Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  How about Polly Esther?” Harry suggested to Bunny (he was on a roll). “Or Aunty Rhinum? Phyllis Tyne! That’s a good one. It would suit you, Bunny, being a Geordie.”

  (“You seem very into the whole drag thing, Harry,” Emily said. “You should beware of cultural appropriation.” Which was definitely something she’d gotten from Miss Dangerfield.)

  From Barclay Jack’s dressing room came the sound of something crashing to the floor, followed by the man himself roaring with anger.

  Bunny pointed her cigarette at the dressing-room door and said, “Has that bastard been giving you trouble again?”

  Harry shrugged. “It’s all right.”

  “He’s raging ’cos he’s not on the telly anymore,” Bunny said. “Plus he’s a fat cunt.”

  If Harry’s father heard Bunny use language like that he would probably deck him. His dad used terrible language himself, as bad as anything that came out of Bunny’s plumped-up lips, but that didn’t seem to count. He had standards for other people, especially Harry. “It’s about bettering yourself,” he said. “Do what I say, not what I do.” Harry hoped his father never came across Bunny. He couldn’t imagine them in the same room together.

  Harry knocked again on Barclay Jack’s door and shouted, “Two minutes, Mr. Jack!”

  “Well, if he does give you trouble,” Bunny said, as they listened to the expletive-fueled response from Barclay Jack, “just mention Bridlington to him.”

  “Bridlington?” Harry asked. “What happened in Bridlington?”

  “Never you mind, pet. You know what they say—what happens in Brid stays in Brid. If you’re lucky, that is.”

  The lights went down on a couple of singers—husband and wife—who had once been the (failed, needless to say) UK entry to Eurovision. Jesus, Barclay thought, it was like stepping back in time. Well, it was stepping back in time—they were billed as a “Blast from the Past,” aka the dregs of seventies and eighties TV. Good decades for Barclay then, but not necessarily now. There were chorus girls kicking their legs up and a ventriloquist whose “doll” was a chicken (Clucky) and who used to inhabit the soul-destroying corridors of kids’ TV. A glitter band that had been—literally—a one-hit wonder and who had been touring in revival shows for the last forty years on the strength of it. A magician who had once had a regular guest spot on something on TV—a magazine program? Cilla Black? Esther Rantzen? Barclay couldn’t remember. Neither could the magician. Everyone thought he was dead. (“Me too,” the magician said.)

  And, of course, bloody Bunny Hopps fannying around like a third-rate pantomime dame. It was enough to make a man puke. The theater was trying to make it into a family show, but they’d been forced by the powers that be to put a warning out before the interval that parents with children in the audience should use their discretion about allowing them to stay for the second half as Barclay Jack was “somewhat risqué.” Management had asked him to “tone it down” for the matinées. Fucking cheeky buggers. He didn’t bother, he knew they wouldn’t be back. The whole show, the whole season, was written off as something from the Dark Ages. As was Barclay himself.

  He’d risen. He’d fallen. He used to be on television all the time, he’d won an “audience choice” award. He’d received hundreds of fan letters a week, emceed Saturday Night at the London Palladium, met the Prince of Wales. Twice. He’d had his own ITV game show for a while. And a short-lived quiz on Channel 5 in its early days. The contestants were not the brightest, even the simplest general-knowledge question seemed to be beyond them. (Question: What was Hitler’s first name? Answer: Heil?)

  And now look at me, Barclay thought. Bottom-feeding. (“Well, Barclay,” his manager Trevor said, “crack cocaine and underage girls, it can be a long road to redemption.”

  “Rumors, Trevor,” Barclay said. “Nothing ever proved.” And it was the seventies, for heaven’s sake. Everybody was at it then.)

  The lights went up again. He could feel the excitement, like a hot vapor rising and filling the auditorium. It was a raucous lot that were in tonight, a couple of hen parties by the sound of it. That was the thing, he was still popular—wildly so, if this audience was anything to go by. Why couldn’t TV executives see that?

