Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe it’s time to clear out some old stuff and make way for the new. After all, I’m about due for a midlife crisis. I should buy a sports car. Get a tattoo. Drive off and see the world.”

  “Have a few one-night stands.” Jenny’s smile made a good attempt at impish. Didn’t quite get there, but he wasn’t going to point out the deficit. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good sex to catch up with.”

  “Is that you objectifying me now? Is that like one final indignity?”

  She made up the shortfall with interest, her smile flicking straight through to delighted laughter. “If only I’d known earlier. You could have been my sassy gay friend.”

  That pinged him wrong. He thought of saying, Listen, I’m not gay, yeah? I’m bi. Different thing. But that seemed a little harsh and this was a bad time to start an argument. Best to let it pass for now.

  “Hey, I still can be your sassy bi friend, I hope.” He reached over the table and took her hand. It turned in his grasp, clasped back, and squeezed.

  “Absolutely.” Her smile had an element of apology in it. “You’d better expect me at weekends and Christmases. Holidays too maybe. Where is it you’re from anyway? Is it nice?”

  Her enthusiasm was catching. He remembered that he’d liked the town, everywhere that wasn’t his parents’ house at least. “Yes, it’s good. Trowchester. Fourth smallest city in the country. Takes three-quarters of an hour to walk across it by foot from one side to the other, and half of that’s river and floodplain, but it’s got a cathedral and a charter, so it’s a city, officially.”

  Tahir rematerialised to clear the empty plates, returned with a platter of halva, cham cham, and rosewater rasgulla, which he put down with an air of apology. “The meal is on the house, of course. Father said if we had known you were going, we would have done something better.”

  May bent his head over the sweets while he worked on smoothing out his anguished look, thrown straight back into grief by the kindness. “I didn’t know either,” he managed at last. “It was— It was kind of sudden.”

  “But you will come back?”

  And that was the killer, wasn’t it? He didn’t know who he was anymore. He couldn’t stand London. He couldn’t stand himself. But he had a hard time believing anything would be better in the place he’d left as soon as it was legal to go. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to be left of me to come back.”

  He should have kept his mouth shut because Jenny’s smile fell off like rotten plaster. “Phone me,” she said. “Whenever. I’m always going to be here. You’re not alone.”

  He could have waited, could have clung on until the bitter end, watching daytime TV, or walking aimlessly down the streets where he expected every loose paving slab to tip up and reveal a corpse.

  But having made up his mind to leave, he was impatient to get it over with.

  He found a leasing company to take responsibility for his flat, put his belongings in storage to be reclaimed or thrown out later when he had the energy to deal with them, and set out ill-advisedly late on Wednesday evening, feeling like Major Tom in the song—high above everything, the world spinning by without him. It was nice of Jenny to say he wasn’t alone, but she was wrong. He was alone, and he was unimportant, and if he died on the motorway on the way to the Midlands, there was no one in his life for the authorities to contact about it.

  This realisation gave everything a surreal, disconnected feel. The traffic on the M25, bumper-to-bumper jams, insane drivers, interminable crawling chaos? It was like he wasn’t involved with it at all. Someone else was piloting his body through the turns.

  Night fell with a rolling of clouds as if the world had drawn on a blanket, and as he finally freed himself from London’s traffic, the rain began to fall. He reached for a CD, refused to sink to the level of listening to Pink Floyd while depressed, and put on Vangelis instead. It did nothing to counter the sense of being alone in a tiny vehicle while the world did its thing without him, but at least it made him feel like Rick Deckard from Blade Runner. Washed up, yes, but unaware that he was about to embark on an adventure that would change his life. If he was going to be a retired and pathetic wreck, he might as well model himself on a retired and pathetic hero.

  He’d managed to achieve some kind of Zen acceptance of fate for most of the drive, but when the landscape became familiar, when he started to recognise the hills, know the names on the signposts, everything closed back in.

