat.
‘Not for free, you wouldn’t.’
I missed my mouth and a drop of red fell on the carpet. I leaped up and came back with kitchen roll to blot it.
‘Are you sure your head’s all right?’ Emily said.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Well, let’s stay up for a while at least. In case you start behaving strangely.’
‘Start?’
‘Stop.’
She sat on the sofa and I stayed on the floor. There was a very small CD collection and I put on Blonde on Blonde. Gradually my head moved closer to her feet and I felt a strong urge to rest it on them. And then I did.
I couldn’t see her face but she must have been wondering how she had got herself in this predicament. I felt wretched. I rolled over and moved my head away. I stood up and sat down on the sofa beside her.
‘I’m not going to kiss you, Paul,’ she said.
‘I’m not going to kiss you either,’ I said.
And then we kissed, which was a great relief from having to talk to each other, and after half a minute or so she pushed me away and said, ‘No. Sorry.’
Then we did it again, with great surprising naturalness, which might have encouraged a sentimental person to believe that we were fated for each other, and after a bit longer she pushed me away and said, ‘No. Sorry. I really mean it.’
I nodded and lay back.
‘What a day,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s improved considerably.’
‘It was a nice kiss,’ she said. ‘But we can’t do it again.’
It wasn’t all I wanted. But it was a good enough start. It’s like you keep telling me. We achieve our progress in increments.
Fifteen
When I get to your place early I have to sit in the bus stop across the road, keeping an eye out for the middle-aged woman who has the slot before me. She comes out at fifty-one minutes past, on the dot, every week. I study her face when she gets out, trying to see if she looks to have undergone significant emotional insight. But the face doesn’t reveal such changes easily. She might just as well have come from a dentist’s.
I wait a few minutes until she’s gone and buzz the door. I’m glad to see you. And you are good at appearing glad to see me. But then we have to talk about my life.
‘How do you feel now you’ve agreed the sale of your mother’s house?’
‘Bereft.’
There’s a long silence between us. I have become familiar with this tactic of yours and have begun to wonder to what extent it is for therapeutic purposes and to what extent you are simply taking a paid break. I’m not saying you’re negligent in your professional duties, but you must get weary of listening to all this moaning.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me something else?’ I say.
‘You’ve just admitted to feeling bereft. I’m waiting to see if you say something facetious, if you make a joke about it.’
‘What did the salmon say when he swam into a wall?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Damn!’
You take another minute’s paid break before you ask, ‘Will you go back much?’
‘Home? No. Well, there won’t be a home to go to.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’
‘Oh, well… The whole place is poisoned now. Place without an i, that is. And not literally, I don’t think. The famous fish and chips are in no danger at all. Especially as it’s all imported from Iceland.’
‘Bereft, you said earlier.’
‘Yes… Do you think you might ask me about something else now?’
*
I could hear the tapping of a laptop from Emily’s room; I brought her a cup of tea and glanced at her screen. She shut the lid and attempted to smile, and I knew it was time to go before she began to consider me a burden.
Before I left town I called for Alan, who was outside on his driveway, washing his car when I arrived. He invited me in and over a cup of tea we spoke awkwardly about Mum, how he was filling his time, the practicalities of selling the house in a depressed market. ‘People are talking about reopening the train line here,’ he said. ‘That would help.’
‘Do you think it will happen?’
‘I doubt it’s a priority, is it?’ he said.
When we shook hands to say goodbye, he told me Amy and I would always be welcome to stay with him. ‘Don’t feel obliged,’ he said quickly, when he saw my face.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not that. I’d like to. It’s only really dawning on me that when we sell the place we’ll…’
‘You both have a place to stay here whenever you want.’
It was something, and I was grateful.
I said goodbye to Alan and shook hands, then I caught a tram to Blackpool, two trains to London.
It was mid-afternoon when I unchained my bike from outside Euston, jumped on the canal at Camden Lock and rode home slowly by the water, dodging all the flâneurs on their Sunday stroll.
As I climbed the rickety stairs to the château I knew I was coming back to my real home, and the relief of this inspired the opposite feeling: where the hell was I going to end up in the autumn? I put a record on, opened a window and let the rush of traffic in before I lay on the bed.
When neither Mary nor Jonathan had appeared after an hour, I went looking for signs of their presence. For once the living room was more like a living room than a bedroom; Jonathan’s bedding was folded up neatly and the air was what passes for fresh round here. I wondered where he had been sleeping and went upstairs to stick my head around Mary’s door. It was the usual mess. I was glad to see no evidence of Jonathan’s belongings in the room.
It was my interview for the job at the publisher’s in the morning. I thought about what to say, and went to bed early while the house was still empty.
*
‘How would you feel about being slightly older than a lot of the entry-level staff?’ asked the marketing director, a woman about my own age.
‘It’s very kind of you to say slightly,’ I said.
