The end was always the same. Exhausted by unexplainable suffering, she allowed him to lead her to his bed, which he did with intense feelings of shame and joy. In the morning her eyes were clear, brow smooth, heart calm, levity for herself and subtle commiseration for him, and a wistful kind of gratitude that he had helped the storm go by. For him one evil cancelled out another, but what would happen if he took Enid home?
The fire glowed between two half-burnt logs that would never sufficiently meet to give a warming flame, kept that way by Fred’s attack of manic parsimony. Alfred put his father close, laid his cashmere coat across to keep the blood from coagulating unto death. The old man’s teeth clattered like Ezekiel’s bones, stopped and then began again, eyes intently shut as if to let him listen more appreciatively to the rhythm. Alfred eased up his trousers, and the flesh above the socks was of a cold that would keep rising, an ice age in reverse going towards the warmer Pole.
Jenny knew there wasn’t, but had to ask. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘He needs a warm hospital,’ and the sight of a lovely-looking nurse or two.
She wondered at the smile when his cheeks were wet with tears. ‘So might the rest of us, before the night’s over.’
Percy’s eyes took time to settle and focus. ‘I should be out there, giving the lads a hand.’
He’ll get at me with his last breath, Alfred thought. He means why aren’t I with them. They don’t need me yet, he could say, but it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.
Percy called out in self-reproach: ‘But I’m not up to it. I’ve got these awful aches in my shoulders.’
‘Try to rest,’ Alfred said. ‘You’ll be fit to travel in the morning then.’
Aaron thought they should get him upstairs to bed, but Alfred waved him away: ‘I want to keep an eye on him down here.’
Enid was putting the various drinks together, like to like — beer, whisky, wine, gin and sherry. ‘We always do this when we clear up. Fred tips the spirits back in the bottles, but he lets me have the other dregs before I go home. The beer and wine makes me sleep better. Only I’m not going home tonight.’
‘I’ll never get to the palm trees,’ Percy sighed. ‘I know it’s a geriatrics’ home you’re taking me to, and who wants to go to one of them? I twigged we wasn’t going to our Brian’s. I’m not so bloody daft.’
A ship had come, to pull Alfred away from the island where he had been marooned with his father since birth. Or that’s what it seemed. The old man was dying, and he wanted him to, but at the same time he hoped he would go on living. ‘I was only trying to do what was best.’
The rattle in the throat declined to a cynical laugh. ‘Oh, I know you was. I was a pest at times, wasn’t I? Everybody is, though. You’ll be a pest one day. Maybe even a bigger one than I’ve ever been. If you aren’t a pest to somebody you aren’t alive. And everybody’s alive, so everybody’s a pest, aren’t they?’
His hands seemed to be searching around the inside of a refrigerator for his favourite leftovers. ‘Sing “Greensleeves” to me, Alfred.’
‘I can’t sing, you know that.’
‘I allus loved it. It brings everything back. Your mother loved it, as well. There’s a lot to say goodbye to. Life’s a bit of a pushbike at times, ain’t it?’
Why don’t you die, you old bastard? — which Alfred didn’t entirely mean, Percy’s words (and his) a row of taps releasing more tears. ‘Don’t leave me, Dad.’
‘I’m not going, you silly sod. What makes you think so? It’s just that I don’t know where I’m coming to.’
No one was going anywhere on a night like this, Eileen thought, the gale thumping and bumping at every brick. She should have stayed in Buxton. Even a doss in a shop doorway would have been cushier, though the police might have prodded her on a few times.
Fred came in with a heap of blankets, the captain of the ship once more, or The Flying Bloody Dutchman, though even that was something to smile about. ‘It’s too late,’ Aaron said, ‘though you might as well cover him. But it was more than blankets he needed, so don’t feel bad about it.’
‘Oh, I don’t. We expect casualties on a trip like this. Even though I run a tight ship you can’t stop the odd accident. We crossed the North Atlantic in such weather once, and lost three chaps. One died of an ulcer, one had a brain haemorrhage, and the third disappeared over the side from no apparent cause. It was the worst crossing I’d ever been on. I left the ship as soon as I could. I trod on a bloody great rat as I went down the gangplank.’
‘Did you?’ Eileen said.
‘You should have heard it squeal. I had a heavy kitbag on my shoulder, and I weighed more than I do now.’
Eileen sniffed. ‘Poor bloody rat.’
‘I didn’t think so. I hated ’em.’
Alfred took the other end of the blanket, to spread it over the body. Talking right to the end: I might have known. If he could talk, and get on at you at the same time, he was alive, nobody more so. I thought he would never let go of the rail, but he’s gone now, back to his tadpoles in jamjars as a kid, and the way sense was knocked into him at school, then to working and college at the same time on the engineering side, living for next to nothing a week and being happy on it because fags were a shilling for twenty and beer a tanner a pint, when courting was courting because you had to be careful of VD and putting a girl in the club — back to hiking and the bike, hard work and cold water, football on the wasteground, the pictures once a week if you were lucky and the music hall when you were flush — back to the happy days you couldn’t get back to till you died, and then you were lucky to find anything at all, though he was sure his domineering old bugger of a father would get all he wanted, even on the other side.
Daniel looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it before — limitless in the gloom, people slumped in their chairs as if in the waiting room to Hell and hoping for the doors to open soon. He could do as he liked now that he was doomed with the rest of them, wouldn’t bother to tell that the van battery was all but flat, only good if you kept the wheels turning, having barely got it going again when it stalled at traffic lights outside Warrington. He stood, a demented-looking figure with a bloodsoaked towel around his head. ‘They won’t come back.’
‘You look like a real fucking terrorist now,’ Eileen said. ‘One of them Arabs. But if you don’t stop saying things like that, I’ll go in the kitchen for a carving knife and finish you off. I won’t fuck around with a bit of old bottle.’
Garry raised a fist, as if to indicate that no one would deserve it more. His tongue wouldn’t do as it was told. He slept and woke. Words spoken in the room came through to his dreams, and when no one took his advice on what they should do with Daniel he assumed they couldn’t hear, being too much in the shadow. In more light they might have heard him better, done something. When Jenny came to hold his hand, a fragment of warmth went momentarily back into his body.
Fred bent from the waist to look. ‘This young rating could do with a few blankets’ — spreading over him what remained. ‘You’ll sleep like a top under these.’
Aaron took the flashlight. ‘Let’s fetch more. They’re going to be needed.’
‘What for?’ Enid wanted to be left alone. Heat was supposed to rise, when there was any, but upstairs it was like entering headfirst into a layer of ice. ‘I’m perishing,’ she said at the landing.
He kissed her lips, hoping to warm her. ‘Go back, then. I’ll do it on my own.’