Connery (Part 12)

A Speculative Novel

I went in to work the next morning. I got more messages from Angela and one from Kirkby’s wife. The car was discovered later that day and initially reported as a suspected organised crime assassination, “a hit job” as the papers called it. “All the hallmarks of the Mafia”, a source close to the investigation stated. Then it was linked to a missing person in Washington and noted foreign affairs lobbyist Bartholomew F. Kirkby was identified via DNA test as the human remains found in the burned-out car.

At the end of the week, I was called in to see my boss: Mavis Teague. Mrs Teague said that I would have to review all my contacts with Kirkby and see if we had missed something the first time around. I told them about the missed appointment and that rang an immediate alarm bell. I was instructed to be helpful to the authorities but to notify immediately our legal counsel and not to offer any information without the presence of the mission’s legal representation. She wasn’t concerned that I might have somehow been involved in the disappearance and death, but rather believed that Kirkby’s exposure as an informant and my own exposure as an agent would be undesirable, to say the very least. I barely managed to supress a delighted bark of laughter. Trying not to smile broadly can often look like smiling grimly.  

This was perfect. It gave me all the cover I could require to be uncooperative without raising suspicion. Even the Americans would understand why I was being evasive. After all, I’m a spy. Of course, I’m going to be evasive.

I spent the next week going over my reports and my own background material on Kirkby and I met Angela once so that we could – by mutual consent – formally break off the affair that had been slowly and quietly dying under the weight of our reciprocal indifference. I had also been seeing someone else and she vaguely suspected this as well. In fact, she knew it as a fact. I did get some more information from her about Kirkby’s dealings and specifically some of his more questionable Middle Eastern clients. This allowed me to fabricate a little bit of tasty information. Add some local colour, so to speak.

Raw intelligence is like this. It allows for a fictional element to creep in. There’s a lot of ‘he said, she said’. A supposition made in paragraph one by paragraph three has become an asserted fact. A thesis matures into description; an inkling morphs into an idea and then confirmed reality. It takes a certain skill and over my three or four years in the United States I had attained this sleight of hand ability and honed it to a high level. I could weave a web and so I produced the apex of my career as a spy. The report was fifteen pages long and I wrote it at home, occasionally stopping to continue with my redecorating or head out to Home Depot and get more paint and turpentine and what not. There’s something incredibly soothing about working in this way at two parallel and related tasks which yet have very different feelings to them. The manual labour would relax me and ease my mind and also new ideas would spring into my head while I was trying to get a tricky part of the ceiling with the roller brush.

And then when I was too tired to go on, I would sit at my computer and write out long paragraphs with footnotes and facts, references and maps. I threw the Saudi royal family in there – at least a disaffected junior branch – as well as some of the most notorious money launderers in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. I threw in some arms dealers and drew some connections to radical fire-spitting Egyptians. Most of this I got from the internet and some Tom Clancy novels. I noted that Kirkby had been instrumental to the effort to arm the Mujahidin, brokering sales of Stinger Missiles in the 80s. I remembered him boasting of his advocacy of the Reagan Doctrine before there was a Reagan Doctrine. I nodded sagely at the time; not altogether sure I knew what the Reagan Doctrine actually was.

My house redecorated – it was a rental so I got permission from my landlady – a librarian who lived in Alabama – before going ahead – my report written and still no call from law enforcement to provide them with details of my whereabouts on the night of October 16th, 1997. I hand-delivered my report to the boss and sat in her foyer drinking coffee from the machine as she read it. Half an hour passed and then Anthony Sturgess, the mission’s lawyer came through the reception area and rushed straight through into the Boss’s office, without knocking, responding no doubt to her summons. The air-conditioning was as ever on too high and had the distinct impression I was back at school waiting in the corridor before being called into the headmaster’s office. People kept popping their heads through the door to ask an inane question but really to see me and hope to overhear something.

When I was finally readmitted, Anthony was standing, hunched over the desk, almost folded in two and reading the report with his hands clasped behind his back. Without rising, he turned his head to me: ‘This is all you have.’

I nodded.

‘Puts a new spin on things,’ my boss said from her chair by the window. A Bond fan like the rest of us, she spun in the chair, so she was facing us. If she’d been stroking a cat, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised. Such are the theatrics we all love in the secret community. Ask that vamping diva, Cornwall. ‘We need to get him out of the country.’

‘A family crisis, something like that,’ Anthony said, returning to the paper, licking a finger and folding down the corner of a page.

