Andy Bragg’s wife conceded to the eyebrow. “I’ll go and see if he’s here,” she said. “You’d better come in,” she added reluctantly, parking them in the residents’ lounge before disappearing into the bowels of the house.
Tourist information leaflets were fanned out on a sideboard. Boat trips, horse riding, local restaurants, and taxi numbers. Reggie took a seat on a sofa and picked up a tide table from the coffee table. The cushions on the sofa and the curtains at the window were made from a fabric that was adorned with seashells. Once you started looking you could see that they were everywhere. It was strangely disturbing. Reggie perused the arcane information contained in the tide table. “Low tide at three today,” she said. Neither Ronnie nor Reggie had ever lived by the sea. It was a mystery to them. In and out, out and in, in thrall to the moon.
A dog the size of a carthorse wandered into the room and examined them in silence before wandering out again.
“That was a big dog,” Ronnie said.
“It was,” Reggie agreed. “Almost as big as you.”
“Or you.”
Reggie looked at her watch. “Do you think Mrs. Bragg has forgotten that she’s looking for Mr. Bragg?”
A man came into the lounge and looked startled at the sight of them.
“Mr. Bragg?” Reggie said, jumping to her feet.
“No,” he said. “Have you seen him anywhere? There’s no hot water in the shower.”
The Nineteenth Hole
“Your round, I believe, Squire,” Andy said.
“Again?” Vince said. How could that be? he wondered. Hadn’t he just bought a round? His bar bill must be through the roof by now—Tommy and Andy were drinking double malts. Vince had tried to restrict himself to pints but nonetheless he was feeling woozy with drink.
“You’re a bit of a lightweight today, Vince,” Tommy said. “What happened to you?”
“Skipped lunch,” Vince said. “Too busy to eat.” Hardly true. Well, the lunch part was true, but not “busy” at all, because on top of everything else—and he had confided this to no one—he had lost his job a week ago. He had reached the bottom of the curve. Rock bottom. Woe piled upon woe. It felt biblical, as if he were being tested by some vengeful Old Testament God. The suffering of Job, he thought. He had been brought up as a West Yorkshire Baptist and his Sunday school Bible lessons had taken root.
It was a funny coincidence, if you thought about it—“Job” and “job” being the same word. Not that funny when you didn’t have one anymore. Redundant.
“Sorry, Vince,” his boss, Neil Mosser, had said. “But you know…” He shrugged. “The takeover and everything.” Vince thought a shrug was an inappropriate response to a man losing his livelihood. “Cuts were bound to happen as soon as they started consolidating,” Mosser said. (“Rhymes with tosser,” they all said behind his back. It was true. He was.)
And, on the other hand, everyone liked Vince, their faces lit up when he walked in, they were always glad to see him—Can I get you a cup of coffee, Vince? How’s that daughter of yours, Vince? Ashley, isn’t it? Not like Wendy, who for the last year had barely looked at him when he walked in the door. There was one particularly nice woman who worked up in the York office, Heather was her name. On the chubby side, always seemed to be dressed in purple, not that either of those things counted against her. She always gave him a hug and said, “Look who’s here, if it isn’t Vince!” as if no one was expecting him.
“I’ve worked for the company twenty years,” Vince said to Mosser. Didn’t it all count for something? “And isn’t it supposed to be first in, last out? Not first in, first out?”
Another shrug from the tosser. “They want fresh meat, you know. Young and hungry, guys who are prepared to bleed for the company.”
“I have bled! I have no blood left! I’m like a vampire’s victim after it’s feasted!”
“Don’t make it more difficult than it is, Vince.” (Why not?) “You’ll get a good severance package.”
Good, my arse, Vince thought. It wouldn’t keep him going for a year. The universe was having a laugh at his expense. An unemployed divorced man nudging fifty—was there a lower life-form on the planet? A year ago he was a fully functioning human being—husband, father, worker—now he was redundant, in every sense of the word. A scrap at the bottom of the fryer.
