‘For God’s sake, Billy, I was three! How many more times do I have to tell you that? I didn’t do it on purpose.’
‘Oh, I know that, Greg,’ Billy said brightly. ‘I’m not expecting you to feel guilty about it. What I meant is that, subconsciously, I think I’ve always known it was your fault and that’s why I resented you.’
‘I didn’t know you did resent me.’
‘Maybe resent’s too strong a word. I mean, I never begrudged you your success or anything like that. Just the opposite in fact: I was proud of you. But there were times when I felt anger towards you and I could never explain why. It used to worry me. But I understand it now – just like I understand why I’m podophobic. And I’d never have discovered any of this if we hadn’t gone to The Gap together. I think it was being there with you that caused the flashback.’
‘It’s on the house, Billy. No need to thank me.’
‘I wasn’t aware I was thanking you,’ Billy said. ‘It was more of an observation. But an odd thought struck me while I was lying on the bed: pipes, which are supposed to connect things, have always driven us apart. I wonder why that is? First it was the sewage pipe, then the drainpipe, and I also remember you smashing my copy of Mull of Kintyre into smithereens because you didn’t like bagpipes – you still owe me for that, by the way.’
Greg smiled. ‘I remember. Oddly enough, it was the only time Dad didn’t tell me off for doing something. I wonder what that tells us. Anyway, we need to get moving. Uncle Frank’s waiting for us in the pub next door and God knows how many people he’s upset by now.’
Uncle Frank had in fact upset no one. Indeed, when Greg and Billy arrived there it appeared that their uncle had made a friend: a strange-looking man with a swastika tattooed on his forehead. ‘God in Heaven!’ Greg muttered.
He bought drinks and, after letting his uncle know that he and Billy had arrived in the pub, took them to the table where Billy had taken a seat. ‘I’ll be right with you,’ Uncle Frank told him.
‘He looks a bit of a rum character, doesn’t he?’ Billy said. ‘Do you think he’s a Hell’s Angel or something?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Greg said. ‘I didn’t wait to be introduced.’
Uncle Frank sidled over to the table and sat down. Billy was just about to ask him who the person he’d been talking to was when the man passed them.
‘Nice meeting you, Frank,’ he squeaked, in a voice that sounded as if it had broken upwards.
‘You too, Killer,’ Uncle Frank replied.
‘Who the hell’s Killer?’ Greg asked, once the man had left the pub.
‘Killer Kilshaw,’ Uncle Frank said. ‘He’s the local rat catcher.’
‘How on earth did you fall into conversation with him?’ Billy asked. ‘You know he’s got a swastika tattooed on his forehead, don’t you?’
‘I’m not blind, Billy, but when I started talking to him he was facing forward and I could only see his profile. I thought he was suffering from Bell’s palsy to tell you the truth – that’s the reason I started talking to him. I told him not to despair and that his face would sort itself out in a few weeks, but when he turned to look at me the other side of his face was exactly the same. He was all right about me saying it though: I think he thought I was making a joke. Anyway, we got to talking and found we had a lot in common.’
‘You haven’t got a tattoo of a swastika on your forehead,’ Billy pointed out.
‘I’m aware of that, you daft hap’orth, but I was in pest control all my life, wasn’t I – and that’s what he’s in. And don’t think I didn’t tell him about that tattoo of his either. I told him it didn’t do him any favours and that a lot of his countrymen had given their lives fighting Hitler and his…’
‘Were you in the war, Uncle Frank?’ Billy asked. ‘I know you never talk about it, but…’
‘I was bloody six at the time! How could I have been? None of the Bowmans fought in the war: we were all either too young or too old. Even if I had been old enough though, I doubt the government would have let me go.’
‘Why, because you were too small?’ Billy suggested.
Uncle Frank looked at his eldest nephew scornfully. ‘No, you dimwit – because they’d have classified me as a key worker! How would the government have looked if the troops had come home and found their houses overrun with rats? Anyway, do you want to hear about Killer, or not?’
Billy apologised for his interruptions and Uncle Frank continued.