‘There will have to be an interview before he goes,’ the chief said.

‘I’ll reach out to the appropriate people,’ Anthony said, airily.

‘Erm,’ I said. Just to remind them I was in the room and happy to participate if called upon.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

I was going to be interviewed by the FBI agents in charge of the murder investigation. I would have submitted a preliminary statement and would be willing – with counsel present – to answer their questions. Then I would fly home on personal leave. I would not take anything with me beyond a normal bag packed for a few nights away. But I would not be returning. I had a girlfriend (as well as my dalliance with Angela) but that would not be a problem. Our arrangement was casual. My things could be shipped to me later. My outstanding obligations would be dealt with via the ambassador’s office and any other legal difficulties – rental agreements, utility bills – would be likewise ‘squared away’. I noted my boss would occasionally use these Americanisms with a hint of affectionate contempt. I had mimicked her habit as well. I noticed everyone had a way of picking up mannerisms from their superiors and so a whole department would slowly morph into a multi-person version of one person. I’d seen it happen in the army when an officer was admired and liked. This is no criticism. Personally, I loved doing it.

‘You had no personal relationship with this Kirkby?’ Anthony suddenly barked from his bent over position. He looked like he was about to get six of the best from the headmaster. Or better still he looked like the headmaster preparing to get six of the best from a prostitute he paid to dress as a schoolboy.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Not effing his wife, were you?’ eyebrow up. ‘Or effing him, perhaps?’

‘Tony!’ my boss said.

‘I was in an intimate relationship his assistant, Angela Cable,’ I said. ‘She’s mentioned on page 13.’

Anthony straightened up. A dry satisfied smile on his face. I’m not sure if the revelation would do me good or damage my credibility, but it seemed in keeping with the tenor of the conversation and it allowed me to take some space up in the room. It seemed to satisfy Anthony though. It was as if now he had context, a framework in which to place the information I had gleaned. He probably suspected much of what I had came from Angela, but that was fine. No man is a gentleman to his valet: and that was even more true of Americans to their PAs. Anthony put his hand on the report, his fingers splayed like spider legs.

‘This is good, substantial work,’ he said. Something human in him dribbled into a smile.

‘I want you to know, Sam,’ my boss said. ‘You’ve really come through. I always suspected you were drifting here. Not glamorous enough, or dangerous enough. I don’t know. Boring I suppose. But you’ve come through. Under the radar. The way it should be done. It’s a very pleasant surprise. [I had a quick flashback to chopping Kirkby’s fingertips off with a large heavy knife] I’ll be sure that everyone in London knows it as well. Who knows? Maybe they’ll send you somewhere more exciting next time.’

I said my thanks and went to the park for a think. It was getting sharply cold – frosty, frosty, frosty – and I realised that I was going to have another change in my life and the fact of the matter was it really, really, really excited me. Why did they have the air-conditioning on when it was so cold out? They made it almost impossible to open windows and then invented machines in order to simulate an open window.

The wind sent little fan shaped ripples across the water into the reeds. The sky held a white grey wash of bad things coming. I loved the Washington skies.

Back at home, the place smelled of fresh paint and the walls looked bright. I inspected the floorboards closely on my hands and knees, inch by arthritic inch. It was innocent of stains, sanded of crime and varnished with a new sense of moral uprightness.

Later that week I went for the dreaded interview. A Wednesday morning. We did it in a conference room where the air conditioning – I’m sorry to go on about this – was on Warsaw in December setting, despite the Autumn rain falling in barrelfulls outside. A hurricane, the tail end, I was told. I’d been watching its progress on TV. I loved Hurricane Season. I stayed up late to watch reporters getting battered by the storm surge. I gleefully tracked the storms, hoping for maximum destruction. It was never as bad as the news feared, though of course it was still fairly bad. I’d always meant to drive south and experience one on the coast, where they made land fall, but had never had the opportunity.

‘Do we have your attention, Mr. Coleridge?’

‘I’m sorry yes.’

Two agents sat opposite me: both men, both regularly large with big strong jaws and hair that looked like it had been freshly cut that morning. One had a cold sore; the other was black like in a TV show. Agents Harnet and Addley simply wanted me to sign the statement in their presence and ask me some broader questions about my relationship with Kirkby and Angela.

‘So, you were having sex?’ Harnet said.

‘Yes. Just the two times.’

‘Was Mr. Kirkby aware of this relationship?’ Addley asked.

