by Eamon Walsh
1
When he returned home from his work, Sam Salt’s wife had asked him, ‘Who’s Shona?’
‘Shona?’ Salt had said.
‘Somebody called Shona rang. Said she wanted to speak to you.’
‘Shona? Doc’s sister I guess,’ Salt said. ‘I don’t know any other Shona.’
‘Remind me, who’s Doc?’
‘James Docherty. Old acquaintance. What’d she want, was there something in particular?’
‘Didn’t say. Just said she needed to speak. Sounded nice enough.’
‘Something must be up for her to just ring like that.’
He hadn’t seen or heard from Shona Docherty in a long while. Twenty-two years previously, when she was twenty-one and he was seventeen, they had sex; just on the one occasion. It was his first time, although he didn’t tell her that because he was pretty sure it wasn’t hers and because, going on what the others said, he had an idea that he might be a late starter. And it happened in the room where they kept the bodies.
He had been in that room before, one afternoon when Mr Docherty and his daughters were out. It was during the long summer holiday; the four of them had smoked some weed and sipped some of Mr Docherty’s whisky. Doc took them through and he started fooling around with the bodies, pretending to interview them and suchlike; lifting the lids and asking them what it felt like to be dead. He never touched them though; nobody touched them and the boy’s laughter contained notes of fear.
That time he and Shona had sex though, was during the first college break. He had called round for Doc but he was out somewhere and she was alone. She was, along with her sister Carolee, running the operation by then, and was just back from a job so she was still wearing her working clothes, including her top-hat. They had necked at a couple of parties and this time, with her mainly directing things, they went further. She ended up astride him on a chair between two of the coffins and – he could never shake this detail – she laid her hat on a lid, underneath of which lay Jacob (Jakey) Mortensen 1928-1973. It was their one and only time and when it was over – it hadn’t taken long – she said thanks and how cool it had been. He remembered that detail too, the thanks. Nobody had ever said thanks since, and maybe there was nothing to say thanks for.
For Salt, it was the most thrilling experience of his life, and that included taking LSD with Doc and Randal, and them taking one of the lifts forty-five floors up to the top of The Wooster Tower, and then jumping from the Wooster across to the Vaughn Dolphin Hotel. At that height, because of the way the Wooster was designed, with the roof overshooting the building, there was only a gap of about a metre between them, but nobody would have survived a wrong step; and it would have taken a long time to hit the ground. But having made it, the three of them lay laughing on the hotel roof and then took the lift down to the foyer of the Vaughn Dolphin. When they told Thimblehay what they had done, he didn’t believe them.
Although he and Shona sometimes ran into each other for a while after, and although Salt thought a lot about what they had done among those dead people, they never spoke about it and it never happened again. But now, after many years, she had phoned and she wanted to speak to him.
When Salt called her, she said she was sorry for troubling him, and that she had got his number from someone they both knew, but the thing was that her brother had died, found by a cleaner in a hotel room in Rotterdam.
‘Doc, dead?’ he said.
‘James, yeah.’
‘Rotterdam?’
‘Yeah, Rotterdam,’ she said. ‘We don’t know why there neither. He hadn’t been in touch in a good while. Claris didn’t even know where he was. They think he took it upon himself.’
‘Took it upon himself?’
‘That was their words. He was always something of a loon I suppose, but nobody expected this. Or maybe they did, I don’t know. I’m just glad our parents aren’t still around.’
‘No note? No explanation? If that’s what happened I mean, the took it upon himself business.’
‘No note we know about, unless there’s something they haven’t told us yet. But if you could let people know, the people you and he used to run around with. You still see them? If you could tell them, if they might still be interested. I don’t have numbers for them, wouldn’t even know if they’re still alive.’
‘Wow, yeah, sure. Of course they’ll be interested. I’ll ring them tonight. If you would just let me know about the arrangements, the why’s and wherefores of what’s happening and when.’
‘Sure, the why’s and wherefores. It might take a while, we need to get him back first. There’s paperwork, but I’ll let you know. Anyway, nice talking to you again, Sam. Pity it wasn’t under other circs.’
‘You too, Shona. And I’m sorry about Doc.’
‘James, yeah. We all are.’
He replaced the phone and poured himself a glass. He hadn’t thought about Doc for a while; certainly not deeply enough to try to find out where he was and how he was doing; but he wondered about him now, and imagined him alone in a foreign city, in a hotel with tablets or a blade or a gun; with the means one way or another to cancel the future.
And he also wondered, were people saying circs now, instead of circumstances? They had started saying uni instead of university. Were those final syllables just getting too much for people to cope with on top of the genocides and the diseases and the disasters? At least Doc had put that all behind him: he was dead – one stark and irreducible syllable. Unless people were going to start saying d.
2
He poured himself another drink, then he made two calls. The first one was to their old friend, Edward Thimblehay, known to them as Thimbles. Last Salt knew, Thimblehay was still living seven-hundred miles or so south, in a town called Hollins. Last time they spoke, he was a DJ on a local radio station, playing in a local band and still writing occasional pieces for the music papers. But he hadn’t spoken to him in over two years. Then, it was to tell him about how Randal was doing, which was not very well.
At first, when Thimblehay picked the phone up and said hello, Salt didn’t recognise the voice because Thimblehay was still holding the smoke from his cigarette in his lungs.
‘Thimbles?’ he said.
‘Salt, what’s up?’ Thimblehay said. Salt pictured the smoke pouring from his nostrils. That was the way he smoked, looking like he was emerging from a burning building. Him and Doc were the smokers. Salt and Randal never took to it as a regular habit; for them it was just a vehicle for weed, and Salt hadn’t touched weed in a long time. ‘Don’t tell me, Randal’s dead.’
‘No, it’s not Randal. Randal’s ok so far as I know. It’s Doc.’
‘Doc dead?’
‘Yeah, in Rotterdam.’
‘Rotterdam?’
From there and for a while after, the conversation was with small variations a repeat of the one Salt had with Shona a half-hour earlier.
‘So, Doc’s gone,’ Thimblehay said when they got the Rotterdam business out of the way. ‘Wow, the first of us to go.’
‘Suppose he is,’ said Salt. ‘If you look at it that way.’
‘Poor old Doc.’
‘You ok?’
‘Yeah, suppose so. Still breathing at least.’
‘Still planning to make it big?’
‘Just let me know about the arrangements, ok.’
He promised to let Thimblehay know what was going on. Then he poured himself another before he rang Anderson Randal.
Randal, after failing to get anywhere with what he used to call his real writing, now wrote children’s books. He had been persuaded by his agent that it was a buying market and that he wouldn’t have any problem shifting whatever he happened to produce so long as there was no sex or bad language and it had a happy ending.
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Randal had said. ‘Is this the best you can do? I’m meant to be writing literature.’
‘It’ll put bread and butter on the table,’ his agent had said. ‘Doesn’t stop you working on your other stuff in the meantime.’
Randal agreed to it as a temporary measure so long as he used a pseudonym. Within a month he had written what turned out to be the first of The Friends of Fatty Loone series, using the name PP Pepper. The books not only put bread and butter on the table, they put steaks and chickens on there as well, alongside wine and whisky.
