thanks, I’m growing it. The girls like it longer.’
‘The girls?’ She laughed and little pieces of Turkish Delight swam around on her teeth. ‘You’re forty-three, Brian.’
He shifted his weight and the leather jacket creaked at his shoulders. He’d bought it from the market. Probably wasn’t even real leather. Probably plastic, pretending to be leather, and the only person who was fooled was the idiot wearing it. He pulled at the collar and it crackled between his fingers.
His mother’s throat rose and fell with Turkish Delight, and he watched her dig her tongue around in her back teeth to make sure she’d definitely got her money’s worth.
‘Empty that ashtray before you go. There’s a good boy.’
He picked up the ashtray and held it at arm’s length, like an uncertain sculpture, a cemetery of cigarettes, each dated with a different colour of lipstick. He watched the ones at the edge tilt and waver as he carried it across the room.
‘Not the fireplace! Take it to the outside bin.’ She sent her instructions through a Lime Barrel. ‘It’ll stink the house out if you leave it in here.’
A curl of smoke twisted from somewhere deep in the mountain of fag ends. He thought he’d imagined it at first, but then the smell brushed at his nostrils.
‘You want to be careful.’ He nodded at the ashtray. ‘This is how fires start.’
She looked over at him and looked back at the box of Milk Tray.
Neither of them spoke.
He nudged around, and found the glow of a tip in the ash. He pinched at it until it flickered and the pleat of smoke stuttered and died. ‘It’s out now,’ he said.
But his mother was lost to the chocolates, gripped by bunions and Orange Cremes and the film now starting on BBC2. He knew she would be exactly the same when he returned from the Legion. He knew she would have pulled the blanket over her legs, and the Milk Tray box would be massacred and left to the carpet, and the television would be playing out a conversation with itself in the corner. He knew that she would not have risked moving from the edges of her crocheted existence. A world within a world, a life she had embroidered for herself over the past few years, which seemed to shrink and tighten with each passing month.
The avenue was silent. He pulled the lid from the dustbin and tipped the cigarettes inside, sending a cloud of ash into his face. When he had finished coughing and swiping at the air, and trying to find his next breath, he looked up and saw Sylvia in the garden of number four. Derek wasn’t with her – or Grace. She was alone. He rarely saw her alone, and he dared to watch for a moment. She hadn’t looked up. She was picking at weeds, throwing them into a bucket and brushing the soil from her hands. Every so often, she straightened her back, and gathered her breath and wiped her forehead with the back of a hand. She hadn’t changed. He wanted to tell her, but he knew it would only lead to more trouble.
He felt a line of sweat edge into his collar. He didn’t know how long he’d been watching, but she looked up and saw him. She lifted her hand to wave, but he turned just in time and got back inside.
He put the ashtray on the footstool.
‘Make sure you’re home by ten,’ his mother said, ‘I’ll need my ointment.’
4 July 1976
The Legion was empty, apart from the two old men in the corner. Every time Brian saw them, they were sitting in the same place, and wearing the same clothes, and having the same exchange. They looked at each other as they spoke, but had two separate conversations, each man lost in his own words. Brian adjusted his eyes after the walk down. It was cooler in here, and darker. Summer soaked into the flocked walls and the polished wood. It was swallowed by the cool slate of the snooker table, and fell into the thread of the carpet, worn down by heavy conversation. The Legion didn’t have a season. It could have been the middle of winter, except for the sweat that caught the edge of Brian’s shirt and the pull of walking in his legs.
Clive sat on a stool at the end of the bar, feeding crisps to a black terrier, who stamped his paws and whistled at the back of his throat if he felt the gap between crisps had become too long.
‘Pint, is it?’ he said, and Brian nodded.
He eased from the stool. ‘Another warm one,’ he said, and Brian nodded again.
Brian handed his money over. There were too many coins. He lifted his pint and beer slipped from the top of the glass and on to the counter.
‘Still looking for work?’ Clive took a cloth and ran it across the wood.
Brian murmured something into his glass and looked away.
‘Tell me about it, love. If they cut my hours any more, I’ll have to go back on the game.’ He turned his hand and examined his nails.
Brian stared at him over the top of his glass.
‘It’s a bloody joke,’ said Clive, and he laughed, and Brian tried to laugh with him, but he couldn’t quite get there.
*
He was on his second pint when they arrived. Harold walked in first, all shorts and shouting.
‘Evening, evening,’ he said, even though the bar was still empty. The men in the corner nodded and looked away.
‘Clive!’ Harold said, as though Clive was the last person he expected to see. They shook each other’s hand and put their other hands over the top of the shake, until there was a pile of shaking and commotion.
Brian watched them.
‘Double Diamond?’ Harold nodded at Brian’s glass.
Brian said no, he’d buy his own, thanks, and Harold said suit yourself, and he turned back to Clive and smiled, as though there was a whole other conversation going on that Brian couldn’t hear. In the middle of the unheard conversation, Eric Lamb arrived with Sheila Dakin, and Clive had to disappear into the back to find a cherry for Sheila’s Babycham.
By the time Brian followed them to the table, he found himself wedged against the wall, trapped between the cigarette machine and the mystery of Sheila Dakin’s bosom.
She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Have you started smoking again, Brian? You smell like an old ashtray.’
‘It’s my mam,’ he said.
‘Maybe think about getting your hair cut as well,’ she said, and dipped her cherry in the Babycham. ‘It looks a right bloody mess.’
There was a radio on somewhere, and Brian could hear a slur of music, but he couldn’t tell what it was. The Drifters, maybe, or The Platters. He wanted to ask Clive to turn it up, but Clive had been standing at the end of the bar for the last five minutes, twisting a tea towel into the same pint glass and trying to listen to their
