What Goes and Comes Around

  Chapter Six

  Cock-a-doodle-do! Get up stoopid you!' Like a horror show clown Dan rattled the curtains along their rail, letting in rays of lousy daylight that evilly poked Ian's achy, hooded eyes. Working out that big bro' had stomped into the kitchen wasn't supposed to require genius - pans clattered and the radio found its louder-than-life voice, 'Reaching out, touching me, touching youuuuuu…'

  'Dear God or whoever,' Ian muttered, his lips barely moving, 'let some crazy neighbour hammer down the wall and plug the effing thing right up Dan's…' On second thoughts, Mr Almighty, cancel that: wasn't Ian's head already pounding like a maniac had assaulted him? Weren't sizzling fat and salty bacon smells dangerously close to dragging him by the nose into the land of the living dead? Groan. Not another day of zombiedom.

  A dull crack and an angry hiss indicated an egg had slithered from its shell into the frying pan. Ian's stomach churned to think of the egg's snotty texture, though his stiff neck needed some sort of lubricant. He'd nodded off upright on the sofa and now, when he tried to put his head down, something cold, hard and angular was in his way. His blind fingers hesitantly explored it. The open toolbox - it had been idle on the sofa the day he moved in. Even with its lid closed, it was too uncomfortable to use as a pillow. Ian rubbed his eyes and stretched with the zeal of a jack-in-box on a knackered spring. 'Turn that frigging radio off.' The bark of authority in his voice surprised him. In an instant only the sizzle of the frying pan reached his ears. No doubt Dan was creased up, holding in his laughter and turning a shade of first blood. Horror show clown? How apt.

  Though his reflection in the dead TV screen was murky, Ian knew he looked as terrible as he felt - hair and beard by Ug the caveman, watery, bloodshot eyes courtesy of Hammer films. There was little chance he'd left a hair of any cheapo mongrel in the fridge, and summoning the will to go walkies to an offy might do for him. Help! echoed through his thick head, though he couldn't figure who'd shouted.

  The TV and DVD player were tucked in a corner of the room on a dusty, silver stand that also supported a wonky row of empty Beck's bottles. And any resemblance to conventional homemaking ended there. Slowly oxidising nuts, bolts, spanners, wrenches, sockets and grimy, half-crushed boxes were scattered over the bare, oil-stained floorboards. In several places the plaster had crumbled away from the walls. Dirty greyish-blue, they hadn't had a lick of paint in a long time. A sketchy diagram of a disassembled motorbike had been chalked in red and green on the smoothest surface; two-way arrows demonstrated how the components fit together. The sketch overlooked an authentic, half-assembled Harley-Davidson, ignominiously balanced on bricks instead of wheels behind the tatty, tweed sofa. Oily fingerprints were daubed over its chrome tank like a confession that the classic machine had been off the road for criminally long months, soon to add up to two years. So much for Dan's dream of restoring it and cruising around America, Henry Fonda-style.

  Bar cobwebs in the corners, two of the bedrooms had been empty until Ian took one. Dan's efforts to make his guest feel at home consisted of inflating a borrowed air mattress and throwing a duvet over it. The stripy, red and blue duvet cover was greasy like a gigantic rag for cleaning engine parts. Ian's clothes largely remained in the deluxe sports bag he'd packed a few days after everything had fallen apart, though an untidy pile of sweaty stuff was growing in a corner. The third bedroom, secured by a great, chunky padlock on an oak door, was where Ian understood Dan kept his shotgun. Much too irresponsibly, perhaps. Many people would say, having seen the grime encrusted kitchen, that they didn't know how anyone could inhabit such a hovel. And Dan didn't live in it, spending his time at the flat of his girlfriend, mysterious Jane who Ian had never met. So, until most recently, a burglar could have sawn through the padlock at his leisure to grab the shooter. Unless, of course, the hypothetical crook entered the property through the window of that very room.

  Dan pushed a dented, silver foil tray under Ian's nose. Two white pills, a steaming black coffee and a bacon and egg sarnie leaking runny yolk and tomato ketchup. 'There you go, sunshine.'