“Get a move on, Vince!” Tommy Holroyd’s voice boomed in his ears, interrupting his thoughts. “Thirsty men here.”
Did you hear the news?” Tommy asked casually as they sat at a table near the window that had a great view of the fairway. (Tommy always got the best table, the club’s female staff liked him.) “Someone said that Carmody’s up for early release. They’re going to let him out on license.”
“Jesus,” Vince said. “How did he wangle that?”
“Compassionate grounds. His wife’s dying. Supposedly.” Tommy and Andy exchanged a look that Vince found hard to interpret. Both Bassani and Carmody had been members of the Belvedere. They were never mentioned at the club now, but their ghosts still lurked somewhere in the shadows. They had left something tainted behind, a question mark over everything they’d touched. And, of course, there’d always been rumors of a third man. Was it someone who was still here? Vince wondered, casting his eye around the clubhouse, alive now with alcohol and the leisurely exchanges of the self-satisfied. Vince had never really felt like he belonged here, even less so now that he had had his own fall from grace.
Bassani and Carmody had been charged with awful things, the kind of things that made Vince feel sick to think about, mostly to do with underage kids. There’d been all kinds of accusations—“parties” that had been held, children that had been “supplied,” trips abroad to somewhere “special” that they owned. A black book that contained the names of judges and bankers and policemen. The great and the good. Not to mention corruption: they had both spent years in local government. Most of it hadn’t been proved, just (just!) indecent assault on underage girls, prostitution of children, and possession of child pornography. It was enough to send them down, or at any rate to send Carmody down, because Bassani had hanged himself in Armley Jail while on remand. Carmody had been found guilty on all counts and been shipped off to Wakefield Prison, still protesting his innocence. Neither of them gave up the contents of the little black book, if it existed at all.
“I heard,” Tommy said, “that Carmody’s sick.”
“Who told you that?” Andy asked.
“A little bird. Or quite a big bird—that retired ACC who drinks in here.”
“The tall bloke with the gay beard?”
“Yeah, that one. He says Carmody’s not got long left. He’ll be eligible for parole in a few months and wants out early. Says there’s talk of him making a deal.”
“Deal?” Andy said sharply. “What kind of deal?”
“I dunno,” Tommy said. “Naming names, maybe.”
“Who?” Vince asked, trying not to be left out of the conversation. “Like the third man?”
Both Tommy and Andy turned to look at him as if they were seeing him for the first time that evening. It took a beat before Tommy laughed and said, “The third man? That’s a film, isn’t it, Vince?”
Tommy and Andy exchanged another look, one that entirely excluded Vince. Friend friends.
Holding Out for a Hero
As soon as he got home Jackson stripped off his sodden clothes and threw them in the washing machine, then he stepped into the shower and blasted himself with hot water. It might be summer but a dip in the North Sea was still enough to give you hypothermia.
It felt good to be back safely on land. The sea really wasn’t his element, Jackson would take earth over water any time. Good to be in a nice warm cottage, too. Logs in the wood store, honeysuckle around the door. The cottage was on an estate dating back hundreds of years to when the Normans appropriated this land. Everything well kept. Jackson liked that. It wasn’t where he would have predicted that he’d end up. Not that he had necessari
ly ended.
The cottage was set back three hundred yards from the sea, tucked in at the end of a small valley, a cleft in the landscape, which meant it was sheltered from the worst of the wind. There was a view of a wood on one side, a hill to shelter behind on the other. A stream ran through the valley. Sometimes there were cows on the hill. The disappearance and reappearance of the cows was a mystery that Jackson spent more time dwelling on than a younger man might have.
He had been living here since the spring and liked it enough to think about making it more permanent. They got cut off when it snowed, a neighbor told him when he moved in, you could go days without seeing anyone. It seemed an inviting idea. (“Reclusivity,” Julia said. “I rest my case.”)
“All right?” Nathan asked, glancing briefly at him when he came into the living room, towel-drying his hair. This show of concern was heartening—they hadn’t raised a sociopath after all.