  His mouth dried. He rotated his jaw to try to work the stiffness out of it, but as soon as he stopped, his aching teeth would go right back to grinding. And it was stupid to feel like this, but knowing as much hardly made it stop.

  He drove past the water tower on the outskirts of town. A retail park had sprung up under its bulbous shadow, and he stopped at the McDonald’s there to eat a cheerless dinner and brace himself for the last gasp.

  New nightclub on the high street with a neon dragon twisting around its door and a queue of implausibly dressed young people under umbrellas waiting to go in. Looked like the cinema had shut. If he let himself, he would feel regret at that—he’d spent so much of his teenage years there. Even on a good day, the potential of his father’s anger filled the house with land mines. Home was where a wrong word or a wrong gesture, or being alive in the wrong room at the wrong moment, could trigger an explosion. The rules changed from moment to moment, so he and his mother never learned how to be safe—because that was the point, of course. They never were.

  So the cinema had been a fantastic escape on rainy weekends. But regretting its absence would mean thinking about the past, and he was not going there. That was not what he was doing here. This was all about the present moment, nothing more.

  Most of the shops were shut. The DIY shop had moved to a less salubrious venue at the bottom of the street, and the space had been taken over by an alternative-therapy beauty parlour. Otherwise the city was pretty much the same as it had been when he’d left. Even in the rain it managed to project a ghost of charm with its eclectic architecture and its drenched flower boxes. Its wet streets winding up to the cathedral, whose twisted spire was floodlit blue.

  The golden angel at the very top of it looked down on May as he turned left from the high street, wiggled through narrow lanes congested with parked cars, and came at last to his old home.

  He drew the car into the gravel drive and stopped with the house picked out by his headlights. The rain felt colder here, pouring off the porch, flooding the pots of the bay trees that stood by the front door. The front garden hadn’t been tended for years and was now a wilderness of brambles behind a towering leylandii hedge.

  Curtains were drawn over all the upstairs windows, and shutters locked behind the lower. He got the impression the house didn’t want him inside any more than he wanted to go in. But he couldn’t sit out here in the car all night.

  He pulled his coat over his head and ran for the front door. Goose bumps stood up over his arms as he fumbled with the key. The wind blew water under the porch roof and spattered him with it as he finally got the key in the lock and tried to turn it.

  It wouldn’t open. He tried again, but the lock wasn’t stiff—the key simply didn’t fit. Now that he looked, there was a second lock farther down that took a deadlock key, something he’d never had.

  He shrugged his coat on properly and buttoned it tight against the cold. It was very like his father to leave him the house while changing all the locks so he couldn’t get in. It wasn’t worth feeling more than a moment’s irritation about it.

  Jamming the useless keys back in his pocket, he left the relative shelter of the porch and stepped out into the drenching rain. The pea shingle of the garden path scuffed his London shoes and water soaked into the leather as he rounded the side of the house to get to the back garden.

  New fence. Locked gate. But there was a drainpipe up the side of the house that his father had not reckoned with. He took a run up to the wall, jumped, and used the p
ipe to scramble farther, got a hand and foot on the top of the fence and let himself drop into the long, sloping back garden.

  No lights on the opposite bank. With the willows whispering down to the water’s edge, it was profoundly dark except for a wavering yellow glimmer to the right, where next door’s land joined his.

  He was already as wet as it was possible to get, so he followed the glint, curious to see what it was. The fences down here were much less intimidating. Great swathes of slats had been knocked over or were missing. He could step through onto the concrete frontage of a boatbuilder’s workshop, in which a channel had been dug out to the river and a single-boat dock built. A rusty gantry crane straddled the dock, its taut chains still tight around the decaying hull of a coal barge that had been hauled out of the water for repair when May was five and left there to rot ever since.

  Beyond it lay a larger boatyard, closed up tight for the night. More-fortunate boats stood in dry dock to be repaired, and in a larger basin beyond the offices, a dozen narrowboats drowsed with lights behind their windows and thin smoke trickling from their generators.

