It was in the early hours before Greg fell asleep. For a long time he lay thinking about what his father had said, not only about him but about the way he’d treated Billy. Had he really been that insensitive and dismissive of his brother’s feelings? The answer troubled him, for the answer was probably yes. Although he’d told his father it had never been his intention to hurt Billy, that his remarks were no more than brotherly teasing, he knew this wasn’t true.
Billy’s straightforward life had always irritated him, especially after their mother’s death when it appeared that his brother’s life had continued as before, as if untroubled by her loss. Billy hadn’t cried at his mother’s funeral and neither had his father; he’d been the only one to shed tears. Thereafter, he realised he’d been happy to stick a spoke in his brother’s wheel at every opportunity. Even his supposed concern for Billy when he announced his engagement to Jean was a sham: he wasn’t worried for his brother – he’d simply disliked Jean.
Greg had never known that Billy had tried as hard as he had at school, and neither was he aware of the acute disappointment he’d felt when his efforts went unrewarded. He’d been happy when Billy failed, when the family’s perfect son came to grief. Greg had never been there to pick up the pieces of his brother’s life, only to scatter them further. What kind of a person did those things – and was that person still him?
For the first time he understood what Billy had meant by you always have to know best, don’t you? He was, he realised, the know-it-all younger brother who’d dismissed his older brother’s opinions out of hand, short-changed him at every opportunity and, as his father had asserted, probably contributed to his lack of confidence. The clarity of the image disturbed him. It was as if he’d been staring at a Magic Eye picture his whole life and seen only a meaningless pattern of dots; now that he concentrated and allowed his eyes to bifurcate, he saw the truth of the three-dimensional picture hidden there.
Unexpectedly, he thought of Cyndi, and was reminded of his father’s assertion that everything in life came easily to him. Certainly this was true when it came to relationships, and also a possible explanation of why he never valued them. Cyndi was only the most recent of a long line of girlfriends and there was little to differentiate her attributes from those of her predecessors. Greg’s tastes were superficial and based solely on physical appearance. He didn’t date for conversation or an intellectual exchange of ideas.
Greg’s male friendships were similarly of the moment, friends who didn’t bother or need him. He drank with them, went to ball games with them, but there was always an unwritten agreement that neither associate would place demands on the other or burden them with personal troubles. Such demands were the preserve of lifetime friends and Greg made a point of not having any. The only long-term relationship he had was with impermanence.
There were two people, however, that Greg had kept in contact with: his father and Uncle Frank. Communication with his father had always been more out of duty than anything else, for although he loved the man, he could never think of much to talk to him about during their weekly phone conversations and had been more than happy for his father to simply recount the minutiae of his last seven days – which, in the event, always tended to be the same as the minutiae of the previous seven days.
Uncle Frank, however, was a different kettle of fish and had always been his favourite relative. Cantankerous and obdurate though the man was, his heart was good and his spirit free, and in him Greg found not only an occasional ally but also a mentor. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for his uncle, it was doubtful that he would now be living in Texas and teaching American history.
The bond between them had formed after the death of his mother, when he and Billy had spent more and more of their time at Auntie Irene’s house, where Uncle Frank also lived. (In truth, the house belonged equally to both Irene and Frank, but it was always described as Auntie Irene’s house, as if somehow Uncle Frank lacked both the responsibility and the means to own a dwelling.)
Uncle Frank’s passion was for the Wild West. It started on his sixth birthday, after his mother had taken him to see Stagecoach at the local picture house, and never ended. That Christmas his parents bought him the first of many cowboy outfits, and thereafter he roamed the neighbourhood with a marshal’s star pinned to his small leather waistcoat, drawing his gun from its holster and firing paper caps into the air. The obsession was nurtured by other films and, after the family bought their first television set, the adventures of The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid and Hopalong Cassidy. He saved his spending money and bought stories set in the West, books written by Jack Schaefer, Elmer Kelton and Louis L’Amour.
