Head for home, head for home. It’ll be all right.
This was the life. Nathan was actually quite hungry but was throwing his sandwich away to a pair of gulls. They peered at him with critical, yellow eyes, pacing tidily beneath their folded wings and anxious for his next gift.
“You’re just going to chuck it all to them, aren’t you?” Mary, beside him on Ancw’s sea wall, dug placidly at his side. “You know you get bad tempered when you’re hungry.”
“Not at all.”
One gull lowered its long neck and started to mew, finally flinging back its head and screaming, its sharp little rose-grey mouth opened like a shell. The noise was pleasantly appalling. Its mate webbed earnestly up to join in the din.
Nathan laughed, producing a gullish squawk himself—not exactly pretty, but not too bad, either. He was with Mary, he could relax, he could even be a little bit ugly and not mind.
“I don’t know which is worse—you or the birds.” She stood, allowing him to look up at her, squinting against the surprisingly warm spring sun. “That’s my bus in. So I’ll have to go.”
“Unless you want to miss it.”
“Which I don’t.” She smiled and made a half step back, the angles of her body opening a touch, unmistakably inviting a hug.
They’d established this little routine with each other quite quickly. After a couple of months in their new acquaintance, their goodbyes hardly ever happened without it. So he stood, set himself in her embrace, let her body close against him, slight, full of little strengths and softnesses, her head snug at his chin. She always began with the left arm, then the right, then shut a flicker of contraction round him. He patted his response, while a small metallic area in his chest shone hotly, possibly proudly, for a breath.
“Off you go, then. Need a hand with your bags?”
“No.”
And she left him with the chill of her withdrawal and a pointedly independent grin.
Nathan nodded in lieu of waving while her face at the misted bus window pulled away. Then he took himself on up the hill into Ancw for a wander. He had an hour to waste before he could catch his own bus and start heading for London. And he enjoyed the stone echo there was to walking about here, the slightly hollow bang of his feet, bouncing in the narrow spaces between flags and walls. It made him feel bigger, more substantial and snug.
Which meant that he was smiling and unwary when he walked past Richard Hooker: a softly moving shadow in the shadow of the chapel wall.
“Ah, Nathan.”
“Ah, Richard.” Fuck it, he’s got that look—he’s got that Nathan, let me tell you something look. “Everything fine?” I don’t want to know. I am being happy and that’s taking all my strength.
“It’s still there, then.” Richard nodded to the chapel noticeboard.
Nathan squinted at it briefly and saw that—yes, indeed—Ruth’s inevitable, ragged verses on the Price boy’s death were still there, rustily pinned and yellowing.
“Mm hm. As if people hadn’t enough to put up with. They have to get blurry doggerel inflicted on them as well. I can only assume no one’s taken it down because no one wants to touch it.”
“Maybe they appreciate the gesture.”
“Well, it makes me want to reciprocate with a gesture of my own.”
Richard produced the injured but indulgent smile that always made Nathan want to stab him in the throat. In the absence of offensive weapons, Nathan kicked at nothing in the gutter, watching the toe of his shoe as it scuffled uselessly.
I know, I know—you’ve had a shitty life and you’re not angry all the time, you’re not offensive the way I am, I should do better, I should keep my mouth shut. Then again, you’re being fucked insensible on a roughly daily basis. Just exactly how sorry am I meant to feel for you?
Nathan tried to think of Mary, to let her calm him, while what was left of her hug in his memory was shredded away from around his ribs by little pangs of fury. “How’s Lynda?”
Richard made another smile—this time, the nervous one. “Oh, you know . . .”
“Yes.” Nathan couldn’t think of even one more suitable word, “Yes,” but started serious work on the casual intake of breath and the shifting of weight, the relatively chummy nod that would lead up to his leaving, to his neat get-away. “Yes, yes.”
“I was just telling her . . .” And Richard stopped him. Five words, that was all it took.
Shit. The sly fuck. I was going, I was practically, officially, to all intents and purposes fucking gone.
“I was just saying—I think maybe a week ago, possibly more.”