Early on, before the money started coming in from the Fatty Loone books, again at the suggestion of his agent and under the name Rachel Spearman, he had written A History of Feline Wisdom: What Cats Can Teach Us About Relationships and Life. It went to number five in the best-seller list and when he, Rachel Spearmen, was invited onto television and radio his agent had to say she had been killed in a car-crash. Similarly, when he wrote How Belly-Dancing Changed the World by Maya Gallimaufry, his agent said that when her belly-dancing days were over she became a nun somewhere out on the north-west tip of Spain, he wasn’t sure where.
Last time Salt spoke to Randal, he was just out of rehab and living with a book-illustrator at the northern edge of the city.
A woman answered.
‘Yeah, who is it?’
‘Hello, could I speak to Anderson Randal please? Have I got the right number? Anderson Randal?’
‘You might have, might not. Depends on who you are and what you want?’
‘I’m a friend of his.’
‘Friend? Which friend? I haven’t heard him talk about any friend.’
‘Is he there? Tell him its Salts.’
‘Salts? What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Who is it?’ It was Randal’s voice in the background.
‘Somebody says he’s a friend of yours. Salts he says, whatever the hell that might mean. You want to speak?’
She put the phone down and it took a long while for it to be picked up again. While Salt waited, there seemed to be an argument going on in the background.
‘Salt, my old pal,’ Randal said when he heard Salt’s voice. ‘How the hell you doing? Long time.’
To Salt, he sounded as if he had been drinking. He didn’t ask about it though. He used to ask, when he cared more. Now he still cared, but less.
‘I’m ok, Rags. I wasn’t sure I had the right number there.’
‘That’s Sylvie. She gets protective. Doesn’t want me getting in with the wrong people. Too late for that though.’
‘She your book-illustrator?’
‘No, afraid I’ve come down in the world since then, my friend.’
‘How are you, anyway?’ Salt asked. ‘You keeping ok? How’s Fatty?’
‘Couldn’t be better, old pal. Something up?’
‘Yeah, it’s Doc.’
‘Doc? Why, what’s he been up to now? You seen him?’
‘He killed himself.’
‘What? Doc killed himself? Jesus, the fucking idiot.’
‘I know, he was in Rotterdam.’
‘Rotterdam?’
They went through the Salt-Shona conversation.
‘Do we know anything about it, about why?’ Randal asked.
‘Why Rotterdam, or why’d he kill himself?’
‘I don’t know. Both, I suppose.’
‘Nobody seems to know.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’
‘So what happens now? They just keep him over there, or what?’
‘They bring him back and bury him. Shona said she would call me again, tell me what’s happening.’
‘Jesus, Shona. How is she? She still on her own in that place? Her and Carolee still keeping the business going?’
‘Seems so.’
‘And Carolee? She still with the eyetie in Greek Fields?’
‘Again, as far as I know. But I don’t know much.’
‘So, Doc’s gone and offed himself, has he? Depleted our little gang by a quarter.’
‘If you want to get mathematical about it, I suppose he has.’
‘Rotterdam.’
‘Rotterdam.’
‘Anderson, you going to be on that phone all night?’ She was shouting from what seemed a long way off. ‘Somebody kill themselves, who?’
‘I’m nearly done for Christ’s sake,’ he shouted back to the woman.
Then to Salt, ‘Sorry about that. I need to go. Listen, thanks for ringing. Let me know what’s happening would you. Will Thimbles be coming up? He still playing his records for the bumpkins? You spoke to him?’
‘Yeah, I just spoke to him. He’s coming up.’
‘Be good to get together, I suppose. It’s been a while. Just let me know what’s happening.’
‘Will do. Well, you take care of yourself, Rags.’
‘You too, old friend.’
3
Salt poured himself another and sat looking out through the front window of the apartment. It was the place he was raised in, the one his parents had bought not long after the war ended. It was on the top floor of a block just off West Slaughter. They had all grown up in this area; he and the two he had just phoned and the dead man, Doc. From where he sat, none of them had lived more than fifteen streets away. They were not the money kids from the old families, but they weren’t the poor kids either. Their parents had done ok.
His own father, between starting his working life on the river and dying at fifty-one, had started his own engineering business and, depending on the state of contracts, employed around thirty people on an industrial estate at the northern edge of the city. Salt was the youngest of three by four years and the only boy; there were twin girls ahead of him. They were Delphin and Joan and there was some history there.
When she and Delphin were eleven, and Delphin was in bed with appendicitis, Joan was on her way to school when she got hit by a tram on Norfolk Street. She was killed without knowing anything about what had happened. And the shock of the thing seemed to stay with Delphin long after time had done its work on the others. Because from when she was thirteen, Salt’s father was a regular visitor to the police station, picking her up when she was found drunk in a park or on the street, or being called to the school because of some disturbance she had been involved in.
And from there on in, things never really got much better for her. She got the occasional job, but could never hold onto anything. And now, and for the last twelve years, she had been out in the countryside at a state asylum; Juniper Haven, they called it. Salt visited her once a year, just before Christmas, and every time he saw her she looked as if she had not seen the sun since his previous visit. They would walk round the gardens – which didn’t have any junipers in it as far as he could see – and she talked about the sister who was killed as if it had happened the day before. And Salt would say the right things, in a sympathetic kind of way, about how bad the whole thing had been. But the fact was that, although he wished that she hadn’t been hit by a tram, he didn’t miss his dead sister in the way that her twin did; in fact, he could barely remember her; in fact, save for when he visited Juniper Haven, it barely occurred to him that he had a dead sister.
When Sam Salt was twenty-nine his mother died. And because he had one sister long dead and one in the nut-house, he was the sole inheritor of everything; the apartment, its contents, and all that was in her accounts. Although he put some of the money into Delphin’s account, and made a donation to the place that was looking after her, as far as he knew she only withdrew enough to pay for clothes when she needed them, and for an escorted outing to take flowers to her sister’s grave on their birthday.
Anderson Randal had lived two streets away on Delamare. His father had started his working life in the city water department and by the time he was thirty-two he was their chief engineer. Randal was their one and only but, from him being around the fourteen mark, he and his father couldn’t get along. The problems were mainly to do with their different ideas about what Randal was going to do with his life. His old man’s idea was the he would get a degree in engineering, work for the City or one of the private companies that were springing up all around the north, and retire on a good pension. He was looking fifty years ahead at a time when Randal could barely see a day ahead. And Randal’s idea was that he was going to write state-of-the-nation novels and win the Nobel Prize for literature.
Thimblehay’s mother had inherited a large apartment on Gander Lane. She was an administrator at the Tech, his father taught drawing and sculpture at the Arts College. He played fiddle and she played the dulcimer in a folky band which had a Monday residency at the Raincock Club on Hydrant Lane. Everyone – including Thimblehay and his sister, and therefore their friends when they got used to the idea – called them Tom and Nanny, Nanny being short for Nanette. They were liberal types who didn’t mind Thimblehay smoking dope in the house and from thirteen, the four pals spent a lot of time there, absorbing the semi-bohemian atmosphere, listening to Thimblehay’s parents and their friends talking about music and art and exhibitions; books and films and politics; stuff that they didn’t hear too much about in their own homes.