The West that Uncle Frank observed on the screen and read about in books was a wild frontier. It was a time of the loner, the nomad, of cowboys and gunfighters who drifted from one small frontier town to the next, living by their own codes of honour and dispensing their own forms of justice to the wrongdoers who crossed them. Their loyalty was to themselves and their immediate circle only, never to the wider community or its abstract laws. It was a world that Uncle Frank could understand, a world that made more sense to him than the one he’d been born into.
Frank’s pride and joy was his collection of model cowboys, Indians and American soldiers. After his parents died, he remained in the small box room rather than move into a larger bedroom, and with his sister Irene’s permission – though never her approval – set about converting their parents’ room into the American West.
He bought three trestle tables and arranged them in the form of an H, a shape that allowed him access to all areas of the frontier he was building. Using sand from the beach and modelling mountains out of papier-mâché, he created the arid and desolate landscape of his imagination. He made small towns from cardboard and old matches, built saloons, livery stables and jailhouses. He constructed ranches with fencing and herds of cattle, Indian encampments with wigwams and totem poles, and turreted stockades for the soldiers. He would spend his evenings and weekends in this room, inventing scenarios of his own or restaging events he’d witnessed on film or read about in books.
This was the world he introduced Greg to when his nephew visited the house, and in doing so allowed the boy into his own world. Greg’s interest in history was born in this room and then nurtured at grammar school by an eccentric teacher who spent entire lessons standing on a desk. Although Greg briefly equivocated between studying history or geography at university, it was his uncle’s salutary words that swayed him. ‘Hell’s teeth, Greg! Geography’s just about maps. History’s about chaps!’
The rest, so to speak, was history. Greg graduated from the University of Arizona and without too much effort landed a position teaching history at the Austin branch of the University of Texas. To be awarded tenure, however, he needed publications to his name.
His doctoral dissertation had been a biography of a little known socialist presidential candidate who had garnered fewer than 20,000 votes. (He’d chosen the subject not for any interest in socialism, but for the more mundane reason that the library held the candidate’s papers in their Special Collections Department and was within easy walking distance of his apartment.)
The contents of the dissertation provided him with two articles that were accepted for publication by reputable journals, and then, as usual, happenstance took Greg by the hand and led him through doorways and down alleyways to a cornucopia of publishable topics that his associates spent lifetimes trying to discover. In quick succession, he had two books published: one on the West Virginia mining war of 1921 – which Syd had alluded to at the funeral – and the other on a 1919 massacre of trade unionists in a small town in Washington State. (The description of Greg as a Labour Historian on the flyleaves of these books came as a surprise to his father: to his knowledge, his son had never done a day’s work in his life.)
Greg fell into a troubled sleep and awoke the next morning with a pounding headache. The bedclo
thes had fallen to the floor during the night and he was perspiring. He lay there for a long time and went to the bathroom only after his saliva glands had started to work overtime. He spat the seemingly never-ending supply of juice into the washbasin and wondered if he was going to be sick. He lifted the lid of the toilet as a precaution and recoiled. Floating there was a large disintegrating stool, the remnant of his father’s last earthly bowel movement.
The wondering stopped and Greg threw up.
He clung helplessly to the toilet bowl as the contents of his stomach splashed into the water. He retched twice and remained kneeling until the feeling of nausea passed. He stood up slowly and washed his hands in the basin and rinsed his mouth with water. He looked at his ashen-faced reflection in the magnified shaving mirror and resolved never to drink sherry again.
He sat down on the side of the bath and held his head, gathered his thoughts and tried to make sense of them. Had he been talking to his father last night or had it been a drunken dream? And, if it hadn’t been a drunken dream, had he in some inexplicable way been haunted by his father’s turd? And, if it had been the turd haunting him and the turd was now flushed, would the haunting stop?
He sighed, the same way he remembered his father sighing, and made his way back to the bedroom. His attention was drawn to something lying on the landing, something that hadn’t been there when he’d gone to bed. He went to pick up the objects and the penny dropped: he was looking at a World War I helmet and gas mask.