There was something in his tone, something quite literally compelling which made Nathan wonder if Richard didn’t fake his vagueness, his distraction to save them all from having to hang on his every word. God save us from that.
Richard allowed himself the small, dry preface of a cough. “I was just letting her know . . .”
Don’t ask him for more, don’t ask him. “What?” Bollocks, he gets me every time. “Letting her know what?”
Ach, let it go, though. Why not let him? Where’s the harm?
“Mm?” Richard blinked, as if Nathan were suddenly a puzzlement, but then he dropped slickly into his story, speaking softly, keeping Nathan eye to eye. “I told her about the time that I ran away. I wouldn’t have been much older than the Price kid. I sneaked out at night, too—the way that he did. A summer night. And I walked and I walked and I ate all the food that I’d managed to take with me and I didn’t sleep very well and I got tired and I got scared. I got more scared of going on than I was of going back.”
Nathan nodded, grim: strenuously holding his imagination back from any depiction of the early Hooker household. “You went home?” And it was terrible, they beat you, they locked you in the cellar, did things . . .
“Yes, I went home.” Richard licked his lips, examined the sky. “And nothing happened.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. It was like dying.”
“Hm?”
“Like dying and finding out that you aren’t missed. Not in any way. I came back and everyone’s life was continuing. They hadn’t searched for me, hadn’t called the police. They’d wanted me gone. They’d got rid of my things.” He looked at Nathan, puzzled again, “They got rid of my things, Nathan,” asking for an explanation, for sense.
Christ, the pain in the world. Jesus Christ.
And Nathan gripped Richard’s hand, the smaller, frailer one, and held it and nodded and peered at the chapel wall, the pavement, the street, anything other than Richard’s face.
“You listen well, Nathan.”
No, I don’t.
Richard shrugged his fist free. “And you’re good with Mary.”
“That’s . . .” Nathan realised that Richard had been watching when he’d said goodbye to Mary. “You . . . ?”
“I happened to see.” Richard blushed very slightly. “You hugged her.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the kind of thing you do. A parent, hugging his child. That’s the way it should be.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”
And Nathan shut his eyes and hugged Richard and tried to make the contact unquestionably firm and caring and humane and in any way a compensation for an aching childhood, for a marriage without children, for a lack of honest or of loving touch.
Jack was under his desk. He hadn’t fallen, hadn’t even been pushed—he was not there by accident, but by design.
“I am not here by accident, but by design.”
“Well,” Nathan had stopped worrying about J.D.—there was no point. Nevertheless, he couldn’t quite think of him without a yank of something not unlike concern at the back of the throat. “Well, could you possibly get up by design? I want to talk to you. Or are you having one of your episodes?”
“I am perfectly chemically unaffected, thank you. I am looking for my pen.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am if anyone com
es in. Or, no—I am sitting on the floor because I have sciatica and it’s more comfortable for me here.”
“Jack, do please make sense. I have come rather a long way to have this conversation, which will relate directly to a book which—degraded and genre-bound though it be and very far from the proper novel I do promise I will eventually produce—is still, nevertheless, a volume you have undertaken to publish.”
Jack raised his head until his eyes could peer across the desk top and flitter about the suspicious crannies of his new office. “Christ, you’re pompous when you’re pissed off. Come round here.”
“What?”
“Come here and help me to look for my pen.”
Despite himself, Nathan sank to his knees and then all-foured it to where Jack was crouched: the modesty panel between them and the door. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Not any more, they just laugh. Hello, Nate.” Jack was going through one of his portly phases, beginning more and more to resemble the late Margaret Rutherford. His eyes gave the impression that he had been recently shocked out of sleep, but he was not otherwise dishevelled. In fact his orangeish tweeds, his tattersall checked shirt and cautious manner, almost gave him the air of a country squire, lurking in a covert for the game to beat by.
And if ever a man seemed in need of a 12-bore, it’s Jack. Not that anybody sane would let him near one.
“So. What the fuck is this all about?”
