Kieran.Stories

There was someone I didn’t recognise outside the library. She wore a cashmere coat and butterfly brooch. They put these events on in the spring. Someone had glued actual Scrabble tiles to the laminate poster: ‘Welcome’. You couldn’t get away with that in rain, although I supposed the laminate would help. The stranger was next to me now.

‘Are you going in for the Scrabble?’ 

We did go inside, together, and we played a few games before leaving.    

We walked through the market. How had this happened? We bullet pointed our lives.  

Jenny had looked after her mother since her dementia diagnosis. But it was too much. She now paid a small fortune for her mother to be looked after in a home. 

I started with Mary. We never travelled further north than junction 18 off the M4. 

‘I’m not exaggerating. Mary died a few years ago now.’ Jenny touched my arm. An hour ago, we’d been strangers.  

Jenny suggested taking the radio into the garden. She wanted to see the rhubarb. She asked me about cricket. I asked her about the book club. We talked around politics. I had a fair idea of where she stood. We went out through the French windows. 

There was a khaki coat in a clump on the floor, against the house. Jenny took a step back. 

I kicked his boot with my pump. There was a semi-circle cut on his cheek, like a crescent moon. His hair was molting. His nose was crooked, but this was the result of a fight outside the Gladstone Arms in June 2016. 

I had kept Mark from Jenny. She might have recognised him from the Wiltshire Gazette. For one day, he had been the top story on the BBC News site. 

He came home with a limp after the tattoo. This was the story: he was pinned down on the school field. They’d done a shoddy job.  

He started fighting. Mud in the washing machine agitator.

He thought about the army. It was his standard response if I asked what he was going to do with his life. 

He clawed some money together and found a bedsit in Bath. Presumably, not a very nice place. We stopped trying to get in touch. 

The house was maybe not peaceful but peaceable. We played cribbage. Mary started to take long walks. We made cups of tea.  

The next time I saw Mark was the day of his mother’s funeral. We talked in the car park. It was August. He was going to Russia to fight for Putin.  

‘Mind how you go,’ I said, and he nodded. 

Meet the British Traitor Fighting for Putin in Ukraine. 

His skin was peeling from the sun. He was asleep on the settee. I placed a glass of water next to him on the floor, then closed the living room door. 

I read my book at the kitchen table. The second volume of Ian Kershaw’s Hitler biography. I had reached the Olympics. The text was dense. Jenny knew that I was reading it, and partly that was why I persevered. I did not forget that Mark was in the living room.     

Mark came into the kitchen as I was buttering two potato cakes. Something to put me on.  

‘Did you sleep?’ 

He nodded.    

‘How did you get back?’    

‘I was on a boat.’  

I saw him pulled to shore by someone in hi-vis. 

Mark dropped his glass of water. He got to his knees. I told him to move, so I could pick up the larger pieces of glass. I found the dustpan and brush.    

‘Sorry about the glass.’ 

‘It’s fine.’  

‘Who was she before?’ He yawned. I heard his jaw crack.  

‘A friend of mine.’   

‘What’s her name?’ 

‘You don’t need to know her name.’ 

He sniffed. I could see all the gunk in his head. I made coffee. I stirred sweetener in. I added two sugars to Mark’s.  

‘We might as well sit through.’   

The settee was black with his sweat. 

‘You’re a disgrace,’ I said.  

Mark nodded. 

He mimed shooting a gun. He was a cowboy. He lifted his t-shirt and showed me his war wound, a gorge right across his stomach. The skin was mossy. His wounds were like something from nature.   

‘I’m going for a shower. Is that okay?’    

That morning, I had left a twenty-pound note on the kitchen counter. I was going to break it at the Co-op for change. It was still there after Mark left. In his position, I would have taken it. It would have been small beer. 

*

I thought about Mark’s tattoo as I drove. For a second, I forgot that it was Jenny next to me, and not Mary. I would keep that to myself, obviously. 

We were well into the Lakes now. Jenny updated me on the view. Her window was down. 

At Christmas, she’d visited and brought the cold in with her. It brought out the smell of sweat but also rosewater. 

On Christmas Day, I went with her to Royal Oak Care Home. June gripped my hand. She was as strong as a vice. She wore a green paper crown.  

Parking at the hotel proved a challenge. I reversed. The weather was not by any means good. Jenny looked forward to the rain. In the Lakes, it would be dramatic. But it wasn’t like there would be any drama. I lifted our case from the boot. There was an awkward step down into the hotel. There was an open fire and a lounge area for guests. It was all very nice.  

There was time for a drink at the Swan before we ate at the hotel. I gave Jenny my wallet to go to the bar.  

At the urinal, I felt hot behind the ears. I zipped my fly and left without drying my hands. 

