“But tell me about you, Billy,” Trevor said, leaning forwards over the table. “What have you been up to?”
Billy couldn’t help smiling at Trevor’s eagerness. He seemed so interested. As if any news of Billy’s would delight him, just so long as Billy could manage to put it into words. It was a childlike quality, one not generally found in people who were middle-aged: either they had lost it along the way, or else they’d had it ground out of them.
“I’m in the police,” Billy said.
“Really? I’ve never met a policeman. I mean, not socially.”
“We’re all right, you know. We’re human.”
Trevor beamed. “You know, I didn’t used to trust the police. Back in the late seventies, I mean, when Thatcher first came in. Now, though, I think it would be a fascinating job. Who knows, if I get fired, I might even become one myself — or is it too late for me?”
“It’s not exactly well paid,” Billy said, “and you do have a large family…”
“That’s true.” Trevor nodded, then drank.
Though he appeared to be agreeing with Billy, he had by no means been put off the idea. Trevor seemed to be a man who was given to continual small enthusiasms. He would probably be exhausting to live with.
“Four children,” Billy mused. “How do you do it?”
“Ask my wife.” Trevor chuckled, shook his head. “What about you, Billy? Have you got kids?”
“I’ve got a daughter,” Billy said. “Emma. She’s got Down’s.”
This piece of information would have thrown most people. Not Trevor, though.
“How bad is it?” he said.
“We’re lucky, really. On a scale of one to ten, she’s probably seven or eight. I mean, she’s fantastic, I love her to bits, but it’s still difficult.”
“You must worry…”
“She’s four and a half, and she can’t talk properly. She just makes sounds. Their tongues are bigger, you see.” Billy swallowed some more lager. “Her eyes are bad too. She had to have an operation to tighten the muscles. And she has to wear special shoes to help her stand up…” Billy thought about mentioning her heart, but he just couldn’t bear it.
“I expect you have to watch her all the time,” Trevor said.
Billy nodded. “Yes. Non-stop.”
It was his round. He went up to the bar and ordered two more pints. Before he could even sit down with the new drinks, Trevor was talking again.
“If you think about it, though, we all have to watch our children now, don’t we? So many things can happen to them. When we were young, it was different.” He reached for his new pint and took a gulp. “Back then, it was all woods and fields, and we’d be gone for the whole day, and no one even thought twice…”
Trevor’s voice had started trembling halfway through the sentence, but then it gave out completely, and he put his face in his hands. Billy stared at Trevor’s bald spot, unable for a moment to believe what was happening.
“Trevor?” he said. “What is it?”
But Trevor wouldn’t answer. He sat in the booth with his hands covering his face, his whole body shaking.
“What’s wrong, Trevor?”
People were beginning to look at them, wondering what was going on. There’s a bloke crying over there.
Billy clambered to his feet and put an arm round Trevor’s shoulders. “Come on, Trevor. Let’s get you back to your room.”
He picked Trevor’s key up off the table, and they left the food barn together, with Billy taking most of Trevor’s weight. Once outside, the cold air hit them. The wind was swooping in from the east, over the landscaped banks and mounds, and Billy thought he could smell snow. That keen, metallic edge. When he lifted his head, the cars bounced beneath the yellow lights. Their shiny surfaces swirled glassily about. How many pints had they had? Six? Seven?
Trevor’s room was on the ground floor, behind reception. On opening the door, Billy saw that the room had been designed for people who were disabled, with pinkish-brown grab-rails everywhere, and a red string dangling between the toilet and the bath. IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY THE DUTY MANAGER CAN BE CALLED BY PULLING THE RED CORD. Billy hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“Asked for a non-smoking room,” Trevor said, slurring his words, “and this’s all they had.” His head lurched on his neck as he looked around. “It’s no different, really. Everything’s a bit lower, that’s all. The bed, door-handles…”
“It’s fine,” Billy said.
Trevor stumbled into the bathroom. Through the closed door, Billy heard the splash of urine, then a controlled roar as the toilet flushed.
When Trevor emerged again, he avoided Billy’s gaze. “Sorry about all that,” he said, wiping his face. “Sorry, Billy. God. Do you want a drink?”
He seemed to have pulled himself together. His speech was clearer. All the same, Billy didn’t feel he could leave Trevor on his own.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Just the one.”
Trevor fetched two water-glasses from the bathroom, then opened his briefcase and took out some red wine and a corkscrew. “I always have a bottle on me,” he said, “just in case I run into an old friend.” He was trying to be funny, but his voice was too thin to carry it off. Too wobbly.
He poured the wine. Even as he held out a glass for Billy, he was gulping from his own. “So I never told you what happened to me?” he said.
Billy crossed the room and sat down in the armchair by the window. He had checked into the Travel Inn because he was tired, and here he was, staying up and getting drunk. “When are you talking about?” he said.
“When I was ten.”
“I didn’t know you then. You’d moved away.”
“That’s right.” Trevor settled on the end of the bed. He drank some more wine, then reached out and placed his glass on the desk where the TV was. Only alcoholics put glasses down that carefully.
“So what happened?” Billy said.
Trevor began to talk about the old days again, what he called “back then”—children off playing by themselves, and no one giving them a thought. Had it ever really been like that? Maybe it had. What Billy remembered most, though, was the housing boom, and all that building going on. Stacks of bricks, cement-mixers. Scaffolding. He and Trevor would climb up inside the new houses and drop messages down between the walls: swearwords, or spells, or sometimes just their two names and the date. They were still there, probably…Only dimly aware of Trevor’s voice, Billy was on the point of drifting off to sleep when a single sentence drew him right in close.
“But that day, for some reason, I was all alone…”
Billy roused himself. “Sorry. Where was this?”
“In Manchester. A place called Fallowfield.”
A white car pulled alongside him, Trevor said, as he was walking. The driver was a woman, and she was on her own. She wound her window down, called out to him. He couldn’t remember what she said, but he remembered that she had a hard voice, flinty and impatient; she sounded like someone who was bad-tempered, or in a hurry. She had black hair, with a headscarf tied over it. Though it was November, she dangled her right arm out of the window, and her painted nails showed up vividly against the door. Between the first and second fingers was a cigarette. There was a moment when she withdrew her arm and dragged on the cigarette, and the whole time she was inhaling she never took her eyes off him, then her arm returned to where it had been before, and the smoke soon followed in a thin blue stream.