He knew then that he had been talking to his father and, moreover, that his father would be returning.
4
Myanmar
Greg drank only coffee for breakfast, and afterwards took the Yellow Pages from the sideboard drawer and looked for names of structural engineers. He located several in the section headed Surveyors and Valuers and, in the hope that the man was as down to earth and no-nonsense as his name suggested, decided upon Fred Stubbington. He dialled the number and arranged for Mr Stubbington to visit the house at ten the following morning. He then phoned the offices of the three estate agents Billy had suggested and arranged for them to call at staggered times on the afternoon of the same day.
The rest of the morning was taken up with errands. He bought groceries from a supermarket; paint, filler, and brushes from a DIY store; and sandwiches for lunch from a local bakery. No sooner had he returned to the house than the phone rang.
‘Hello, Gregory, it’s Mrs Turton. I was wondering if you’d like to come round for coffee this afternoon.’
‘Sure, Mrs Turton. What time do you have in mind? Three? That’s fine. Okay, I’ll see you then.’
Greg still held a grudge against Mrs Turton for telling his father about the propelling pencil he’d stolen from the newsagent, and the idea of spending an afternoon in her company didn’t appeal. He reminded himself, however, that she’d been a good neighbour to his father over the years and that it had been her who’d first raised the alarm for his mother’s well-being after seeing her prostrate on the lounge floor – though why she’d been looking through the bay window that day had never been fully explained.
Three o’clock arrived and Greg knocked on Mrs Turton’s door.
She opened it slightly, sufficient only to see who was standing there. Even after recognising Greg as the caller she still kept the door in the same position.
‘Hello, Gregory,’ she said, eyeing him suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’
‘You invited me for coffee, Mrs Turton. I could come back if it’s not convenient.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, of course I did! I forgot all about it, Gregory. Barry says I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on. Come on in, will you.’
Greg stepped through the door and was told to wipe his feet on the mat.
While his parents had always lived in the back room, Mrs Turton preferred to live in the front room and use her dining room for storage. Even so, the lounge was still overflowing with bric-a-brac, and a selection of stuffed bears had to be moved from the settee before Greg could sit down.
‘Make yourself comfortable, Gregory, and I’ll go and make the coffee,’ she said.
She returned a few minutes later with two coffees and a plate of custard cream biscuits.
‘Custard creams are my favourite, Mrs Turton,’ Greg said. ‘They’re one of the few things I miss about England. I think my Dad’s funeral was the first time I’d seen any in years.’
Mrs Turton looked uncomfortable for a moment, wondering if Greg had seen her taking the biscuits from the funeral buffet. ‘Mine too,’ she said guardedly.
They chatted about this and that, old times and new, and the sadness of Mr Bowman’s passing. (His father and Mrs Turton – like most people of their generation – had clung to the etiquette of addressing each other formally. Lyle had always been Mr Bowman and Doris had always been Mrs Turton,)
Mrs Turton then raised the subject of the Collards.
‘We’re still not speaking,’ she said. ‘And they’re still refusing to lower that wall of theirs, even though they don’t have a dog now.’
The building of the wall that separated her property from theirs was the source of the conflict that now divided the two neighbours.
The rift had started when the Collards bought a collie. Constantly worrying that the dog they called Sam might escape from the garden and follow its instincts to herd sheep, they determined to secure its borders. Fence panels already divided their property from that of their attached neighbours, but nothing separated their drive from Mrs Turton’s. Consequently, they hired a builder and asked him to build a wall measuring six feet from base to capstones. Although the builder doubted the necessity for a wall so high, he kept the reservation to himself and duly obliged.
Despite these precautions – and the fact that there were no sheep in the area to herd – the dog escaped the property on the day Margaret Collard forgot to close the gate behind her. Two miles from the house, and on a road close to the motorway, Sam was knocked down and killed by a lorry transporting pet food.