‘He very much regrets having the tattoo on his forehead, if you must know. He said he was impetuous in his youth and ran with the wrong crowd – actually, he used the words fucking stupid, but I’m cleaning his conversation up for your benefit, Billy. Anyway, to cut a long story short, he told me that the swastika no longer reflects his political views and hasn’t done for some time. He votes UKIP these days and he’s saving up to have it removed. He might look the rough sort, but deep down, if you dig deep enough, he’s okay. You can’t always go by appearances.’
Billy ordered another round of drinks, and by the time they reached the Italian restaurant Uncle Frank was quite squiffy. A waiter brought them menus and Greg ordered a bottle of Chianti. When it came to ordering, Billy and Greg placed theirs straightaway.
‘And you, sir: what would you care for?’ the waiter asked Uncle Frank.
‘I want the world and I want it now!’ Uncle Frank replied playfully, quoting a line from a Doors song.
‘I’m sure we’d all like that, sir,’ the waiter replied straight-faced, ‘but in the meantime is there anything more specific you’d care to order – like food, for instance?’
‘Egg and chips then,’ Uncle Frank replied, without bothering to look at the menu.
‘Make that the Cotoletta alla Milanese, will you?’ Greg said to the waiter. ‘You’ll like that, Uncle Frank. It’s what I’m having.’
The food was good and the wine drank easily. They ordered another bottle and made toasts – to Lyle’s memory, to the Wild West, to Billy’s feet, to Montana and to themselves – the Last of the Bowmans.
It was their Last Supper. In the morning, they would drive home and go their separate ways: Billy would drive to London for his Wednesday morning appointment with Dr Haffenden; Greg would gather his belongings and leave for Heathrow the following day; and Uncle Frank would return to the planet of Rock and the worlds of Judge Judy and The Real Housewives of Orange County.
Billy waited in the car while Greg went inside the house. Greg asked his uncle to check he hadn’t left anything in the car and Uncle Frank emptied the contents of his plastic bag on to the table: Pac a Mac, pyjamas, toothpaste and brush, hotel soaps and shampoos, Lyle’s handkerchiefs and the Fisherman’s Friends. All was in order.
Greg then put his arms around the small man and drew him close. Rather than shy away – as Greg feared he might – Uncle Frank welcomed his embrace and hugged him back. It was the human touch he’d longed for – the touch that had been denied him through life.
‘Thanks for taking me to the coast, lad,’ Uncle Frank said. ‘Maybe next time we could go to Llandudno for a visit. You’ll like Llandudno. And we’re still going to Montana next year, aren’t we?’
Greg told him they were: they’d ride the range together, buy cowboy boots and cowboy hats, drink in saloons with swinging doors and visit the scene of Custer’s Last Stand. It would be the holiday of a lifetime – for both of them.
He kissed his uncle on the top of his head and told him he loved him.
Deep in the folds of Greg’s shirt, Uncle Frank raised an eyebrow. Love? What was the boy trying to tell him? That something was wrong? That there was something he wanted to get off his chest? The cogs in his mind started to turn: a diamond stud in his nephew’s ear; his preference for tissues rather than handkerchiefs; his unusually white teeth…
He pulled away from Greg and looked up.
‘You’re not trying to tell me you like musicals, are you, lad?’
There was a For Sale sign outside the house when they returned. While Billy inspected the rooms and made a note of the furniture, Greg boiled the kettle and made coffee. Billy came into the kitchen and told him he’d phone the British Heart Foundation when he got back from London/Scotland and arrange for the house to be cleared. They did it for free, he explained, and it would save them the expense of hiring a professional clearer who would only tell them the furniture was worthless, charge them £400 for its removal ‘as a favour to them’, and then sell it for twice that amount.
They took their coffees into the back garden.
‘They’ve done a good job,’ Billy commented. ‘You can see where the crack’s been filled, but at least they pebble-dashed over the new cement. With time and a bit of weathering, you won’t even know there was a crack. I wonder if Dad knew it was there.’
