When We Were Young

by Richard Roper

  I managed to bite my tongue.

  “Do you mind if we sit and observe?” Joel asked. “Could be a story in it.”

  The soldiers exchanged looks. The big man nodded. “Have a seat over there.”

  “Come on, Tarquin,” Joel said brightly, leading me over to a tree stump where we could sit and survey the scene.

  A murky patch of cloud had snuck up on us, and without warning it began to rain hard. With nowhere to shelter, we were quickly soaked. The battle reenactors mainly seemed unperturbed, although one of them, I noticed, kept looking toward the road, where all their cars were parked.

  “I don’t suppose your average Anglo-Saxon had access to a Kia Sportage,” I said.

  “I’d say not,” Joel replied. “Škoda Fabia, tops.”

  We watched on as the rain continued to fall.

  “This really is surreal,” I murmured. “How old do you think they all are?”

  “Hmm,” Joel said. “Late fifties, sixties? Retired, I’d say, most of them.”

  As I watched the men practicing their swordsmanship, I felt guilty for having laughed at them before. It was all innocent fun. And at least they had a hobby—one that clearly made them happy. To get to the point where they could retire and indulge themselves in the middle of a rainy afternoon with chain mail and chicken legs—that was surely only because they’d led successful lives beforehand. They’d turned up, knuckled down, done their time and then got out. What had I done? I’d basically given up at the first hurdle and then complained about it ever since, blaming everyone except myself for the failure.

  And then there was the camaraderie they all clearly shared. Where was my bunch of mates going to come from by the time I reached that age? As much as I didn’t want to admit it, Alice was probably right: I’d been stuck in the shed for so long I’d forgotten what it meant to be out with friends, meeting new people—taking advantage of what the real world had to offer. And if the real world involved necking mead out of a tankard and singing songs of yore at half past four on a Monday, then I was all for it. The revelation felt strangely exciting. I wasn’t going to pretend that I wasn’t missing home, even after only a couple of days, but I could see how much my life had come to a juddering halt, and at the same time I realized I was capable of getting the wheels moving again—starting with The Regulars.

  “It’s sort of great, this, isn’t it?” I said, turning to Joel.

  “What, pretending to be a soldier from the past?”

  “Yeah, but more how happy they all are. It feels like they’ve got all the hard bits of life out of the way, you know? They’ve slogged through the commutes and the meetings and the pre-meeting meetings. This is pure freedom, isn’t it? Aren’t you sort of excited about getting to that point in your life?”

  After a moment of waiting for Joel to answer, I glanced over and saw that he was looking at the scene with a strange sort of pining, his newfound energy seemingly evaporated already.

  “Yeah,” he said at last, his voice gruff. “Would be nice.”

  Just then, one of the soldiers shouted across to us. “You gonna take photos now for the story or what?”

  After a second, Joel got to his feet. He seemed to be pleased to have a distraction. “You don’t mind if I take this one, do you, Tarquin?”

  I shook my head.

  Amazingly, Joel did actually have a camera in his bag. The man hadn’t brought a waterproof coat, but he did have room for an SLR that looked like it cost more than a small island. As he bounced off, all Tigger meets David Bailey, I noticed a bit of paper on the grass that must have come out of his bag as he’d removed his camera. I reached down for it, but a gust of wind took it away from me, and I was forced to chase it along the grass toward the others, squirming with embarrassment at my lack of coordination. At last, just as I got to Joel, I managed to clamp my foot down on it.

  Joel was in full flow, talking to the men and asking them to get in to position. He hadn’t heard me approach, but as he saw me at his side, he smiled. It was only a small moment, but it was a smile of such warmth and affection that it left me strangely moved. I suppose just as Joel’s mood had been up and down, so had the way I’d felt toward him since he’d turned up on my doorstep. I’d hated him fiercely that day—the brass fucking neck of him appearing unannounced like that. Even after all this time, the pain he’d caused was still raw, and yet here, in this moment, I couldn’t deny how good it felt to be with him again, getting into another scrape.

  I know that In another life . . . speculation is a dangerous habit, but I couldn’t help indulging it now. Because what if there had been another life where things had worked out with Babs, and Joel and I were still as close as we were on course to be when we were kids? For one thing, the day would have come where I’d have asked him to be my best man. I imagined him on a bench somewhere, writing his speech, and then playing his part as the most reassuring presence in the church—adjusting my buttonhole, telling me to take a breath, to remember to actually enjoy myself. A little later down the line, there he’d be—bending down and scooping up his godson or goddaughter, twirling them around in the air, ignoring my halfhearted attempts to stop exciting them this much before bed. All these moments that stretched out into a parallel future that felt agonizingly close . . . Was it too much to think we could still sidestep into it, or a life like it, even if Babs wasn’t there? In that moment, basking in the warmth of Joel’s smile and feeling a great rush of fondness for him, it felt like we probably could.

  But then I saw the expression on Joel’s face gradually change. It was as if someone had held a painting of him over an open flame until the canvas began to split and tear, revealing another image of him underneath—except this time his face was full of shock, his cheeks colorless. And that’s when I looked down and saw what was written at the top of the page I was standing on.