‘It’s really impossible to say.’

‘And you have no idea who might have had anything against him?’ Addley continued.

Anthony covered the microphone.

‘We have suspicions that Mr. Kirkby had a number of enemies,’ sotto voce. ‘And we are willing to disclose them but only in a more secure setting and we don’t need to include Mr. Coleridge in this. He has already submitted a report, a redacted version of which will be handed over to you to help you in your enquiries.’

They looked at each other and there was a general feeling of smug pleasure at this development. Some more questions; some more answers. Someone knocked on the door and brought in a plastic tray of coffees in cartons. Addley and Harnet quarrelled about which one had sugar in it. They kept sipping them and swapping them and then sipping them and swapping them again.  

More questions, but conversational. Almost as if we were simply killing the time until the coffees were drank.

‘Thank you for your time, gentlemen,’ one of them said.

And we all shook hands.

I went to the bathroom on the way out. I love seeing what bathrooms look like. They’re always the same but always different. It’s amazing to go into a bathroom and then think, ‘hmmm, someone didn’t flush in the FBI.’ I had a bold invigorating movement. The soap smelt of mint. I didn’t flush.

Anthony walked me to the car. He handed me over my tickets and some expense money to use in an official wallet. I liked the wallet.

‘Yes, they’re nice, aren’t they? Rather neat.’

He said he envied me. He missed England: he longed for the cricket, the Sunday roast, bad teeth and the beer. He spent his evenings watching DVD box sets of Dad’s Army and Are You Being Served?

‘I’m a big fan of Dick Emery,’ he offered, unprovoked.

We shook hands with that confession fizzing in the air between us along with the truly drenching rain. Something he appeared to be impervious to. I was soaked, making squelching noises as I shifted in the seat of my car. When I got home, I had a shower and tried to cry again. I was getting quite good at it and soon the sobs ‘racked my body’. I stayed in the shower until the water turned cold and then came out suitably refreshed. When I packed my bag, I used the vacuum cleaner to get the air out of the bags and allow me to pack more.  

I had managed to accrue so many miles from transatlantic flights that I had earned a membership card which gave me access to the exclusive lounge where there was an ongoing buffet and free magazines and drinks, comfortable chairs and they boarded you after everyone else so you didn’t have to sit in the plane for too long. I enjoyed the lounge so much I tended to turn up very early for my flight so that I could get a good hour or two in the lounge. It was in the lounge in JFK that I had my third encounter with Sean Connery. He was sitting with his wife Micheline Roquebrune; and at first, I didn’t feel that I ought to intrude on them. I understood from interviews I had read that Connery was a very private man, unenamoured of the trappings of celebrity and he would certainly not like an approach and anyway, what would I say to him. Would he recognise me from that meeting five or six years ago? I doubted it very much. So, I got a pile of magazines and started working my way through them, starting with GQ and sipping on my grapefruit juice.

After about ten minutes, someone tapped me on the knee.

‘Do you mind if I join you?’ Connery said and, without waiting, sat in the chair next to mine. ‘I couldn’t help noticing you sitting here. I was sat over there, and I said to my wife, I know that chap. I don’t know from where or how, or in what capacity…are you in the film business?’

‘N-no,’ I said.

He barked a laugh. ‘Thank God for that. We must be friends then, but I’ll be blinded with a red-hot poker if I can remember where it is I’ve met you. You play golf?’

‘Badly,’ I said.

‘That can’t be it then,’ Connery shook his head a little crossly. ‘I don’t play with duffers.’

‘We’ve actually met twice,’ I said.

‘I knew it!’ he slapped his leg.

‘I was nine years old the first time,’ I said. ‘On the beach, a small place in Cumbria.’

Connery looked at the carpet between his feet, frowning, trying to remember, to coax Cumbria from the hexagonal pattern of the weave.

He gave up.

‘And the second time?’

‘On the ferry over from France. About six or so years ago.’

‘That’s possible. Avoid flying if I can and I like boats. Time permitting. Yes, that tickles a feint recollection. Night-time, was it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And here we both are: returning once more to England. What are the odds? What are you going back for … err…?’

‘Sam.’

‘What are you going back for, Sammy?’

‘Work. My posting is over.’

‘Government man, eh?’

‘Something like that. And you?’

‘Got to make another bloody film,’ contempt laced his words. ‘God knows why I do it. The script is a mess and the team behind it look like a bunch of bloody incompetent kids. The director has still got acne for crying out loud. Remaking a TV show as a movie! What utter hogwash.’