‘I don’t know,’ Greg said. ‘His eyes were bad, but I can’t believe he wasn’t aware of it. He’d have known it wasn’t structural, though. He’d lived in the house long enough to know that. He probably thought we could take care of the superficial stuff – and we have.’
‘We have, haven’t we?’ Billy smiled. ‘We worked well together.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And we’re okay now, aren’t we? I mean the two of us?’
‘I was always okay,’ Greg replied. ‘You were the problem.’
Billy looked at him with a wounded expression, and Greg started to laugh. ‘Of course we’re okay, you big lug!’ He pulled Billy towards him and hugged him. ‘We’re more than okay, Billy – we’re brothers.’
‘Mrs Turton’s watching us,’ Billy whispered. ‘What if she gets the wrong idea?’
‘Fuck Mrs Turton,’ Greg said. ‘She always gets the wrong idea.’
‘Just one other thing, Greg: It’s no big deal, but you’re standing on my foot.’
Greg rose early the following morning. He ran a bath and lazed in the warmth of the water for half an hour and then towelled himself dry. He dressed in his travelling clothes – Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt – and slipped the flip-flops on his feet. He carried his suitcase to the car and returned to the house for one last look, one last smell.
He locked the front door behind him and placed the key under a large stone for Billy to retrieve. He walked up the garden path and released the catch on the wrought-iron gate. He saw Mrs Turton standing at the next-door window and ignored her. She ignored him back.
He left the house with a framed photograph of his mother, and keepsakes that would remind him of his father: Lyle’s flat corduroy cap, his mangled toothbrush and the hardened paintbrush. And, at the bottom of his suitcase, wrapped in thick newspaper, the helmet and gasmask his father had retrieved from the loft.
Greg would never see the house again, but he returned to England four months later.
MONTANA
On a hot July morning, a year to the day after Lyle had been laid to rest, a black sedan left the car park of a hotel in downtown Billings and travelled east through the dry sloping prairies of south-eastern Montana. Behind the wheel was Billy, and beside him his now eight-year-old daughter Katy. Greg was sitting in the back, directly behind Billy, and on the seat next to him rested an old leather saddlebag.
Lives had changed over the year.
Billy and Jean, though still living under the same roof, were now separated by a wall: Billy banished to the flat once occupied by Betty, and Betty back in the main house living with Jean and Katy. It was an arrangement borne of convenience and the complicated ownership of Spinney Cottage rather than any desire on Jean’s part to remain physically close to Billy. The separation, after all, had been her idea, instigated not because of the circumstances of Billy’s resignation from the company – which she still knew nothing about – but because Billy, against her expressed wishes, had set himself up as a painter and decorator.
Although Jean had always looked down on Billy’s career in sales, his position had always been masked by the cachet afforded by the word ‘publishing’. If asked what her husband did for a living, she would simply reply ‘publishing’ and leave them to presume whatever they liked, which was usually along the lines of Billy being a commissioner of literary masterpieces. She’d noticed that people were always impressed by her answer and it was obvious, even to her, a person who never read books, that publishing was a profession that carried status.
If she could have described her husband as an artist or a painter – which at one social gathering she had – and be allowed to live behind yet another mask, then their relationship might have survived. But Billy could never be relied upon to give traction to such subterfuge, and she still remembered the above soirée with horror.
That evening, over pre-dinner drinks, she’d explained to one of the guests that her husband was a painter and left the man with the impression – as she’d intended to – that Billy was an artist. Over the dinner that followed, the same man – who was interested in commissioning a portrait of his wife – asked Billy what medium he preferred to work in, an answer he expected to be either oil or watercolour. When Billy had replied emulsion and gloss, the man had stared strangely at him for a moment and then, in a somewhat querulous voice, asked if he was or wasn’t a painter.
‘I don’t like to blow my own trumpet, Pete – it is Pete, isn’t it,’ Billy had replied, ‘but I like to think of myself as being slightly more upmarket than that: I’m a painter and decorator. I also wallpaper.’
That evening Jean died, and so too did their marriage.