  My Kicking-the-Bucket List.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Joel

  Give me that, please,” I said. My voice was calm, but I worried my trembling hand betrayed what I was really feeling.

  Theo stood there, unmoved. The rain was beginning to fall harder now, and the wind was getting up.

  “What is this?” Theo asked.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, “just another project I’m working on.” The page was folded over so that all that was visible were those five words. That was bad enough, but I knew that if Theo looked at anything else on that piece of paper, then this was all over. I willed the rain to fall harder, to smudge the words away.

  “What sort of a project?” Theo said.

  “It’s . . . just give me that and I’ll tell you, all right?”

  After what seemed an age, Theo handed me the piece of paper and I shoved it into my back pocket.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “It’s another TV show I’m working on. Can’t go into details. Sorry. It’s quite celeb-heavy.”

  Theo raised his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, believe me, I know how much of a dick that makes me sound, but these people and their nondisclosure agreements and everything . . .”

  “Oh, right,” Theo said. He sounded disappointed, but in a way where I couldn’t work out if it was because he thought I wasn’t committed to The Regulars or if he was just humoring me when I was obviously lying. I felt compelled to double down.

  “And besides, I didn’t want you to think I had another thing on the go.”

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “Well, let’s face it, when we used to write, you always got annoyed when I got distracted by some new idea when we hadn’t finished what we were working on. Remember?”

  “I . . . I guess so. Well, actually, I think that maybe happened once, but—”

  “Once? You’re joking, right? It happened all the time!”

  “Jesus, I didn’t realize that was such a sore spot.”

  If I could just kee
p him distracted . . .

  “Look, I think about those days a lot, okay? And that was always one of your biggest bugbears. I didn’t want to piss you off, thinking that I wasn’t committed to The Regulars.”

  Theo folded his arms. “I understand that. I just . . . Look, I get the feeling maybe something’s going on that you’re not—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “What happened to that speech you gave me when we started the walk, about how we weren’t going to talk about anything serious? You’ve changed your tune! Anyway, there’s nothing ‘going on.’ I was just trying not to hurt your feelings, okay? And think carefully before you go down that route, by the way.”

  “Oh yeah? And what route’s that?”

  “The route where I ask you a few questions about what’s ‘going on’ with you. Like . . . oh, I don’t know—where you’re living, for example.”

  A sad smile appeared on Theo’s face. “Well, you’ve got me there,” he said. “I’ve been living in the shed at the bottom of Mum and Dad’s garden.”

  I was thrown by this. I’d hoped turning the tables on Theo would have made him clam up so we could move on.

  “In fact, I’ve barely left the village, let alone the county, for quite a long time, and if I stop and think about how far away I am from home, I actually feel a bit sick. Oh, and did I mention my job—which I may well get fired from—is writing tweets for a budget burger company?”

  “Mate, come on,” I started. “You don’t have to—”

  “I know how this goes when I ask you what’s going on in your life, but I’m doing it anyway. If you don’t want to tell me, then that’s on you. So, before we go any further, if you want to tell me something—anything at all—then now’s your chance.”

  The wind whipped across the field, rippling my clothes. I looked at Theo and tried to find the words, but they just wouldn’t come. I wasn’t sure what he thought he knew, but this tone of his had me horribly worried. I’d long ago come to accept that he hated me, but to hear pity in his voice . . . that was a different thing altogether. I didn’t want this trip to be some pathetic swan song where Theo indulged me—gave a dying man his last wish while pretending he didn’t still despise me.

  I made myself look him square in the eye.

  “I’m fine, okay? Scout’s honor. I was just stressed about this other project. But now you know, so can we get out of here sharpish before we drown in this fucking field?”

  I felt movement behind me, and I turned to see a Saxon battalion, weapons drawn, looking confused. Then the big man cleared his throat.

  “Are we having our picture taken for the paper, then, or what?”

  * * *

  As we trudged on—the sky brightening, as if the wind and rain had just stopped by to watch our little drama play out—Theo began to pull away in front. I wasn’t complaining—I needed to gather myself, to work out how we were going to move past this. I watched as Theo scuffed his way along the path, seemingly incapable of picking his feet up. And then, out of nowhere, he slipped on some mud, arms windmilling frantically until he caught his balance. I couldn’t help smiling. Theo had always been able to make me laugh on cue—unintentionally or not—even when things seemed dire. I’d never been able to explain to him just how much I’d needed that back then—how the moments we’d spent helpless with laughter had been like a soothing balm in the days my world got turned upside down.

  * * *

  By the time we were fourteen, we’d developed that cockiness specific to teenaged boys where we knew absolutely everything and most other people were idiots. Teachers began to hate us for how much we larked about. A highlight was the day Mr. Barnes, the biology teacher, bellowed, “Well, you two are quite the little double act, aren’t you?” and got so angry that he actually cut the lesson short, briefly making Theo and me class heroes.

