Bright Stars

by Sophie Duffy

  Didn’t make the best decisions that night.

  ‘Maybe you need to see someone.’

  ‘I need sleep.’

  ‘You need to give up the fags.’

  ‘I know I need to give up the fags.’

  I look at Tommo, sitting there next to me on the bench, see his stubble flecked with grey, his wan complexion, a scar above his eyebrow. For some reason Bex loves this man. ‘Then do it,’ I say. ‘Stop arsing around and do it.’

  ‘Steady on, MacSporran.’ He laughs and I can hear spittle struggling to find a way out of him. ‘You might have a point, I’ll give you that. If I do this, then maybe Rebecca will see I’m trying hard at something cos quite frankly I’m fed up of being a failure in her eyes.’

  ‘Things not so good at home?’

  ‘Been better.’

  ‘Have you been playing around?’

  ‘Playing around? Is that what you think?’ He sounds outraged. Genuinely outraged. ‘I’ve never cheated on Rebecca. And it’s not for lack of opportunities.’

  ‘The groupies?’

  ‘Ha! Not exactly, no.’ He shakes his head wistfully. ‘Have you any idea what she’d do to me?’

  ‘I can imagine. Put a red hot poker up your arse. Hang, draw and quarter you. Wear your testicles for earrings. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Indeed, that sort of thing.’ A wry laugh. ‘But seriously, why would I? She’s my soul mate.’

  ‘Soulmate?’

  ‘Yep.

  He coughs, mutters, hobo-like. ‘I need to sleep. When I sleep I don’t have to worry that Rebecca doesn’t want me anymore. But you always have to wake up. Sometimes I don’t want to wake up.’

  Tommo is poorly.

  Tommo must go to the doctors.

  Tommo is not right in the heid.

  I coax him into a cab and we shudder our way back to the hotel. He’s morose, staring blankly out of the window, past the Palace of Westminster where the Englishmen think they can rule over us Scots. Around Parliament Square, past Westminster Abbey * where Mary Stuart is buried, where Burns and Scott are commemorated, and past Churchill’s statue lording it over the plebs. Down Whitehall, past the Cenotaph where the fallen are honoured, flags and poppy wreaths, Downing Street where that Eton boy who shares my name ponces about, then onto Trafalgar Square, Nelson’s column, Canada House with the maple leaf flying, Cockspur Street and onto Pall Mall. St James Street. Piccadilly.

  Bex and the twins are still out so I stay with him awhile in his room. I make him a coffee and he empties another dram into it.

  ‘You look feverish. Do you have any paracetamol?’

  ‘Try Rebecca’s wash bag thing.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The bathroom. And I don’t want any of her hippy crap.’

  I go in the bathroom and – I don’t know why – I lock the door. There’s an array of wash bags but I know which one will be hers. Indian cotton with elephants. Inside, is of course the ‘hippy crap’. Arnica cream, homoeopathic pills, Rescue Remedy. Body Shop make-up and Lush creams. And a packet of paracetamol which I nab. But for a moment, before I put back the bag, I clutch it to me, breathe in the distant, familiar scent of Bex that I now know is vetivert. Myrrh and violets. Earthy woodlands.

  Back in their bedroom, I administer the pills and make myself a cup of tea. I could go back to my own room for a rest but I can’t bring myself to leave Tommo’s side. He really does look ill.

  ‘So, Lou says she saw you last night?’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘At some restaurant. On your own.’

  ‘Oh, well, yeah. My friend cancelled at the last moment. Some work thing. I ate on my own. Which was fine. The food was good.’

  ‘You might be needing a passport soon to come down here and eat our English food.’

  ‘It was an Italian restaurant. I ate a pizza and I drank a Peroni.’

  ‘You Scots have got a chip on your shoulder. In fact, you’ve got chips everywhere.’

  ‘Aye, and deep fried Mars bars, I know, I know.’

  He coughs then. Serves him right.

  Once he’s recovered, he switches on the TV, channel surfs. Rude. Then the BBC News. And who would have thought it? Alex Salmond, the Saltire waving brightly in the background.

  Tommo looks at me and we actually share a smile.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘ Tell me about Amanda.’