  But the fire or candlelight he’d seen earlier spilled out of the belly of the rotting barge, showing off her great ribs. He wished for a torch or his badge or both as he crept closer, suspecting the local ne’er-do-wells were making an incompetent attempt at arson. “Hello?”

  There was no reply, but his policeman’s instincts told him that something had stirred, something had pricked up its ears and was now listening to him approach.

  “Is there someone in there?” He came two quiet steps closer. Still no movement. A less experienced hunter might have doubted their prey’s existence, but he just eased his weight onto his toes to go more quietly and listened harder for the crackle of a fire. He snuffed the air but only smelled diesel from the distant pumps and the dank, depressing scent of waterlogged wood.

  He thought of saying, It’s the police, but it wasn’t, and at that bitter reflection he almost walked away. It was no longer his job to investigate suspicious things. Let someone else phone for the fire brigade or disturb the drug addicts in their den. Not his business.

  He considered, I mean you no harm, as an opener. But if it was drug addicts or petty vandals, then I mean to scare the shit out of you and get you off my neighbour’s property would be closer to the mark.

  It had been so long since he’d been a private individual, nothing to back him up at all—no station, no sergeant, no authority. His step faltered at the knowledge, and he felt a pang of bereavement a hundred times stronger than he had felt when they told him his father had died. It made him gasp, rub a hand over his face to wash away the distress.

  His fingers were still over his eyes when the rotting boat erupted with scrabbling noise. He dropped them, looked up in time to see a flash of white on top of a dark figure scrambling over the far gunwale and dropping onto the concrete forecourt of the boatyard. The instinctive reaction to a hooded figure running away was to give chase, but God, it was fast. Chains and detritus on the ground kept breaking his step, breaking his concentration. He got around the concrete lip of the pool in time to see the two luminous stripes on the back of the fugitive’s trainers sprint around a distant shed.

  He pushed himself hard to catch up, rejoicing in the familiar thrill, but when he got to the shed, there was no one in sight and no further glint of light. Panting, he put his hands on his knees and caught his breath. “Damn it.” Then he returned to the dead barge and its crane.

  He used a stepladder attached to the rear right leg of the crane to scramble onto the deck of the barge. The wood felt spongy under his feet, and as he got to the edge of the cabin his heel went through, sending a rain of punk through into the hold.

  The light filtering out of the boat was not strong, but in the almost absolute darkness it was enough to show a rope descending through a hacked hole in the deck, disappearing into the gold-lit dim of the hold. No guarantee there wasn’t someone else down there, someone braver, waiting in ambush for him to lower himself through the hole, eyes dazzled and hands occupied.

  He went anyway, half because he refused to be afraid, half because he wasn’t entirely sure he cared if there was a bullet with his name on it tonight.

  Rain dripped from his hair into his eyes, pittered into the puddles awash across the keel. The stink of stagnant water mingled with the sweet rankness he was familiar with among London’s homeless, the ones who had pissed themselves and then slept in it, had it dry into their clothes over days of damp body heat while they sheltered in cold doorways.

  Gleaned wood from supermarket pallets had been laid over the ribs of the boat at the stern, where two layers of deck still kept a watertight roof over the hollow. On this dry platform flickered a pumpkin-spiced candle in a glass holder traced with decorative golden glitter, and a single dirty blanket with its end trailing over the platform into the bilge.

  Around the platform, on every accessible space, flowers had been drawn—silvery ones scraped into the mould with a fingernail, huge black ones burnt on, maybe with the flame of this very candle.

  May hunkered down and fished the corner of the blanket out of the puddle before it could sop up all the water. He looked at the little nest and blew out a long sad breath. When he was young, he’d thought everyone in Trowchester lived in snug stone houses. And yes, he’d gone so far as to hoard food under the bed in preparation for running away, but he’d never really had the courage. He didn’t want to think that this place, this corner of old England where there was honey still for tea, could have anything in common with the uncaring metropolis.