And then there was Docherty, the man lying on a slab in Rotterdam.
His father had inherited a funeral parlour: Docherty – Bespoke Funeral Services – Undertaker and Embalmer. They had been the main people for that sort of thing in the southern part of the city since the turn of the century.
There were three younger Dochertys: Carolee the oldest; Shona two years behind: and then James. Their mother died when James was eight; leukaemia, which took a long time to kill her. When it finished her, it was old man Docherty and his daughters who got her ready; they kept the youngest out of it to the extent that he barely knew what was happening until he watched them lowering the box into the ground.
And then when the old man died, Carolee and Shona took over the business.
Shona did the main work and saw to Docherty, which was the alternative to him being taken in by relatives they barely knew, or being looked after by the City. At first, there were doubts that they could keep the thing going, but they managed to persuade their suppliers and the bank that they had picked up enough knowledge to stay in profit and they were never short of business, especially in the winter months. They were helped by the fact that old man Docherty had made sure that they now owned the buildings and the land around.
4
So, they were the four: Sam Salt, Anderson Randal, Edward Thimblehay and James Docherty; and that was the soil from which they grew. They were friends from the age of eleven when they found each other during their first confusing weeks at Old Powers High. They were not at first an exclusive group; they wandered into and around each other’s orbits until, a year or two on, records and books and art-house films bound them tighter until they formed a solid centre toward which the other misfits of the place gravitated.
Soon, they were surnames or variations of surnames only, because surnames were for the big boys: the Shakespeares, the Bogarts, and the Picassos. Those types had no need of first names for people to know who they were. It was a man thing, and the Old Powers boys fancied themselves as men, biding their time in adolescent bodies until they were ready to impose themselves upon the world. So very early on it was Salt, Thimblehay, Docherty and Randal. And very soon after that, it was Salts, Thimbles, Doc and Rags.
They mastered the dishevelment of expensive clothes – unbuttoned shirts and skewed ties, bright socks and sometimes none. They went to the limit of what they might get away with at such a school. They wore their hair long when others were short, and short when others were long. Doc usually took the lead. He was the first of them to wear a buttonhole – there was nothing in the school rules about it, for or against. He alone had a short-lived spell of wearing glasses with coloured rims. He often wore velvet pants on the basis of having read that, for the wearing of velvet pants, men were sent to the camps in the Soviet Union.
They swapped books – the Beats and Baudelaire, Orwell and DH Lawrence. They tried to understand what there might be to understand in Jean Paul Sartre. For a while everything became, or could become, or was existential. They listened to Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. They sneaked into The Subterranean Horns, which was a jazz club off Grosvenor Street. They swore on a copy of The Outsider that they would not become a part of the Grover population; the workaday crowd, striving for what they could not have, or for what was not worth having. They would not be as their parents were, plodding their way to their doom.
At fourteen they started a band – The Guitar Horses – and practiced in the basement at Thimble’s place. Of them, Thimbles turned out to be the musician. He played guitar and drums and keyboards and had some talent, whereas the others had only enthusiasm. At first, they did Byrds and Beatles covers, then they attempted their own stuff, Thimbles and Doc being the main writers; they wrote songs of male loneliness and struggle – which they were acquainted with through books and the songs of others; songs by which they hoped to attract girls to their sensitivity. Through Thimbles’ father they got unpaid bookings at the Tuppertown People’s Centre, which held a youth club Tuesdays and Fridays, watched over by a priest by the name of O’Hara who wore his shirts open-necked for the occasion.
5
When they got to sixteen, Doc disappeared for a while. They had queued overnight at Poop Records to get tickets to see the Stones in Our Lady of Consolation Park – it was the Rolling Stones first tour of the country. Still high on their success, showing their tickets off, they went round to Thimble’s place that evening. There, they had a beer and a couple of joints and listened to some stories from a friend of Thimble’s parents, Felix Frances, who back then was in a television series called Holland’s Quest, but who now nobody has heard of for years. He told tales about the vices and peccadilloes of the stars of the day, who was taking what, who had been in rehab, and who was screwing who. Although they didn’t really know who or what he was talking about most of the time, the friends, already primed for a good time, laughed along.
Frances seemed taken with Doc. It might have been the fact that Doc was wearing a red and yellow striped blazer and a blue cravat which to an actor’s eyes might have had a hint of theatricality about it. Or it may have been that Doc actually had some adult-sounding things to say in regard to some of what Frances happened to be talking about. Whatever it was, he made a point of passing the joint straight to Doc, bypassing Salt and Nan who were seated right next to him.
And for some reason he asked Doc what he was planning to do with his life. To that kind of question Doc would usually give a sarcastic answer, but this time he said that he might give the acting game a try. That was how he said it, the acting game. The other three looked at each other, what the fuck? That was the first they had heard anything of Doc’s acting ambitions. Then they laughed because they had a fair idea about where the notion came from. It came from Ms Dowson.
6
Ms Dowson was the drama teacher, and also took literature. They were all involved in the drama class and were in love with her. That afternoon, having gone straight to school from the Stones queue, they had been acting Death of a Salesman: Doc and Salt played the brothers, Thimbles was the neighbour and Rags was Willie Loman’s boss. There was an older kid, Ralph Skeets – who really did want to be an actor and wasn’t there mainly because he liked to be near Ms Dowson – playing Willie Loman. He kept talking like the Loman character even when they were taking a break, which was most of the time. Ms Dowson said she admired his dedication to the role, but most of the others thought he sounded like a jerk.
‘Do you have a first name, Miss?’ Thimbles had asked when they were taking a break.
‘Yeah,’ Doc said. ‘Can we use it? Be less formal.’
‘Take no notice of them, Miss,’ Marianne Teenan, who was playing Willie’s wife and was two years older than the friends, said. ‘They are immature idiots.’
‘Idiots or not,’ Thimbles said, ‘might be good for the morale of the cast, less hierarchical.’
Marianne Teenan tutted loudly.
‘Well gentlemen, if you must know my name is Emmeline, and my friends call me Emmy.’
‘So, what can we call you?’ Salt asked. ‘Would Emmy be ok?’
‘No, Miss Dowson will suffice for the time being I think. Shall we get on?’
She smiled as she said it, a lopsided smile, with the tip of her tongue touching the tips of her teeth – which, along with the words for the time being, hinted at a future beyond the present time; a future in which they might call her Emmy, or even Em, when they might repeat her name breathlessly as they lay on top of her, just as they had seen Marlon Brando at The Reel Deal laying on top of Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. And Emmaline, as she lived in their imaginations, and living there at the limits of her reason, would mutter their names, depending upon which of them it was that was lying between her legs.
So that evening at Thimble’s place it might have been an easy leap for Doc, from lusting after Emmeline Dowson to his answer to Felix Frances’ question. And upon that answer, Frances swapped seats with Salt and started giving tips to Doc about getting started, and Doc either was or pretended to be interested.