  I get on the bed next to him – Eric and Ernie – and I tell him about her latest job at the Festival, admin instead of acting. I tell him how we met at Skeletours (without the lascivious details). I tell him how beautiful and talented she is (A Brummy? Has she thought of elocution lessons to give her a chance at a proper acting role?). I tell him that she wants a baby but I feel the time has passed.

  ‘You’re only forty-seven,’ he says.

  ‘I’m forty-six,’ I correct him.

  ‘Think on, my man,’ he says. ‘You’re as young as the woman who loves you. How old is Amanda by the way?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘Time’s running out then,’ he says. ‘Women want babies. Simple as.’

  Sexist nonsense.

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No need to blush, Cameron. Man up.’

  ‘I love her, all right. I love her.’

  Tommo shrugs, ramming home his point that it’s simple, which maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just the hardest thing in the world, to love someone.

  ‘I swore I’d spend the rest of my life looking after Rebecca,’ he carries on, clutching his coffee to him like a talisman. ‘I couldn’t do any more for you, Cameron. I couldn’t do any more for Christie. But I could love Rebecca with all my heart and all my soul. She was my bright star, my guiding light, my beginning and my end.’

  ‘What are you saying? You’re sounding like a song.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m saying. I always sound like a song.’ He squeezes his eyes shut. Opens them again, realises I’m still here. ‘It should’ve been me serving that sentence,’ he says, quiet as anything. ‘I let you take the rap.’

  I don’t correct him on that one.

  ‘And I know it must’ve been some kind of hell in there but it was all over after a few months. Whereas I’ll have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life.’

  ‘You have your freedom, Tommo. You have it in your reach. Why make life so hard for yourself?’

  ‘I wish I knew the answer to that.’ He sounds miserable, takes a slug of whisky. ‘Thanks for looking after me, mate. I appreciate it. I feel rotten. Have done for weeks. I should see a doctor but you know what us middle-aged men are like when it comes to doctors.

  ‘Have you talked to Bex?’

  ‘Rebecca isn’t the best of nurses. You have to be dying, preferably in an underdeveloped country, to get any sympathy out of her. She’s never let the kids miss school. She’s always worked, couldn’t get time off. Always blamed successive governments for insufficient family-friendly working conditions.’

  ‘Maybe there’s more to it than that. A sense that you both escaped death and that your twins should thank their lucky stars they have the gift of life.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s anything as philosophical as that. You know her, always one for actions, not thinking.’

  I’m remembering teenage Bex with her red paint and her placards. Then her son comes in, smelling of the cold and French fries, and I wonder what his passions are. Other than grunting and eating.

  ‘All right, Ethan?’ Tommo asks. ‘Where are the women?’

  ‘Shopping. Said they won’t be long.’ When he takes his eyes off his phone he notices his father sitting in bed with another man. ‘What you doing in bed, Dad?’

  ‘Feeling rough. Got this cough.’

  ‘You’ve always got this cough.’ Ethan slumps onto the end of the bed, the three of us sprawled like we’re on a boat all at sea. He checks his phone again as it’s been at least thirty seconds. ‘Should give up the fags.’
r />   ‘Good advice from your son there, Tommo.’

  ‘Reckons it goes with his rock-and-roll image. Dad still wants to be David Hasselhoff.’

  Tommo struggles to a sitting up position. ‘David Hasselhoff?’

  ‘No wait, sorry. I meant David Bowie.’

  ‘You had me worried there for a sec, mate. No, wait. I am worried. That you should confuse David Hasselhoff for David Bowie?’

  ‘Who’s David Bowie again?’

  Tommo is horrified, as if Ethan had announced he was thinking of joining UKIP. ‘We should do one of those DNA tests.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cos sometimes I wonder if you’re my son. I mean you like Dizzy Whotsit and Diddy Doodah.’

  Ethan shakes his head.

  ‘Oh, never mind.’ Tommo sighs. ‘Let’s get a drink. This cough of mine needs more whisky. Text your sister and tell them to meet us down in the bar.’ He slaps Ethan on the arm, in a fatherly way, to show he’s joking about the DNA thing.

  His whole life, a bloody joke.

  I’ll have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life.

