Highbridge

by Phil Redmond

  ‘No one else wears this sort of thing to butter toast, I know that?’

  He knew it was a weekend gesture as her preferred choice was passion-killing winceyette floral pyjamas. Perhaps that was it. The others didn’t have a missus like his so they enjoyed living the life down there. Or perhaps they did and it was him who was being daft. ‘I couldn’t make the sort of money I do now up here. Not enough oligarchs or sheiks trying to outdo each other. The bloke we’re doing this house for, well knocking all three into one.’ Joey shook his head. ‘The stuff he has installed then ripped out when he goes somewhere and sees something he likes better. He’s changed the M&E spec three times. Ivantmoreofich we call him. Now he’s discovered he’s the only one in the street not to have a three-floor basement. So he’s got them digging out another floor. They’re insane.’

  ‘They’re running away. They don’t like their own country so they spend most of their time flying round the world looking for something better. It’s not about money, Joe. It never is.’ She offered the toast and squeezed his hand as she said it. And the big brown eyes said everything else. We made the decision.

  ‘I know. But, well, I just need a bit more time. Get finished on this job and we’ll have enough to last about six months, I reckon.’

  She leaned up and kissed him. ‘You sure? Is it the right decision?’ I hate you being away, but …’

  ‘You like Friday nights too?’ The impish grin was back on his face.

  ‘We can still have all that. But we agreed for you to do it until you had at least a year’s worth of work.’

  ‘Stop.’ He put his arm round her shoulders as he leaned against the granite worktop next to her. ‘It’s the right decision. I’m coming back. I don’t want to miss the kids growing up just so we can have a self-loading singing toaster.’

  He didn’t have to mention that it was also a result of the recent scare over Tanya with a knife and that he would never be able to cope if something did actually happen to her when he was away. He knew what it was like to be the brother. Had seen how it chewed up Luke as the husband. No matter what sort of world-weary faces they had put on over Janey. What would it be like as the father? Instead of mentioning this, he simply tightened his squeeze on Natasha’s shoulders.

  She grinned and pushed her body more into his. ‘It does match the food mixer, though.’

  ‘It does. And it makes us smile.’

  ‘Especially if we can still have our Friday nights.’

  She pulled herself round, into his chest, never appreciating that her hair nearly suffocated him every time she did this. But he thought it would be a nice way to go.

  ‘We’ve got a couple of hours before you have to go and get the boys.’

  ‘What about the girls?’

  ‘They won’t surface until at least the shops open.’ She reached up and kissed him quickly. ‘But brush your teeth first.’

  She turned and headed out the door, he ditched the coffee down the sink then turned to follow but saw her quickly return with a frustrated grin on her face as Tanya came hurrying into the kitchen, still in a hooded jersey sleep shirt, and across to the dog basket. ‘Move, Roscoe.’

  Joey looked at Natasha, who was now trying to suppress a giggle, then back at Tanya. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Becky’s phone.’ She waved it as she went across to switch the kettle on while flicking through the phone and apparently deleting text messages.

  ‘Should you be doing that?’ asked Joey.

  ‘Should you two be walking round in your undies with the house full of my friends?’

  It was a more pertinent point. Joey turned to Natasha, now really struggling to contain herself. She grabbed his arm and dragged him to the door as Tanya curled her lip and threw a parting shot. ‘And remember. There’s only a stud and plaster wall between you and us.’

  Out in the hall Joey turned to Natasha. What now? She just giggled again and dragged him upstairs, towards the spare room. At the far end of the landing. No, Joey thought, life is not all about money.

  ‘It just takes one.’ It was Matt, breaking open a fruit breakfast bar from the Vestey Army Ration Pack they had brought with them. ‘One bad apple. The whole barrel’s toast. Toasted apples, I suppose. Do you want the porridge?’

  Luke took another sweep along the street. All quiet. He glanced at his watch. It would be another half-hour before the van that dropped off the spuds and stuff. Every day. 10.30, give or take a minute or so. They had been eyeballing Fatchops for three weeks now. Clocking his lifestyle POLO. His timings. His habits. And he had them. Most people do and they don’t even know it. How they get up in the morning. Which ball or breast they scratch first. Which curtain they open first. Whether it’s tea or coffee. Whether they get dressed and eat, or eat and dress. Whether they pick up a newspaper before breakfast, or on their way out. Once you have it clocked it’s just a question of waiting for all the other stuff to fall into place. Whether the postman, milkman or paper lad delivers on time. Is early or late. Too early and they might knock the routine. Too late and they discover the body and it all kicks off too early. He rolled to face Matt.

  ‘Yep. Creature of habit. We all are. Even your toasted apples. Clock their habits. And here we are. Same brekkie every morning.’

  ‘Not much choice in these things,’ Matt countered. ‘But doubt anyone’ll slot us if we opt for the Chicken Masala before sun up. And if these packs weren’t so bloody expensive I’d probably just live on them at home. Always had a ten-man box in me dad’s shed. Before he popped his clogs. Just in case. Got a new one every summer and me and the old fella would scoff the old one when we went fishing. Especially after me mum went and he didn’t have anyone nagging him.’