The three of them left Thimble’s place and went their separate ways at nine-thirty. It was then that the City was having one of its crackdowns on what it called the drugs problem and the police stopped Doc on Ghent Lower Street, half a mile from his home. When they searched him, they found a small piece of hash wrapped in silver foil. Unknown to the others, Felix Frances had given it to him as they were leaving; but when the police asked him where he got it from he wouldn’t say, even though they told him they could go easy with him if he spilled the beans. His father came to the station and begged him to say where he had obtained the stuff but Doc, either because he was enjoying the drama, or because he didn’t want to get the Thimble’s into any kind of trouble, wouldn’t say. He thought they would just give his father a fine and that would be the end of it. But when his case was heard the next week, they didn’t just hand out a fine, they gave him six weeks at the Juvenile Improvement Camp in Cambo Post, about fifteen miles out to the north-west of the city. The friends, who had thought the thing a huge laugh, found out what had happened when it was in that night’s Citizen. By that time, James Docherty had been processed as detainee number 1015.
He wrote to them three weeks later; identical letters:
Hey,
Your old jailbird pal here. Hope you haven’t been stealing all my girls while I’m in here. In case you were wondering, I’ve settled in ok. Got my own pad with a decent stereo system and one of the female guards comes in and blows me every night after dinner. Part of the new liberal regime apparently. It can get somewhat tedious night after night but what the hell. The food is good – last night it was monkfish goujons, potato dauphinoise and roasted vegetables. Only problem was the white wine, a ’58 Riesling which hadn’t been sufficiently chilled. But to give them their due, they have promised that it will not happen again.
And we get our weekly ration of weed. Is that ironic or what? Is that the word – ironic? I get mixed up with irony and coincidence or just plain odd. It’s something me and the boys discuss a lot during recreation, the meaning of words and of life generally. There are many philosophers in here, many of a Hobbesian persuasion and some of them quite violent in their arguments.
Believe it or not, I’m still doing my schoolwork. They send it in every week and I’ll be out in time for the exams. My nearest and dearest are visiting on Sunday and I just can’t wait to see the old folks, they’ll be so pleased to see me in my prison clothes with my neat new haircut. Weather permitting, we may have a picnic in the meadow.
I suppose the Rolling Stones will just have to try to get along without me.
Hope you are all keeping as well as I am.
Th-th-that’s All for Now Folks
Doc
A week later he wrote identical letters to them again:
Hey, Old Friend,
You may already know – or you may not know. If you already know I’m sorry to bore you with the repetition, but my old man died on Monday. Can you believe that. He and my sisters came out here on Sunday – even though I told them there was no need and that I would see them when I got out – and when they got home, he had a heart attack in the middle of the night. So, he is dead. Is that ironic? I must ask the gorgeous Emmeline about that, whether the death of an undertaker is ironic, or just inevitable. My new friends here have kindly offered to take me to the funeral. I’m pretty sure you will like them once you get to know them.
Your Little Orphan Pal
Doc
They already knew. That, too, had been in the Citizen – Father of Jailed Teen Dies. Death of Well-Known Grover Figure.
They didn’t know Doc’s father particularly well, but they got out of school and went to the funeral anyway. Carolee, who had the qualifications, took charge of the logistics – who did what and when. Shona, not yet qualified, assisted. They had no control over their brother though – what time he arrived, what time he left, where he sat. They had already brought their father into the chapel when he arrived handcuffed to a female guard, both of them followed by a male guard. The murmuring ceased when they came up the aisle and everyone turned to look at him. With his free hand he gave a discreet wave to his friends and they nodded in return. As they approached the front pew, Shona moved toward him with her arms stretched but the guard he was handcuffed too raised her palm to keep her back. Carolee was arranging the flowers on top of the coffin.
At the grave’s edge, a piper played a lament for George Docherty; a nod to some Scottish ancestry. Some wept, but not his handcuffed son, nor his daughters. Doc spent much of the time looking up to the sky and his guards looked to their shoes. And his top-hatted daughters had their jobs to do. After their father was lowered, they paid the gravediggers in cash.
When it seemed appropriate Salt, Randal and Thimbles walked toward where Doc was standing at the other side of the grave. They wanted to get close to him, and to ask about his Stones ticket and what Combo Post was like, but the people from the prison moved him away. And from the back of the car, he gave a two-fingered salute with his free hand. They didn’t know whether the salute was a jokey hippy-like peace greeting – they were hippy-haters – or a sign that he had only two weeks left of his incarceration to go. Shona and Carolee, Carolee’s hand on Shona’s arm, watched him being taken down the long drive and onto the Olympic Road. Then they began to get the right people into the right cars for the short journey back to where they would have tea, and talk of the deceased and what might become of his son.
There were more letters and two weeks later Shona went out to collect him.
That same evening the friends got together in Heathers Bar on Porterfield Street. They asked him about the prison, and he made light of it all. He didn’t ask about the Stones and they didn’t tell him how great it had been. They had wondered at the time whether from his cell he had been able to hear the noise from Consolation Park, but they didn’t ask, it would have been too cruel. They drank beer and later spirits, and just after midnight Doc collapsed in the street and was taken to the Saint James Infirmary to have his stomach pumped.
7
Biding their time before going off to college, Randal and Thimbles got jobs in Norman Blow’s record shop on Peel Street, Salt worked for the city’s gardens department; and Doc, through the influence of his sisters, dug graves up at the south cemetery four days a week. In the evenings they got together at Thimble’s place and tried to write songs and at the weekends they spent most of their wages in Heathers.
One morning, not long after his stomach pump, Doc for the first time went alone through the swing doors and stepped into the big main room. It was early and he was the first customer. The barman was in the cellar – he could hear him moving barrels or whatever it was they did down there – so he was alone for a few minutes. Without people, without the company of his excited friends, the place smelled different and looked bigger.
‘You got ID?’ the barman asked when he came up. He didn’t recognise Doc, separate from his pals. They were spenders and had not before been asked for ID.
‘Not on me,’ Doc said, padding his breast pocket. ‘Sorry. You want me to…?’ He didn’t bother completing the sentence.
‘Well bring it next time, will you? We don’t want neither of us ending up in jail, do we?’
He ordered a half of Hooters Ale and took it to a window seat.
There, it was as strange as he had hoped it would be, sitting in an empty bar alone like a Bukowski or a Roth. He had wondered about the people – always men – who sat alone in bars in the morning. What did they think about? Was this it for the rest of the day, for the rest of their lives? Those solitary men who sat with their drinks, sometimes looking at a newspaper, sometimes not. And when not, what was going through their minds? Old loves, old failures, things they might have done but didn’t, people they might have been kinder to, or how they might have avoided sitting alone in places like Heathers so often and for so long. Or could it be, was it possible, that they were happy?
And he watched the world outside and pondered the mystery of the passing people and their business. What could be going on in all of those lives? Were they actual lives? Or were they phantasmal figures sent for his wonderment and amusement? He wanted on this side of the glass to get started on his life; a life which would not, like those out there be one of anonymity and ordinary failure. If there was to be failure, then it would not be plain; it would be as a rocket exploding on its way to a far and unvisited galaxy, or a fall from a high virgin peak, within grasp of the summit. He sipped his Hooters and saw Brueghel’s Icarus take shape in the coloured glass.
A few minutes in and the entrance of another customer, and that customer’s glance in his direction, excited in the boy a sense of his own absurdity; he saw himself through those other eyes, as someone who had strayed comically beyond the bounds of his years, playing a part – that of the solitary and tragic barroom drinker – for which he was not yet ready and might never be. Unnerved, he abandoned his drink and joined the people on the street.