He shook his head again. This time in disgust. ‘Do you know who had bad acne, Sammy?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Richard Burton.’

‘Really?’

I hummed for a moment. At a loss what to say.

‘You don’t seem to much like acting, if you don’t mind my saying so Mr. Connery.’

‘What’s there to like, Sammy?’ he gazed around the lounge. ‘A lot of hanging around, they dress you up like a bloody idiot, slap makeup on your face like you’re a t’penny tart and then make you recite the most ridiculous drivel to help prop up a story that half the time makes no sense whatsoever.’ He finished his drink and raised his glass. ‘Will you join me? Richard Burton once told me he never trusted anyone who could get on a plane sober. I’m of a similar opinion. Poor spotty Dick.’

‘I usually don’t but…’

‘In respect for your elders. Good man.’

He came back with two whiskeys. I’ve heard lots of intelligent men wax lyrical about the taste and quality of whiskey, different years and malts, the relative merits of Irish and Scotch and Bourbon, but to me, it all tasted like the same amber petrol. I winced, which was apparently the thing to do.

We talked a little bit more. Mr. Connery was talking about how he hoped to retire. His real passion was golf and he enjoyed his free time. He felt no urge to work and in fact felt that because he was so disinterested when it came to choosing projects, it was more likely that he would damage his legacy than add to it in any meaningful positive way. His wife came back, and he introduced us, and we all shook hands as our flight was announced. I slept on the flight, smiling happily at the thought of how lucky I was. How blessed by good fortune. Kirkby not even appearing as a bad memory, just not there at all.

He surprised me again when he caught my shoulder after we had landed in England.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘What was your name again? So, the next time we meet I’ll have it and I won’t come across as a doddering old fool.’

‘Samuel Coleridge.’

‘Sammy Coleridge, like the poet. Well that should be easy to remember! Nice to meet you again Sammy.’

And we shook hands. Then he spied the paparazzi and his faced flushed with blood. ‘Bastards!’ he muttered and grabbed his wife’s arm and hustled her away.

I’d never lived in London. Not for any appreciable period. My initial plan was to find a place to live and then take some leave so I could go and see dad but finding a place to live proved difficult and it occurred to me that the rents were so extortionate, it might make more sense to buy a place. There was no way it was going to do anything but appreciate. I say it occurred to me; it was actually a friend of mine who I went drinking with from GCHQ. I’d been seconded there until they could work out what to do with me.

Although we were the same age, Ollie Arrow looked older, a young fogie with a full beard and receding hair, a penchant for tweed and pipe smoking, and a robust laugh that he’d weaponized and used to startle people. He always had something in his hand: either a brolly or a black cane with a silver dog’s head on the handle, at a pinch, a rolled-up newspaper which he would bat his thigh with. He called the cane his mugger deterrent. I liked Ollie and I appreciated the way he didn’t mind that I didn’t drink. This usually put other people off, especially heavy drinkers, as I think I’ve already mentioned, but he took an ‘all the more for me’ attitude. Ollie honestly didn’t care what other people thought of him and somehow that gave him a cloak of invulnerability. Despite being loud and boorish and frequently argumentative, no one seemed to bother about him or get too upset. Easing confrontation was someone else’s job as far as Ollie was concerned. He would tell people to eff off in pubs on a regular basis and people took it as if he was joshing them. He’d chat up boys and girls with bland indifference, both to their gender and the chances of success, or in fact their own apparent willingness to be chatted up, including because they were already visibly and palpably with someone. Now and again he would succeed and winking to me and waving his cane in the air, he’d make for a quick escape with an arm around his prize and zero ceremony when it came to excuses or goodbyes. He never apologised for these swift departures, nor for being late when obviously hungover or standing me up which he did from time to time. He was always full of schemes and I had been warned almost immediately to steer clear of Ollie. Sooner or later, it was intimated, he would come a cropper and it was sheer luck that it hadn’t happened yet. But there was always a grand tradition in the British secret service of trusting to these wild and rich eccentrics, these colourful larger than life characters. Of course, it was a tradition that had produced the most embarrassing failures – Guy Burgess, Kim Philby et al – but failure and betrayal were likewise tied into the romance of the service. When Ollie inevitably ended up in prison, his flat searched and incriminating evidence caught on videotape, we would all gather to do a post-mortem and before it was over, we would no doubt be laughing at some escapade Ollie had pulled off at the Christmas party, or that team building exercise in Gibraltar. It was a dreadful way to run national security, but with a shrug it was accepted: as inevitable as train delays, policemen getting younger and hospital waiting lists.

