“Billy Tyler,” Raymond said, not getting up. He was wearing a fawn leather jacket that looked expensive, and his skin was lightly tanned.
“Raymond! What are you doing here? I thought you’d be in London.”
“Oh, you know,” Raymond said. “I get around.”
He had the same mocking smile that he’d had as a teenager. It had been amusing then, even necessary, as much a part of his image as his haircut or his flared trousers, but in a man approaching forty it looked much more like provocation. It didn’t seem as if Raymond knew that, though — or perhaps he just didn’t care.
“So,” Billy said, “how are you?”
“Could be worse. What about you?”
“Not bad.”
“I almost drowned him once,” Raymond told the girl, his eyes still moving over Billy’s face. The girl’s mouth opened a fraction, then she laughed quickly and reached for her champagne.
For a moment Billy saw the water, almost black, and seeming to slope uphill, away from him.
“I suppose you’re running Scotland Yard by now,” Raymond said.
Billy smiled faintly. “Something like that.”
So Raymond knew what he did. He was sure Raymond found it not only ludicrous but incomprehensible. After everything they had been through together, he would be bound to see it as a betrayal too. But that was years ago, all that…
Raymond introduced him to the girl. Her name was Henry, Raymond said. When Billy stared at her, she smiled and told him it was short for Henrietta. They shook hands, hers cocked slightly at the wrist, and bright with rings. She had a pair of sunglasses in her hair. Billy thought she was probably a model.
He turned back to Raymond, his eyes dropping briefly to Raymond’s jacket. “You look as if you’re doing all right for yourself,” he said. “Nothing illegal, I hope.”
Raymond laughed. “You want to join us, Billy? You want to pull up a chair?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m with someone.”
Raymond looked past him. “Who’s the lucky girl?”
“My mother,” Billy said.
They both smiled, but their smiles didn’t reach their eyes.
“Well, anyway,” Raymond said, brisker now, “good to see you.” You’d think they ran into each other all the time. It had been twenty years, though. Maybe more.
“Take it easy, Raymond,” Billy said, then he turned to Henrietta. “Nice to have met you.”
He walked over to the bar. As he ordered the drinks, he heard Raymond and the girl start laughing. On his way back, he passed their table again and nodded, but he didn’t stop, focusing instead on the two glasses he was carrying, as if worried they might spill.
Sometime later, he looked through the window and saw Raymond standing near a low-slung sports car. The girl was with him. Though it was already dark, she had her sunglasses on. Out of habit, he made a mental note of Raymond’s number plate. BOY 1DA. If Raymond wanted to, he could drive to London tonight with that beautiful girl beside him. Or Paris. He could do anything.
“Are they friends of yours?” Billy’s mother asked.
“That’s Raymond,” Billy said. “Raymond Percival.”
“You were at school with him, weren’t you?”
Billy nodded. “I went on holiday with him as well. We travelled all round Europe.”
“I remember.” His mother’s eyes lingered on Raymond as he climbed into the car. “Good-looking boy.”
Billy smiled to himself.
“Your father had something of that about him,” she said.
“Really?”
“He was glamorous.” She took a sip of wine, then put the glass back on the table. She kept her hand on it, though, and twisted it from time to time. “Imagine falling for a musician…”
They both watched through the window as the sports car moved noisily out on to the road.
“Was he ever violent?” Billy asked.
“He got drunk sometimes. I was frightened of him then.” She looked across at Billy. “He never hit me, if that’s what you mean.”
Billy stared at the table. His father had been drinking the night he died, apparently. A tram had knocked him down. In Hamburg. When Billy thought about the death, all he could see was a saxophone lying on a cobbled street, the bell tinted red by strip-club neon, the octave key bent out of shape. His father, the musician…Had he been playing live that night? Where had he been living, and who with? What had happened to the saxophone? The questions came to him in a leisurely, almost sluggish way, as though aware that answers were unlikely to materialise. They had more to do with a kind of nostalgia than with any real curiosity. He had seen his father just twice in his entire life.
“Why do you ask?” his mother said, and he could sense her eyes on him.
“No reason,” he said, still staring at the table.
“You’re not in trouble, Billy, are you?”
“No.” And he wasn’t. But he felt as if he was.
12
He couldn’t remember actually meeting Raymond Percival. There had been no fanfare, no shaft of light, no thin blade through his heart — nothing to let him know how deeply he would fall under Raymond’s spell. He thought they must have been in the same year at school, but it wasn’t the classroom that Billy saw when he brought Raymond to mind. He didn’t see a uniform either. Somehow Raymond always appeared in the clothes he put on after school, or at weekends. It was the late sixties, and Raymond dressed in long-sleeved T-shirts that were too tight under the arms, usually with a picture of an album cover or a group on the front. He wore flared jeans too, often with a triangle of fabric sewn into the lower leg to make them wider still. His hair was cut shorter than everybody else’s, a style that only came into fashion more than twenty years later, in the early nineties. Ahead of his time, Raymond was. Naturally.
The first conversation Billy remembered had to do with fathers. As a boy, Billy would never admit that his father had walked out — he had invented an alternative reality involving things he didn’t understand, like record deals and gigs — so when Raymond asked him whether it was true that his father was a musician, Billy gave his standard reply:
“He plays jazz. I don’t see much of him, though. He’s always away, on tour.”
Raymond sent him a look that tilted through the air towards him like a flying roof-tile in a gale. “I heard he left before you were even born.”
Perhaps because he was so shocked, Billy reverted to the truth. “So what? Have you got a dad?”
“He’s a nobody,” Raymond said. “I’m never going to be like him.” He kicked a stone into the gutter, then said, “Anyway, he’s dead.”
“I think my dad might be dead too, actually.” Billy had no reason to say that. It just came out.
“Do you care?” Raymond asked.
Billy shook his head. “No.”
Raymond seemed to approve of Billy’s answer. The speed of it. The frankness.
Raymond’s father had died of cancer, but Raymond wouldn’t talk about it except to say that he’d like to fucking blow up ICI. His father had worked at ICI for thirty years. His uncle still did, and now he had cancer too. One evening Raymond took Billy into a field that overlooked the plant. A few horses stood about, tearing at the grass with big stained teeth; against the mass of spotlit pipes and tanks, they looked incongruous, primitive, oddly out of date. Coming to a halt in the middle of the field, with Castner Kellner and Rocksavage glittering below him and the River Mersey in the distance, Raymond threw his arms out wide and made a loud exploding sound. The horses scattered, eyes rolling, their hooves thudding across the lumpy turf. One of them almost ran Billy down. He murmured in protest, but Raymond was hunched over with his hands wrapped around his head, and Billy understood that debris from the dynamited factories was falling from the sky. If you said ICI had brought jobs to the area, Raymond would tell you it had brought pollution too. If you mentioned the recreation club and the sports facilities, he would smile sourly. “That’s just guilt,” he’d say. He was unshakeable. Raymond always slept with his windows shut on account of the toxic gases that were released into the atmosphere at night. He didn’t trust anything that was produced locally. He only ever drank soda water, which he stole from the Co-op, and he refused to eat fruit and vegetables unless they came from somewhere far away like Israel or Costa Rica.