  A sip of the hot coffee helped the painkillers down. 'Do I have to?' Ian pulled a face at the sarnie like a sweet-toothed kid eyeing boiled cabbage.

  'I haven't been to the shop and back and then fried it up for nothing. You looked so out of it when I came in, I thought you were a goner. Get it down you.'

  Though Dan and Ian shared the same chiselled bone structure, wavy brown locks and grey-blue eyes, the former's complexion was more rugged and leathery, a consequence of working outdoors on building sites for years. Whenever he removed his top, Dan flaunted a bulging, toned physique and an immaculate tattoo on his back of a skeleton from hell riding a roaring, blazing chopper. There was no point arguing with a brother like Dan. And the sandwich, which Ian nibbled at first, was actually just what the doc ordered. Dan waited until his sibling took heartier bites before announcing, 'Ma and pa phoned to make their expected enquiries.'

  'Uh-huh. And you told her what?'

  'That you'll tell her everything in person. I've arranged to drop you off mid-afternoon. You've been invited for tea.'

  'You're having me on.'

  'Afraid not, brother. You're going to get your skanky hide in the shower and make yourself look and smell half-human. That includes a shave. How about that? You can't fall over in this place forever. I'm thinking of selling up.'

  'When?' Would bad news ever stop beating Ian round the head?

  'Only thinking,' Dan shrugged, non-committally. 'I ran out of work in the middle of last week. These times are no good for self-employed bricklayers. It's looking like I'll have to do this place up, cash in, and officially move to Jane's. Luckily, I got it so cheap in the housing crash years back I can make a killing.' Dan flexed his muscles under his long-sleeved, tight black top and threw a left-right combination at his shadow. 'Who did you have a punch up with?'

  'What?'

  'Your nose is caked with dry blood.'

  'I… ' Ian remembered meeting up with Wolfie and Mick Weevil in the club. Then the others arrived. They'd ridiculed that union fool, Johnny Jacks… Had he lashed out when Ian was too out of it to defend himself? The others must have beaten him off? What an arse! '…Gave as good as I got.'

  'By accidentally butting your opponent when you fell over?' Dan snatched the empty tray from Ian's hands. 'Shower, chump!'

  After Dan's grimy, garage-like dwelling, and Cathy's keep off the exhibits, mock palace, the spick and span humility of his parents' abode might have made a heartening change, except Ian wasn't in any shape to brush off his mother's probing about home affairs. Trust big bro'; he just couldn't resist rerunning their childhood one more time, dishing up the same getting-you-done-dirt that Alicia and Davie regularly tried to force down each other's throats. And how are the kids? Ian really couldn't say. He'd so quickly become accustomed to wobbling insensibly round life's difficulties that straight dealing seemed to be something he'd done… A quite surreal intuition that he was surfacing from a deep coma provoked the alarming notion that maybe he'd gone a little insane of late... Bloody damn Dan! Mother would try to bully Ian's demons out of him or, in her attempt, prod him that bit closer to the edge. The tension in the room stretched like an abrading elastic tightrope over a wide, heart-stoppingly deep canyon, the lone link between new and old worlds.

  Mother cantankerously dusted her humble heirlooms and the ornaments she'd collected over a lifetime of sifting through second-hand goods. They crowded the window-sills, the wall unit, the mantelpiece with a maudlin, Victorian-like sentimentality that had never ceased to give Ian the willies. Mother thrived in junk shops, charity shops, jumble sales and at car boot sales as if the present is a strange country where they do nothing but sell overpriced rubbish. It wasn't without significance that she furiously elbow-greased the brass likeness of her Lord on a crucifix, repositioning him on the mantelpiece to the immediate right of the carriage clock. Time to watch over souls was her cryptic sermon's gist, if
her son wasn't mistaken.

  Despite his perspiring brow and sore brain, Ian found some consolation in the knowledge that Mother couldn't stop time - freedom beckoned in a few hours. And yet that was a problem in itself; for now that Ian's nuclear family and 'prospects' had imploded, he hadn't a clue how to spend his days. Like an institutionalised man on the 'wrong' side of the institution's walls, he was learning the hard way that few cope with an outsider's role. Nevertheless, he wasn't going to conform to any throwback nonsense of Mother's.