I also knew that Ollie’s relationship with me was transactional. My reputation – even in the short weeks since I handed in my report and turned up in person – had grown considerably. It helped that no one had seen me in London much. I had gone from training straight to New York and then Washington for four years. No one knew me except by report and then this interesting bombshell and the glamorous smear of violence. I was an unknown quantity and London is forever chasing novelty.

‘He was getting too close,’ they said. ‘Someone took care of his source.’

Eyebrows raised. Lips pursed. Bottle of water uncapped. The report passed around at the highest security level. Ministers had seen it; I was told in the strictest confidence. It didn’t surprise me. The information in it was mostly readily available from newspapers. There was some additional colour, mostly from Angela, and the least of all were the stories and titbits from Kirkby himself. But none of that mattered. The death was like a red wax seal of quality, with a little frayed ribbon underneath.

Ollie wanted to grab my coattails but not so he could rise. He was perfectly happy where he was – close enough to the wheels of power for fun; not so close as to get crushed – but he knew I would make a good contact, a protector, a source of potential earning power and who knows? Maybe at some point at the future I’d be able to send him on freebies around the world at the expense of the great British taxpayer. Funnily enough the exact opposite was going to happen, but who knew? In the meantime, anything he could do, don’t hesitate to ask. I trust people like Ollie. Their self-interest is so obvious and so easy to factor in. I could use him as much as I liked, safe in the knowledge that he would ask for it all back when the time came. But also, aware that when the time came, I would be in a position to say ‘no’. His help came in the idea of buying a small flat that he knew was going for a song – well, for London a song where elsewhere it would have been a Wagner opera cycle – I had enough for a deposit and could get a mortgage easily enough with the job I had. Then in a couple of years I could flip it and buy something halfway decent. Rinse and repeat.

‘The important thing is to get on the ladder,’ Ollie said. ‘I don’t even unpack anymore.’

So, I bought the flat, which was in Deptford, South London. It was close to the underground, there were plenty of places to grab food nearby and that’s all I really needed. Ollie knew the owner, and everything was done amicably and quickly.

My work at GCHQ was drab. A glorified office boy. I couldn’t get properly started on anything because there was the idea that I would soon be posted elsewhere – I’d rent my new flat out if this was the case and pay the mortgage with the rent money – but the call upstairs hadn’t come and six months went by with routine tasks and a series of mandatory courses which involved an exhausting amount of PowerPoint. I ran many miles, and even completed the London Marathon for some charity – multiple sclerosis, I think, or perhaps Alzheimer’s – and would go to the pool and swim as well. There was something calming about swimming. I enjoyed it a great deal and I felt it was important to keep myself in good trim. Healthy and fit. Ready for anything the world threw at me. Assassinations if I could get them: murders if I couldn’t!

Though, it was also during this period that I began first to feel a general lowness of spirits. ‘I have of late wherefore I know not lost all my mirth,’ I told Ollie.

‘Oh bum,’ was his reply. And he shot off to the bar where he bought two drinks, one to take back to the table and one to drink while he was waiting for that one to be poured.

It was probably fallout from the excitement of my last weeks in the States. It was ironic given how dull the experience had otherwise generally been, but I found myself hankering for a new adventure. The obvious answer was for me to kill someone, or at least start planning, but – partly as a result of all the courses I was doing in electronic surveillance – I was becoming aware of new obstacles that had been put in my way. The diffusion of CCTV cameras for instance had changed everything. Already I had been aware of how much film there might be of me driving Kirkby’s car around captured by traffic cameras, but I was also confident that they would never trace it all the way back to my house. My neighbourhood perhaps, but then again, he had been supposed to come and visit me so that would not necessarily be something outside of the narrative I had supplied. If he had been killed because of his relationship with me then the killer might well have known about our appointment and lain in wait close to my house and killed him as he got out of his car to come up my drive, bundled his lifeless body back into the car and driven him to his eventual immolation.

That was in the past and I was okay with that. My real problem was in the future. How was I ever going to kill anyone again? This thought at least had the advantage of making me increasingly interested in the courses I was being forced to take. Knowing about the technology – what it can and cannot do – might prove genuinely useful later on, in the commission of a murder. So, I took notes and my diligence was looked on favourably. I kept my languages up with regular trips to the arthouse cinemas to see foreign films and rotating languages in the novels I read.

