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‘What?’
‘We’re going to go for a walk. I’m going to take you to where I go when it all gets too much. And we’re going to work out a plan, a life plan. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds good,’ he said.
He helped me wash up and then together we locked the bar.
‘Just let me stash this,’ he said and jogged round to the back of the pub with his sleeping bag, returning a couple of minutes later without it.
‘That took a while,’ I said.
He sniffed and brushed his hands together. ‘Just so no one nicks it. Right, let’s go.’
Chatting non-stop, we walked through town, over the bridge that crosses the canal, and towards the bottom of Heath Road. This will have been getting on for half eleven, quarter to midnight.
‘What is it you think you might want to do when you get yourself back on your feet?’ I asked him.
‘Plumber,’ he replied straight away. ‘The money’s good and I like people. I get on with them, like. I did go to college but it was hard to stay clean and warm and fed, so in the end I… I dropped out.’
‘I understand. Sounds like you got yourself into a bit of a mess, but you just need a new start. A base, food, routine, that type of thing.’
‘I do, yeah. That’s what I need, but it’s so hard.’
I wondered if I could give that to him, that start. What Mark would say if I suggested it. It might be exactly what we needed. But at the same time, I could feel a tension building up in me, and when I pressed my arm against my bag, it came as no surprise, none whatsoever, to feel the solid shape of the knife against my wrist. I couldn’t remember putting it in my bag and yet there was no surprise in it being there. My veins were rods running through me. It’s a wonder I could bend my limbs at all. Yes, the knife was there, where I had known in some dark part of me it would be. But whether it was for protection or destruction, I didn’t know.
We reached the town hall. Behind the railings, the grass verge stretched away, darkening by degrees into a deep jet void. In the upper branches of the oaks, the wind rustled the leaves. The town hall itself stood white and toy-like at the top of the rise. I thought about my wedding day, a day full of joy, of love.
On the other side of the road, the Red Admiral stood proud in its car park. The lights were still on; there were still people talking outside. It was a young person’s venue, I thought. Probably had a late licence.
‘Come on,’ I said, nodding towards it. ‘This used to be my local when I was your age.’
‘So you took him into the pub?’ Blue Eyes asks.
‘I did, yes.’
Did it feel weird, taking a homeless lad for a drink?
Blue Eyes didn’t ask that; that was me, asking myself.
And the answer would be no, not really. I’d flowed around this boy like water. I’d understood what he needed, what would make him feel better, and as no one else wanted my kindness, my love, I suppose you’d say, I’d offered it to him. Our feelings have to go somewhere, don’t they? None of us are above that, and lately I’d effectively been practising my… I suppose, with hindsight, you’d call them my grooming skills: engaging strangers in conversation by using insights I’d spent a lifetime learning – how to read faces, how to read bodies, how to listen, how to adapt, what they were really asking me for beneath the words they said or didn’t say. If someone was shy, I knew to chat so that they didn’t feel any responsibility for maintaining the conversation, but at the same time, if there was something they were struggling to say, I could give them space to reach it. With the extroverts, I knew I could tease more quickly, establish something affectionate, almost intimate, from the off. And I could adapt to every human need in between.
I’d rehearsed. I was prepared.
They were drops. I was water.
At the door of the pub, I hesitated. I hadn’t been inside since it was all crème de menthe and lemonade, cider and black, the crafty sighting of a Fourth Division footballer if you were lucky. The previous time I’d gone in, I’d not known it was the last time I’d go in as a young person, otherwise I might have made more of a fuss of it. We never know when it’s the last time, do we? For anything. The last time I ever breastfed Katie, I would have savoured the moment instead of wishing she would hurry up so I could hang the washing out. The last time Kieron let me hug him before he went off to uni, I would have held on tighter.
There on the steps of the pub, I texted him:Thinking of you. Hope you’re behaving yourself. Love Mum xxx
‘Is there a problem?’ Ian asked.
‘No, love. Just texting my son.’
I knew I wasn’t right. But I could never have known it was the last day I would spend as a free member of society.
42
Rachel