  'That new?' Ian mumbled, trying to throw the old girl. Her ambition to unearth a forgotten treasure that would convert into hard cash, justifying the schmaltzy and spiritual value she afforded her collection, had increased twofold since her retirement from the care home up Halfpenny Lane. 'It looks like its worth something.'

  She looked at him like he'd put his foot in it.

  'The china Virgin Mary,' he said, warily.

  'Cathy bought it for my birthday several years ago.'

  Great move, pea-brain.

  'Let me get this clear in my mind,' Mother started, as if what scant information Ian had so far related was priceless for the most unbelievably wrong reason. 'Cathy kicked you out after you'd lost your job. Correct?'

  'Not exactly,' Ian replied, squirming.

  'What exactly?'

  Looking into his mother's face - at her fading blue eyes with dark, hollow rings, her crumpled, sagging skin, her flyaway white hair - Ian was shocked by the extent of her aging. Back in the day, when he and Dan were boys and before that, she'd have been considered a fine-looking woman. Young or old, it had always been hard to tell her anything.

  'You'll have to tell us some time,' she insisted, her spirit anything but frail.

  'What does it matter?'

  'What a stupid question!'

  'She's been seeing someone else,' Ian said emphatically, yet looking away, anywhere. The brown suede of his right trainer was stained with a splodge of blood from his dripping nose of yesterday afternoon. Or had it kicked off last night? How and when had he got home?

  'How do you know?' Mother demanded, her arms akimbo. Her apron was a memento from York Minster. Ian felt akin to a former occupant of York Castle Prison.

  'I just know.'

  'How?'

  'Alicia let slip.'

  'I can't believe my ears! How did Alicia know about it?'

  'Let it go. I'm sick of it.'

  'You shouldn't have married her. She was always a self-serving strumpet. Didn't I say it at the time, Richard?'

  Dad's shorn grey bonce, creased forehead and black-rimmed specs appeared over his Daily Mirror like he was reconnoitring from a trench. 'We thought you made a lovely couple.' He glanced at the happy wedding photo on the buttermilk wall to the right of his armchair. 'It's a crying shame. That's life sometimes. Ian has to move on.'

  'And our Dan tells us what a fine job he's making of doing just that. Where did Dan shoot off to? And don't contradict me! I knew she was trouble. I put a brave face on it for the sake of peace.'

  'Her dad was a fine chap who had time for everybody. Her mother, so they say, was a pea in the same pod. It can't be helped that Ian and Cathy's marriage didn't work out, and shouting about it isn't going to fix it.'

  'Is that all you've to say about it? And it hardly matters if her parents waited on the Queen of Sheba - Cathy isn't anyone's idea of a perfect wife!'

  'There's no such thing as perfection in marriage.' With that, Dad ducked behind his newspaper and left Ian to face the inevitable barrage. What about the kids' welfare? Have you seen a solicitor? Does she expect to keep the house and everything in it? You make her think again or I'll do it for you! Start with me and she'll wish that she hadn't!

  'That,' said Dad, dropping his paper to his lap, 'is exactly the attitude that will make things worse. Caring too much and going about it the wrong way brings on disaster. We've got to let them…'

  'Ian needs my help and he's got it!'

  'He hasn't asked for any help.' Dad got up.

  'And where are you off to?'

  'Jester needs exercise. Come on, boy, time for walkies.'

  Jester the cocker spaniel sprang from his basket, excitedly getting under Dad's feet as they left the room. Mother flung her duster at the folded newspaper in the armchair when the back door softly closed a moment later. 'And are you going to tell me who he is? Is he going to finish off bringing up the kids? And if you think that's a bad idea, and you should, what are you going to do about it? Those kids need their real dad, and that's you! And nobody knows that better than me!'