  Well, Tommo, one act of recklessness, one ill-formed decision can have repercussions. Just take a long good look at me. What’s that you say? You’d rather look at yourself? Of course you’d rather look at yourself. You’re Ptolemy Dulac. Indestructible as Mick Jagger. As craggy and scrawny as a Rolling Stone.

  And whoops, no. I didn’t say that out loud.

  As we go down in the lift, Ethan watches his father’s reflection in the mirror. ‘I was like joking, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, what about?’

  ‘David Bowie. Do you really think I’ve learnt nothing from you? I’ve got Hunky Dory and Scary Monsters on my iPod.

  Tommo gives him a hug, which Ethan grudgingly accepts. And Tommo doesn’t even mention that downloading Bowie is a sacrilege. That vinyl is the only way to listen to the master. Because that’s what he is most likely thinking.

  As we come out the lift, Bex and Lou are standing there with bags of shopping.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘The bar?’

  ‘I don’t think so. We’ve got sandwiches. Thought we could have them in the room. Cheaper than eating out. Want to join us, Cameron? There’s plenty here.’ She practically pushes us back in the lift.

  There’s not much room. I can smell her vetivert. Memories of a fox’s brush and a vicious man in red. A red they call pink.

  ‘You okay, Dad?’ Loulou asks. ‘You look like crap.’

  ‘Thanks, love. I feel like it.’

  ‘You can have a rest this afternoon, Tommo,’ Bex concedes. ‘But there’s no way you’re backing out of tonight.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Rebecca.’

  I’ve dreamt of nothing else. I want to get out of this lift, out of this hotel, out of this city, this country, and back to my home. Only that would mean leaving Bex and I’ve only just found her again.

  _________________________

  *Above the statue to Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner is a small oval mural tablet with a lyre to John Keats.

  Shop

  3.30pm and the pavements of Oxford Street are buzzing with shoppers and hordes of what UKIP * would call ‘foreigners’. Traffic is nose to tail; stuttering red buses, black cabs, cyclists. The Christmas lights are almost overwhelming. I want to look up all the time. Bex and Loulou – who’ve dragged me out with them while the other two nap – are doing the same, staring in awe at the shop windows, the skinny mannequins, the shoppers.

  ‘We must seem like yokels,’ Bex says.

  ‘We are yokels,’ Loulou quips back.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ I say. ‘I come from a capital city, remember.’

  ‘Where’s that, Cameron?’ Loulou asks.

  ‘Edinburgh born and bred.’

  ‘Cool. I want to go to the festival there.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The comedy one. It looks well good.’

  ‘I try to avoid it, to be honest. The town gets even more touristy than ever. But you should go. Definitely. I can show you around.’

  ‘Thanks, Cameron. That’s awesome.’

  ‘Come on, Lou,’ Bex says, a wee bit briskly. ‘Let’s get you this dress.’

  Loulou gives her mother a smile of pure joy and strides ahead with the confidence of youth. Not that I ever had confidence in my youth. I have a smattering now but only in my own world. The one underground with the ghosties and ghoulies.

  ‘If only the prospect of a new dress would do the same for me,’ Bex says. ‘My daughter might be exasperating but she knows how to be happy. That’s quite a gift.’

  ‘It is.’

  Are you frightened of being happy?

  We find ourselves, kettled by the crowd, outside Topshop. Loulou grabs Bex by the arm and steers her in. I can do nothing but follow, my first time in Topshop, through the throng, into banging music, horrifying mirrors, the smell of sickly-sweet perfume with a base note of dirty feet – only partially better than the traffic fumes swirling about in the cold air outside. I pat my coat pocket to check my inhaler is there. Maybe I should’ve offered it to Tommo.

  The teenager lunges straight for the tiniest, flimsiest dresses and I watch Bex struggling not to pass judgement.

  ‘She should be able to wear what she wants,’ she says to me, ‘but with my job, I know the worst that can happen.’

  ‘You’re still a social worker then?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Standing adrift in the massive store, while Loulou snatches up dresses, piling them over one arm, I feel very, very middle-aged. And launched out of my comfort zone.

  Bex sighs. She must feel it too. ‘I used to love Topshop,’ she says.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Mmm. And Chelsea Girl. There was a massive one in Exeter.’

