by Heide Goody
“I’m sure that won’t happen,” said Nick with a nervous laugh.
Tony turned to stare at Nick. “Wait a second. Is this…?”
“What?”
“Is this about the cancer? Are you planning what to do if I pop my clogs while we’re away?”
“No!” said Nick, unable to stop his voice sounding high and squeaky. “I was – no! I mean it was just a joke, you know?”
“Joke?”
“You’ve got plenty of time left. Well, some time, I guess. Oh, God.”
21
“I’m just saying,” said Finn.
“You’ve been just saying for the last twenty miles,” said Adam irritably.
“You are a Muslim and work for criminals.”
“You are Christian and work for criminals,” he retorted.
“I’m not a Christian,” she said.
“Were you christened?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to church?”
“Chapel. Yes.”
“Sounds pretty damned Christian to me, Finn.”
“But you’re a Muslim.”
“That’s as much a cultural thing as it is religious. Have you seen me getting out my prayer mat today? No.”
“So, you’re not really a Muslim?”
Adam made a weird growling noise like he was trying to show how angry he was. “Right. I am a Muslim. I believe in God and the Prophet. I believe we are judged for what we do in this life. But I’m not compromised by the work I do. The job I’m doing here is one I’m happy with.”
“The job you’re doing here is cutting someone’s heart out. Your religion’s fine with that?”
“Islam is fine with organ transplants.”
“Against the person’s will.”
“Not exactly; but my own personal principles are fine. It’s a deal all parties entered into willingly.”
“The guy in the car has agreed to have his heart cut out?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. He might be regretting it now, but he signed a contract with Mr Argyll.” He chuckled. “You know who that guy is?”
Finn nodded ahead. “Oz Bingley.”
“But who he is? See, Oz was Mr Argyll’s top killer, back in the day.”
Finn shook her head.
“Code name was Lupo,” said Adam.
“Lupo. I’ve heard of him.” Finn tried to recall. “He was an animal. That explains the job he did on the house. Have I got a code name?”
“No,” said Adam, too quickly. Finn figured he was lying. “Anyway, Oz retired, and Mr Argyll pays him an extremely generous monthly retainer on the condition that, when requested, he will donate his heart for Mr Argyll’s research. He even paid for the care home for Doreen as well.”
“Research. Cool,” said Finn. Mr Argyll sounded like someone with interests very similar to her own. “So he didn’t want to wait until Oz just died? I get that. What’s the research?”
Adam shrugged. “I’m not sure. But we have instructions on what to do with the heart, once it’s extracted.”
“So, how much longer do we wait to extract it?” asked Finn. We’re what – somewhere in the Lake District now? We could—”
“We wait,” said Adam firmly.
22
Nick had been trying to find a way to unravel the uncomfortable atmosphere in the car. It wasn’t all in his trousers, although that was becoming almost intolerable. Theirs was not a family which indulged in emotional exchanges, but he wanted to show his dad he cared about his illness, and wasn’t just freaked out by the ghoulish possibility he might drop dead while in Nick’s care. Actually, he realised, he was extremely freaked out by the ghoulish possibility his father might drop dead while in Nick’s care. How likely was that, exactly?
“Dad?”
“You want one of your sucky sweets now?” said Tony.
“No, dad. Can I ask you about your, um, condition?”
“What about it?”
“What have the doctors said? How much do they know?”
Tony looked at him. “Son, they’re doctors. They know as much as anybody because they’re the experts on this stuff. They don’t have a crystal ball, though. Nobody really knows how things are going to play out. No point in dwelling on it either. I’m a firm believer in not giving something headroom if you don’t want it taking over your life.”
“Yes,” said Nick, who recognised the signs of his father terminating the conversation, “but I wasn’t sure if there’s anything I should look out for. Like if you might get symptoms I should tell you about, or something. You know?”
“Symptoms?”
“There have been studies which say people on their own are more likely to die because they don’t notice things, or act on them. It’s particularly bad for men, because we just don’t tell people when something’s up. Suffer in silence and all that.”
“Nothing wrong with suffering in silence,” said Tony.
“I just want to know what to look out for.”
Tony growled. “Heaven help me. Right, listen up and don’t bug me anymore about the cancer after this. Apparently, I might meet my end in any of the following ways. You ready?”
Nick gripped the steering wheel tightly and braced himself for the details. “Ready.”
“I have throat cancer.” Tony pointed helpfully at his throat. “Where the tumour is located means it’s possible my lungs might be affected and cause me respiratory problems; although I expect I’ll notice I can’t breathe way before you do.”
“Right.”
“If it decides to infiltrate one of my major blood vessels then I expect I’ll just drop to the floor and bleed out, dying almost instantly. A much more likely scenario is I will simply lose the ability to swallow as my oesophagus closes up.”
“Shit.”
“Again, I think I’ll notice before you.”
“That’s … that’s…”
“Bloody awful, yes,” said Tony with fierce simplicity. “Whatever happens, I don’t need you mothering me. Understood?”
“Yes,” said Nick in a small voice.