Boxes of my possessions arrived in Deptford from North Potomac in the Spring, along with a letter from my landlady saying that she had noticed that a rug of hers was missing and if I had absentmindedly packed it, then I owed her $250. I wired her the money with a note to apologise for the omission.

Thoughtless of me.

One Saturday evening, the light still strong in the sky like a surprise, a bonus, I was running at the edges of one of the bigger parks when my sister’s face went by on the side of a bus. I had seen it a few times, curved around the station walls of the tube. She looked stylishly terrified. It reminded me that I really ought to go up north and see my father. It had been some years, and curiosity was strong to see how Larry was bearing up. He had surprised everyone by not dying of drink almost immediately upon mum dying. There really seemed no reason for his continued existence, but nevertheless he stuck around. Probably just to annoy his brother Mike who buttressed his own sense of self-worth with the idea that his brother was a total loser. I arranged a week’s leave though I knew I probably didn’t need a week, rented a car and headed north. I enjoyed the drive. I listened to an audio book about making things happen by thinking about them. It was called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. It was a technique that basically said if you wanted something to happen and you visualized it enough then it would come true. It was very convincing and by the time I stopped at Charnock Richards for lunch I was convinced. A convert. I don’t know if I can explain the whole thing because I’m sure there would be issues of copyright – after all, she did call it The Secret – but all the same, I imagine you’ll understand what I mean. I would for years visualize what I wanted and most of the time I got whatever it was. I visualized victims, bloody mayhem and writing this book, for instance. And here you are reading it.

When I got to Feather Lane and the cottage, I was struck by the banal realisation of how small everything seemed. This was the telescoping of adulthood. Could the cottage be actively sinking? Was it a swamp? A mire? A Bog? It felt as though the mossy lawn was pushing at the windowsills. Dad was out and I listened to the bell ringing hollowly in the empty house behind the locked door. That made me laugh. I had just assumed he would be crouched in the darkness waiting for me or Taylor to turn up. In yellow underwear, with blue piping, and incoherently drunk. Although actually Taylor was no longer speaking to him, after he had sold a story to one of the red tops about her about a year earlier. There had been nothing particularly salacious or scandalous about the story. It was rich girl makes good and abandons her poor dad in squalor. The headline was something along the lines of ‘His Daughter Plays to Millions while He Lives on the Breadline’. Neither of those points were factually true. She didn’t play to millions and with mum’s settlement and the life insurance, he was comfortably off. But just dad doing it was enough to be hurtful. She told me on the phone that she would have given him money if he needed it, but he wanted to hurt her. That was the thing. She didn’t like that I told her that it was basically true that she had gone off on her own and didn’t go home that often.

That irked her to say the least.

‘At least I know you won’t got to the tabloids,’ she said. ‘And blow your 007 cover or whatever it is.’

When I had been mentioned in magazine profiles, which I very rarely was, it was as ex-Army paratrooper, now a civil servant. That’s as far as it got. I sat in the car and closed my eyes. It had been a long drive and I woke from a dream where I was eating this huge cat and the cat kept saying to me ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ and I’d cover my mouth and say ‘nothing’ but I couldn’t say it because I had a chunk of cat meat in my mouth with my dad banging on the windscreen. He was wearing his parka and his duffel bag, and I realised with a jolt of surprised mixed with bleary half-awakeness that he was still working at the shipyard. Of course, Larry was nowhere near retirement age, but I’d assumed with mum dying and the settlement and his constant thirst he would just stay at home and concentrate on drinking.

‘Well, are you coming in or what?’ he growled.

