I was waiting when Davey Wallace got out of hospital. The swelling had gone down but his face was still a dark spectrum of bruises. He walked slowly but gingerly, as if treading on hot coals. I guessed that anything but the gentlest footfall would jar through his cracked ribs. Somehow, he managed to grin his usual grin at me. That hurt more than if he’d swung a punch at me.
I held open the car door for him. He got in and we drove across the city. Davey told me that he didn’t want me to worry about him and that he would be ready to do work for me again in a couple of weeks. And he would have plenty of time, he told me: he’d been laid off from the yard.
I didn’t say anything. Instead I drove down to the river and parked on a scruffy patch of cleared bomb-site. I helped Davey to the water’s edge and we sat on a wall beneath the bristling black branches of shipyard cranes. A puffer belched blackly as it drifted past us.
We sat there for more than an hour while I talked, without a break. I talked about my home in Canada and about the war. I talked about when I’d been Davey’s age and everything I thought the world had held for me. I talked about things that I hadn’t talked about to anybody before, and I told Davey that. I talked about Sicily and Aachen, about the friends I’d seen die and the enemies I’d killed. About the bad things I’d done because you had to do bad things in war, and the bad things I’d done even when I didn’t have to do them. I laid out my life for him. And for me.
When I finished, I handed him an envelope. The same classy, vellum type I had given May. I told Davey about Saskatchewan, about open prairies and hot summers and snow as deep as your chin in winter. I told him he should quit watching gangster movies and watch more Westerns.
‘Two friends of mine are moving out there. May and George. They’ve got a huge farm out there and they’ll need someone to help out. There’s a ticket in there for you to travel with them and five hundred pounds in sterling. That goes a long way in Canadian dollars, Davey.’
‘Why are you doing this, Mr Lennox?’
‘Because you’re a good kid, Davey, and I was a good kid once. Or I like to pretend to myself that I was a good kid once. You deserve something better than this…’ I gestured to the black, oily Clyde, to the cranes around us, to the dark city behind us. ‘I’ve put a letter in there as well. It gives my folks’ address and details in New Brunswick. I wired my dad and he said he’ll stand as sponsor for you if immigration need it.’ I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘But you won’t. Canada wants good kids like you.’
‘I don’t know what to say, Mr Lennox. If there’s anything I can ever do…’
‘What I want you to do is have a good life. Marry one of those strong, pretty Ukrainian-Canadian girls with sky-blue eyes, rosy cheeks and butter-coloured hair they’ve got in Saskatchewan and have a dozen blond kids.’
Davey sat silently in the car on the way back, the white envelope on his lap. He didn’t speak until I pulled up outside his digs.
‘I’ll never forget this, Mr Lennox. Never.’ His face was determined. Almost grim.
‘Good,’ I grinned. ‘I don’t expect you to. Maybe one day I’ll come out and visit.’
After I left Davey, I drove back to Great Western Road. Something churned in my gut and I knew it was because, out there by the river, I had faced things with Davey that I hadn’t faced since the war. It had liberated me and burdened me all at the same time. But at least, for once, I knew for sure what my next move was going to be.
I parked the Atlantic outside my digs, walked up to the door, unlocked it and stepped into the hallway. But I didn’t go up to my flat.
Instead, without hesitating, I knocked firmly on Fiona White’s door.