  He walked out onto the stage and took a moment to appreciate it, his stomach settled now. He waggled a leering eyebrow at a woman in the front row and she looked as if she was going to wet herself. “How do you get a fat bird to go to bed with you?” he shouted to the back row of the balcony. They were laughing already, even before the punch line.

  “Easy!” he yelled. “A piece of cake!” He was loved.

  Time, Gentlemen

  “Well,” Andy said, “I suppose it’s time to get home to the old ball and chain.” Tommy clucked sympathetically. Andy’s wife, Rhoda, was built to very different architecture from Crystal, whose blueprint was that of a goddess. “You would think,” Andy said to Vince once, out of Tommy’s hearing, “that if Crystal had been a glamour model there’d be nudie photos of her all over the web, but I haven’t been able to find anything. I think our Tommy’s telling porkies.”

  “You’ve looked?” Vince said, horrified.

  “Course I have. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

  He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. It was disrespectful. He would never be able to look at Crystal again without imagining her naked.

  “That’s kind of the point, Vince,” Andy said.

  The denizens of the Belvedere clubhouse bar made their tardy way home. Mindful of the law, Tommy Holroyd had phoned for a cab.

  Andy, as usual, was happy to take his chances of being stopped. The Belvedere was second home to quite a few members of the force who would probably turn a blind eye to his transgressions. He offered Vince a lift to the hovel Wendy had forced him into, but he declined.

  If he was going to die—and to be quite honest he wouldn’t be that bothered if he did—then Vince didn’t want it to be with his face in the airbag of Andy Bragg’s Volvo. There were better places for it—deep in the purple-clad cleavage of Heather in York, for example. He could imagine himself plunging his head into her fat balloon-like bosom. Look who’s here, if it isn’t Vince! And then he would—

  Andy Bragg hooted at him as he drove past. He slowed and rolled down the passenger-side window. “Are you sure you don’t want a lift, Vince?”

  “Nah, I’m all right, Andy. Thanks. I fancy some air. It’s a nice evening. I might drop by the house, take the dog for its walk before bedtime. Haven’t seen Sparky for a while.”

  “As you wish, Squire.” Andy roared off into the night. He lived a forty-minute drive up the coast in his hotel—the Seashell—but Vince knew he would be trying to do it in thirty.

  The Seashell. They’d bought Sea View a couple of years ago, changed the name, and relaunched it as a boutique hotel. (“Luxury boutique,” Rhoda insisted.) It had been an old-fashioned, very tired hotel when they bought it. Red and blue figured carpet, nicotine-stained Lincrusta wallpaper, wall lamps with fringed shades and candle lightbulbs. They stripped it bare, made the seven bedrooms en suite, painted everything in muted grays and blues and greens, sanded and whitewashed floorboards. “Cape Cod style,” Rhoda said, although neither of them had ever been to Cape Cod. In a nod to something more British they had called the rooms after shipping forecast areas—Lundy, Malin, Cromarty, and so on. Not the weird ones like German Bight or Dogger, which sounded vaguely pornographic.

  It was Rhoda’s baby, really. Andy did the “heavy lifting,” as she called it—driving to the Cash and Carry, the endless maintenance, not to mention the more awkward guests who had to be placated. He was good at appeasement—Mr. Congeniality, Rhoda called him sometimes, although it didn’t always seem to be a compliment. Conflict resolution was not Rhoda’s forte. She was more likely to start a fight than to end one.

  Andy’s travel agency—the eponymous Andy’s Travel—had gone bust some time ago and now he ran his reincarnated business from home, with Rhoda’s name on the company docum
ents, under the anonymous epithet of Exotic Travel.

  He’d been in travel longer than he cared to remember. After serving an apprenticeship with Thomas Cook he started his own business, with a desk in someone else’s agency—he was in Bridlington at the time—until he scraped together enough money for his own storefront further up the coast. In those days it was still mostly packages—two weeks in Lanzarote, the Algarve, or the Costa Brava, clutching your travelers’ checks in one hand and a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic in the other.

