Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  “He’s such a card, your father. It must be a laugh a minute living with him,” the old lads at the bowling club used to say to Michael as he stood dumbly in the corner of the room, waiting for his father to stop showing off and take him home, before the dinner his mother was cooking was spoiled to the point she could be blamed and harangued for it. And yeah, yeah, it was hilarious being the butt of the joke all day, every day, all your life.

  “It’s not funny, Dad,” he’d dared to mutter once or twice, when the unfairness of it had got to him, and he’d been in a public setting and therefore relatively safe.

  His father would beam from ear to ear, implore his friends to sympathise with his plight. “You see what I have to deal with? The boy’s got no sense of humour, and his mother is worse. I try to keep things cheerful, but these two? Sour as Scotsmen and twice as mean. For God’s sake, don’t be so uptight!” Then—when they were home—there would be three-quarters of an hour of shouting about how Michael had let the side down, how Michael had shamed him in front of his friends, how he should throw Michael out on the street, though it would break his mother’s heart . . .

  His father’s little jokes—they were just the petty nastiness on top of a whole berg of malice. Further proof, maybe, that his father enjoyed making life hard for him, but not worth getting too riled up about. He threw his useless keys into a plant pot, went down, and opened the front door.

  Only to narrowly avoid being punched in the nose by the woman who had raised her fist to knock. They both ducked and recoiled. She laughed. She was a motherly-looking Chinese lady, with her plaited hair tied back in a headscarf. She wore an apron whose pockets were stuffed with bottles of spray cleaner and bright-yellow cleaning cloths.

  May gave her what he hoped was a politely inquisitive look.

  “Are you young Mr. May?” Unbelievably, she handed him a red thermos.

  “I am.” He unscrewed the top of the flask and inhaled deeply the smell of instant coffee, more watery than Michael’s caffeine dependency might have preferred but oh so welcome. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”

  “Mrs. Li.” She watched him struggle with the desire to pour and drink, and her smile settled into a beam of smugness. “My husband and I own the boatyard next door. I came outside to clean the unused boats and saw your car. You arrived during the night?”

  “Yes.” He ushered her inside, ashamed of the cold shabbiness of the place, although to be honest the ghost of unhappiness that clung around every piece of furniture might not be visible to her. “I couldn’t get in. I had to sleep in the narrowboat.”

  “But you had keys?”

  He decided not to embark on a full retelling of his father’s last prank. The bastard loved to be talked about, and May had long ago decided he never would. “It turned out I brought the wrong ones. But it’s okay. I knew where he kept the spares, so I’m all good now. Just got to get the gas and electric back on, and then we’ll be set. So I’m afraid I can’t offer you—”

  Mrs. Li’s smile broadened. “I thought that might be the case, and that you would need something hot to pick you up. You can bring the flask back when you’ve finished in town, and meet the rest of my family.”

  “There was an old codger who owned the boatyard when I was little,” May offered, not quite sure what to do with a conversation that wasn’t a questioning. “Looked a proper old salt. Aran sweater, beard, and pipe and all.”

  Her smile didn’t falter, but her eyes took on a considering look, as if wondering if he was working up to something annoying. I thought you people only ran restaurants, for example.

  “Yes. He retired in 1990 and we took over. You’ve never been back in all that time?”

  Oh no, her faint disapproval must be more a reflection on his filial piety. “We didn’t get on well, my father and I.”

  She wrapped her right hand around the handgrip of a spray-cleaner bottle as if it were a gun, and sighed. “But still I am sorry for you that he’s dead. It’s hard to lose a parent, no matter what.”

  This time May did pour the coffee and wrap his hands around the cup to chase away the cold. He sipped, and his entire body sighed with relief. “Oh. You are a lifesaver, Mrs. Li. I needed this. Here . . .”

  He dived into the kitchen for a cup, filled it, and gestured her to one of the sofas. “Well, I can’t offer you my own coffee, but I can offer you yours.”