In September they had a last night together at Heathers and the next day they were in different towns. Docherty started a media and drama course in Bellenberg, Salt started a course in Art History at the Weser Institute; Thimblehay did music at Cole College and Randal did literature at Galion Arts College. Their long drift had begun.
8
They came back at Christmas, and then came back to summer jobs. That first time, Doc turned up with Glory Ohio, who some people had heard of – she had had been Saint Bonnie in The Life of Saint Bonnie and had a part in something directed by Roger Corman. She was twenty-five and to them seemed much older. And she carried herself as though she was the biggest thing to hit the screen since Greta Garbo. She called Doc Jimbo, and sometimes Jimmy. Like his sisters, she never referred to him as Doc.
‘Is that her real name?’ Randal asked, a few hours into their first evening in Heathers. ‘Glory Ohio?’
‘Who knows?’ Doc said. ‘And who cares? She can be who the hell she likes, can’t she? We all can.’
‘Only asking,’ Randal said.
‘Only telling,’ Doc said.
Doc and Glory stayed with Shona for four days. On the last night before she had to return to Bellenberg they had a party. When Doc fell asleep in his old room, she and Thimblehay found themselves alone out in the garden. He told her that she reminded him of Slim Watchkins, who people now seem to have forgotten but who used to sing in a jazzy outfit called The Unholy Alliance after Grace Slick beat her to the Jefferson Airplane job.
‘Really?’ she had said. ‘You really think I look like Slim Watchkins?’
‘The dead spit,’ Thimblehay said.
‘Dead spit? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Dead spit. You don’t say that where you come from? Where do you come from anyway?’
‘None of your damned business and no, we most certainly do not. What’s it mean?’
‘Just means you look very much like her.’
‘Do I? Ok. You’re not so bad, you know that? Jimbo made you all sound like a bunch of jerks. But for young kids you seem ok.’
‘He’s the jerk, falling asleep and leaving you all alone like this.’
‘I’m not alone. You’re here.’
They kissed and, each holding the hips of the other, lowered themselves onto the grass.
‘Let’s keep this a big shush, shall we?’ she said. ‘Just keep it nice between us. Jimmy can be a bit on the insecure side. I can barely look at a cherry trifle and he gets jealous.’
‘A big shush it is,’ Thimblehay said.
9
Five years later, Thimblehay was playing in bands in one of the southern towns where his girlfriend was from. One of them was a three-piece called Devil Don’t Care and he had co-written something called Berlin Rendezvous which got some radio plays and got to a place in the low end of the charts. After that, they went nowhere and he started working for the music magazines and Sunday papers, writing about other people’s gigs and records, doing profiles. He would phone the friends and tell them his stories; the crazy times with Iggy and Jim, going round Europe with The Carruthers, the time he got mugged by three black guys in Pittsburgh when he was there to interview Billy Deacon. For a while they were interested.
Salt, two years out of college, was working in the archives of the Grover Museum and Gallery. After five years he was also lecturing in the evenings at The Grover Institute of Art. There, he soon became aware that it was necessary, or at least an advantage in terms of money and position, to have opinions about opaque subjects and to have those opinions printed, distributed and read by the right people.
Early on, he had tried out several opinions – about the significance of Titian’s use of blue for one, and about the specific composition of Van Ruisdael landscapes for two – and had then through persistence and contacts had those opinions published in the academic magazines. He then passed those opinions on to his students. His most persistent and disseminated opinion was that the Renaissance painter’s incorporation of domestic details into their work – the intricacies of their tiles, the curves of their roof slates, the dust kicked up by a passing mule – reflected man’s changing view of his place in the world, an appreciation of the material world’s importance and a diminution of supernatural influence. He didn’t know whether any of it was true, but he wrote many articles along those lines before it became more advantageous to get into the conceptual side of things; the bricks on the floor, the empty frames, the chair on top of the Formica table.
Straight from college, Randal got a reporting job in Bisket Bridge, way up in the north. He came down occasionally to see his mother and would go for a drink with whichever of the pals was available. He seemed to be having no luck with women. One of them had an abortion while carrying his child; another died of some kind of overdose, the details of which he didn’t care to go into.
10
Then ten years. And Doc stayed away for most of those years. He told them he was trying to get going in the film business, working on some low-budget projects. One time he told Thimblehay, but not the others, that he had met Truffaut and hoped to get some work with him on his next film. Thimblehay passed the information onto Salt and Randal both of whom to each other doubted that Doc was about to work with Francois Truffaut. They didn’t say so, but they both hoped that it was not true. It would cast too much of a shadow over their own lives. Then Truffaut died and the shadow lifted for a while.
Then Doc came back for a few months and stayed with Shona. Nobody asked about Truffaut and he didn’t mention him. He started going round with a local girl who had been in and out of their group. Claris came from a Catholic family in the Campion district. She was the black sheep among three older sisters – one whom was with the Poor Clares – and ran wild in her teenage years. Over the previous few years, she had slept not only with Doc, but also with Salt and Thimbles, and others besides.
One evening, Doc rang Salt:
‘Hey man,’ he said. ‘Time to congratulate your old pal.’
‘Congratulations. What for?’
‘Listen to this, I’m about to become a father.’
‘Really? Who’s the unlucky woman?’
‘Claris Spector. You remember Claris?’
‘I remember.’
‘Well, she’s pregnant.’
‘Really? Jesus. Wow. That’s great news I suppose.’
‘No suppose about it, old friend. It is great news.’
‘What, so you’re pleased about it?’
‘Pleased? I’m over the moon as the soccer stars say.’
‘Wow again Doc. What can I say?’
‘You can say, Let us go out and celebrate my nearest and dearest friend before fatherhood prohibits such excesses.’
With Randal they went out to Heathers. Doc was high on weed and the excitement of imminent fatherhood. And Randal, who had old cuts on his face which he said were from Carly, the photographer woman he was living with, advised him to run while he had the chance. Pointing to the cuts, he said, ‘This is the kind of thing that happens if you hang around too long. They soon change from how they were when you met them. Look at the evidence. It’s irrefutable.’
‘That what you intend?’ Salt asked. ‘You plan to settle now, in Grover.’
‘Well, why not? It might just be what I need, you know. Some responsibility, stop the drift, something to keep the ship steady. We’ll get married of course.’
‘Doc, are you fucking crazy?’ Randal asked. ‘Are you off your fucking chump? Married?’
None of them was married as far as the others knew.
‘Certainly. And in recognition of your support, you can be my best man, Rags. Salt, you can be groomsman.’
‘Be what?’
‘Groomsman. It’s a very onerous responsibility I’ve heard it said. Not all are up to the task.’
‘What can I say?’ Salt said. ‘I’m quite overcome.’
They stayed in Heathers until two when Shona came to collect Doc. She wound the window down.
‘Has he told you?’ she shouted across to Randal and Salt.
‘Yes, he has brought the glad tidings to us.’
She tapped the side of her head with her finger.
‘Oh ye of fragile faith,’ Doc said. ‘I bestow upon my dear sister the gift of aunthood and scorn is my reward.’