The house looked in good shape. Actually, in much better shape than I had ever seen it. He told me that after mum had died, he’d hired a skip and threw everything out that had always annoyed him. All her clothes, the ornaments he didn’t like, the pictures on the walls, half of the kitchenware that she never used anyway. There were all those things she bought in a sudden enthusiasm that lasted three days: the bread maker, the ice cream maker, the popcorn machine, the sandwich toaster, the electric juicer. He’d thrown out half of the furniture, all her books. He cleared out our bedrooms which had stayed morbidly the same since we’d left: as if Taylor and I had both died as children. The magazines – the Look Ins and NMEs, The Faces and Qs – that I recalled piled in fragile colourful skyscrapers were all gone. The heavy curtains that mum liked had gone as well. The rugs, the throws, the blankets, the quilts, the pillows and the cushions. Inside, the house seemed bigger now with sharper edges. He’d got satellite TV and thrown out all of the videocassettes. He had no nostalgia. He’d read a book and throw it out or leave it on the park bench for someone else or the rain. He’d painted the walls ‘apple white’, which is just white basically. There was supposed to be a tinge of green he told me, but I couldn’t see it. He had a chair for himself in front of the tv and a small sofa in case he wanted to lie down against the wall in the corner. The kitchen was spic and span and when I went in the cupboards to prepare something to eat, I saw that he had tins of beans, frozen chips and frozen beef burgers and that was about it. Condiments as well. The fridge was full of booze and his one extravagance was a well-stocked bar which he had made himself. It curved in the corner of the living room, opposite the sofa. There was a mirror behind it and optics with all his favourite spirits. He even had a stool there. I couldn’t think of him sitting there and having a drink, pretending he was at the corner of some swank nightclub Michael Caine might manage.

Larry looked hollow, skinny; he didn’t blink, and gave no indication of seeing anything. I told him about London and the United States. We talked about Taylor for a time; though this was a sore topic for him. He believed she should send him money and I told him she would if he asked for it and he got angry and said, ‘Why do I have to ask?’

‘Who drove her to the music lessons?’ he shouted, furious. ‘Who bought her that first guitar? Who put up with her imitating drowning cats and murdering Stairway to Heaven? And all the time giving her encouragement?’

‘Mum,’ I said.

And he laughed and shrugged – the anger gone – and said, ‘I suppose.’

The truth was neither of them had done much to put Taylor on her way, except giving her a couple of album’s worth of grounded misery to draw on. There was a reason she had changed her name; a reason she had gone away and also a reason she didn’t want to come back. I knew this. She had made it plain after mum’s funeral.    

‘Some people sip at life, Sam,’ dad said. ‘I’m a gulper. I always have been. I glug it down. Doesn’t even touch the sides, my dad would tell me. I don’t taste it. I don’t taste anything. And so, I can’t even enjoy it. And because I can’t enjoy it, I have to have more. Your mother was the same as me. Mary was always thirsty; always starving. Never hungry, mind. Famished. That was us. You and Taylor, both of you, you were always sippers. You sipped at life. You blew on it first so it wouldn’t burn your lips and your tongue. And then you took little dainty sips.’

I wasn’t sure how profound this was. I mean accurate, yes. But he was just peeved I wouldn’t have a beer with him and was instead sipping at a mug of tea I’d made. We’d eaten and dad wanted to watch television now. There was a James Bond season on ITV and so we watched The Living Daylights with Timothy Dalton. After a couple of cans, Dad switched from beer to rum and coke and then whiskey and coke. I made them for him with ice and lemon. But he got irritated with the rinds of fruit, said the ice hurt his teeth and accused me of stinginess on the measures.

‘You pour them like you bought the bottle,’ he said, so he would lumber upright, hold his hands out horizontal like a tight rope walker waiting for his balance to right itself and then proceed gingerly to the bar.

‘Timothy Dalton is not very good, is he?’ I said as he fell back into his armchair on returning.

‘Shocking,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself at all.’

The next day was a Saturday and he slept late. I took the car to Asda to get some shopping for dad and restock his bar. It might sound ridiculous to someone who hasn’t grown up in the countryside in the seventies but going to Asda on a Friday after school had been a highlight of the week. It seemed like mum was glamorous because she worked there. It was after all a super-market. There were still shops back then, with everything crushed together and back rooms with boxes of stock behind beaded rainbow-coloured curtains, and everything needed to be weighed and measured and scooped from jars with screw on lids. And then here was this massive warehouse of a shop, brightly lit, with no shadows, full to the brim with an endless variety of thousands of articles, foods, and frozen foods, clothes, underwear, socks, pyjamas, toiletries, toothpaste, soap and stuff from foreign lands, spices, and books and magazines and it even had its own canteen where sometimes we’d wait for mum to finish work, drinking Lilt and eating a fruit teacake on mum’s staff discount. Cassettes and records and toys it had as well. So, going there was like going back to that wonderful time but of course now it was just a supermarket. It held no real excitement. And there were other competing supermarkets just down the road.

I wheeled my trolley around the aisles feeling a bit deflated. You can never go home again; Thomas Wolf had written; presumably not about Asda but the idea held.

‘Hey Sam,’ a familiar face said. He was pushing a trolley with a child sat in the basket.