  She waved it away with a resurgence of the smile. “I shouldn’t. I have five boats to clean and pump out before the next batch of tourists arrives at nine to hire them. You enjoy that and come over, meet us properly later.”

  “That sounds like a lot of hard work.” He escorted her to the door feeling marginally better about the day. Good neighbours were a blessing.

  “Oh, it is. My . . . uh . . . my child helps, but only on the holidays. I don’t want anything getting in the way of their schoolwork during the terms.”

  “I can see that.” He held the door open for her. Coffee had given him the mental alertness to begin to grapple with his problems, so he added, “Is the crane and the barge in it part of your yard?”

  Her step faltered a little, and her expression became unambiguously complicated. “I presume you noticed the state of the fences?”

  Folding her arms and looking at where the tip-top of the rusting crane could just be seen over the hedge, she admitted, “The ownership of that strip of land is disputed. Your father has deeds to the dock, but so do we. Sometimes your father would put a fence up to claim the land as his, and my husband would knock it down. Sometimes my husband would fence around the land where our deed claims the boundaries, and your father would knock it down. This—” she made a gesture he thought indicated their introduction, the chat “—was partly in hope that we could talk to you more reasonably than we could to him.”

  “He liked to jerk people around as a hobby,” May offered, feeling guilty and tired again. It was always this way. He ended up talking about the old man no matter how many times he vowed he would not. “He was never going to settle with you. He’d have been having far too much fun knowing he was pissing you off. I’m not like that.”

  Truth was he’d set out from the age of five to be the exact opposite. To be reliable and straightforward and honest. To have people know that they could trust him, and not to betray that trust. He heaved a great sigh of weariness, and followed her gaze to the beam of the crane from which the dead boat hung. He was still determined to do something for its mysterious occupant, if only they could be lured to come back.

  May drained his first cup and refilled it. “I’d really like to be able to do some work on that old barge. Maybe see if it can be repaired. But I’d rather have the goodwill of my neighbours. We can talk about the deeds, figure something out that’ll suit us all, I’m sure.”

  Mrs. Li’s smile took on a shade more softness. “Well. You need time to move in before we pester you. How about you come over for dinner on Friday, and we’ll talk about it then?”

  Dinner on Friday gave him a point to steer by, like the North Star seen through clouds. With that as a goal, he could probably make it through the week. Maybe the boat restoration project wasn’t so mad after all. And presumably he’d find out what was up with her . . . child as well, because the trained investigator in him just didn’t want to leave that one alone.

  “Thank you,” he said again, ushering her out into the cold yellow morning. “For the coffee and the welcome and everything. I needed it.”

  She waved a cloth over her shoulder as she walked away. “Anytime.”

  May went inside so that he could phone for the amenities to be turned back on. But the house phone was dead too, and his mobile dangerously low on battery. The empty house surrounded him with silent recriminations, inviting him to sit and contemplate how very badly he had messed up his one chance to do what he’d always wanted to do with his life. Misery flowed out from under the tables, from under the carpet, down from the spiders’ webs in the corners, and whispered at him with i
ts soft, inexorable voice.

  So he finished all the coffee in the thermos and went out.

  Trowchester looked better in daylight than it had when he’d driven through it in the rain and under the influence of disappointment. With its great cathedral, its castle, the ruins of the Roman walls, the holiday traffic up and down the river, and its apparent location on some sort of Stone Age Zen pathway he wasn’t entirely clear about, it owed a significant proportion of its wealth to tourism. And while the natives complained about this incessantly, it did mean the place made an effort to keep itself pretty.

  The tourist hordes were thinning now as autumn added a bite to the wind and clogged the gutters with bronze leaves, but hanging baskets still filled the streets with colour and softened the predominantly grey stone buildings. Tourism meant there was not only a Starbucks and a Costa, but there were three other independent coffee shops and one tea shop far too splendid for an impromptu breakfast.