Jenny had found a nook. I checked my wallet. The twenty-pound note was gone.   

‘I had a twenty in here. I thought you’d use my card.’  

‘Sorry, you didn’t say. I don’t know your pin.’  

‘It’s contactless.’  

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I paused. ‘Wordsworth mentions this pub in one of his poems.’  

‘Oh? I wandered lonely as a swan?’

‘Probably.’ 

Being peaceable had a lot to do with tone of voice.

I wasn’t sure why I’d kept the twenty. For whatever reason, maybe it reminded me of Mark. 

‘What’re you thinking?’  

‘I wasn’t thinking about anything,’ I said. 

We walked back to the hotel. Jenny stopped at the bookshop. We held hands through Grasmere. All the young couples in their Regatta cagoules. They had probably been together longer than we had. Jenny squeezed my hand.

I found my trousers and dressed in the dark. 

It was cold out. The sky was clear. 

I arrived at the Swan. In the beer garden, I waited to see if there was movement inside. The lights were off. I went to the window and broke the glass with a piece of dry-stone wall. I expected an alarm, but there wasn’t one. I stepped over broken glass. I used the torch on my phone to find the bar. I was looking for the till.

From below, I heard a bestial moan. I stopped. 

There was someone behind me.  

‘Alright?’ It was a young man.   

‘What was that?’  

He held a halogen bulb. I could only see his face. He moved closer. 

I followed him through the pub, because he asked me to. I had to stay close. Watch your step. I followed him down. There was light in the cellar. 

He blew on the bulb and the light went out. Two more teenagers were down here. The girl was drinking Gordon’s from a can. The boy started to smoke. The other boy was on his phone, lounging in one of the beanbags. It was a blank space. No barrels. Only the young people and their beanbags, and me. ‘I heard a noise.’

‘That was me.’ His leg was wrapped in cling film. ‘She hurt me.’  

‘You’ll have to pay for the window. The one you smashed.’  

Were they drunk? 

‘What’re you doing here?’ she asked. 

‘It’s nothing to do with you.’ 

‘Don’t get spicy,’ she said. ‘Take a beanbag. We might as well sit through.’ 

She drank the last of her Gordon’s and placed the empty can on the stone floor.    

‘We’re working on spells.’ 

She waited for me to look at her again, before going on. 

‘We’re reaching.’ She stretched out her arms. ‘Do you know Aleister Crowley?’  

I did. I had given myself this project after Mary’s death. I would identify and write brief biographies of all the cutouts on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Crowley was the last face I identified. I did not use the internet, that was a point of pride. 

‘I knew him personally.’ She scratched beneath her eye. She held a long needle. ‘We’re the painted ones. We wish to strike.’ 

She handed the needle to the first boy and removed her top. She lay on the floor. He shuffled around her on his knees.  

‘I say strike, but the purpose of a tattoo is to defend.’ She bit her lip. 

I found a beanbag. 

‘Are you interested in history?’  

‘Yes,’ I said. 

‘We’re interested in England. Meet the British traitor fighting for Putin in Ukraine.’

Her eyes closed. Her back must have been frozen. I could hear, or I thought I could hear, the jab of the needle as it pierced her skin, over and over.   

*

The Morris dancers settled in the gap between pub and picnic table. It would have been rude to leave; we represented twenty percent of their audience. I recognised the girl. She hit her stick precisely against her partner’s. The sound was clear and dead. 

I scratched. Jenny had told me to stop scratching several times that morning. I kept apologising.  

‘Do you still want to sit inside?’     

Tweedies was packed. We found two stools. It was undignified. 

The football was on. No one in Tweedies seemed moved by the match. I always liked the Man City blue. Mark had chosen Arsenal towards the end of his primary school career. When I was his age, you weren’t allowed to pick a team. You got what you were given. 

At the urinal, I could have slipped through the floor.

I rolled up my shirtsleeve (a chequered blue from M&S) and checked the damage. The cling film was slightly damp. The pain had gone. When I blinked, I could see the symbol inside its perfect disc. 

Jenny had found somewhere else to sit. There was an empty, streaked glass on the table. I looked at the football, not taking it in. ‘Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)’ by Squeeze played through the pub speakers, instead of commentary. It reminded me of Mary. 

‘I was sitting here. That’s my glass.’ He leant over our table, picked up the pint glass.

‘It’s empty,’ I said.  

‘I was at the bar.’  

‘Why don’t we go outside?’ 

The gentleman followed me outside. He was half my age.  

She was standing by the wall, vaping. She bowed her head. Her straw hat looked nibbled. 

On the concrete slab before the smoking hut, he floored me. I thought he might stop after that. There was damp in the air. My arm ached. Each slow dusk was a drawing-down of blinds.