  Luke looked across and saw the watery eye and the habitual rub of his scar. He was not as hard as he tried to make out, so decided to move the conversation on. ‘I thought you told me not to worry about the shifts in global capitalism.’

  ‘It’s not global capitalism I fret about, mate.’ Matt sniffed, pulling himself out of his memories. ‘It’s the greedy gets in the union suits who have worked out they can bring the country to a standstill by stopping the overnight deliveries. Imagine if Fatty down there didn’t get his regular supply of spuds?’

  ‘People could be healthier?’

  ‘It’s not his spuds that’s killing people. Otherwise we wouldn’t be up here freezing our nuts off.’

  ‘You reckon a ten-day box is enough, do you?’

  ‘Yeah. Two days of posturing. Two days to mobilise the troops to step in. If necessary. Two more of huffing and puffing. Two days for some sort of deal to be made. Two days to get back to normal.’

  ‘Still a bit tight.’

  ‘Nah. You’re forgetting the panic buying. Shops’ll know before anyone that a strike’s on its way. They’ll overstock because they know the public are stupid. Whack a couple of pence on here and there. Get rid of everything in the panic buying running up to the strike. Big boost to profits. Then, lay off all the casuals for a week. Saving on wages. Only ones who lose, as usual, are the ones in the front line. Not the suits. It’ll be the bloody delivery drivers. But hasn’t that always been the way?’

  Luke looked across at Matt finishing off the breakfast bar. He never ceased to amaze. ‘This the sort of thing you think about when we go dark?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m always dark me mate.’

  ‘True. But is it?’

  ‘Actually, it’s usually only when I’m lying frozen in a tank track for fourteen hours trying not to be seen by some goatherd with his standard issue AK-47 and pondering on what service I am actually doing for our beloved country, while some dickhead with a company credit card is swanning round the country trying to get paternity leave or something for his members. Things do tend to come into focus then. Until the sun goes down. And we take off again. And I know why I chose what I do. Did. Just wish they’d be a bit more grateful. That’s all.’

  ‘Part of the deal though, isn’t it. Keep
them safe in their beds?’ Luke asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. So they can get their legs over and have more kids so they can get more paternity leave. All coming into focus now. Democracy.’

  ‘Never have so many been so lucky because of so few?’

  ‘You got that off the bog wall in Helmand.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘How long d’you reckon? Before we pop Fatty?’

  ‘As soon as we find out how he’s passing the stuff over.’

  Tanya heard the creak of the ceiling boards as she finished cleaning up Becky’s phone. She let a slight sigh escape as she shook her head. Typical. They sneak along to the guest room, forgetting it’s above the kitchen. She brushed Becky’s phone across the butter, tossed it over to Roscoe who initially eyed it with suspicion until his nose, then tongue, registered the butter. As he licked away Tanya reached for her own phone, then smiled at a message. T’HOUSE? 9-ISH? It was the local name for the pub now known as the Sandstone Box. Originally called T’House at Cross it was a 500-year-old former coaching inn that marked the eastern approach to the town. It was built in sandstone blocks that matched the cross opposite its front door, the monument to the old Abbey that once stood on the site.

  In the late 1990s old Jim Mulligan, whose family had owned T’House for three generations, finally decided he had had enough trying to scrape by as an independent and sold out to the brewery. Five hundred years of history was immediately absorbed by the marketing machine and turned into yet another themed outlet, the new name aimed at the transitional youth market. Somewhere ‘between the sandpit and thinking out of the box’, the Planning Committee was told. They didn’t really care so long as old Jim got a decent price for his service to the community and the community itself got to keep their pub, with real ale and a bronze, not cheap brass, plaque on the wall outlining the site’s heritage.

  Everybody seemed happy, especially in refusing to call it by its daft new name. It was, is, and always will be T’House. If you didn’t know that, you weren’t local. And there was some value in knowing that. Especially as Billy and Shirley McGuire, who now ran it, interpreted the brewery’s transitional youth policy as any local over sixteen, as Billy and Shirley knew who they were and knew their families would appreciate knowing where they were.

  Which was exactly where Tanya would be tonight. However, MIGHT B, was all she texted back as she heard a hollow thump from overhead and decided it was time to go back to bed, trying to blank any images of parental sex.

  *

  Even Sandra, who could talk the leg off a chair, had not got far with Glynnis, telling Sean that the only thing she found out was that Glynnis had moved into the area about twenty years ago. So whatever it was had happened before that. The only other thing Sandra suspected was that Glynnis had ‘a thing’ for Sean. Initially, like the rest of the staff, she thought it was a crush, but it became more than that. Not romantic, more protective. She would do anything for him. And only the three of them knew why. She had become dependent on him.

  Sandra had suggested they try and get her to learn to read and write, but Sean said he had tried when he found out but she reacted so badly that he had to work hard not only to stop her moving on, but also to convince Glynnis that her secret was safe with him. Which is why he had really laid down the law with Sandra, and even then only told her when she was getting a bit too pointed in asking him what the attraction was with Glynnis. Since then, and to his great delight, she had been true to her word and had even helped work out strategies to protect Glynnis.

