Monday 8 June 2020

THE FOX AND THE HOUND

I never thought I’d find myself back in Stanton, which is to say I never considered that my Mum might ever actually die. We’d been out of touch ever since that falling-out we had, and according to my sister she held that spite all the way to the grave. Ade still had a soft spot for the woman and the plan was originally for me to get back to Britain in time to see her before she went. Didn’t turn out that way, but I planned to stay for the funeral for my sister’s sake. She’d been through enough lately; I didn’t want her burying Mum alone.
   Ade had been living with Mum and moved into our old house, long enough that it’d clearly been repainted, redecorated and migrated with enough of Ade’s spirit to show she’d been looking after Mum for a while. Seeing the same space that was familiar to me as a child, and still came up sometimes in my dreams, with a new veneer affected me more than I thought it would. Ade made me something to drink. The room Mum died in remained untouched, drab and dark wood, except for the bedsheets which were pure white – the woman had been erased, like a stroke of white paint. I slept in the room that I used to call my own, claustrophobic and entirely barren; Ade didn’t receive many guests. The wooden trunk that carried all the things I collected had turned to empty space, no doubt buried in some landfill in an unmarked grave. There was nothing to grant me even a whisper of nostalgia. As far as she was concerned I’d already erased myself long before.
   Things were still tense between me and Ade. Not surprising really since I was here over Mum, our dividing line, our Iron Curtain. I tried to be nice and she tried to be nice and for the most part we succeeded, but her hopes for me to perform a eulogy at the funeral were hopelessly misplaced, and there was still resentment in her voice whenever my job or even my home in the States floated to the conversation’s surface. If she wanted kickbacks, all she had to do was ask, which was true. Not for Mum, but for her. But we both knew it was about more than money. Maybe she envied my independence. She once asked me years ago, pleadingly, how I could detach Mum from my heart. ‘Easy. With a single snip,’ I told her. ‘That won’t stop us being family,’ she said. ‘That’s a tether you can never cut.’ A tether she could never cut, was what she meant.
   Eventually I escaped over to Barley Street to discover, by some miracle, The Fox and Hound was still standing there, a little cleaner and with a fresh new sign, but still standing, and its warm orange windows were welcoming hearth-fires in the moonless country night. I stepped in and took a look around – quiet night, groups of two of three. Even some lonely drinkers, me included. The new barstaff looked young. I ordered a stout and sat at the edge of the bar, not knowing what to do except let my thoughts roll underneath me like an empty highway.
Then what do you know, some prick pulls up a stool beside me and for a second I was worried something nasty was going to happen, a case of mistaken identity, or even just the scent of an outsider that came innately to the provincial creatures of Stanton. A lanky fellow, shaved head and an earring, a thick jacket and vest with enough laxity to show wiry chest hair and wild, spiny tattoos. A regular nutter, I thought. Local arsonist, I reckoned, or worse. I looked up, ready to clash, but one look into his eyes disarmed me. ‘As I live and breathe,’ he said with a gleeful smirk. ‘How you been, Harry?’
   The anxious mini-panic of not recognising this character fell away, and left me wide-eyed as I retraced the aged lines around the reddened eyes of the character before me. ‘Kev. Bloody hell.’
   ‘You didn’t tell me you were in town.’
   ‘I don’t even know how to contact you. When was the last time we spoke?’ I could hear the heightened pitch in my voice.
   ‘When d’you think, you thick idiot? At your going-away party, however long ago. I brought in the rhino charlie You gave Julie a goodbye shag. Anything else to shake your memory?’
   All these memories, images, like faded slides frozen one after another, dizzied me. They were all so long ago, from a different life entirely. ‘Damn. My god. It’s been… come here.’ I lunged over to hug him, hardly stopping to think. It was a primal force, and it was only fear that kept me from welling up tears.