  Mother's own father, a harsh, gin-soaked miner, had died of hypothermia when he'd fallen into a ditch and knocked himself unconscious; the accident followed a heavy drinking session one December night when hell itself had frozen over. Jimmy's widow interpreted her wayward husband's demise as celestial retribution, and from then on Mrs Martha Speight passionately embraced her hitherto foundering Protestantism, filling any gaps in her bible learning with the gospel according to the superstitions, myths and legends of folklore. A gossip with a tongue of fire and brimstone throughout her life, at eighty years of age Martha harangued all callers to her terraced house after becoming convinced the devil in many guises was stalking her. A magpie frequenting the bird table in her poky yard had stoked the flames of wild irrationality. Martha's poverty, the morals she preached, and a traditional girls' school education had imprinted a strict, parochial outlook on her four daughters - Ian's mother's most advanced views edged just beyond the portrayal of gender roles in the Famous Five books she read in the nineteen-fifties. That decade had begun with her father's funeral in a snowy cemetery, a scene that most deeply affected June Speight's five year old mind. Nonetheless, the scared, tiny waif grew into a dependable and industrious woman, qualities that, despite her neurotic edge, attracted Ian's cordial, fun-loving father, who'd grown up a few terraces away. June's principles had stolidly guided their marriage around any obstacle that it encountered, albeit that her Richard had often needed a blind eye and a deaf ear to go on her detours. The birth of their children and then their grandchildren brought to the fore June's tenderness and patience; she'd entertained Alicia and Davie for hour upon hour when they were little angels, compensating to some degree for the absence of Cathy's mother and father following their premature journey to the pearly gates. Not that the kids fully appreciated their grandmother or her standards now they had hit their teens.

  June's sense of self-sacrifice eventually tempered her fiery outrage. After warning her son about that 'devil drink', she got busy in the kitchen, determined to cook a roast beef dinner that would make her menfolk drool. Ian, who might have insisted on helping out another time, waited in the edgy, delicate peace of the room, too wary of re-sparking her ire to ask for a drink to slake his dehydration. It was a measure of her distress that she'd neglected to offer one.

  Between his thumb and forefinger, Ian nursed his sore nose. That effing Johnny Jacks! A text message was quickly despatched to the big man Wolfie: 'Wot u do to Johnny?'

  '??? Last saw of him he put u in taxi after u fell. Drunken bums r us, lol,' Wolfie directly replied.

  Rather than suffer a shameful beating, Ian had wrongfully blamed the man who'd been out to help him. Again. Didn't Ian have to face it? The bloody awful fact that he could be a most rotten judge of character. Johnny really had tried his damnedest, not that it was ever going to be enough - the company's decisions were final, no room for u-turns. That said, Ian couldn't absolve himself. He remembered how Dad, no, the whole family, had struggled through the year long strike back in the day. Dad would be ashamed and angry to he hear about his son's recent behaviour. Thank God he hadn't walked through a picket line! It was enough that Ian had stirred trouble at work while being utterly blind to his problems at home. In the light he currently saw his life in, the photos of him, Cathy and the kids that remained mounted on his parents' walls exhibited conniving smiles and fake, melodramatic hugs rather th
an what they had once actually been. Ian was more convinced than ever that he'd lived a lie. And such a thought, whether true or false, is volatile and dangerous if it goes unchallenged.

  Dad returned and reclaimed his armchair with an affirmative nod; the worst was over, at least as far as his dearest was concerned. Ian could see Dan in their father, and, because of his and Dan's brotherly likeness, he wondered if he'd be a ringer for the old fellow in his own senior years. A little gnarled, pot-bellied, dusty even, Richard Randall visually epitomised the working man whose labours were behind him. A collier until redundancy had opened up a diverse career founded on contractual insecurity and shitty tasks, he'd nevertheless often said he'd been luckier than many he knew because, for the decade or so up to his retirement, he'd pulled on a train guard's uniform. Even when Dad's modest expectations regarding good fortune were taken on board, Ian suspected that recent events had seen him drop into the ranks of the hapless 'many'. As if to confirm it, black and tan Jester sniffed distrustfully round Ian's ankles, licking the splodge of blood on his suede trainer. Not entirely won over by the taste, the pooch padded over to his wicker basket alongside Dad's armchair and curled up.