  May got a fry-up in Sandra’s Café, where he didn’t have to worry about spilling sauce on the plastic tablecloths, and then headed for the town hall and the government buildings that surrounded it.

  He spent several hours in the offices of British Telecom, British Gas, and Northern Electric, receiving promises that the power and phone service would be restored to his home in due course. They would of course try to do it today, but he should be prepared to spend another night without.

  With that in mind, he bought supplies for the narrowboat: another gas canister to power the fridge and cooker, the kind of groceries that could be cooked on a two-ring hot plate, a duvet and sheets, smokeless fuel for the stove. As he packed them into his car, loneliness hit him like a physical blow, taking him by surprise. He felt the universe all around him, huge and busy, and himself, utterly irrelevant to its purposes, untethered from everything that made human life worth living.

  So he wasn’t going back to the house in that state of mind. He dumped the groceries in the boot, locked the car, and headed for the library, where he could read in the warmth, surrounded by people, and pretend not to be so acutely on his own.

  As he passed the stone cross on Castle Street, a little bookshop caught his eye. Wedged between a glittery emporium selling implausibly coloured dream catchers woven out of nylon thread, and a sweet shop that claimed it was Ye Olde Candy Shoppe, which made him wince and had certainly not been there when he was young, the bookshop with its awning and small table of rummage books looked too classy for its company.

  Its green-painted door had a knocker shaped like a giant squid, and was forbiddingly closed. The frontage of the shop was so narrow its display window was scarcely wider than a second door. There was only one thing in it: a single volume on a book stand, open at two carpet pages of illumination. Tangled swathes of colour drew his eye. Patches of gold burned under noon’s strong light. May approached until he could see the delicate, intensely detailed pictures more closely.

  On the right, a castle was being built out of a field of flames. Little stone masons in medieval clothes proved on a second glance to be animals on their hind legs. A giant hare with a cunning expression was operating a treadwheel on the top turret to hoist up a pallet full of hedgehogs. On the left was a sea full of monsters with the keel of Noah’s ark just visible at the top.

  Above this astonishing volume, old-fashioned golden letters had been applied to the shop window in a similar style to the fake Victorianism of Ye Olde Candy Shoppe. May looked up and burst out laughing. They read, “Bibliophile Bookshop: If this book doesn’t bring you inside, I don’t want you. Piss off.”

  The door opened silently onto coconut matting and a long pale corridor with cream walls, on the right hand of which was painted in careful copperplate, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The steps up, with a handrail of ship’s cable, had been roped off. Two steps down, through an arch to the right, and he stepped into a wizard’s study. Heavy wooden bookcases lined the room and stood three deep freestanding in the centre of it. The smell of leather and paper and knowledge permeated the air. A great bench littered with tapestry cushions reclined beneath the window. Two enormous volumes were chained to reading desks just before the shelves began, their covers embossed with ravens.

  Brass astrolabes glinted in spare corners and a distant alcove held a great Pegasus of glittering glass. He looked up and laughed again because yes, there was an embalmed dragon hanging from the ceiling, and it was giving him a peculiarly reptilian sneer.

  The sound of his laugh brought movement from the distance. He walked forwards, saw more steps down into a further series of cave-like rooms where a young man with blue hair was just edging himself out from behind a large desk half taken up with a steampunk monstrosity of a till.

  The young man straightened, looked at May, and froze for a long, telling moment. Not a bad-looking lad, but with a round scar on one cheek that spoke of having been bottled in a bar fight. Toned physique, square hands with tattoos over the knuckles, something indefinable about him that said gay, and something much, much stronger that said ex-con, but May was keeping an open mind on the ex. Maybe it was the flinch, or the way he had obviously IDed May as a copper and was now wondering what to do about it, but they recognised one another as predator and prey at a glance.

  Except that May wasn’t a copper anymore, and he had better not forget it. He swallowed down the stab of grief just as the shop clerk swallowed down his own reaction and said, “Can I help you?”