J.D. smirked and then straightened himself. “Now, old Sport, I must point out tout d’abord that you shouldn’t say I’m being paranoid because, quite frankly, you don’t know, you do not fucking understand what things are like here.”
“Since the move?”
“Since the move, since being taken over, transported and possessed, since being bought out by Rex Mundy and his evil cohorts, since being stuffed into this cupboard as if I were an unwanted ironing board . . .” He knuckled away a dot of splenetic spittle. “Since then, everybody knows what I’m doing, what I’ve said, what I’m fucking thinking, for God’s sake. And the last thing you want these shits to be sure of is that. I might as well fax them all death threats every morning.”
“I thought you did.”
J.D. rolled his eyes into his sleepiest, most psychotic stare. “That was an isolated incident, a very long time ago. And meant as a joke. But this, really, Nate, is most disturbing: my plans, my tucked-away promising authors, the bastards know about them all. I couldn’t work out why and then I realised—it’s the new building.” He paused, a tight, nodding smile inviting a gesture of agreement.
“Ah . . . the building?”
Jesus God, don’t have lost it this much. Please. You’re so good when you’re good—just get your bloody head in order.
“Yes.” An unnerving urgency was starting to twitch at Jack’s arms, while flattening his voice to a wheezy growl. “The building. Rex Mundy Ltd—it’s like any other conglomerate now—it wants to check up on its staff. And how do they do that?—with pinhole cameras, video surveillance, CCTV. All illegal, but what do they care? I’m telling you . . .” He knelt closer, his breath alcohol-free but vaguely dank. “We are being watched. So the only way to keep a secret is to work, rest and play under here.”
Nathan knew he was now smiling like a maniac—his usual response to people who quite plainly were maniacs. “You don’t suppose they might know all about you because you’ll tell people almost anything once you’re tired and emotional? And that you then don’t remember doing it afterwards? Perhaps?”
“Blackouts, you mean?” Jack frowned, apparently pondering.
“Well . . .” Nathan tried to keep it casual, “maybe . . .”
“Yes, blackouts would explain a lot—I see what you mean.” An uncomfortable pause elongated uncomfortably.
Before Jack’s smirk widened and he chuckled himself into a full, tubercular laugh. “Oh, Nate. Fuck me . . . You’re getting slack. Surely you didn’t really believe your old editorial chum was that far gone?” He wheezed and made a pretence of dabbing his eyes. “Ah, you did, though. Poor old Nate—you’re so gullible, it’s almost no fun gulling you.”
“But only almost.” Nathan shoved his hand rapidly forward and grasped Jack’s throat. “You shit.”
J.D.’s eyes gave a bewildered shudder while he recoiled and thumped his head against the underside of his desk. He opened his mouth, then thought better of speaking, but left himself gaping in any case.
Nathan, on the other hand, had something to get off his chest. “You manipulative, shoddy, fucking bastard.”
Jack forced a swallow past Nathan’s constricting thumb and tried to nod. Then Nathan snatched his grip away, giggled. “And you’re even more gullible than me. Surely you didn’t imagine I’d really garrotte you, my old editorial chum?”
J.D. managed to rasp, “Ha, sodding ha,” scuffling to his feet. “All right, let’s get out of here. And you can tell me what it’s like to be speaking to your daughter again.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Didn’t have to. It’s painted all over the backs of your eyes, shines out like daylight through a dirty screen door.” He was going for a Bogart drawl.
“Mm hm. Don’t give up the day job. But, yes, we are . . . back.” A nuzzle of pleasure stretched his spine. “Back the way we should be.”
“She spoken to you about letters? From her father?”
“Only the one you sent for me . . . Letters?” Jack was looking both smug and shifty: this wasn’t a good sign. “Jack, what have you done?”
“What you would have, if you’d been thinking sensibly.” He gave a tactful cough. “Nathan, I may be a highly unsuccessful father, but I do know what fathers are supposed to do. Writing to your daughter once, after fifteen years of silence, and then not ever writing again isn’t on the list of recommended behaviours.”