“Yes. Thanks,” he replied.
Nathan was slouching on the sofa—on a chat site, by the look of it—while on the TV there was some kind of game show—complicated and moronic at the same time. (“Like you, then,” he heard Julia’s voice say in his head.) There were people dressed as animals—chickens, rabbits, squirrels, with oversized heads—running around while other people screamed encouragement at them.
“Meanwhile in Aleppo,” Jackson murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Jackson sighed.
“It was cool,” Nathan said, after a while.
“What was?”
“What you did today.”
“Just another day at the office,” Jackson said, although inside his heart swelled with pride. The son honored the father.
Julia had neglected to have an opinion on crisps, so they shared a large bag of Kettle sweet chili and sour cream, quite companionably, and watched the giant squirrels and rabbits chasing each other. It was a good day, Jackson thought, when you saved someone’s life. Even better when you didn’t lose your own.
Summer Season
Barclay Jack was in his dressing room, spading Rimmel foundation onto his face. He paused to gaze gloomily into the mirror. Did he look his age? (Fifty-eight.) Yes, he did, every minute of it and more. Barclay (real name Brian Smith) felt a drooping of the spirits. His stomach swooped around inside him. Stage fright? Or a dodgy curry?
There was a knock on the dressing-room door. It opened tentatively and Harry put his head around it. Barclay had been given an “assistant” for the season, a volunteer, a schoolkid who wanted to “get into theater.” Well, this isn’t the path, sunshine, Barclay thought. Harry. Harry Holroyd. It was the name for someone in silent comedies. Or an escape artist.
“That’s your ten minutes, Mr. Jack.”
“Fuck off.”
“Yes, Mr. Jack.”
Harry shut the door and hovered in the corridor. Next year he was applying to the University of Sunderland to do film and theater studies and so he thought of the Palace as a kind of work experience that would look good on his application form. It was certainly an experience—Harry only realized what a sheltered, naïve life he’d been living when he came to work here. “The Palace” was a bit of a misnomer. It couldn’t have been less like a palace if it tried.
Bunny Hopps sashayed toward him along the narrow corridor, teetering on his colossal red sparkly heels. Honeybun Hopps—but everyone called him Bunny—was enormous, well over six foot and built like a rugby forward. “No relation to Lady Bunny,” he said, rather mysteriously. “I’ve been Bunny since I was a bairn.” His real name was Clive but his surname really was Hopps. He was billed as a “female impersonator”—a description that seemed to infuriate him. “I’m not fucking Danny La Rue,” he said to Harry. Harry had no idea who that was, but he’d found him—her—on an old TV program called The Good Old Days. “It was a bit… weird,” Harry reported to Bunny. “Aw, pet,” Bunny said (he was a Geordie), “wait until you come across Fanny Cradock.” The show at the Palace was an eighties revival thing—a variety show that in its own weird way echoed The Good Old Days.
“I’m a drag queen, for fuck’s sake,” Bunny said. “Why haven’t they billed me as that?” Out of curiosity, Harry had sought out RuPaul’s Drag Race and discovered that Bunny, despite his protestations, was quite an old-fashioned participant in the shape-shifting world of drag, more Lily Savage than RuPaul. Of course, his father, who took no interest in anything Harry watched, would choose that moment to barge into his room. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Couldn’t you watch porn like everyone else?”
Bunny trawled for cigarettes somewhere inside the corset he was stuffed into. Smoking was strictly forbidden in the theater—it was a “tinderbox” waiting to catch fire, according to the ASM. What smoke alarms there were had run out of battery long ago and there was a singular lack of sprinklers backstage, allowing for a good deal of illicit smoking from the performers. The chorus girls were the worst, lighting up like chimneys in their dressing room amid a health-and-safety nightmare of hairspray and polyester.
Bunny offered his pack of cigarettes to Harry, saying, “Go on, pet, it won’t kill you.”