‘Get in,’ Shona said. ‘Some of us need to work in the morning.’
Next day Claris Spector rang Salt. Salt was at the time living with a sculptor, Stella Sheers, who had a studio in Tuppertown.
‘Sam? You remember me, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘Course I remember you,’ he said. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘Well I’m sorry to bother you like this, but are you alone?’
‘Why, what is it?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘I know, I was with Doc last night. Congratulations.’
‘Did he seem happy?’
‘Ecstatic. I thought he might have run off but he seems to love the idea of being a father. Might be good for him, who knows?’
‘Might be. There’s only one problem.’
‘And which problem is that?’
‘The child I’m carrying. It’s not his.’
‘What do you mean, not his?’
‘Not his.’
‘Well, I’m sure I won’t like the answer to this, but whose is it?’
‘You know whose.’
‘Do I? How come?’
‘You know how come, Sam. Don’t come the innocent.’
‘Ok, less of the innocent, but how are you so sure? You’ve been seeing Doc a while now. We were a long way back and it was only once.’
‘Two months, and it was twice. He was up in Great Brunning trying to make a film so he said, remember? And me and Doc don’t exactly see each other. It’s yours, there’s no doubt. Couldn’t be anybody else’s.’
‘You sure?’
‘Course I’m sure, what do you take me for? And don’t answer that. You want to take a test or something to prove it?’
‘Oh God, what now? What the hell will he think of me? He’ll be crushed.’
‘I know. And we don’t want him to be crushed. Whatever you might think, I’m quite fond of Doc. It would cause too much trouble for him to find out, too much trouble for everybody, including you.’
‘Can’t you…you know?’
‘No I can’t. I could never do that. My religion says no even if I wanted to, which I don’t. And anyway, I need a child in my life. I need some focus, you know.’
He wondered what her religion said about drinking too much, sleeping around and telling big lies.
‘What if it looks more like me than Doc.’
‘Well let’s just hope the poor kid looks more like me than either of you.’
‘So, you want me to support it? Support you both, I mean. Its only right, I suppose.’
‘No, that’s ok. It would just get too complicated. We’ll manage.’
‘So you don’t plan to tell anybody? That its mine, I mean?’
‘Of course I don’t plan to tell anybody. We can live with it. People live with a lot worse. And if I were you Sam, I wouldn’t plan too much on thinking of it as your child.’
‘So in that case why’d you tell me, Claris? Why mention it, if you don’t plan on me being around for the kid or even thinking about it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m just a bit confused I suppose. I needed to say it out loud, and you seemed to be the appropriate person to say it out loud to. Some things are just too big to keep in. But you’re right, I shouldn’t have burdened you with it.’
‘No it’s ok, thanks for telling me. I appreciate it. You need anything, you let me know, ok?’
‘And Doc. Even if you have a fight with him, you won’t tell him, will you?’
‘Don’t worry.’
To the surprise of no one, Doc and Claris didn’t marry. He stayed around for the birth and for a while after, although he always stayed living with Shona. Then he said he had the chance of a job which he couldn’t ignore with some experimental film group on the south coast. Claris didn’t mind; if anything, it made her life easier, not having to try to please both Doc and her family. After that he came back for birthdays when he could, and most Christmases. When he came back, he made a huge fuss of the kid who they had called Ingrid. People who knew Doc assumed the name to be after Ingrid Bergman; it turned out though that Claris’ grandmother was also called Ingrid.
He invited Salt round for one of the kid’s birthday parties, but Salt said he was busy.
11
Fifteen years.
Salt had recently – but not for the first time in the middle of a sleepless winter night, when the branches were being blown against his window – looked at his notes, written years before. How many times he had said these, or words similar, to his students since then:
It is, I think, most exemplified in the paintings of Brueghel that we detect this change. Even his many works with overtly moral themes – his Netherlandish Proverbs being a case in point – are packed with the details of everyday life. He is as cognisant of the place where people live their lives than the reason as to why they are living them, or believe themselves to be. The shitting figures, the gossiping women, the dogs on the bone, they all take precedence over the distant steeple and any morality or promise of redemption which it may represent.
And Veronese, let us look at his Crucifixion, the event itself viewed through a domestic window. If we look closely, we see how he fusses over these tiles. Look at this one below the arched window, look at the tiny bird and the nesting materials which it holds in its beak. Look at the tree in which it is putting those materials to use. Small though the whole conception may be, the reticulations of the leaves have been rendered to wondrous and detailed effect. Veronese has lowered his gaze from the heavens and taken notice of the world as it is, not as it might be, or how he hopes it to be in some promised future. A tile is afforded more time and attention than the man and the cross to which he is pinned. The crucifixion is just another detail, no more or less important than the observer’s immediate surroundings. The tile as well as the dying man will in the broadest sense form the bedrock of a changed Western culture, and not only in aesthetic terms. And notice, the figure in the painting is not even looking at the event which for us, and certainly for our forebears, seems to be a cataclysmic and defining one. He seems to find more of interest in what is before him on his lectern. He is more aware of his material existence than on otherworldly notions. His redemption, or consolation at least, lies to hand.
‘Sam? What you thinking about?’ The yawned question came from Debbie Calvert, one of his mature students.
‘Veronese,’ he had said. ‘And Brueghel. And the big sham that is my life.’
‘Go to sleep.’
The thing with Debbie Calvert didn’t last long. On their third night together, she wore underwear upon which was imprinted images of Disney characters, reanimated by the movement of her buttocks. The previous two times it had been black, then dark blue, silk briefs which thrilled him somewhat. Now, Daffy and Dumbo, Bambi, Cruella and Donald, Mickey and Minnie came to life when she walked from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again. They, and Donald in particular – as if warning of the approach of a runaway train – signalled to him that there could be no future with Debbie.
He had read somewhere that the person who was the voice of Mickey was married to the person who was the voice of Minnie. That morning, while he was inside Debbie, he heard them in his head, loud and squawky in their passion.
12
Shona rang Salt to tell him that they were collecting her brother from the airport at four on Friday. ‘We’re picking James up,’ she had said, as if he was coming back from a holiday. They could see him after six if they wanted to. They would bury him on the Monday.
‘You needn’t if you don’t want to,’ she said. ‘It’s just what some people do.’
‘Yeah, course. I’ll tell the others.’
He hasn’t seen a body before.
They gather on the Friday afternoon in Heathers. It is the first time in five years that the three of them have been in the same room. Thimblehay has come up from Hollins with his woman, Flo, who is still sleeping in the hotel. It has been six years since Salt has seen him. Randal, came in on the train from Carlisle Hills. Salt was relieved that he didn’t have Sylvie with him, although he did say she was coming to the funeral.
At this time of the day, the place is quiet; a skinny black kid is reading a book of Tort behind the bar, and seven older men are pretty evenly spaced around the room. Apart from the odd exchange about the weather or the local sports teams, the three old friends are the only ones talking. They are talking about Docherty and what had happened. And they didn’t know for sure what had happened. They had only the information that Salt had from Shona, that he had been found by a cleaner two weeks before in a small hotel in the docks area of Rotterdam. As far as they are aware, aside from it being the last place he was alive in, he had no connection to Rotterdam. None of them had any connection to Rotterdam.