Nathan’s imagination turned clammy. “Jack, this is another wind-up, isn’t it? By which I mean, it had better be.” He realised that he was still on all-fours and got up to argue his point from a position of dignity.
Jack withdrew a pace. “Calmness, Sport, tranquillity . . . keep a grip. I do, after all, know your style—the way that you like to put things, your common usages. I simply dropped her a few more lines, now and then, signed them Your Father, as we agreed, and that’s that.” Jack rested his arm across Nathan’s shoulders. “Don’t worry, Sport—I just told her what you’ve told me, the stories, the places you’d been—this and that about the way she was. I told her you loved her.”
“You had no right to do that.” Nathan was saying this and trying to sound outraged while shame creaked and broke in him, soured his mouth.
“No, Nathan, I would say that you had no right not to.”
Bastard.
Braced against his own justifiable fury, Nathan was, in fact, simply swamped by a sudden, caustic need to weep. He stumbled forward against Jack, treading on one of his feet, and completed a clumsy, slapping hug. “I suppose,” his voice sounded ridiculously breathless and bleak, “I suppose I should thank you.”
“Yes, quite probably. But we could probably take it as read—don’t you think? And I do have another foot, but I’d rather you didn’t dance about and try to flatten that one, too.”
They stood back from each other, examined the room and hunted their pockets softly for distractions.
Bryn had always been elegant, but now, Mary thought, he had an edge about him. He had become striking. His hair had turned completely, startlingly white and was cut very short on the rise to the crown and then allowed to finish in a longer, almost military, brush cut. This had the effect of elongating his face, lifting him, somehow.
When Mary visited, he seemed younger, was, in actuality, slimmer and had a tightness or tautness about him, traces of an unfamiliar energy, pent up for undisclosed, close work. As any widow might, he had taken more to dark colours and absolute black, but he’d also developed a taste for brilliant waistcoats: ember red, butter yellow and one in vel
vet, electrostatic blue.
“Well, you know, love, when you’re by yourself, you can please yourself. You can do things that, before, you might not have, even if perhaps you have to like them differently. You know?”
“I think so.”
They were dawdling along Roberts Street, arm in arm—a way of walking they’d only developed recently. A dusty blue van was parked in the lane on their left, its motor idling and Brian Perry leaning on its steering wheel, seated beside a very much younger woman. They were hot in what seemed, behind the windscreen condensation and billows of exhaust, to be an extremely unpleasant conversation.
“Is that who I think it is?” Mary tried not to peer, while Bryn stared across, proprietorially blatant.
“Yes. Brian Perry with Tracy Williams—they’ve been going on like that for months and thinking no one knows it. But I see them. I see everyone. There’s not much else to do here, except for having extra-maritals. And the drinking, I suppose. Facito aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum.”
“The devil makes work for idle hands.”
“ ’Specially when no one else will. Still, it’s better than the way it used to be, I suppose—the work schemes, the camps in the country—I’ve seen men start up crying, just thinking about them. Billy Marsh, you remember him. They sent him off digging ditches, officer-types screaming at him, humiliating him. Never had the same heart in him when he came back. Dead now, of course. Most of those boys are. All too long ago. Billy Marsh, he went to London, lay down in the road to make people see that he mattered. You wouldn’t have thought it, looking at him, would you? That he’d go and do a thing like that. The things inside of people that they never say—always surprising . . .”
Mary thought she should change the subject for him, but he brightened without her help.
“So, yes—Brian and Tracy. Not happy, but doing their best and Mrs. Perry not too much the wiser. It all started with the fuss about the pigeons. Someone tried using stolen dets to kill the peregrines. Brian and another boy, they strapped them on to the pigeons, set them flying, and hoped that the falcon would take them, get blown up. Didn’t work—well, not often. And people, including Tracy, said it was cruel. In the end, she made Brian agree—with that and lots of other things—and, true enough, nobody wants bits of pigeon coming and landing all over their wash. Now that I think, you know, it was Mrs. Perry’s wash one of the times when it did work. Hasn’t had a lucky year, that woman.”
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