At the harbour end of the Prom the asphalt gives way to the wooden prosthetic of the jetty; this is where the outsiders park. Those people who have not renewed their membership of the human race. VW campers, old travelling library vans converted into homes, ancient ambulances from the days when they painted a red cross on the side so thick that no amount of painting over with white house paint will ever efface the outline. They don’t paint red crosses on ambulances any more, it’s one of those things that give the world its comforting familiarity and which they change without telling anyone. One day you wake up and notice all the ambulances are fluorescent green and yellow. They say it’s safer, it enhances visibility, but they are wrong. In an ambulance you are never at risk from other traffic. There is only one danger to watch out for in an ambulance, and it was for this that the red crosses were painted on them: attack by dive bomber.
It must be odd sleeping in one; you would surely dream about all the people who didn’t make it, who went to sleep permanently en route. You know you are in trouble if they switch off the siren. As long as you can still hear it, there’s hope. For many of us it will be the last earthly sound we hear, the technological plash of Charon’s oar. What thoughts rush through your mind as they carry you out through the front door of the house you will never return to? As they slam you into the back of the fluorescent funerary chariot, the eternal bread van? Do you know this will be the last time you see blue sky? What thoughts go through your head?
A man approached as I leant on the railings and watched the harbour lights glitter on the water. I thought he would ask for a cigarette, but it was Eeyore. He didn’t say anything, just patted me on the shoulder, then leant on the railings next to me and stared out to sea. After a while, I said, ‘The police are looking for me.’
‘I know, I saw it on the news.’
‘I’m tempted to go and give myself up. What should I do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When you were a cop, how did you keep going?’
He thought for a while and said, ‘I used to think about Big Nose George Parrott.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Not many people have. Big Nose George Parrott was one of the people they never tell you about.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He was a cattle rustler from Wyoming at the end of the nineteenth century, with a $20,000 bounty on his head for killing a Union Pacific Railroad detective. They sentenced him to hang, but the townsfolk snatched him from the gaol and strung him up from a telegraph pole. After his death they sent his hide to the tannery, where they made it into a pair of shoes. The shoes were given to a fellow called John Eugene Osborne, a surgeon for the Union Pacific Railway, who wore them to the inaugural ball after being elected the first governor of Wyoming. I don’t really know much more about him, but you don’t really need to. I’m sure he was a swell fellow, a real darling. The first governor of Wyoming. I’m sure everywhere he went they loved him.’
‘You say the man shot a detective?’
‘A Pinkerton, I believe. It could have been you or me, I know, so it doesn’t make sense that I should admire him.’
‘It makes a sort of sense.’
‘Sure, he never should have shot that Pinkerton, but it’s not like he wanted to. He did it because he probably couldn’t see any way out of things, and didn’t have enough brains in his head to figure one out. They were hiding away in some bolt-hole, surrounded; their discovery was a surprise, I think. I’m sure if he’d had a choice he wouldn’t have wanted to shoot that man. But people like Big Nose George Parrott never have a choice; they spend their lives in a corner with nowhere left to run, and the cards they hold are always twos and threes; it’s the first governors of Wyoming who get the picture cards. The names change but the story never does. In 1950 builders doing alterations to the Rawlins National Bank across the road from the gaol found the shoes in a barrel. That’s how it goes. People like that governor spend their lives walking all over the little guys. He just took it one stage further and made it literal.’
‘Big Nose George Parrott, eh?’
‘The thing about people like that first governor of Wyoming is they get all the breaks in life, sleep in a nice feather bed, go to the best schools, and it’s easy for them; I don’t mind that. It’s the automatic sense of entitlement that goes with it that I despise. The presumption that they get all those good things because they are special people, that they are better than others. As far as I can see, there is only one difference between that governor in his fancy waistcoat and Big Nose George Parrott. He was luckier. That governor stuck his head out of the womb in a nicer room.’ He turned to me and whispered, ‘Son, all you can do sometimes is try and wipe the smile off their faces.’
Miaow held the door ajar on a safety chain that stretched across the bridge of her nose, her face twisted in the scowl of the householder disturbed late at night. She was wearing striped men’s pyjamas: pink vertical bars sandwiching thinner lines of grey. There were three buttons on the jacket, the bottom one missing. Without the button the fabric parted, revealing the taut satin of her midriff. In the dim light it shone like antique amber.
‘I’m worn out,’ I said.
She put on a pair of spectacles and focused on my face.
‘You’re soaked through.’
I followed her in and sat at the Formica table. I placed my elbows on the tabletop and my head in my hands. Miaow slipped next to me and put her palms on my cheeks. Her hands were cool and soothing, like the hands of an alabaster saint. ‘Poor you,’ she whispered. I sat there and let myself be soothed. She moved her hands and pressed her head against mine. Her breathing took on the rhythm of the sea out in the darkness; the earth slowed, ceased its pointless celestial whirligig. She pressed her head closer, pulled tighter with her arms, but said nothing. Just breathed, like the ocean, with a hint of Jack Daniels.
‘I just want to sleep.’
‘You can.’
‘They’ll find me here.’
‘If they do, I’ll shoot them. I’ll make some cocoa.’ She stood up, moved over to the stove and began to boil milk. I went and stood next to her, slumped against the wall.
‘Where did you get the gun?’
‘It used to belong to my father.’
‘What did he need it for?’
She smiled. ‘He was an outlaw like you.’
‘What sort of outlaw?’
‘His name was Iestyn Probert.’
I looked at her in astonishment, mouth agape in the dark. ‘Well, I’ll be . . . all this time you . . . you’ve been . . . I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’m so sorry. I hated lying to you. I’m just a little kid, Louie. I don’t think I’d be strong enough to stand on that battlement.’
I took her face in my hands and kissed her. ‘You would, trust me.’
‘Iestyn spent a week on the run before they caught him. My mother hid him in her cottage. Nine months later I was born.’