“Mind you,” said Tony, “nobody ever mentioned olfactory hallucinations.”
“What, smelling things that aren’t really there?” asked Nick, afraid he knew where this was going.
“Yes. Smells like something crapped in your car. Tell me you can smell it too?”
Nick was trapped. Under any other circumstances he would have denied he could smell anything. Having it presented as a possibly worrying symptom, he didn’t have that option. He did the only reasonable thing.
“I smell it too. I think Pickles has farted.”
His dad glanced sceptically back at the dog, snoozing on the back seat. “Get that dog to the vets when you can. I’d be worried if that was my guts. Seriously. And I’m dying.”
Nick glanced at his father. Tony was grinning to himself. Nick was torn between smiling and crying. He tried smiling.
23
“We’re on the news,” said Finn as she checked her phone.
“What?” Adam said, his eyes wide.
“An unexplained explosion destroyed a house in Brandwood End, Birmingham today. There are no reported fatalities, but a neighbour is being treated for shock. Police are keen to track down the drivers of two vehicles which left the scene, in particular a blue BMW, thought to have been hired in Liverpool. The police are not saying if this incident is terrorism related.”
“Shit, that means they’ve got our registration,” said Adam, thumping the steering wheel.
“I expect Audrey’s told them all about me,” said Finn, pulling her Polaroids out of a pocket and flicking through until she found Audrey’s picture. “She might come to regret it.”
Adam looked across at her. “Would you seriously go back and mess her up?”
“Of course,” said Finn, surprised by the question. “I intend to.”
“It could put you at risk. It could put Mr Argyll’s entire operation at risk.”
“I’m not sure you understand how I work. There’s only risk when I don’t have control of a situation. I always have control of a situation.”
Adam smiled. “You can’t control every situation. Something will always happen which you can’t anticipate.”
“Oh, I’m very adaptable,” said Finn. “It’s when I do my best work.”
24
“Welcome to Scotland,” said Tony, pointing at the giant blue and white saltire on the road sign.
“Fàilte gu Alba,” read Nick, not knowing or caring how badly he was mispronouncing the Gaelic. “Nearly there.”
“We’re in Scotland,” agreed Tony. “Still bloody miles to Inverness.”
Nick looked at the landscape to the sides of the motorway. It didn’t look particularly Scottish. It just looked English: grassy, green and dull. No mountains, no heather-strewn valleys, no bonnie lassies skipping through the glen in tartan kilts. Maybe it would get a bit more Scottish further up.
“Gretna Green,” said Tony. He pointed at the sign for the border town. “I guess it doesn’t carry all that much significance for your generation. I don’t hear about anyone eloping anymore.”
“Can’t imagine many sixteen year olds nipping over the border to get married,” agreed Nick. “But I think people still like to elope; just for different reasons. They sneak off to Vegas to get married because it’s cheaper, or they can’t bear the family bickering.”
“I wonder what your mother would make of it if you and Abigail decided to do that?” Tony chuckled. “If you haven’t already, of course!”
“No, we haven’t,” said Nick. He immediately felt like a complete lowlife. Every single sentence about Abigail coming out of his mouth which did not include the fact they were no longer together was a hideous lie by omission. One he knew would only get worse as time went by. He needed to man up and put his father in the picture. If he could spend the morning rolling in the blood of a dead man then he could tell his father the truth about his relationship status. “The thing is, we decided to take a bit of a break from each other.”
“For the weekend, you mean?”
Nick realised the term was not in his father’s vocabulary. “No, dad, I mean we’ve split up.”
“She dumped you? Oh, what a shame. Nice girl Abigail. Really nice. Should have kept hold of that one.”
Nick bit down on the urge to protest it was a mutual split. In truth she had dumped him. He was annoyed at the unspoken implication Abigail was too good for him and he’d simply failed to do what was needed to keep her. He cast around for a scathing retort, but he had nothing. The truth of the matter was he had failed to do what was needed to keep Abigail.
“Well the journey wasn’t going the way I thought it was. I did a fair amount of research on it too, but I guess I had it wrong.”
Tony turned in his seat and fixed Nick with a stare. “What journey? Your mother and I had some of our most blazing rows when driving.”
“Not that kind of journey.”
“Then what on earth are you on about?”
“I’m talking about the emotional journey; the narrative stages.”
“Is this that marketing thing again? There’s a difference between selling … whatever it is you sell, and a relationship.”
“That’s what she said,” muttered Nick. He was silent for a long time, thinking about the awful scene in John Lewis. It had started as a simple enough task: buying a dining table so they could have friends round for dinner parties. Abigail had been saying something about not wanting to cook, or not liking to cook and he’d shushed her. A few Jamie Oliver videos and they’d be fine, surely. Having dinner parties was what people did when they got to a certain stage, wasn’t it? The style magazines featured endless photos of cool urban interiors, geared up for entertaining friends. He’d been pondering what sort of a centrepiece would work most effectively when he’d turned to see Abigail sprawled across a table, stark naked, yelling “I am not a customer journey, I am a human being! If I stick a candle in my arse and call myself a centrepiece will you listen to me then?” He’d wrapped her in a table runner and hustled her out as quickly as he could, although he had to go via the tills to pay for the runner once he realised he’d forgotten to pick up her clothes.