  ‘I thought you got your stuff from the army surplus store.’

  ‘Well, yeah, I did. I loved those monkey boots. Lou would shudder.’

  ‘I’ve progressed from Burton’s to M&S.’

  ‘I wish Tommo would progress.’

  We share a laugh.

  ‘He’ll still be in skinny jeans in his nursing home. In fact he’d rather go on an all-inclusive one-way trip to Switzerland than relinquish them.’ She looks around, hands on her hips, hips as slim as I remember them. ‘How old are you when you have to stop buying clothes from Topshop? I have a positive body image – but I don’t want to compete with my daughter.’

  We shuffle round the store after said daughter, thankfully bypassing the lingerie – though I notice Lou’s appraising glance of the frilly push-up bras.

  ‘I’m just grateful for the return of big pants,’ Bex says. ‘The vintage-style ones that hold you in. So much nicer than those cheese-cutter thongs and all that Brazilian nonsense.’

  She sighs again.

  I feel light-headed.

  ‘Why don’t you get a dress, Mum?’

  ‘From here? You are joking, right?’

  ‘Well, no, I wasn’t thinking from here. You don’t want to look like a slapper.’

  ‘No, we wouldn’t want that.’

  The irony floats right over Lou’s head. ‘I was thinking like from a department store or something? Maybe Marks and Spencer’s?’

  ‘Has it come to that?’ Bex throws me an embarrassed smile. ‘Whoops.’

  M&S. Solid. Reliable. Trustworthy.

  The girl’s expression alters, a hint of self-awareness. She hazards a more positive comment. ‘You’ve got a great body for someone your age?’

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  ‘All right, don’t give me evils.’ She pouts. ‘Five minutes and I bet I can find something in here that won’t embarrass either of us.’

  Bex checks her watch.

  ‘Five minutes, Mother.’ Loulou hands over the dresses, heads off into the unknown.

  We retreat to the shoes, find a perch on a footstool.

  ‘The sight of those tortuous heels makes my b
unions throb.’ Bex takes off her trainer – a trendy leather trainer rather than a naff running one – and rubs her foot. Does she have the same line of thought as me? Christie. What type of shoes does she wear? ‘Maybe I could treat myself to a pair of wedges or some ankle boots,’ she blethers. ‘Then I won’t need to get a dress. I mean, it’s nice to see Loulou so enthused but I really can’t be bothered to try stuff on. I want a cup of tea. Maybe a glass of wine. Definitely a glass of wine.’

  ‘I guess there’ll be plenty of wine tonight.’

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Whatever Icewine might be.’

  We are quiet for a bit, thoughts jumbling about, spinning and spinning.

  ‘So what’s it like having twins?’ I ask to break the silence.

  She turns to look at me and my heart pinches. ‘One’s gobby, one’s quiet,’ she says. ‘But both of them are untidy, filthy pigs. The hotel room is already drowning under a tide of discarded clothes and aerosol cans.’

  ‘What’s it like being a parent?’

  ‘I make it up as I go along. I’m pleased Lou’s gobby. I just wish she would embrace the political. Not the cosmetic.’ She pauses a moment and I want to kiss her so much it hurts because I know I never will. ‘Maybe she’s in charge of her destiny in a way I could never hope to be.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘If any of us are.’

  ‘I think we are. We can make things happen. It’s whether we make the right things happen. I want to pass on my gobbiness to Loulou because I want her to change the world. And you need to be gobby, not just in what you say, but in what you do. Gobby is a lifestyle choice.’

  ‘Did your mum pass this gobbiness onto you?’

  ‘I can barely remember my own mother. But I suspect she had to keep her opinions to herself, with my overbearing dad. I have no one to keep the memories alive. My grandmother could never talk about Mum without crying and I didn’t want Granny to cry. I knew that would make me cry too. And I couldn’t cry, I wouldn’t cry, I can’t cry, because if I did, if I do, I might never stop.’

  She shrugs, picks up a black suede ankle boot. ‘These would be okay. They look wearable. Comfy. Lou would be cross with me for using ‘comfy’ as an adjective to describe shoes…’