  Under a dizzying wave of day-after nausea, Ian grunted in acknowledgement when Dad outlined the route he and his faithful, four-legged friend took to the overgrown waste ground. 'Not too good,' he managed to get out in reply to the old man's question about Dan's motorcycle restoration.

  'Thought it might stall,' Dad grinned, pun very much intended. 'Dan reminds me of a train-driver I regularly worked with. He was spot on up and down tracks that were laid for him, but when he needed to get off to pave the way for his grand ideas, well, he was as much use as a map of Yorkshire in Lancashire.' Dad thoughtfully sucked on his bottom lip. 'I suppose he never had the capital, to be fair. Do you need anything, son?'

  'Wouldn't mind a glass of water.'

  'Coming right up.'

  'You've been on the strong pop?' Dad asked as if he hadn't known when he returned with a pint of lemon squash and two strong painkillers. 'And I meant financially. We've a small amount saved that you can borrow if you're desperately skint.'

  'So you have to struggle to get by? Thanks, but no thanks.' Ian popped the pills and thirstily drained his glass. 'Another pint of squash would be much appreciated.'

  Mother's mood had improved, and the traditional feast she served up at the kitchen table was mouth-wateringly second to none. Excluding the greasy sandwich Dan had knocked up that morning, Ian didn't think he'd eaten for two or three days - he discovered a mighty appetite in spite of his boozy botheration. Like a man rescued from the wilderness, he wolfed down his mountain of tender beef, crunchy, roast potatoes and parsnips, creamy mash, and sweet peas and carrots. Picking up and holding his plate at an angle, he licked it clean and wiped a smear of gravy from his chops. 'Can't thank you enough, Mother.'

  'We always try to have one decent tea through the week,' she replied, slicing a golden potato.

  'No thanks to any grey geezer in the sky,' added Dad, who after all their married years was still irritated by the way his wife insisted on saying grace before every meal.

  'Richard!'

  'It's getting harder for a lot of folk,' said Ian, regretfully. He suddenly felt useless and forlornly wished he could do more for his folks. Notwithstanding her usually blinkered piety, Mother had called this one perfect: the drinking malarkey had to stop. He'd had a couple of big shocks - didn't he have to get over them and get it together?

  'You could do with eating properly on a regular basis, you know. You've lost too much weight. And you need a haircut.'

  'I can agree with that,' said Dad, ardently. 'You are getting some shopping into Dan's dump?'

  'I'm getting by.'

  His parents exchanged one of those looks.

  'Why don't you phone Cathy and arrange for the kids to come round for a meal? I'm sure you'd…'

  'I've already done it.' Mother passed the mint sauce to her husband, thinking, not for the first time, that his right eye must be failing. That, or he couldn't see for looking. 'We're waiting for Alicia to fit us in her diary. More importantly right now, I want you to promise that you'll get to a supermarket. Do you need a loan?'

  'Dad's already offered, thanks. I can just about tide myself over. I'll find some work soon with a bit of luck.'

  'On one of these zero-hour contracts that are currently the rage with employers? Some good that will do you like some good this 'economic recovery' is doing us all. The suit and ties on the news must think we were born yesterday.'

  'Well, we've made some progress if he's agreed to stop drinking every day.' Mother put her hands to her cheeks in dismay: 'I've forgotten the Yorkshire puddings!'

  'We've got one at the table with us, the way he's been behaving,' Dad joked, stabbing at a slice of beef.

  'Richard!' Mother tittered like a girl on a date with the school hunk.

  They persuaded Mother to let them take over and do the washing up. Though Dad didn't say much, his no nonsense, no strings attached company made Ian feel better, stronger. A hastily gulped pint-and-a-half of what Dad called council pop also did its bit.

  When they went through to the living room, a pre-recorded Antiques Roadshow was running . Some bowtie-wearing dandy used his expertise to gut a punter, pointing out that his green tea set wasn't quite an exclusive relic. 'Just any old mass-produced thing. Sounds about right,' Ian remarked.

  'I don't want any criticisms of my shows.' Mother's eye swept over the mantelpiece and her artefacts. 'Do you hear?'

  'His tea set's got more chips than Harry Ramsden's.'

  'What did I say?'

  Dad picked up his newspaper and coughed.