  Life was simple then. People needed travel agents. Now they were dead in the water, killed by the internet. It had been dog-eat-dog out there for a long time and you could only survive if you evolved. So Andy had evolved, focusing on the more niche aspects of the business—“a bespoke service catering for individual taste” was how he had described his approach. Sex tourism, basically. Trips for blokes to Thailand, Bali, Sri Lanka, where they could pick up girls in bars, boys on beaches, even find a wife if that was what they were after. Now that, too, had gone the way of all flesh, as it were. The blokes were doing it for themselves and Exotic Travel didn’t exist in much more than name only. Andy’s business had gone underground. These days it was all about import rather than export. Rhoda took no interest in Andy’s business, which was just as well, considering.

  It was a slippery slope. You started off selling Club Med packages to eighteen-year-olds who wanted a bit of fun and sun, and you ended up on the end of a pitchfork being toasted like a pikelet. Sins of commission. Andy knew what was waiting for him. He’d been brought up a strict Catholic, his mother was ferocious in her faith. It was going to take more than a few Hail Marys to wipe his slate clean.

  The Seashell was in a village, or what passed for a village, although it was mostly holiday rental properties nowadays, strung out along the road or, in the case of the more expensive ones, hiding up the valley. There was none of the tacky carnival atmosphere you found further down the coast, no arcades or fish-and-chip shops or amusements. The air wasn’t polluted by the stench of frying fat and sugar. This was where dog walkers came—middle-aged retirees, day-trippers (unfortunately), and young couples with small children who wanted old-fashioned bucket-and-spade holidays. “Staycations” (he hated that word). None of them were the ideal clientele for the Seashell. They were licensed, though, and did “light lunches,” which helped, but he supposed that Airbnb would be the death of them eventually. It wouldn’t matter, it wasn’t as if there wasn’t plenty of money, he was swilling in cash, it was just unfortunate that he couldn’t find a way of explaining any of it to Rhoda.

  Rhoda had made a feature of the shell thing. Big conches in the en suites, scallop shells for soap dishes, wind chimes made of periwinkles and slipper shells. Andy didn’t know a winkle from a mussel. The table mats in the dining room were expensive with a classical-style painting of shells on each one. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in Pompeii. A large shell adorned the center of every table. Rhoda had personally glued seashells onto the Ikea lamp bases. Andy thought that she had taken the theme too far, but she was like a woman possessed. In TK Maxx in the Metrocentre in Gateshead she’d seen shower curtains with seashells on them (there was a tongue twister if ever there was) and was now contemplating custom-made towels, embroidered with the hotel’s logo—a seashell above a pair of entwined “S”s. Andy worried about the Nazi connotations. Rhoda, a bit of a storm trooper herself, thought he was being oversensitive—not something Andy was usually accused of.

  Andy had met Rhoda ten years ago when she came into his agency to book a singles holiday in Fuerteventura. She had been passing through—she was a traveler for a pharmaceutical company and was a formidable woman in many ways, not least in size. She was wearing an ill-fitting tight gray trouser suit (that made the word “haunches” spring unexpectedly into his mind) and was enveloped in a choking fog composed equally of Elnett hairspray and Dior Poison. After Andy had secured the booking and taken the deposit he’d said, “A gorgeous woman like you shouldn’t be single.” Rhoda had laughed dismissively at him in the same way that the girls at school used to. Then she picked up her heavy black case of samples and got back in her company car. Nonetheless his chat-up line must have had some effect because a year later they were on honeymoon in a hotel in Crete that he’d secured a great trade discount on.

  Rhoda had been living in Luton (“a hellhole”) at the time, but was from Filey originally and was relieved to move back to the East Coast. The magnetic pull of the North. “Like a spawning salmon,” Rhoda said. “Except I’m not going to actually spawn. God forbid.” It was a second marriage for them both and Rhoda hadn’t wanted children. “I think that ship has sailed anyway,” she said, without any sign of regret. Andy did sometimes wonder what fatherhood would be like—seeing his own DNA blossom in a child. But then, he thought, perhaps the world was better off without another Andy Bragg in it.

