Back up the stairs, then, to the podium – and what now? A drink in the Barbican Centre beckons but you can’t afford it. There’s still plenty of time to grab some essentials and head for the sleeper train, but can you face more travel after today?
Wearily, you cast about, getting your bearings. Orientating yourself is surprisingly hard; you don’t normally approach the flat from this direction. You finally settle on a route that leads you around Speed Garden. It’s not direct, but it’s dusk now and you want to catch the last of the light. The corn dolly is still in your hand, or what’s left of it; you look for a bin, but when you get back to the flat the dolly is still in your hand.
Standing at the door, fishing for your keys, it occurs to you that maybe you should knock first. What if Fel’s removal men have arrived? What if Fel is here?
Oh, to hell with the whole situation! Savagely, you wrestle the key into the lock.
There’s no one inside.
Unlacing your boots takes the usual age, then you head into the bedroom. You can barely keep your eyes open. You figure that if you steal a nap, you’ll wake up just in time to buy something to eat at a convenience store. But if you sleep on, does it matter? This day has gone on too long already.
You’ll at least leave the blinds open. You take off your trousers and dump them in a heap in front of the wardrobe. The duvet is folded, without a cover, at the foot of the bed. You pull it up over yourself as you lie down. You close your eyes.
Wilkes’s ruined face looms at you behind your eyelids. The shock of finding him bleeding on the pavement, never mind your potentially risky confrontation with the chickie just now, has left you trembling. You turn over, away from the window, willing on oblivion.
When you came off the moors behind Jim and his friends, you could still smell the smoke. It was in your clothes and stuck to your skin. You ran sooted hands through your hair and wished you could get away with shaving your head, the way Jim shaved his. You wanted, above all things, to be like your brother. It’s why you lit the match in the first place. It’s why you torched my nest.
You sit up in the half-light, confused.
A warm-milk smell is rising in the room.
You turn the pillow over to its cool side and something falls off the end of the bed onto the floor. You look over the edge. It is the corn dolly. You should get up and throw it away once and for all, but the kitchen bin has no liner, remember; anyway, you are far too tired.
You close your eyes, letting the smell rise and set around you. A fresh smell. Flour and milk and heat and sugar. You imagine afternoons with Fel. Cooking with her, listening to music with her, listening to her play. You imagine her warmth against yours in the night. As you drift off, you are dimly aware of your tears, and your hand, as if of its own volition, moves to cradle your erection.
You wanted to be like Jim in every way. You wanted to be a soldier like him. You wanted to leave home with him when his furlough ended. You didn’t want to be left in the valley with your maundering dad, your fading mum.
At the point where the path made its first, marked descent off the moors, Jim and his friends broke into a whooping run. They had forgotten about you. You paused a second, glancing back. The smoke rising from your fire was white at last. You figured that it had gone out, that it was just smouldering. Satisfied, you turned on the path and scampered after your brother and his friends.
Jim’s brothers-in-arms were gone the next day and Jim himself returned to his regiment at the weekend. Left on your own, you told yourself you would explore the moors, dig for treasure, practise the physical exercises James’s friends had taught you – their lunges and presses and thrusts – and intersperse these activities with long, punishing runs. That way, you would be in training. That way, even as you remained where you were, you would be beginning your escape. But, what with one thing and another, you did not set foot on the moors again that summer.
Jim came home for Christmas. On Boxing Day Betty, feeling as well as she would ever feel again, suggested a walk up the valley to the pub at Heptonstall. You begged her not to tire herself. You grew insistent. Bob, shying away from confrontation as usual, weighed in on your side, so that your mum never did climb the valley, but sat listening to the radio all day long, fidgeting and disappointed.
Jim came home again, but only briefly, the following summer. He asked you if you wanted to take a walk with him over the moors and you said no. Jim asked you why not, and you had no answer. He asked you what the matter was. You looked at him, quite blank: wrong? There was nothing wrong. You just didn’t want to.
‘I’ll buy you a pint in Heptonstall,’ he said.
‘You can buy me a pint here,’ you said.
‘If we’re staying here, then you’re buying.’
‘All right,’ you said.
Over your second pint, you asked him: ‘When do you think Mum will come home?’
Shortly after Christmas she had decamped to her sister’s in Islington, north London. There were treatments there she could not get locally. You had begun to wonder whether she was, after all, dying.
Jim finished his beer. ‘Honestly? I don’t think she’s coming home. I think she prefers it in the Smoke. Can you blame her?’
Naturally you blamed her. She was your mother and she had deserted you. Whatever was wrong with her, however serious it was, she had no business using it as an excuse to avoid you.
Another Christmas. Betty was still away at Stella’s.
‘Dad, when is Mum coming home?’
Bob told you to dubbin your boots. Tomorrow you and he and Jim and Billy Marsden and his new girlfriend were going for a Boxing Day tramp about the moors.
Somehow you contrived to stay at home.
Come Easter, your dad found your walking boots under the stairs and they were in a terrible state, all dry and cracking; you hadn’t been up on the moors for over a year. Did your boots even fit you any more? They did not. And so it went on. Until at last you matriculated and it was time for you to leave for London: an exhibition scholar, bound for the Bartlett School of Architecture!
‘Can’t keep him out of his books,’ Bob used to say to strangers, his voice always more puzzled than proud. ‘Can hardly get him out of the house, this one.’
It was true. Since burning my nest, you had found yourself unwilling to return to the moors. It was as if, beyond a certain altitude, all the oxygen left your lungs. You spent your days indoors, inventing playgrounds of your own with pencil and ruler and protractor. You grew monomaniacal. You grew proficient. The people you thought of as friends at school began to laugh at you, began to shun you, but you did not care. You built and built. And such a fortress you raised around yourself! Palaces of tracing paper. Moat-loads of Indian ink.
You weren’t much to look at when you left for London. Pasty, fat, stooped, white as a sheet. You looked self-buried. But what a fuss everyone made! Betty came back for a week or two to help get you ready. At night you had to lie there listening to her and Bob arguing.
To you she said, ‘We’ll be living in the same city soon!’
You managed a thin smile. Her friendliness was coming far too late. You’d needed her here, at home. You’d needed her to be your mum. Now that you were leaving, you did not need her any more. She was just one more part of the past you wanted to put behind you.
It took weeks to get you ready: days spent in and out of shops and the barber’s and rail stations and council offices in Halifax, in Bradford, and once as far as Leeds, all to outfit you for London. From up on the moors, on top of the barrow where once I had worked away with flint and wooden shovel, preparing and burying my dead, I could see you all rushing around, gathering and dispersing across the valley: what a carry-on!