  As the theme tune played and the credits rolled, Mother switched to the menu screen. 'More channels mean more repeats and low-budget drivel,' she complained, stealing a glance of a best-selling paperback on top of her magazine rack. A buy one get one free sticker partially concealed the title and the author's name from Ian's vantage point on the sofa.

  'It's time for me to be getting on.' Dan hadn't arranged to pick up Ian and it was already gone seven. He reached for the waterproof his brother had lent him and that was draped over the back of the sofa. 'It's been lovely seeing you both. Don't be worrying about anything. And thanks for a truly hearty meal.'

  'The reason Dan's place isn't crawling with vermin is that the larder is always empty. Why don't you move back here until you know where you stand? We can help to sort things out, can't we, Dad?'

  'Erm, sure, yes. Certainly.'

  'I'll think about it.'

  'Well, make sure you visit us more often. And Dad can drop you off.'

  'It's no problem, my son.'

  'I could do with some exercise and fresh air. I'll walk into town to catch a bus, thanks all the same.' Ian shook Dad's hand and pecked Mother's cheek. 'See you soon.'

  'Mind how you go.'

  'Don't forget that phones have been invented.'

  Ian was opening the wrought iron gate onto the gloomy street when a blazing summer's day from way back lit up his mind. He and Dan had fired water-pistols at each other over the bonnet of the family car while Mum packed a picnic into the boot. 'You'd better not scratch the paintwork, boys,' Dad had warned, immediately inspecting the beige Mark I Cavalier. Hadn't he then loaded a long leather case and a wicker basket into the motor? Yes, that was it! They'd cast lines for trout in the Yorkshire Dales! Mother had read some book in the shade of a stout tree downstream from rapids that roared and frothed over smooth, mossy boulders, bank to bank. The memory of the stirring tug on his line as he reeled in his only catch of the day, and Dad's pride as he took over to remove the hook from the beautiful, flapping, two-pound rainbow trout, triggered a heart-wrenching realisation: his parents hadn't given everything over the years so he could be the resident fool in a boozy hole. And what about the house a few estates away where until most recently he'd lived under the i
llusion of respectability? What were Davie, Alicia and Cathy doing? Was he there? Dan had tried to tell Ian that it was all in the past, but isn't the past that most painful realm where bad things stay exactly the same forever? He caught a vision of maggots writhing in a bait tub. Everything was about perspective. The barbecued trout had been such a treat for his parents.

  Ian's breath steamed in the nippy, damp air. He tucked his hands in his waterproof's pockets, stepping in the opposite direction to the club and his former home. Clouds covered the moon and the stars, and the promise of cool, constant rain possessed a melancholy attraction - what would it be like to be cleansed, free of everything? Broken glass crunching underfoot, he cut through the short, dark snicket formed by thick, overgrown hedges and entered the next estate at its highest point. The terraced houses were built on a hillside that Ian could dimly remember as wild grassland bursting with bright poppies. And then the bulldozers must have come. From concrete steps that led down to the sloping pavement, Ian looked to his right, over the rooftops, observing the distant, hazy glimmer and black, angular silhouettes of the town centre's lights and buildings. The clock face on the old church's tower glowed like a surrogate moon. No matter that its hands weren't visible to Ian's naked eye, for he knew the time had come when he had to find something. Only what or where it might be wholly eluded him.

  He huffed and puffed, sweating, at the summit of steep steps that rose up at the end of a poorly lit, cracked tarmac path dissecting public gardens and waste ground where a hospital had stood until twelve or so months ago. From the path both vegetation and rubble were shrouded by night, but it hadn't stopped Ian seeing through the years. At about the age of five, he'd slipped off the edge of the public garden's concrete paddling pool, splitting open his head and turning the clear water to a clotty, pink ink. Everybody had panicked and screamed at once. And then he was in his mother's arms, rushing to the A&E, sobbing at the drip-drop trail of blood on the paving slabs behind them. Butterfly stitches had sounded like something that might help him to fly, an idea that calmed him down by rousing a sense of intrigue and wild expectation. Though the paddling pool had been filled in at some unknown point, and the casualty demolished, Ian's left brow still bore the nick of a scar. Until the internet made fighters' records and press cuttings more accessible, he'd boasted to anyone who couldn't know better that his injury was caused by a clash of heads in an amateur boxing bout that had had the audience in an uproarious frenzy. Truth was, he'd hardly worn the Lonsdale gloves he'd received one birthday. Dan could be too much of a big brother.

