He’d crawled up from Brinsop in the truck, behind a man on a bike.
‘Well, well,’ Percy said.
Walter handed Lol tea in a china cup. A low-wattage bulb, its brown flex hanging over a blackened beam, had probably been on all day. Coal was burning in an iron range. There was a TV set that had to be fifty years old and probably didn’t work any more. The room smelled of… well, it smelled of old blokes.
‘Lol writes songs,’ Bax told Percy.
‘Too many bloody songs, now. All sounds the same.’
Percy was a few years younger than Walter. His hair was white and curly.
‘No, proper songs,’ Bax said. ‘Folk songs. Songs about life. And songs about things what goes on…’ he winked at Lol ‘… that people don’t talk about much no more.’
‘Talk? They wanted me to give a talk, look,’ Percy said. ‘Women’s Institute. Some woman comes round, asks me to give a talk.’
‘That was my missus, Percy.’
‘Wasn’t gonner talk to a load o’ women. They spreads stuff all over, women does. And they gets it wrong.’
‘Always a problem with women,’ Bax admitted.
‘En’t I don’t like to talk.’ Percy nodded at Walter. ‘ He don’t like to talk much, never has, look. I likes to talk, long as folks gets it right, what I tells ’em. Half the buggers, they don’t listen proper, n’more.’
Bax nodded.
‘Talks back, don’t listen,’ Percy said.
After a while he seemed to notice Lol, sitting on a stool by the door. Lol was listening. Percy nodded approvingly.
‘Tell Lol what you seen in the long field that night,’ Bax said.
In the feeble light, the already muted colours in the room had died back into a sombre sepia. Percy did some thinking.
‘Wouldn’t ’appen to ’ave any more o’ that scenty baccy, would you, boy?’ he said eventually.
Halfway down Church Street, Jane began to feel cold and a little stupid in the sawn-off white hoodie that she’d worn in the Swan the night she’d met Cornel. But he’d been pissed then and she needed him to recognize her.
Ready for this now. Knew exactly how she’d handle him. Sure he’d come out of the Ox at some point. Maybe he was here with his cockfighting mates. Eventually she went in and had a glance around.
Mistake.
‘Watkins!’
Slobby Dean Wall at one of the gaming machines.
‘Don’t get excited, Wall,’ Jane said calmly. ‘I’m only looking for somebody.’
‘Yeah.’ Wall looked at her bare bits, sucking in his breath. ‘It looks like you bloody are, too.’
Jane took a couple of steps inside. Stink of stale beer. Only the Ox could sell beer that smelled stale when it was fresh out of the pump. Men’s eyes were flickering her way from all corners of the cramped bar with its tobacco beams and stained flags. A barmaid was clearing glasses from a table. Six pint glasses in two hands, fingers down in the dregs, clinking. She looked up, and it was Lori Jenkin, who worked part-time in the Eight Till Late. Jane leaned over, lowered her voice.
‘I’m looking for Cornel.’
‘Your mum know about this, Jane?’
‘Got a message for him, that’s all. Somebody said he was in here.’
This was going all wrong. She needed to just, like, bump into him.
‘I think he’s in his room,’ Lori said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘He’s staying here?’
The Ox had two spare bedrooms, which Jane understood were used mainly by sad downmarket commercial travellers too pissed to go back on the road. A guy with a Porsche staying here… that did not sound right.
Lori said, ‘I’ll get somebody to give him a knock, if you like.’
‘ No… No, it’s OK. It’s not urgent, I’ll catch him again.’
Jane got out of the Ox under Dean Wall’s soiled, beery gaze and stood there feeling like a prostitute, shivering. They always underdressed, apparently. This wasn’t working. Give up for tonight, go home.
Rapid footsteps across the street and, oh jeez, it was Mum walking up from the village hall. Jane hung back, keeping close to the shadowed cottages. But, after a few paces, inevitably tonight, Mum looked back and saw her.
Jane walked up, hands jammed in her pockets to pull the hoodie down over the bare bits. How was she going to explain this?
‘Meeting’s over already?’
‘Uncle Ted couldn’t make it, so we had a fairly restricted agenda, thank God. Apparently, he, erm… tried to ring me earlier.’ Mum glancing sideways at Jane, as they walked up to the empty square, taking in the skimpy apparel and then glancing away. ‘Jane, look, I know it’s none of my-’
‘I needed to walk and think and stuff. Didn’t realize how cold it was.’
They reached the square, with its tumble of black and white buildings, the weary lanterns coming on outside the Swan, soon to be owned by…
Jane’s fists tightened.
‘So,’ Mum said, ‘you were thinking. And stuff.’
‘Last day of term. Last school holiday. The future.’
Everybody had been demob happy at school. Those facing A levels probably less so, but nobody quite as messed-up as she was.
Mum said, ‘I’m not so old I don’t remember what that’s like. You’ve made a decision that could determine the rest of your life and you’re thinking, God, have I done the right thing?’
‘Oh.’ Jane went to stand with her back to the open-sided, oak-pillared market hall. ‘Like… most of the guys at school, they just can’t wait to get the hell out of here and go to London. Or Paris or New York?’
‘Sure.’
‘Me, I don’t even want to go to university.’
There. It was out.
‘Ah,’ Mum said. ‘So that’s it.’
‘Three years? That’s like…’
‘Flower, compared with the rest of-’
‘The rest of my life, yeah. It is actually about more than that, though, isn’t it? And, like, for what? A degree means nothing any more. There’s guys out there with PhDs who can’t spell. Coops is Dr Cooper, and he just works for the council. And the… the forces of darkness are gathering. Hereford’s already as good as gone. All crap superstores and charity shops and women getting murdered in the back streets…’
‘Jane-’
‘And if I leave… if I go… I’ll come back and it’ll all be shit here, too.’ Jane felt the pressure of tears; hadn’t intended to go this far. ‘That sounds bonkers, doesn’t it? So why do I keep waking up depressed and frightened?’
‘Frightened, how?’
‘Frightened that like in ten years or something I’m going to be looking back with this awful self-hatred because I didn’t do what I should’ve done at the time.’
‘Flower-’
‘Yeah, I know, teenage angst. A phase. It’s always a phase, isn’t it? Well, how do you know for sure when it’s a phase, Mum? Is it after you like walk away, live in a city, get a mortgage, get pregnant… grow up?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mum said.
They were alone on the square. Only a faint wisp of the woodsmoke which used to scent the whole village. Jane felt like they were both enclosed in a cold vapour. Mum looked young and waiflike tonight, in her dark jeans and woolly, no dog collar, not even a pectoral cross. Like somebody who hadn’t grown up after all. Who still knew nothing. It made Jane want to cry with despair.
‘What about you? What about you and Lol? If Bernie Dunmore retires, and you get a bunch of extra parishes dumped on you… and Lol has to go back on the road because nobody’s making money out of CDs any more… how long are you going to last as an item then?’
Actually crying now, couldn’t help it.
‘Let’s go to the pub,’ Mum said.
‘What?’
‘Let’s go to the Swan and get a drink.’
Men who had been reappearing? Oh aye, Percy knowed about them. He sat in the ochre glow of the firelight and the haze of scenty baccy, and he talked and giggled as the small windows grew dim.
Walter had gone off somewhere. He’d doubtless heard it all before, these tales of the people who came up the fields in the river mist, no faces, no feet. Maybe Bax had, too, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was an incomer, and the fact that someone like Percy would talk to him at all about such matters, even after thirty years, was clearly a source of pride to him.