For Jean, there was no status whatsoever in being attached to a tradesman, certainly not one who dressed in brown overalls and drove around in a second-hand van, and she decided that life for her would be easier and more pleasant if she just told people that she and her husband, who had worked in publishing, were now separated and likely to divorce. She was comforted that these two words – separated and divorce – had the same effect on people as telling them she had cancer, a condition she’d once read about in Reader’s Digest and afterwards eaten a four course meal to ease the plight of those suffering from the disease. It was the evening she’d met Billy.
Billy adapted to the situation quickly – too quickly for Jean’s liking. His conversations with Dr Haffenden had been wide-ranging and he’d already come to the conclusion that he and Jean had fallen in love with a set of circumstances rather than each other, and that love built on circumstance was no more solid than a bungalow built on the cliffs of The Gap. And Billy’s changed circumstances pleased him. He was a free man. He no longer feared feet! He was his own boss doing a job he enjoyed and a job he was good at. He slept in his own bed at night instead of in characterless hotels and saw his daughter every day. He’d made new acquaintances and rekindled old friendships. And he was now free to talk on the phone to the friend he valued more than any other: his younger brother.
Greg, though still single, was surprisingly unattached. He’d broken up with Cyndi shortly after returning from England – two miles from the airport, to be exact. She’d met him at the gate and they’d hugged silently, pecking each other on the lips. But then, in the car, Cyndi had unwisely asked if he’d missed her while he’d been away, and when he’d told her no, had even more unwisely pressed him on the point of love: did he still love her? And his answer was again no. At this point, Cyndi had stopped the car on the hard shoulder of the interstate and told him to get his sorry ass out of her car and walk home.
It would have been better if she’d asked him these questions back at his apartment, Greg later told Billy, who in turn suggested that it might have been better if he’d just lied until they’d arrived there. Certainly, the journey home would have been more comfortable in her air-conditioned car than it had been in the back of the pickup truck that had stopped to give him a lift. ‘Live and learn,’ Greg had said. ‘Preferable to living and not learning,’ Billy h
ad replied.
Since then, Greg had dated no one seriously. Without intention he’d found himself thinking of Gillian Diamanti, thinking of Bicycle Boy, and wondering if he was only thinking of Bicycle Boy because he was thinking of Gillian and not because Bicycle Boy was his son. But there’d also been occasions when he’d found himself thinking not of Gillian or Bicycle Boy, but of Lyle Jr: his son, his father’s grandson, and the boy who was living testament to his father’s love for both of them. But as suddenly as these thoughts came he as quickly brushed them aside. They disquieted him and filled him with feelings safer not to pinpoint. As he’d once forced himself not to think of his mother after she died, he now trained himself not to think of Lyle Jr. It was easier to cope by thinking only of Bicycle Boy and keeping his son at arm’s length.
There were times when he was tempted to call Gillian, but every time he picked up the phone he wisely replaced the receiver. He thought of asking Billy to discover her situation: had she married Ben, or had Ben fallen off his bicycle and sustained injuries that had left him with no desire to marry a hairdresser. Billy, he knew, would have willingly obliged him. His brother would have parked his van outside her shop and studiously taken notes of who went in and who came out; he would have observed her movements through night vision binoculars and gone through her rubbish bins while she slept; and, if she’d gone anywhere on foot, he would have followed. Greg didn’t doubt that his brother would have executed the task wholeheartedly, but did worry about his brother’s discretion. Billy had already proved himself inept as a stalker, so how capable would he be as a detective? And what if he was stopped by the police – how would that pan out? It was safer for both of them, he decided, if Billy wasn’t involved.
To rid himself of such a complicated and futile infatuation, Greg threw himself into writing a book on black trade unionists, a subject he’d chosen as much to piss Mrs Turton off, as advance his career – though advance his career it undoubtedly would. It also pissed him off that Barry and Diane had bought their father’s house, even though their offer had been closer to the asking price than any other. The Grove, if the other residents weren’t careful, was in danger of becoming a Turtondom, where the Law of Barry would prevail: hands chopped off for littering, legs broken for building walls and public lashings for those found guilty of trafficking in scented candles.
The Last of the Bowmans Page 27