She smiled but I got the sense I might be overdoing the self-deprecation.
‘I live in Dalston. Everyone is younger than me every time I leave the front door.’
She kept smiling, politely.
‘I’d work hard,’ I said, ‘and be ambitious, and I’d hope my experience in the world and in the book trade would enable me to distinguish myself and progress quickly.’
This was another of Susannah’s set answers. I surprised myself by almost believing it.
She was seeing some other people that week, she said, but she’d let me know.
*
And everyone in London talked about nothing but Brexit. You asked a friend or a customer how they were, and they moaned the word ‘Brexit’. Politicians resigned from their jobs and went on holiday to avoid having to think about Brexit. I stopped talking to people whenever possible. For the first three weeks I read everything there was to read about Brexit and then I couldn’t digest any more. We joined or left the Labour Party, depending on whether we had been members in the first place. I tried to give up newspapers and retreat to novels. But if you didn’t bring up Brexit in the first ten words of a conversation then you knew that the person you were talking to thought you lacked moral seriousness. I wished I was Irish. I had grown up Catholic on the coast of the Irish Sea! I was not Irish in any way at all. And we were probably about to make another mess of Ireland too.
Sophie was about to go on holiday with some of her friends, to a villa that one of their parents owned in Italy. I hadn’t been invited, and didn’t expect to be, but the idea of lying with her by a pool winded me whenever I thought about it. Helen caught me on the staircase holding my stomach.
‘Brexit?’ she asked.
Outside the shop the sun was shining all the time. The courtyard filled up with men in shirts and elongated leather shoes. Orange women drank pink wine. Our customers, pushed up against the wall, lit cigarettes and sucked vape machines and made disparaging comments about the fair-weather crowd who had once again stolen their tables and chairs.
When I wasn’t at work I rode out to canal-side bars, met friends for beer and pizza, took photos of women with exceptional haircuts. Filed it to Stev’n. Did it again. White Jesus had decided against the legal highs column in the face of new legislation; they had replaced it with a cycle-rage page in which Macaulay Culkin drove around with a GoPro camera strapped to his head, trying to provoke tradesmen to abandon their vans and punch him. He had become a viral sensation (‘Where’s my helmet? At the end of my big dick!’) and received a promotion.
Meanwhile, Emily had stayed on at the house longer than the two weeks she’d first suggested. She didn’t reply to the first emails I sent to her, and I didn’t know if she was going somewhere to check them. Then she sent me a quick one to ask if she could spend two more weeks there, to tell me she was making progress on the novel and wanted to continue working there. Fine, I wrote. Are you all right?
I’m fine, she said, but little more.
It was during the first of these weeks, while Sophie was still on holiday, that Andrew wrote me an email to ask if I’d meet him for a drink after work one day.
*
The courtyard was still fluorescing, squarely. Men juggled suit jackets, pints of beer and cigarettes. Women in strappy dresses carried jugs of Pimm’s. An idea of English leisure summoned with the right props. Red squash and cricket whites, freshly mown lawns. Grass rhymes with arse. Dennis plays tennis.
From the shop cou
nter I watched out for Andrew and when I saw him arrive, overcoat slung over a shoulder, I said goodbye to Helen and finished up for the day.
We shook hands. ‘Hi, Paul,’ he said, nodding towards the bar, and we walked there together.
‘I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ I said. ‘I got the job Susannah recommended I apply for. I’m so grateful to you for introducing us.’
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Well done.’
He didn’t smile, which confirmed my suspicion that he was here to tell me off. I pretended not to pick up on that. ‘Let me buy you a drink,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’ll come with you.’
There was a tight crowd squashed around the bar. We were wedged together tightly as different sections of the pack expanded to let people out with the drinks they’d bought.
‘There are a lot of jugs of Pimm’s being ordered,’ he observed.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like Pimm’s?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
The silence that followed was uncomfortable so I broke it with some inane small talk.
‘You won’t be handing out glasses of it at your wedding, then?’
‘To all six guests?’
‘Is that all you’ll have?’
‘Emily’s not had much of luck with her family.’
‘How is she?’
‘Don’t you know? I thought you were in regular contact?’
‘Not really.’
‘It’s hard to get through to her sometimes. Phone signals are dodgy in these places, aren’t they?’
‘My phone works well there. Must be a network thing.’
‘Must be a network thing,’ he said.
‘Must be,’ I said.
‘Things have been a little fraught, actually,’ he said.
‘Right.’
‘For reasons I’m going to ask you about.’
‘OK. Ask away.’
‘Let’s get a drink and sit down.’
‘OK. But she’s all right?’
‘Yes, yes. When I get hold of her she says she’s working well. She’s enjoying the town.’
‘The town?’
‘Or am I putting words into her mouth? The quiet. She’s getting work done. It’s kind of you to lend her the house.’