‘It’s such an eyesore,’ Mrs Turton said. ‘And it’s not even made from real stone, either. Barry calls it the Berlin Wall. Anyway, I’ve told them flat that as long as the wall’s there I’m not speaking to them. Maybe it’s not the most Christian of things to say, but I’ve talked it over with the minister and he says he can fully understand my feelings.’
She paused for a moment and then confided in Greg: ‘The minister says I haven’t got an unchristian bone in my body.’
Greg nodded his head and murmured sympathetically, wondering how much longer he’d have to sit there before politely excusing himself.
‘There are all kinds I suppose, and goodness knows we’ve got enough of them living in this city,’ Mrs Turton said. ‘Newcomers,’ she added, when she saw Greg looking puzzled.
Greg – or Gregory, as Mrs Turton insisted on calling him – was still mystified by her comment. ‘What newcomers are you talking about, Mrs Turton?’
Mrs Turton shuffled uneasily in her seat and almost whispered the answer. ‘The ones from Myanmar, Gregory.’
‘I didn’t know we had any Burmese people living here. When did they arrive?’
‘They’ve been coming here since the sixties,’ Mrs Turton said, herself now baffled by Greg’s remark. ‘But they’re not from Burma. Maybe I’ve got the name wrong. I’ll phone Barry – he’ll know.’
Mrs Turton looked for her phone but couldn’t locate it. ‘I wonder where that’s got to. I was only using it this morning. You’re not sitting on it are you, Gregory?’
Greg stood up. There was no phone in his chair, but he did notice one half-hidden by some knitting on the table next to Mrs Turton. ‘Is that your phone?’ he asked, pointing to it.
‘Well, what the deary me,’ Mrs Turton laughed. ‘Right next to me all the time.’
‘What are you
knitting?’ Greg asked.
‘It’s a scarf for one of the orphans in India, Gregory.’
‘It looks to be about ten feet long, Mrs Turton. How big are their necks?’
‘It’s fifteen feet actually,’ Mrs Turton replied with a smile. ‘And I still haven’t finished knitting it. This is going to be a special scarf, Gregory – the longest scarf in the world! It’s Barry’s idea really. He says that once I’ve knitted it I should call the local newspaper and get them to write an article about the work I do for other people. He says I should stop hiding my light under a bushel and take some credit for a change. That boy: he’s always thinking of me… that reminds me, I was going to phone him, wasn’t I?’
She pressed a number on the speed dial.
‘Hello, Barry, it’s your Mum, love. No, nothing’s wrong. I’ve got Gregory here with me. No, of course he won’t take anything.’ She looked across and smiled at Greg. ‘Barry says you haven’t got to steal anything.’
Greg was astonished by her remark, but smiled back.
‘I was telling him about the newcomers, Barry. Where are they from again? No, not the ones from Poland – the ones that have been here longer. Mirpur, that’s it! What did I tell you it was called, Gregory?’
‘Myanmar.’
‘I told him it was Myanmar, but he said that was Burma. Did you know that? No, me neither. Is Diane doing all right? Three pounds? Well, that’s not the direction we were hoping for, is it? Have you been keeping her away from the bread? I know you can’t watch her all the time, love. I’m not going on, Barry: I just want what’s best for her. Okay then. Call me when you get home then. Bye.’
Mrs Turton put the telephone back on the table and shook her head. ‘That girl is a fool to herself. She’s already the size of an elephant. How big does she want to get? Now where were we? That’s it, Mirpur.’
‘I presume that’s a part of Pakistan then,’ Greg said.
‘Yes, that’s right, Gregory. When the newcomers first came here, it was like having a year-round Nativity in the city – you know, the way they dressed and everything – but then, more and more of them started to come and they’re half the population now. It doesn’t bother me, but I think it bothered your father. He never said anything, but I could tell from his eyes and the way he sighed when I talked to him about them.’
The Last of the Bowmans Page 9