“No, I’m all right, Bunny, thanks,” Harry said. They had pretty much the same exchange every night and Harry kept a box of matches in his pocket so that he could light Bunny’s cigarettes. He (she, she, he corrected himself) could manage the cigarettes but there wasn’t room in her costume for anything to light them with. “Too tight,” Bunny growled. “The friction it would cause if I tried to squeeze anything else in there would be dangerous. You might see a case of spontaneous combustion.”
Harry knew that just about everything Bunny said was salacious but he wasn’t always sure what was intended by the double entendres. There was something oddly Shakespearean about Bunny. They’d done some stuff about gender swapping at school—“Compare and contrast male and female roles in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.”
Harry had studied Bunny’s act as he might indeed have studied Shakespeare. It had an interesting trajectory (one of Miss Dangerfield’s favored terms). Bunny’s act closed the first half of the show and was based around the concept that he—she—was an opera diva, a screechy soprano, who never quite got around to singing her big aria. (It was more entertaining than it sounded.) For the first half of Bunny’s performance the audience was restless, cat-calling and muttering—a lot of them were only there for Barclay Jack, not a big man in heels.
“But you always win them over,” Harry told Bunny.
“Thanks for explaining my own act to me, pet,” Bunny said.
“Sorry,” Harry said, pressing on anyway. “But I really like the way that you do it—you really are funny, and kind of… reckless.” Harry would have liked to learn how to be reckless. “And then by the time you get to your big ending—” (“Oo, Betty,” Bunny said mysteriously) “they’re cheering you on like you’re a hero. It’s brilliant.”
Harry liked the transformative nature of what Bunny did. He wondered whether if he changed his own name he would become a different person. What name would he choose for himself if he took on the identity of a drag queen? (An unlikely idea, he would never have the nerve.) “Hedda Gobbler?” he offered Bunny. “Lynn Crusta?”
“A bit obscure, pet.”
Bunny knew a drag queen called Auntie Hista-Mean, and another one called Miss Demena, which were definitely not real names. And Anna Rexia, which was just plain wrong. He wondered if Amy had eaten the hummus sandwich he’d left for her.
Crystal was called Crystal Waters before his dad married her. It seemed an unlikely name. She confided to Harry that it was her “stage name.” Had she been onstage? Harry asked eagerly. “Well, you know…” she said vaguely. His dad had said that she’d once been a glamour model, “topless only,” as if that was an achievement, although more on his part than hers.
Not an achievement but a debasement, according to Emily. Emily could be harshly opinionated, especially on the subject of Crystal. “An ersatz woman,
” she called her. Harry had known Emily since primary school, so it was a bit late to start standing up to her. “I mean, your stepmother’s not exactly a feminist icon, is she, Harry?” “No, but she’s a nice person,” Harry defended weakly. And you had to admire the effort she put into her appearance—almost as much as Bunny did. (“Donatella, eat your heart out,” Bunny said when Harry showed him a photo. He was actually showing him a picture of Candace, but Bunny was more interested in Crystal, who also happened to be in the frame.) Harry recognized “ersatz” as one of Miss Dangerfield’s words. Emily was going to be very put out when she learned that Miss Dangerfield wasn’t returning to school after the summer. Emily was scarily clever. She was reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake “for fun” during the summer holidays. She would have been appalled by the show at the Palace.
Crystal was cleverer than Emily gave her credit for, cleverer than she gave herself credit for. For example, she played a mean, albeit reluctant, game of chess, although she was always making out that she was thick. And you had to be pretty savvy to digest (as it were) all that science about “clean eating.” Sometimes she sounded as if she had a degree in advanced nutrition. “You see the thing about B-twelve, Harry, is that…” and so on. Harry thought she was “hiding her light under a bushel”—that was what Miss Dangerfield had said about Harry to his parents at last term’s PTA.
“Miss Dangerfield’s bush,” his father grinned when he came home. “That would be a sight for sore eyes.” His father could be horribly crude sometimes. He seemed to think it would make a man of Harry.
“And is that what you want to be, pet?” Bunny asked. “To be a man? Because, believe me, it’s not all it’s cut out to be.”
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