Nick wondered why he still had the table runner when he didn’t have anything to put it on (neither a dining table nor an Abigail). He sighed. “I didn’t pay her enough attention. I thought I was doing the right things, the things we should be doing; but I didn’t spend enough time listening to what she wanted to do.”
Tony looked disappointed. “Well it explains why you’re in such a state, I suppose.”
“I think I’m holding it together quite well.”
“Not emotional state, Nick. It’s not the dog’s farts at all, is it? You’re in some sort of a filthy mess under that coat. You stink to high heaven.”
“The coat has got a bit of an aura, it’s true. The salesman told me they use buffalo urine to cure the leather—” Nick clamped down on his words. Sometimes his enthusiasm for bullshit got the better of him. Just because he could spout moderately plausible lies at will, didn’t mean he should. It was a lesson which eluded him surprisingly often.
25
By the middle of the afternoon, they were off the motorways and on the one dual-carriageway which ran up Scotland’s eastern side. Traffic was light but constant, the white-peaked mountains rose ahead of them. Finn itched to kill something.
“We need to fuel up,” said Adam.
“We’re not losing them,” Finn told him.
“I think that car of theirs must have an enormous fuel tank. I can’t believe they’re still going. We’re going to need to stop at the next place.”
“We’re not stopping.”
“It could be fifty miles to the next petrol station.”
Finn looked at her phone and tried to get a signal to bring up a map and list of petrol stations. She was operating on zero bars of data.
Adam glanced at her mute phone. “There aren’t many garages on these isolated roads.”
Finn rolled her eyes. “Isolated roads, more opportunities. If I was driving we’d have rammed them off the road by now.”
“That’s why you’re not driving. If we’re fast, we’ll soon catch up with them, this Beemer will go a lot faster if we need it to.”
“As long as we don’t get stuck behind something.”
“There’s a place coming up in a couple of minutes. Pitlochry. I’ll put fuel in the tank, you can go in and pay, yeah?” Adam paused. “One thing. Do you think you could just give them the cash and not kill anyone? Please?”
“Why so squeamish all of a sudden?” asked Finn.
“No, it’s not that, but I can go quicker if I’m not, you know…”
“Worrying about what I might be doing?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Fine. Don’t worry about what I might do.” Finn was careful not to commit fully to any no-killing rules. She liked to remain flexible.
26
Tony reached into the back of the car. “Got some bacon sandwiches here, courtesy of your mother. I reckon it’s about time we dug them out, don’t you?”
“Mm, yeah!” said Nick. A bacon sandwich would be a welcome distraction from the growing irritation in his groin. What sort of disease would you get from sitting in poo-stained trousers for hours on end? He couldn’t come up with anything better than nappy rash. There was sure to be something more serious and grow-up sounding. What was that blood disease you got from infected bed sores?
“Pickles, you’d better not be chewing the upholstery,” said Tony.
“Probably bored,” said Nick, half-looking round. “Oh cool! You’ve got the tin!”
Tony was piling things from his bag onto his lap to retrieve the sandwiches. “What? This?”
He lifted the old tobacco tin. It was scuffed. Almost all of the lithographic print’s colour was gone, but the details of the picture were just as clea
r.
“That picture there, that’s us this weekend,” said Nick.
“It’s—?”
Tony turned it over in his hands. The picture oozed manly nostalgia. It could have come from a Boy’s Own adventure thriller, with its rugged solo male in his fisherman’s sweater. He was sat on a boulder on the shore of a wide body of water. At the far side, black against blue, were forests and a zig-zag mountain range. Just to one side, on the edge of the vignette was the edge of a veranda and the wall of a log cabin. A faithful hound sat at his side, picked out in the light of the campfire. The man sat with his back to the viewer, shotgun over his arm – he held it with such casual cool – and a tumbler of whisky in the other. This man, this uber-mensch figure, looked like he was merely relaxing for a moment before sailing away across the dark lake, or going to hunt majestic stags in the wood. Nick thought it looking fucking gorgeous.
“This is us?” said Tony.
“Yep.”
“This … this scene?”
“Yes.”
“So, the business with a log cabin in the Highlands?”
Nick waved his hands at the mountains surrounding them. “Inspired by that.”
“And the whisky?”
“The Talisker. Yes.”
“And the clay pigeon shooting?”
“Yes.”
“And the dog?”
“The dog was sort of a last minute thing. But, yeah, I look at that tin and I think of you.”
Tony looked thoughtful. “I have had it a long time.”
“It’s not just that. It’s the essence of dadness. A bit old-fashioned, but in a good way. A man who taps his barometer and knows about tools. A man who likes the classic tunes of yesteryear but can’t stand the noise of modern music. A man who likes meat and two veg—”
“Are you talking about me or the guy on the tin?” asked Tony.