Mum pursed her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know. A grown man, and he’s never done a day’s bloody work in his life. He’s a waster, Fix, and there’s nothing down for him. Some people are never going to do any good for themselves if you give them a hundred years. And he’s — you know . . .’ Mum made the limp-wrist gesture.
‘He’s gay?’ I said blankly.
Mum pursed her lips and nodded.
‘You’re saying they kicked him out because he’s gay?’
Mum stood her ground. ‘Well, you don’t want your son bringing strange men into the house, do you?’ she demanded. ‘Some of these people–’
‘Thanks for the tip, Mum,’ I said, cutting her off. And thinking of Juliet I added, ‘At least he didn’t go outside his own species.’
I think the homophobia must be a generational thing: it’s certainly not class or geography, because you can meet the same bullshit in Hampstead just as easily. I remembered now that Richie had made some non-standard life choices even as a kid — he was the only boy in my circle of acquaintances with a skipping rope — but I’d never read anything into that. Maybe someone else had, though: maybe the nickname Dick-Breath was more than just a whimsical jeu de mots.
‘Now Ronnie Seddon –’ another finger went down ‘he was selling drugs at the Palm Tree, until he tried to sell them to a couple of plain-clothes coppers, so that was the end of him. He got three years in Walton. Mind you, there’s more drugs in there than there is anywhere else, from what I hear, so he’s probably happy. Teresa Size’s lad, Philip, was saying they smuggle them in over the wall from the cemetery on Hornby Road. They use catapults, he said. Just tie Jiffy bags full of heroin to old batteries and shoot them in with catapults.’
Mum recounted this with relish. Her favourite reading matter had always been true crime, although she preferred a good murder to any amount of aggravated robbery.
‘Then there’s Steven Seddon,’ she said. ‘He was at the docks for a while, back when they still had a few ships coming in every now and then. But he gave that up in the end and went to some night-school thing. He’s at a law office in the Cunard, now, and he wears a suit. I’ve seen him waiting for the bus up at the broo, looking like Lord Muck. I wouldn’t trust him with a bloody paper clip.’
‘Would any of them still drink at the Breeze?’ I asked.
Mum made a sour face. ‘Richie might, though it’s a bloody mystery to me why anyone would go back to that place. Harold Keighley is the most miserable bastard of a landlord I’ve ever met, God forgive my language. He opens the doors when he puts the towel up, so the place gets as cold as a fridge.’
The description made me grin: I remembered those winter nights when the determination to finish your last drink clashed with the onset of hypothermia. ‘Does he still do that, then?’ I asked.
‘It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots, Fix,’ she said sententiously. ‘And Keighley doesn’t even change his bloody underwear more than twice a year.’
Mum got up and went into the kitchen again, coming back with two bottles of pale this time. She opened both with a kitchen tin opener — one of the old kind that have two hooked blades, one large and one small, and look like exotic torture implements. She handed a bottle to me, and I took it because I knew if I refused she’d drink them both herself.
We drank, and reminisced, as evening fell outside. At half past seven there was a pause while Mum watched Coronation Street and I made a foray to the off-licence at the top of the street. Then we drank and reminisced some more.
‘Mum,’ I said, when I judged that she was mellow enough to roll with the impact, ‘Matt left home around the same time I did, didn’t he?’
Mum nodded. ‘Same year,’ she confirmed. ‘His first parish was in Birmingham. Our Lady of Zion. You went to Oxford in September, and Matty left in December. He gave his first sermon two weeks before Christmas. You remember? We all came up for it.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. But he was ordained in April. So what was he doing in between times?’
Mum gave me a look that was a couple of centuries too ripe to be merely old-fashioned. ‘He was learning to be a priest,’ she said. ‘He’d been ordained, aye, so he wasn’t a deacon any more, but it isn’t like an assembly line, Fix. They had all sorts of things he had to do first. Seminars, he called them. A seminar here and a seminar there. All up and down the country, he was, and living out of a suitcase. Except it wasn’t a suitcase, it was just a big shapeless bag with two handles that he got from the Army and Navy. Six feet long.’ She illustrated with her hands. ‘He looked like he was carrying a bloody bazooka, honest to God. If it was nowadays, someone would think he was a terrorist and shoot him.’
That brought her too close to the painful subject of Matt’s current situation, so she shied away from it again. ‘He was everywhere,’ she concluded. ‘Running around like a blue-arsed fly.’
‘But he was still living at the seminary? Over in Skem?’
‘In Upholland? No, after that big — you know, passing-out parade thing, where the bishop put the oil on him, and gave him his Jezebel — they needed his room for someone else. He stayed there until the autumn, when they had the new lads in, then he came back here.’
‘Jezebel’ was Mum’s mispronunciation of chasuble, the sleeveless robe that a priest wears on top of all his other vestments when he does the business at Mass. I was never sure whether it was a joke or an actual mistake: after all, her mangled renderings of song lyrics, including turning Fun Boy Three’s ‘Our Lips are Sealed’ into ‘Olives to See You’, were legendary.
But what made my ears prick up was the revelation that Matt had come back home in between the seminary and his first ministry. I was already off out in the world by that time, screwing up my degree course, and I don’t think I came home once in the first two terms.
‘Back to Walton?’ I asked, making sure I was getting this straight.
‘Back to this house, Fix. Where else was he going to go?’
I nodded, conceding the point. ‘So he was around for three months,’ I said. ‘Back in circulation. Looking up old friends.’
Mum sniffed. ‘I don’t know about that. He saw some of them, aye, but he wasn’t going to walk in the Breeze and stand at the bar with them, was he? It’s not that kind of life, when you’re a man of the cloth. You’ve got to stand aloof.’
The conversation veered off in other directions, by virtue of some unspoken agreement that passed between us. Nostalgia and beer are a potent combination in themselves; and when Mum got the photo album out and cracked it open in the middle we had the emotional perfect storm. There we all were: Matt and me in short trousers, Dad all tanned and handsome — ‘a dark horse’, my grandma used to call him, with mingled disapproval and admiration — and Mum looking like a million dollars.
‘Where did it go?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘We just–’ I couldn’t find a word for it, so I pantomimed it instead — holding my hand in front of my face with the fingers pursed together, then opening it wide. ‘Where did that come from? One minute we’re a family, the next we’re . . . in the wind.’
Mum didn’t answer. She just turned a few pages in the book back and folded it open at a page we hadn’t seen yet. There were three photos on the page: the first, Mum holding a baby, the baby all swathed in pink blankets and pink bonnet and pink everything; the second, the three Castor siblings in school uniforms, wearing the pained grimaces children always put on when they’re told to smile; and the third, Katie by herself, aged four, smiling a smile that was altogether more believable — a smile with secret, solemn little-kid thoughts behind it.
I stared at the photos, suddenly sober despite the seven or eight beers I’d downed.
‘It took a while,’ Mum said, her tone soft. ‘It didn’t happen all at once.’