  He should have expected that question and had an answer prepared. Instead he was thrown. “I . . . uh. I don’t know.”

  “No, you can’t help this gentleman, Kevin,” a voice came from behind him. An older voice, amused, urbane. Just a little touch of Irish accent. “This is a man who needs something he himself doesn’t recognise. Something he can’t express. Am I right?”

  Now May was amused too, because yeah, he’d just said that, but when this guy rephrased it in his intellectual doublespeak, with that smooth voice, it sounded deep. It sounded like he was here on some kind of quest. He turned with a smile to meet the person who was obviously the wizard in charge of this establishment.

  The guy was shorter than him. That was always a pleasant surprise. But whereas May was wide enough across the shoulders to feel square, this guy was perfectly shaped for his height. He should have looked small, delicate even, but something about his personality turned it around, made him seem lean, capable, beautifully built and proportioned. Made everything else in the world seem out of scale.

  He wore pale flannel trousers and a tweed jacket with a crescent moon tiepin worn in one lapel like a brooch. His white shirt was unbuttoned to the top of his waistcoat, his oak-blond hair cut in a floppy 1920s’ style. Right down to the clever, ironic expression in his green eyes, he could have stepped out of an episode of Poirot, and though May had seen young intellectuals in London attempt the same look often enough, this was the first time he’d seen it really pulled off.

  This vision of elegance waved a hand dismissively at his clerk. “Be off with you.”

  From the corner of his eye, May watched as Kevin took the hint. Stopping to haul a box of books out from under the desk, the young man disappeared through a distant door with a nervous backwards glance in May’s direction, trying to look like he was busy doing his job and not running away.

  Rocking his weight back on his heels, the wizard considered May with a small smile, as though May were one of his pieces of art, or a volume he was appraising to buy.

  “You liked what you saw?”

  May could have dealt with camp easily enough. This wasn’t quite camp, or if it was, it was camp done sideways, undermining itself. He had no idea what to make of the man’s attitude or demeanour. He thought he was being checked out, but he honestly couldn’t tell for sure.

  The guy’s impish smile spread at his confusion. “The book in the window?”

  “I like it,” said May. “But it can’t be real, right? You’d never put a real medieval manus
cript out in the sunlight like that.”

  “Well, well.” Everything about the guy seemed calculated to be soft. The oatmeal-coloured trousers, the whimsical fringe of his hair, and the lowered, lilting voice. But May got the impression that he was marshmallow wrapped round barbed wire. He liked it.

  “They do say ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’” said the wizard approvingly. “It’s obviously true in your case.” He held out an ink-stained hand for May to shake. The grip would have crushed his bones together if he hadn’t expected it and braced beforehand. “I’m Fintan. Fintan Hulme, the proprietor of this marvellous emporium. Call me Finn, why don’t you? Everyone does.”

  “Michael. Michael May.”

  “What can I do for you, Michael May? More to the point, why haven’t I seen you in here before? A man who knows enough not to expose a valuable manuscript to the light, but can appreciate a more robust copy . . . I would have thought a man like that would have had the good taste to come in sooner.”

  Okay, so now he was pretty sure he was being flirted with. A long way away from home with no career to lose and no one to disappoint, he was being hit on by an extraordinary guy. It occurred to him with a thrill of wonder that he didn’t have to shut this down, and then with an accompanying thrill of terror that he didn’t know how not to. He glanced aside, discovering that someone had drawn a mousehole on the skirting board with a little cartoon mouse beside it.

  He admired the whimsy of it, wished he had something equally offbeat and interesting to say, but could think of nothing but the truth. “I . . . um. I just moved in. Into town. My dad died, left me the house. Though I’m actually in the narrowboat at the bottom of the garden.” Catching himself rambling, he ducked his head, tried to pull himself back together. “And you don’t need to know that, do you? Sorry. But I arrived yesterday evening. You were closed then.”