Margate
We come in on the Canterbury Road, past faded, peely bay-windowed terraces with that icing-on-an-old-cake look that buildings only have at the seaside. Hotels, B-and-Bs. Vacancies. The buildings look extra pale against the grey, piled-up sky, and against the clouds you can see little twirling specks of white, like broken-off flakes of the buildings, like scatterings of white being flung about by the wind. Seagulls. You can feel the wind, even in the Merc, bouncing up the side-streets and jolting into us, and we're all thinking, Any moment now we'll see it, we've got to see it, it can only be just over there. Then we see it, as we come over a brow and a gap opens up in the buildings: the sea, the sea. With the whole of Margate spread out below us, the front, the bay, the sands, with Cliftonville beyond, except you can't see the sands, or precious little of them, because the tide's right in, like Vie said it would be, and the sea's grey and thick and churny like the sky, with white spray flying up. And that long harbour wall out there on the far side of the bay, the only thing you can see that's like a pier, with the spray lashing up against it extra fierce: that looks like where we've got to go, that looks like where we've got to do it.
With a storm brewing.
Lenny says, 'Journey's end. 'AUelujah. I need a pee.'
Two extra pints in Canterbury.
He says, 'Looks like it's expecting us.'
Vie is sort of perking up, like he's coming into his rightful element. I'm thinking, You could get blown clean off that wall. I'm holding Jack again, in his bag, in his jar, and I hold on to him tighter, like I already need the extra ballast. Vince is looking all cool and careful and deliberate. He don't say nothing. He only had the one at the last port of call, but I reckon we're all glad we took a little extra on board to steady ourselves for what's to come. He drives on slowly down the hill, the sweep of the bay ahead of us, his eyes looking this way and that. It's not exactly thick with traffic or bulging with trippers. It's not season.
We join the front proper and he pulls up by the kerb, leaving the engine running. It seems he's heeded Lenny's little problem. Sudden sight of all this water. One thing it's not hard to find in a seaside resort is a public bog, and he's drawn up close to one, it looks like a blockhouse. But he don't stop at that. He opens his driver's door and gets out. There's a great gust of air. He walks round to the pavement, lifting his head and scanning the bay, his messed-up white shirt flapping like a flag, then he opens the passenger door for Lenny, courtesy itself, like a chauffeur. He cocks his head towards the blank-walled building on the other side of the pavement. 'Make yourself comfy, Lenny,' he says and it sounds as though he says it with a smile. It's like he wants things from now on to be proper and seemly, with no snags and upsets like a bursting bladder. 'Anyone else?' he says. But I'm not feeling the call. I switched to whisky, taking a tip from Vie.
Lenny edges out of his seat, all abashed and obedient. More raw air swirls round the car while his door's open but Vince, out on the pavement, doesn't seem to mind. It's as though he wanted the excuse to be the first of us to stand on the front at Margate and breathe in the briny. I twist my head round so I can see him hoisting back his shoulders and holding up his chin. You can hear the din of the waves. I hold on to Jack. Little pin-pricks of rain are peppering the windscreen and being dried off again almost immediately as if, despite the clouds, the sky's too het-up to start a real downpour. All wind and no piss. Lenny stands on the pavement and takes his own lungful of air, half like it does him a power of good and half like it hurts. He looks around, hunched and braced, and looks at Vince, straight and tall, looking around beside him. He says, 'Remember it, Big Boy? Remember it?'
Vince
So I walk into the hospital with the money in my inside pocket. Eight hundred in fifties, rest in twenties, rubber band, brown paper envelope. I think, There can't be many people who turn up at this place like they're hitting a casino. And I hope he understands it wasn't easy. He ought to know a thing or two about cash-flow, him of all people. He might think that kind of dosh is just pocket money to me, because I wear a four-hundred-quid suit, because I flog jalopies for readies on the spot, but he ought to know about margins, now specially. Sometimes cash flows and sometimes it don't. Right now it's hardly trickling.
So Hussein better.
And when am I getting it back? You can't deny a dying man a favour, any crazy thing he asks, but that don't mean. You can't take it with you when you go, but he will, he will.
I think, I might as well be taking this money to chuck it off the edge of a cliff.
But then I come out the lift and walk down the corridor, with the usual traffic of trolleys and wheelchairs, and there's that smell again that's getting so familiar you can smell it when it aint there. I'm standing in the showroom and I can smell it. I'm breathing in cars but I can smell it. Like the smell of the swab they give you after a jab, only scaled up, and beneath it the smell of something stale and thin and used up, like the smell of old tired papery skin. I suppose it's the smell of— I think of all the patients in this hospital, heads in beds, I wonder what the tot-up is, I wonder what today's takings are. And I think, I've done what he asked, I've only done what he asked, and if I don't ever touch this money again, still it's cleared my conscience, aint nothing on my conscience.
So I stride down that corridor with my head held high, like I'm back on the square at the depot and the sergeant's called me out. Deetail! And I look at all those poor crumpled-up bastards and old girls in their wheelchairs, thinking, I bet you aint got a thousand pounds to give away, have you? But it's only money, aint it? Only paper.
I walk in, and there he is with his tubes and his pumps and his meters and his belly all swolled up like he's pregnant. I can see he aint looking so good. I mean, given he's buggered in the first place. Today he's having a worse day than yesterday. Every day's a notch in only one direction. But I can tell what the first thing on his mind is, so I don't play no tricks, I don't tease. I pull out the envelope, giving a quick squint around, like the place is full of spies and thieves, and hand it to him, looking at him, thinking, I aint ever going to see this money never again.
I say, "There you are, Jack, as per promise. You don't have to count it.'
Though I bet he does, soon as I'm gone. He just takes a quick peek inside the envelope, feeling the thickness, stroking it with his thumb, then he looks at me, up and down like he's taking in the whole of me, like he's that sergeant inspecting my turn-out, and says, 'You're a good boy, Vince.'
Amy
They'll be there now, where we might have gone. Ended up or started again. New people, old people, the same people.
He looks at me while I sit by the bed, holding his hand, his thumb moving gently, dryly, in tittle circles round the base of mine, and I think, We aren't going to look at each other so many times again, there aren't going to be so many more times we'll speak. First you count the years, the decades, then suddenly it's hours and minutes. And even now, when it's his last chance, he's not going to mention her, he's not going to say a word about her. It's like we could be back there now, fifty years ago, in that guesthouse, with me seeing, with me knowing clear as day suddenly that he didn't ever want to know. You'd think they could come up with something.