Outside, darkness fell and the lights went on in the apartments on the other side of the road. Then, moments after the streets-lamps came on, and as if he had been waiting for the cue, he came past. Shona was driving and Carolee was in the passenger seat, holding one of her kids on her knee. They were both wearing their ordinary clothes, as if they were coming back home with the groceries. The three friends watched as they took him round and into Norfolk Street. Nobody said anything for a while.
‘What the hell was he thinking?’ Randal wondered aloud.
‘Why the hell didn’t he just ring one of us?’ Salt said. ‘We could’ve talked him round.’
‘Who said it? I can’t go on, I must go on.’
‘Becket.’
‘He was right, you’ve just got to go on.’
‘He couldn’t, or he would,’ Randal said. ‘You must reach a point where you just can’t, where the future is all pain.’
‘Well, well,’ Thimbles said. ‘Socrates has come among us.’
‘Better Socrates than pop-picker to the yokels,’ Randal said. ‘How’s Iggy anyway?’
‘Touché, my friend. Touché.’
‘Calm down, boys,’ Salt said. ‘Let’s have some decorum.’
They sat in silence for a long while, the only noise in the bar coming from the afternoon drinkers; the rustle of a newspaper, the clearing of a throat.
‘Jesus, look at us,’ Thimblehay said. ‘Sitting here like grieving old widows. He’s probably up there now, having a good laugh.’
Nobody said anything. Thimblehay tried to hide his embarrassment and asked if anyone wanted another drink, but nobody did. They finished what they had and went across the street to see their friend for the last time before his sisters took him up the Olympic Road.
13
It was Shona who showed them through. She lived alone there, in the next-door apartment, where they had lived as children. Because it was them, she wasn’t in her working clothes and she spoke in her normal voice; she was barefoot, her hair was dyed red, and she was wearing a T-shirt which said Hot Diggity Dog. Seeing her for the first time in years, and being in that room, Salt thought of what they had done that time; since then, he had never seen a passing funeral without their encounter coming to his mind; her quick breathing and that hat, and her right hand – then as now with a large ring on every finger – covering his mouth as he came, even though there was nobody in the place but five dead people. Since then, for him sex was often accompanied by the odours of embalming fluid and polished pine. She opened the lid.
In the clichéd way of the dead, Docherty looked like he might be asleep. He looked more peaceful than any of them could ever recall seeing him when he was alive. But the finality of his situation, the certainty that this was extinction and not sleep, was suggested by a plug of cotton-wool stuffed into his head, just forward of his right ear. Randal pointed to the area and looked to Shona, and Shona nodded.
‘Nobody hear anything in the hotel?’ he asked. ‘Nobody say anything?’
‘Not that kind of hotel, apparently,’ Shona said. ‘That’s what we were told. It wasn’t the Ritz.’
They looked down into the box, and nobody spoke until Thimblehay said, ‘Well.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Shona said. ‘That’s James, there he is, thanks for calling round.’
They hugged her awkwardly as they were leaving and Salt, last in line, she bit softly on his earlobe.
14
They returned to the bar, where the skinny kid was still reading his book.
‘You remember Gladstone?’ Thimblehay asked
‘We’re not heading down memory lane, are we?’ Randal said. ‘Come on, there’s nothing down there, it’s a dead-end.’
‘Yeah, wonder what happened to old Gladstone?’ Salt said. ‘Or any of those people.’
‘Who cares?’ Randal said. ‘Just who the fuck cares?’
Gladstone was the physical education teacher at Old Powers High. He hated them, and they hated him. He hated them because of their cocky attitudes, their lack of sporting interest, and the fact that he knew that two of them smoked and he never tired of telling people how much he hated smoking. But the reason they hated him was mainly because of Miss Dowson.
Three of them had gone on a camping trip from the school. Salt had had to go to a family wedding, so he couldn’t go. They would not have dreamt of going to the camp normally; at fifteen, none of them had been before. The camping trips were for the outdoorsy kids, the sporty types who wore their ties straight and polished their shoes each day and whose hair wouldn’t draw any attention. It wasn’t for the cool kids.
But finding out that Ms Dowson would be there, they put their names down.
It was a four-day trip to Chalmers Lake, about ninety miles east of the city. There was an itinerary and it included long stretches on hiking-trails, swimming and canoeing on the lake, talks on plant-life and the climate from the head of bio-sciences, Mr Josquin. Gladstone was down as the physical training coordinator, although it didn’t say what that meant exactly. Ms Dowson was the house-mother and dispenser of any medicines which may be needed. The boys hope to attract a minor ailment which might require medication.
It does not turn out the way they had hoped. They barely see her. She doesn’t join them on the hiking trails or in the water, although she sometimes watches from the shore as they slap around in canoes. They see her at the evening meal – three long trestle-tables at which they eat the food prepared by two local hippy women brought in for the occasion. But she is at the staff table, alongside Miss Graber, one of the geography teachers, with Gladstone sitting opposite.
They brought their own provisions. On the second night, they are having a beer and cigarettes a way out from the camp when Ms Dowson, out for a stroll, sees them. Luckily for them she is alone.
‘Boys, boys, boys,’ she says quietly. ‘This is not permitted.’
But she is smiling, as if in on the transgression. Emboldened, Thimblehay holds his bottle out to her.
‘Feel free,’ he says. ‘We won’t tell.’
They expect her to refuse, but she steps into the clearing and takes the bottle, wipes the opening with her forearm and takes a drink. She hands it back and presses her forefinger to her lips. The exchange makes the hardships of the trip seem worthwhile.
After the meal on the final night, they walk round to the far end of the lake. They were not country boys, any of them. The books they had read had taken them from New York to San Francisco with Jack and Neal; and down the Mississippi with Tom and Huck; they had been in the gulags, fought against Franco and been Down and Out in Paris and London. But, outside of books and films, they had in their fifteen years, except for the odd family trip to the coast or to another city, barely been beyond the outer suburbs of Grover. This was a world fresh to them.
They sat at a small jetty and drank their bottles of Hooters Ale, and listened to this newly discovered world: the sounds of birds, and trees which they could not name, the air moving across the water, and the water bubbling up onto the shale. The emptiness of the place, a world without the confusions and threats of the city, where the people on the streets shout about God or are looking for a hit; without the puerile advertisements for stuff nobody ever thought they might want. They sipped their beers and listened to a quieter world, a world cut off from the roar of human stupidity.
Then, among these fresh sounds, they heard Ms Dowson. Not her voice exactly but a sound which suggested her close presence. It was a sound similar to that which each of them had previously created many times in their heads. They looked at each other with exaggerated surprise but didn’t speak. Rising together, they walked tip-toed toward the sound which by then had been joined by another, the second one possessing an animal depth, more like a growl. Then, through the trees they saw movement, something on the ground, maybe something trying to escape from a trap, or some creature fallen from a tree and hurt. Could traps be laid here? Did animals fall from trees?
They breathed without sound, glancing back and forth between each other and between the figure on the ground. And when their eyes adjusted to the green shade, they saw that it was not one figure but two, and the two figures shaped themselves into Gladstone and Ms Dowson, their very own Emmeline. She was laid face down on a blanket, her brow on her forearm and he was laid on top of her, thrusting in the style of Brando in Last Tango in Paris. They could hear him, Emmy, Emmy, for God’s sake Emmy.