  Instead of a child they had a dog, a Newfoundland called Lottie who was as big as a pony and featured on their website as if she was one of the attractions of the Seashell, yet she remained stoically indifferent to guests. Andy and Rhoda projected a variety of emotions onto her, although in fact her expression—a kind of resolute blankness—never changed. Andy thought it was a shame she didn’t play poker. She tended to block your path, like a large, impassive piece of furniture. In some ways Lottie reminded Andy of his wife.

  Rhoda knew her own mind, it was one of her best features. Also one of her worst, of course. She was determined to make the Seashell a success, even if she had to drug the passing trade and drag them through the doors. Like a tiger with prey, Andy thought.

  The front door was locked by the time Andy got home—residents had a key. It took him several minutes to find his own key and a few drunken attempts before he managed to get it in the lock. There was no way he was going to ring the bell and get Rhoda out of bed—she was a nightmare if her sleep was disturbed. She was a lark, not an owl, she said. The differences between Rhoda and a lark were too great to contemplate.

  Finally he managed to get inside, not before tripping over the giant spider conch that was acting as a doorstop for the inner porch door.

  He passed the open door of the dining room, where everything was neatly laid out for tomorrow’s breakfasts. Little individual jars of ketchup and jams that were expensive and wasteful, but that’s what defined “luxury,” apparently. High season and only three of the seven bedrooms were occupied. It was amazing what one poor review on TripAdvisor could do.

  He had to negotiate his way around Lottie, who was sleeping soundly on the landing, before he could tiptoe up to the attic room that served as the office for Exotic Travel. He paused on the threshold and listened to make sure that Rhoda wasn’t stirring in the room beneath. He switched on his computer. He logged on. The screen was the only light in the room and he stared at it for a long time before typing in a website address. It wasn’t the kind of website you could find on Google.

  Crystal had been sneaking a cigarette on the doorstep when she heard the sound of a car turning in to the driveway. Squinting into the darkness, she felt a little flutter of fear. Was it the silver BMW?

  The motion-sensor lights that lined the drive were suddenly activated and she could see that it was only a local taxi approaching—Tommy home from the Belvedere. “Fig,” she muttered, grinding out the cigarette beneath her foot.

  She gave herself a quick skoosh of mouth freshener and took up a pose on the doorstep as if she were on the catwalk, and when Tommy had exited the taxi she said, “Hello, babe. Did you have a good day?”

  “Yeah, great day,” Tommy Holroyd said. “I hit an albatross.”

  Crystal frowned. She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which that could lead to a great day, particularly not for the albatross, but she said, “Oh, well done, you. I didn’t even know we had them in Britain.”

  Thisldo. “The marital home,” as it was now known in Steve Mellors’s legalese. The pigeon part of his brain guided Vince’s feet there
automatically. Perhaps he could have a word with Wendy, ask her to dial down the divorce so he didn’t lose everything, especially his dignity.

  The lights were on, a fact which irritated him as he was still paying the electricity bill. Wendy could show a little mercy, even if only by turning a light off. She had a job, after all, only part-time, but she could easily go full-time and make some more money instead of taking all of his. (And half his pension! How could that be fair?) Wendy worked in the office of a local college, although you would think she spent her day hewing coal with her bare hands from the dramatic way she used to fling herself on the sofa when she came in from work. (“I’m knackered, Vince, fetch me a glass of prosecco, will you?”)

  Vince peered through the front window but couldn’t see anything between the finger-thin gap in the curtains. It seemed unlikely that Wendy was in there with a new man, she would surely have been canoodling by the soft light of a lamp or a forgiving candle rather than in the full glare of their five-armed BHS ceiling chandelier. British Home Stores may have gone bust now but their light fixtures blazed bravely on. It was a Saturday night, he supposed Wendy was out painting the town.

  He rested his head against the cold glass of the window for a moment. The house seemed deathly quiet. No chatter from the television, no crazed barking from Sparky.

  “Vince!”

  Vince jumped away from the window but it was only a neighbor—Benny. Ex-neighbor.

  “You all right, mate?”

  “Just checking in on the old homestead, you know.”

  “We miss you around here.”

  “Yeah, I miss me too,” Vince said.

  “How are you doing, anyway?” Benny asked, an expression of concern on his face, a doctor with a terminal patient.