  An aluminium barrier prevented unsuspecting pedestrians from stepping out at the top of the steps onto the sometimes murderously busy road. Ian leant on the cold metal until he caught his breath. Nipping through a gap in steady traffic, he noticed that the low, long pub on the corner had reopened under the name The Highwayman. The road Ian had crossed to stand alongside the pub was an ancient route; he recalled that an area of the town - Nevison - took the name of a stand and deliver merchant. A blue plaque - fixed to the surviving side of a deep cutting in rock that allowed another road to climb its way out of town - marked the spot where the robber's steed had reputedly performed a death-defying leap. From one side of the cutting to the other, horse and rider had miraculously escaped pursuing constables without injury and, just as significantly, deferred the swashbuckling horseman's date with the hangman's noose. For the life of him, Ian couldn't remember the pub's name when, at the age of sixteen, it had been his crowd's meeting place as they set out on illicit nights on the tiles. No one ever turned them away; everybody had done it, generation after generation. In those days, Ian could take out eight quid, get smashed, and stagger home with fish and chips to receive a rollicking from his mother that sailed straight over his head. Wolfie and Mick were still around, but where had those other, once familiar faces gone? For sure, a couple had vanished into the ranks of the army, but Carl, Stevo, Jed and the rest? Maybe they were still around, treading the same paths, only never at the same time. Would catching up with them reveal they'd all gone through similar things as if life came in the one design?

  Through The Highwayman's window, a barmaid could be seen bowed over a magazine spread on the bar. Nothing doing, then. The place would close again as abruptly as it had reopened. Just as Ian was about to move on towards the precinct, a guitar chord rang out, followed by a shuffling roll on a snare drum. On a notice board beside the entrance Ian spotted a poster announcing Kill A Killjoy's presence in the house. It wasn't so much the name, but the remote recollection that he'd once played guitar in a band that put a wistful smile on his lips. Didn't he still have a Telecaster in a case in the attic at home? Or rather Cathy's place. Ian was overwhelmed by a bizarre intimation that he'd lived another life, long ago… What on earth had happened to that, well, version of him? It was him, wasn't it?

  On starting out, his band had found it practically impossible to draw an audience from beyond friends and family. People went for big names and if yours hadn't already been made, well, that was how you got stuck in obscure, dark function rooms hired by students-cum-promoters who pinned posters of their heroes on the walls. Moved by his memories, Ian reckoned a struggling band would welcome his support, and one more drink for old times' sake and to hail the new times just round the corner, wherever they lead, wouldn't do any harm. He felt for his wallet. He had barely enough for a bus ticket, but the hole in the wall up the street would remedy that. Twenty should be enough to see out the old, bring in the new, without getting into a mess.

  The pint-sized barmaid had tapered, hazel eyes and dyed black hair in a ponytail, and though her small ears weren't pointed, there was something uncannily elfish about her. She wore a baggy, ivy green hoodie that added to the effect, though it's impact was blunted by the bold white letters promoting her employer's business. She avoided eye contact by gazing into the glass as she poured Ian's foamy beer. Leaning on the bar, he looked away and sized up Kill A Killjoy - four teenage lads in black T-shirts, skin-tight jeans and sneakers. The guitarist's leather jacket was a couple of sizes too big as if his part was taking some growing into. Some kind of beat up Gibson copy covered in Marvel Comics stickers was slung down over his groin. Going on the ghoulish white powder the bassist and drummer had plastered on their faces, and their top hats festooned with theatrical cobwebs, they would once have been considered Goths, but wasn't it something different nowadays? On first hearing them from outside, Ian had guessed the band were fine-tuning; they were now ready for the real thing. The guitarist showily shredded a few scales; the bassist dum-dummed and feigned boredom; the grinning drummer twirled his sticks and thudded his bass drum. A thickset youth with spiky, bleached hair and a stud piercing in his left nostril leaned his mic stand at forty five degrees and screamed, 'Kill a Killjoy!' The audience - two girls and three boys dressed in an equally funereal fashion - whistled and shouted encouragement from their seats round a table directly across the room. And then a fuzzy, thumping, feedbacking racket swamped everything. Just able to pick out a few obscenities in the sandpapery, strained vocals, Ian took a big swig of his beer, vowing to get out as soon as he'd polished it off.