‘Jesus, Elliott Comb,’ I said. ‘How are you doing? Is this yours? Hello, what’s your name?’

‘Elsie,’ the child said in a strikingly forthright and adult voice.

‘And how old are you?’

‘Three.’

‘Very confident,’ I used a complementary tone.

‘All her mother,’ Elliott said, laughing. ‘She works of a Saturday morning, so this is our Saturday routine. Isn’t it, Elsie?’

‘It is, yeah,’ Elsie said, unwilling to let her side of the conversation droop. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m an old friend of daddy’s,’ I said. ‘Call me Sam.’

‘You here to see your dad?’

I nodded and did one of those faces that people read everything off – number seven – and Elliot nodded understandingly and even put his hand on my arm. I hadn’t actually said anything, but here I was getting consoled for my mum dying five years ago.

We continued going around Asda together as Elliott went through his list. He told me he always made sure he forgot one thing so that he wasn’t taken for granted. He was working in the offices at the shipyard and it was going well. Plenty of work. He asked after my dad and talked for a bit about Taylor, cautiously, not wanting to seem overly impressed, or eager. At the checkouts, there was another familiar face at the checkouts beeping through my purchases, but I couldn’t bring back who it was, though the name was on the tip of my tongue and the man was so coldly formal that I immediately understood, though he knew me, he didn’t like me so it was best to leave well alone.

I bagged my shopping and paid.

Outside, while I was loading the shopping in the car, Elliott came over. ‘It was good to see you again,’ he said, shaking my hand.

‘Who was that on the tills?’

‘Gavin Steer,’ Elliott said. ‘Don’t you remember him? You went to the same school.’

‘I stabbed him in the face with a fork,’ I clicked my fingers, a flood of happy memories rushing in.

‘I heard something about that,’ Elliot frowned.

I shook my head, as though ruing those wild days.

‘I was a right psycho when I was a kid,’ I said, my accent becoming progressively more northern with every moment I spoke to Elliott.

‘You can say that again,’ Elliott said laughing. ‘You and that effing dog. What was he called?’

‘Allan. That bastard Stephen Pritt killed him.’

He laughed as if I was joking, until he stopped laughing. And then nodded, smiled, blew his nose and then gestured with his thumb back at his car.

‘I better… Elsie will be …’

I let him go. I consider going back to see Gavin, but I’d had enough of memory lane and drove back to see if dad was up. He wasn’t but he got up when he heard me crashing about in the kitchen. He took one of the cans of high strength lager from the fridge and cracked it open, emptying half of it in one swig.

‘Aaaaaaah!’ he said.

One thing I haven’t mentioned but that was a significant change in dad’s living arrangements. There were no cars in various stages of dismantlement. Out in the drive or in the garage which was now very empty. I asked him about it later and he said he got bored of it. Couldn’t be arsed. Simple as. I read a lack of hope there. He was just hanging around. There was nothing that was going to change in his life.

I took him for a walk to Birk Rigg, like you might a reluctant old dog. After five minutes of traipsing through the bracken laced paths and picking our way through the various animal droppings, leaning into a wind that changed direction, so you stumbled forward suddenly shoved in the back. Above us the clouds curved down like the buttocks of gods.

He said, ‘eff this’ and went back to the car. I stayed out a little longer just so that I could breathe some fresh air and get my bearings. Having him there, it felt like something was being said, even when he was silent, which was pretty much all the time. He was very, very, very quiet. Much more so than he had ever been. He lacked joie de vivre. I felt as if he were brooding, some resentment, some deep fury, but I couldn’t work it out. He can’t have felt we abandoned him, could he? We had gone our ways but that was what he and mum had taught us to do. There had never ever, ever been an imperative to stay around them, look after them – quite the opposite. They couldn’t wait to get shot of us.

Mum was very unsentimental in wanting us out from under her as soon as possible. I remember her saying when we were really young – I remember it really clearly – at the kitchen table and my sister and I had been sat down so we must have done something wrong because she had placed us in our seats with our hands on the table. And she told us that the only benefit she could think of about having us two so young was that when we finally got out of her hair, she would still have some of her life left. And then she took down her heavy Reader’s Digest Cookbook and brought it up over her head and then slammed it down on my sister’s hand.

‘I haven’t finished,’ she yelled when we pulled our hands away. ‘Put your hands back on the table. Palms down.’

I walked back to dad, who was sitting in the hire car, smoking, the windows wound up and the car full of his cigarette smoke, like a dense poisonous fog.