  I was still in the grips of that high that same evening when, out of nowhere, part of the ceiling collapsed as Mum and I ate dinner, sending a torrent of water and plaster down on us. If only that ceiling had held firm for a few more days, when Mum could have had the pick of the local builders—but it just so happened there was only one free. Mike turned up the following morning in his rusty van, and basically never left. There were other things that needed fixing, he claimed. But he seemed to spend most of the time in the kitchen drinking cups of tea which Mum made for him.

  One day I got back from school and thought I could hear Mum crying hysterically, but when I rushed into the kitchen, it turned out she was laughing at something Mike had said. Before long, Mum informed me that they were “dating.”

  “Dating?” Theo asked me, sounding disgusted.

  We were down at the Thames Head monument, enjoying our favorite pastime of throwing stones at a tree. We’d pilfered some cider from Theo’s dad, and I was trying to drink it fast enough that I got dizzy and didn’t have to think about Mum and Mike.

  “Dating,” I confirmed, hurling my stone as hard as I could. “And then, last night, I . . . heard them.”

  “Heard them what?”

  “Playing Scrabble.”

  “Really?”

  “No, Theo.”

  “So, what . . . Oh.” He screwed his face up.

  “Yeah.”

  “Urgh. That’s mental.”

  “Tell me about it. But it’s worse. She told me he’s moving in.”

  “Shit. Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  I threw another stone at the tree. Then another. I didn’t really know what it was about all this that made me so angry. I suppose deep down I knew at some point Mum might start seeing someone else. It wasn’t like Dad had died and she was never going to move on. I think she might have even been on the odd date or two, though we didn’t talk about it.

  Mike quite literally brought a stability to the house—someone to fix things, to drive to the dump and to Ikea. He didn’t have kids himself, but there was something generically dad-like about him in those early days—a safe pair of hands. I think Mum worried that I was missing that sort of figure in my life. At fourteen, I was lazy and didn’t have any sort of drive to speak of. Maybe Mum thought having Mike around would help with that. But I took against him straightaway. I hated how he winked at me. I hated the ripple of fat on the back of his neck and how he kept clapping me on the shoulder, trying to be matey. But, more than anything, I just felt an overwhelming sense that he was taking advantage of Mum somehow. And that was what left me with a burning anger, which just then, as I threw the biggest stone I could find, had me unexpectedly crying, tears running silently down my cheeks.

  “Oh . . . um . . . ,” Theo started. And I knew that if he asked me if I was okay, I would properly lose it, which I was not going to do. Our friendship was about laughing and mucking around and getting away from all the other bullshit. I didn’t want to infect it—let Mike change this like he was changing things at home.

  “Let’s do something else,” I said, before Theo could ask me anything.

  For the rest of the evening we sat back-to-back on the ground and wrote sketches. Two years of Theo’s indoctrinating had begun to pay off, and it was always a real triumph if I managed to write something that made him laugh. There were two versions of his laugh: there was the Muttley-esque snigger, but then there was the lesser-spotted belly laugh, which made his hair shake like a tree in the wind.

  That evening, as the sun went down, we wrote a sketch featuring reality TV shows of the future as announced sincerely by continuity people:

  “Coming up next on Channel 4, it’s Britain’s Most Arrogant Babies.”

  “Don’t go anywhere, it’s time for Celebrity Abattoir.”

  Even when it got dark and we were shivering in our T-shirts, I wished more than anything that we could stay out, the two of us against the world. But Theo told me he had to get b
ack or his parents would worry.

  “Yeah, course,” I said, and I watched him walk across the field until he was just a dot enveloped in the gloom while I trudged home in the opposite direction. I decided not to take the train. I’d rather be freezing and exhausted than get back to what was happening there.

  In the event, it turned out they were still out at the pub, and so I lay in my room, waiting for them to come home, miserable with anticipation. Sure enough, when they got in, drunk and giggly, they went up to Mum’s room and I was forced to clamp my hands over my ears to block out the noise, but it was no good. And before I knew it, I was dragging my knuckles fast across the rough patch on my wall, scraping and tearing the skin until the pain overwhelmed everything else—a great shriek of white noise until at last I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the throbbing in my fingers.

  It wasn’t long before Mike was thoroughly bedded in like some disgusting tick. His smell seemed to permeate the house. He’d pulled an armchair around in front of the TV and Mum had started referring to it as “Mike’s chair.” He’d been on his best behavior for as long as he thought he needed to, because now he thought nothing of bollocking me for getting in late, or complaining to Mum if dinner wasn’t on the table—like it was the fucking fifties.

  One evening, I heard raised voices and came into the kitchen just as they stopped—but though Mike had clearly had time to take his hand from Mum’s arm, I could see the imprint from where he’d grabbed her.

  “Mum, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing, darling,” Mum replied, humming tunelessly and moving to wipe down the kitchen counter before shooing me out.

  A few weeks later, the same thing happened again—except this time I caught Mike with his hand around Mum’s wrist.

  “Get the fuck off her,” I said, taking a step forward, trying to stand up tall.

  Mum quickly saw what was about to happen and stood in front of me.