How the fuck? Gladstone? And him calling her Emmy. How come him and not one of them? How come so early in their hopeful lives the triumph of philistinism over beauty? If they were in any doubt, they were now certain; their friends Camus and Sartre were right, there was no God, and certainly not one who was wise and just and fair. No, something was very wrong with the world and that wrongness had been exemplified by what they had just seen: Ms Dowson, in her dishevelment, being violated by the king of the parallel bars.
15
Thimblehay bought the next round.
‘So, here we are,’ Salt said.
‘Yep, here we are,’ Randal said. ‘How’s the pewter mug racket anyway? I saw you on the news. I thought, at last my friend has hit the big-time.’
Salt had been in the news the previous year. He was on the board of the Mignolet Gallery and they were about to bid for what was said in the brochure to be a seventeenth-century domestic by Jacob Neeskens. Next to a river scene by Corot, it would have been their most expensive acquisition if they bought it. Salt, who had some kind of interest in the period, went out to the auction-room to check it out. Using a magnifying-glass, he noticed that a pewter-mug which was surrounded by dead rabbits, drinking-glasses and a cabbage was engraved with what was said to be the town-hall of a town twenty miles to the north of Ghent. Salt had been to that same town-hall and had some doubts. He looked the place up and found that it had not been built until at least one-hundred years after the supposed date of the painting. It turned out to be a forgery from the early nineteen-hundreds and barely worth the cost of the frame.
‘Pewter-mug racket is fine, thank you for asking,’ Salt said. ‘How’s Freddie Fuckwit or whatever he’s called doing?’
‘He’s bringing me a bucket-load of money every week if you must know.’
They stared coldly at each other.
‘You got kids, Thimbles?’ Salt said, to break the atmosphere.
‘Two as a matter of fact.’
‘Really, I didn’t know that. I should have known, shouldn’t I?’
‘You never asked.’
‘You see them?’ Randal asked.
‘Yeah, now and again.’
‘More than I do. Haven’t seen mine in ten years.’
‘That’s sad,’ Salt said.
They sat for a while, considering sadness.
16
On muddy ropes, Doc is lowered and comes to rest above his father. His mother is in there also, and the dark trench looks pretty full. Depending on how they work these things out, there might be room for just one extra, but no more. Doc has knocked things out of sequence and taken a place that was not meant for him. So the sisters, one of them at least, will have to make other plans.
17
There was no one else she could think of, so Shona asked Salt to give the eulogy. And when the time came, he read two verses from Ecclesiastes – which he referred to as that most literary of scriptures – and said some things about his friend. He talked about their schooldays and their shared enthusiasms; he raised an echoing laugh when he referred to the Guitar Horses and how, given an even break, they could have been bigger than the Beatles. He mentioned the injustice of Doc sitting in a cell at Cambo Post while the rest of them were watching the Stones in Consolation Park, and also how after those six weeks he came back and seemed to be his same old self – Same old Doc, he said, although he was only sixteen. And he said also that they had, the four of them, remained friends even though they went long periods with no word between them.
At the back of the altar a video was playing on a loop; Salt read his pieces and turned to watch – there they are at the coast; there is the child burying him in the sand, Doc standing in the water with the child on his shoulders, both of them sat on a low wall eating ice-creams, he chasing her over the sand with seaweed; she standing beside him eating candy-floss, he smoking a cigarette.
Salt turned back to the congregation: ‘Doc had a love of life,’ he said. ‘He loved music, he loved theatre, loved weed, loved his friends and family. And most of all, although nobody could have imagined such a love all those years back, he loved being a father.’ He looked to Claris, her and the child with the front row to themselves. Claris had her arm around the child’s shoulder, and was kissing the top of her head. Salt wanted to step down from the altar and tell her, Its ok, your father has not died. Here I am. You can stop crying.
As he sat back in his pew, he heard someone from behind say, Good man Salts. It was Thimblehay, his accent now more south than north. Without looking round, Salt raised his hand in acknowledgement.
18
Back at the funeral parlour it is a warm evening and they move out to the grassed garden at the back. It is where the families of the dead, freshly reminded of their own mortality, loiter. At first, the three men stand together with their partners, the six of them in a circle thinking of things to say, trying to avoid cliché. Then, when the silence becomes oppressive, they disperse to talk with people they barely know but who are somehow linked to them by the dead man.
A woman brings her daughter across to where Randal and Sylvie are standing.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ the woman says. ‘I’m a friend of the family, through Carolee, although I didn’t know James particularly well. I just wanted my daughter, Shirley, to meet you, Mr Pepper. She’s Fatty Loone’s biggest fan.’
‘Oh, that’s great,’ Sylvie said. ‘Isn’t that marvellous Anderson? Little Shirley here loves your books.’
‘Marvellous,’ Randal says.
‘Anderson?’ the woman asks.
‘Yeah,’ Sylvie says. ‘Pepper’s just a name he uses for the books. It was his agent’s idea. You need an autograph?’
‘Yeah, we need him to put Pepper though. Otherwise it’s not worth anything.’
‘Pepper it is,’ Sylvie says. ‘Anybody got a pen?’
‘Yeah, here,’ the woman says and she holds out a ball-point and a red autograph-book to Randal.
‘Just put To My Dearest Shirley Best Wishes PP Pepper.’
‘Fuck off,’ Randal says quietly but firmly.
‘I beg your pardon,’ the woman says.
‘Anderson,’ Sylvie says. Where’s your manners?’
‘Please forgive me,’ he says. ‘Let me rephrase that. Would you mind terribly just fucking off?’
‘Anderson, we’re at a funeral.’
‘I do apologise,’ he says. ‘Must be the grief getting to me.’
The woman hustles the child away.
19
When Salt’s wife goes inside to get a drink, Shona comes across.
‘Nice eulogy,’ she says.
‘Well, Doc was a good pal for a long time.’
‘He was always a strange kid. Everything ok with you?’
‘As ok as I deserve it to be, I suppose. I’ve got a job.’
‘And happily married?’
‘Married.’
‘Remember Jacob Mortensen?’
’Course I remember. 1928 to 1973. May he rest in peace.’
‘What are you two smiling about?’ Salt’s wife asks when she returns.
‘Just remembering Doc,’ Salt says.
20
The sun slides behind the cedar trees which stand high along three sides of the garden. The women who remain are seated around two large tables from which laughter erupts every few minutes. The three men are seated with their drinks at the farther end of the lawn. Each guesses what the others will be thinking about – a cheap hotel in Rotterdam, a gunshot.
When the light is almost gone from the garden and the time comes to go, the women have made friendships and are slow to part. They hug, swap numbers, and say they will stay in touch. And they mean to.
Each man shakes the hand of the others and speaks the other’s name. Then they stand apart in the gloom, waiting for the women. They make no arrangements, make no promises to call or to meet. If they do meet it will be unplanned, in the street or in a bar. They will meet as uneasy strangers, each seeing himself in the other, not wishing to look for long, and thinking of a reason to be on his way.
© 2026 Eamon Walsh All rights reserved.
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