  There couldn’t be blood on the pavements here too. There couldn’t be, or where would he go to escape?

  Pulling himself together, he took his notebook out and wrote Sorry. Tore out the page and pinned it to the blanket with a two-pound coin. Chances were whoever lived here was a petty shoplifter—he’d stake his life that candle had not been paid for—but it was a small measure of freedom that it was no longer his duty to care about that part. Anyone who lived like this deserved a little treat, now and again.

  Climbing back out, he stumbled blindly through the fence and into his own garden. Knowing his father, cracking the house was going to be a serious business, and he would need light for it. He followed the slope of the ground down to the river’s edge and waded among sedge and grebe nests before his outstretched hands found the hard edge of the narrowboat’s stern. It too was locked, but it was a great deal easier to lift the small doors off their hinges and crawl through to the cabin than it would have been to do the same to the house doors.

  He stumbled and cursed, knocking his knees against piles of hard-edged stuff his father had clearly put in here to hoard. Broken dishwasher. Valve-powered TV. Microwave with the glass shattered. Even a bookcase. He reached the bed eventually, blindly groped for the covers, stripped off his soaked clothes, and crawled in to shiver.

  The bedding clearly hadn’t been aired since his father’s cancer was diagnosed six months ago. It smelled of damp and dust and mildew. Worse, it smelled of wariness and cruel laughter. It tightened around him like a fist. With the roof so low and the walls so close, he might have been lying in a coffin, but that was obscurely comforting. If he were dead, then he could stop. He could lie down and rest. He could let go.

  He hoped he had not frightened his vagrant neighbour out of their night’s sleep. The rain kept coming down, and no one deserved to be out in it alone. Maybe that could be his project. Not the house, but plugging up the leaks in the hulk of the barge. Give the poor bastard somewhere dry to sleep and a proper address, so they could start looking for a job . . .

  “You’re a lamb in wolf’s clothing,” Jenny had said, and yes, he didn’t see why he should stop trying to protect people just because he could no longer be official about it. He only hoped his homeless neighbour wouldn’t die of exposure before they had the chance to find out that Michael was a soft touch for a hard luck story right now.

 
The morning came early and bright. Condensation trickled down the narrowboat’s tiny windows, pooling even under the cut-glass roundel in the toilet. The gas did not want to play but yielded to his persistence, and he boiled hot water before discovering there was neither tea nor coffee aboard.

  “Urgh,” he said, clambering back into damp, clingy clothes. “Fuck that. Fuck all of this. All of it. Every last bit.” Then he drank his hot water and scrambled out to face the day.

  Morning light revealed that the back of the house was easier than the front. A yellow plum tree grew close to the conservatory, so he could climb up the tree, across a branch that was dropping plums outside the conservatory door, and gingerly edge along the main supporting beam of the roof until he came to the spare bedroom windows. They were locked too, of course, but with a simple latch he could jimmy with a credit card.

  He swung them open, crawled inside.

  The place still smelled of misery, though if he was reporting it at the station he would have described it as the scent of decaying carpet and toilet cleaner, old age and dust. Since it was bright outside, he left the window wide. Sidling into the other bedrooms, feeling like a burglar, he opened all the windows in the hope of flushing out the smell with fresh air.

  First things first. Downstairs, he chipped a chunk of semidissolved granules out of the cracked container in which his father kept the coffee, went to turn the kettle on, and discovered that the electricity had been turned off. He stood far too long facing the countertop, stymied by the silent appliance while his mind took a brief absence of leave. Reassembling himself to do anything else seemed to take more resilience than he had left. But he did it eventually, sighing and raising his head.

  There were coffee shops in town. He only had to locate the house keys, then he could drive to the nearest and get his first coffee of the morning there, with something good to eat thrown in.

  Long experience both of searching houses and of his father’s sense of humour let him turn up the house keys in only half an hour: bundled in a plastic ziplock bag and taped inside the cistern of the upstairs toilet.