  It was Sandra who suggested they always had a junior member of staff working with her to keep all the paperwork up to date, as it was Sandra’s idea to present the menu in pictures, an idea picked up when they had been to Japan during their travelling years. It was supposed to be for letting kids pick their own meals, for which it had been a great success, but it was really to allow Glynnis to put up the Specials Board. And in this she had blossomed to become both photographer and graphic artist as she herself took the pictures when they changed the menu, then imported them to the graphics package, manipulated the menu style and printed out the new versions. Even words like Menu, Starters, Mains, Puddings, Service, VAT and everything else that creeps on to menus she recognised by the font design and word shapes rather than the cluster of letters.

  Sean was reflecting on this as he finished the last bit of Red Dragon, then wiped the runny remnants of egg, beans and tomato sauce from his plate with a piece of toast. Something Sandra wouldn’t let him do at home. It was another of life’s great mysteries still to be solved, why no one had yet been able to bottle that extraordinary culinary mix that remains after a runny egg breakfast. Probably linked to individual preferences, Sean thought as he got up to go. One person’s amount of egg against another’s beans and sauce. These are the things that make us unique. As a species we tolerate conformity but we desire individuality. It is also what makes us survive. What makes someone at some time, somewhere, decide that enough is enough and go after change.

  It was, Sean thought as he headed off, like his brother Joey’s dog Roscoe, for the daily toilet patrol, what allows people like Glynnis to slip through the education and social net. Non-conformers who are either tolerated because of a uniform understanding of difference or, more likely, dismissed for not conforming. You can be tolerated outside the system if you don’t make trouble for the system. That was what Glynnis had opted for. Something had set her apart from the herd but if she didn’t make trouble, the herd would leave her alone. But what a waste of human potential. What a waste of a life.

  As he ticked the inspection sheet on his way out of the toilets he realised he was back on the same theme he had finished up talking about the night before, after his tales of boyhood mountaineering: wasted potential. His idea for local councils to take on recidivists had gone down, as expected, like the proverbial lead balloon, although, Sean smiled, at least he had left them with the question: how do local towns face the challenge, perhaps curse, of modern life and find local solutions to their local problems when everyone seems to be focused on national targets and benchmarks?

  He had talked about the issue of teenage unemployment being, as he thought, high on the list as a root cause of all the town’s social problems. Boredom. Teenagers bored with nothing to do or look forward to, but with an almost irrepressible energy and need to explore the world around them. That was what they were genetically programmed to do. If they can’t do it legitimately, then they will find other ways. Like the drugs problem the town was currently facing. Why had it got so bad in recent years? And why did he always finish his breakfast with these sort of thoughts? Better get on and get Santa’s Garden on the go.

  It was such a good idea he would tell Byron that it was Sandra’s. Byron had a real soft spot for Sandra. Well, so did most men of a certain age who still recalled her time as Rose Queen, but Byron was also one for his own ideas. Sean had appointed him as Manager of Rock ’n’ Shrub not for his people skills but because he was as straight as a die and a stickler for detail, process and procedures. Every bulb, cutting and bag of peat would always be meticulously documented and every timecard stamped, checked and kept up to date. He was, as everyone said, anal.

  It always made Sean smile. The five-foot illiterate café manager and the six-foot-five anal-retentive garden centre manager working alongside each other. If only he could blend them and split them down the middle. But as he couldn’t, he knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell Byron that the Santa Garden was Glynnis’s idea. Glynnis would understand. So would Sandra. She’d lost count of how many good ideas she had supposedly had, as well as the amount of times, as a consequence, Byron had told her she should be running the place, not Sean. He picked up his plate and took it over to the counter and shouted thanks to Glynnis as he went off in search of Byron, nodding to the wannabe Mohican haircut who was talking to the Coy Carp, as he did every morning. Where would life be without its dysfunctionals? Sean mused, as he spotted Byron heading into the
Salvage Barn.

  Joey deliberately and noisily scuffed his feet as he went past Tanya’s room, not wanting anyone else to wander out after bumping into Carol on his way out of the guest room earlier. He went down the stairs two at a time, staying on the edges so they wouldn’t creak, heading for his North Face All Terrain jacket hanging on the rack near the garage door. As he pulled it on he took a look at his phone. Nothing. He tapped in the code to unlock the garage and just as he opened the door he nearly jumped out of his skin.

  ‘Morning, Mr Nolan.’ It was Becky, halfway down the stairs on her way to the kitchen in search of her phone, with that similar knowing but slightly embarrassed smile Carol had upstairs. She was also, like Carol, only half dressed in a tight tank and boxer-type shorts. He had once asked Tanya if she paraded round her friends’ houses like that, but was, he thought, given a backhanded compliment by being told no, only in their house. There were no adolescent predators and he was, well, her dad. Which obviously meant Alex and Ross were still babies and he was no threat, but equally was a constant source of embarrassment. A role in which he appeared to be excelling this morning. He grinned, as he always did, when he turned the key in his pride and joy. The boys hated it and usually refused to go out in it. But this morning they would have no choice if they wanted to get a lift a home. He pressed the fob to open the garage door and checked the phone again. Still nothing.