   ‘You soft sap,’ Kev said. ‘Hey,’ he addressed the acne-ridden barman with a click of the fingers, ‘two shots of Grand Tequila.’ He turned to me: ‘Think this deserves a toast.’
   The stubby bullet-shaped glasses came and we bumped them with a harmonious clink. ‘Good health,’ he said. ‘And you.’ I hadn’t drank tequila in more than a decade, and the taste itself was enough to throw me back to before the two of us could even legally drink. ‘It’s good to see you.’
   ‘The land of opportunity’s done you good,’ he said, eyeing me up and down. ‘You’re wearing a shirt, for god’s sake. How’s the work? Got yourself a secretary you can bang yet.’
   I smiled and shook my head. ‘It’s not like that. Want me to explain what it is I do?’
   ‘You think I wouldn’t be interested?’
   ‘Christ, when I say it out loud, I’d be surprised if anyone was interested.’
   ‘But you’ve got a secretary, right?’
   ‘I’ve got a P.A. But I don’t sleep with her.’
   He asked me why I was back, and once I explained a shade of embarrassment came over him, as he said he’d heard about Mum. It didn’t take a lot of mouths for word to make its way round the county. ‘Me Dad mentioned it. Dunno how he’s still going himself, to be fair.’
   ‘He still smoking those big, black cigars?’
   ‘The ones that made us sick when we were seventeen?’ He said. ‘More now than ever. His pad is like a gas chamber.’
   Watching him lift his pint, I saw his knuckles were freshly grazed. There were a few scars on his temple I’d never seen before. And he was skinny, skinnier than the gallant brute who used to help me out when I got into scraps with the kids round the estate. I wondered how I looked to him, suddenly aware of my recent pedicure and expert shave courtesy of Shafiq, my own personal guy. ‘How are you keeping these days?’ I asked.
   Kev nodded. ‘Same old. Had meself a painter-decorator gig. Still do, from time to time. But mostly just been… well, trading, I spose. Got a good thing going on with Steve.’
   ‘Steve Milton?’
   ‘Runs a small works, gets me cheap metals. Favour of a favour. Remember when he nicked your wallet so we tied him to the railings with his trousers down?’
   I couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Was a cold night, that one.’
   ‘Aye, and you could tell.’ The pub was quiet as a crypt while the two of us laughed. We carried on drinking. Kev bought all my drinks no matter how much I insisted. Even when I snuck one in while he was in the toilet, he forced a fiver into my hand. And when he did, neither of us let go. Instead I found my thumb rubbing gently across the ridges of his fingers.
There wasn’t much of a morning after, up in the lodging-room I paid for once Kev admitted his cash supply had been eaten up. It was only the terror of returning home that kept me sat on the bed, as Kev lay still-naked flaunting the no-smoking rules with a sock over the alarm.
   ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Hangover that bad?’
   ‘I’m not so sure this was a good idea.’
   Kev scoffed, in that superior tone he always had. He always found my hesitation hilarious, and I guess that attitude hadn’t changed. ‘Beats the handball we used to play in school though, no?’
   ‘And I thought that was something we’d never talk about again.’
   He stubbed his cigarette out. ‘Well... we didn’t.’ The cobra tattoo on his arm slithered round and under his ribcage, where a line of hair led up to his chest like the trunk of a tree.
   ‘I should go,’ I said, already standing, already covering up. ‘The funeral’s tomorrow, after all.’
   ‘Tomorrow? Not gonna spend the day with an old pal?’
   I struggled with my shirt buttons. One was missing, ripped off. ‘Maybe another time, Kev. How about next time I’m through town?’
   ‘What d’you think the two of us would’ve said if we knew this would happen one day?’ he posited to me, not listening.
   ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Those kids were two different people.’
   ‘Oh yeah? Then who are we?’
   I don’t know what kind of look I gave him on the way out, but he rolled his eyes at it. It was raining as I walked back home, past the car park where the two of us used to let off fireworks at one another, sometimes letting them soar and shred into the stars, otherwise often watching their snake-trail of exuberant sparks come to a dead, dispirited finish in the corner of the trolley bay.

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