  The male contingent in Kill A Killjoy's fan club pushed and ragged each other by the pool table that had been dragged up against the wall along from the bar to create room for a mosh pit. The scrawny, bespectacled lad with a purple Mohican went flying over an outstretched leg. He got up off his knees, straightening his specs, laughing like he got the joke better than its perpetrator, a chubby blond kid in a skull T-shirt. Fun! Remember that? Kill A Killjoy and their 'crowd' were at the perfect age to make a noise, Ian reasoned. His own band had probably been ear-pollutingly bad right at the start; people had walked out on them leastways. Give the kids a chance? The bleached vocalist stared Ian's way with mean-eyed bewilderment when he raucously applauded at the opening song's conclusion. 'Bravo! Excellent! Might as well get me another pint, love.'

  'This next song is dedicated to th
e idiot at the bar. It's called Screw You! One, two, three, four!' A number as musical as a convoy of HGVs with dodgy exhausts tearing through the Mersey tunnel. But fair play, Ian ruefully grinned, screw useless me for screwing up everything. And to think his band of brothers had sworn they'd never stop off at Ordinaryville, where they mercilessly buried you alive under rules and conventions that weren't supposed to make sense. They'd zipped everywhere in their blue transit banger, cramped between guitar cases, amplifiers, a keyboard, a drum kit - the weapons they'd use to take on what their elders revered as the real world, a place that never failed to teach upstarts a lesson or two, oh no. And so it had. Middle-aged Ian Randall felt cheated. Like his identity had been stolen. Hadn't he aspired to be some kind of spokesman, modelled on Lennon? He'd turned out more like a lemming. A cuckolded one at that.

  The sight and sound of the kids in black manically headbanging to a strident, raspy, three note riff was like another wallop of rude awakening. Alicia! Ian suddenly believed he saw the world through his daughter' eyes, as if he hadn't really known all along. She hadn't needed counselling or medication! What a blessing that Cathy had binned the leaflets he'd ordered over the internet. No matter how great Alicia looked - and the kid was a stunner - life wasn't an easy ride. Ups and downs? A scream-a-minute rollercoaster? What brainless garbage! At that age everything is a full-throttled race down an oil-slicked motorway on a brute, awkward contraption you have no idea - absolutely no idea - how to control. And every time you smash it up you're supposed to pick yourself up from the wreckage, jump on another incarnation of the beast, and roar along, proving you're big enough to take it. The best days of your life? Your heart and head rule each other at all the wrong times - you don't know if you're coming, going, or spinning on the spot in your own little world that never orbits planet Normal. Yes, that's what Ian had experienced; he couldn't begin to imagine what girls like Alicia endured, expected, as they were, to be someone else's dream as well as their own. Growing pains? Medieval torturers wouldn't have put their victims through modern adolescence. The more these kids had, the more they had yet to get and to live up to. Was it any wonder they never seemed grateful? Chasing so many things you mostly need just to be 'in' just pulls you in every direction until you're lost or broken up. Isn't that what had happened to his marriage? Hadn't he and Cathy behaved like kids in an overpriced toy store? It hadn't got better as they'd aged - maturity is that deadening thing that cons you into believing that, after all, the world is a fair old place where everybody gets their just deserts. But look at the evidence. He'd worked his fingers to the bone and his family still had to pile up debts to have-something rather than have-not. Since his eldest's birth, he'd routinely kidded himself that things would get better on a snakes and ladders board rife with over-sized vipers and smashed-up rungs. The whole rotten set-up only guaranteed to dirty your hands, head and heart. And hadn't an urgent whisper inside Ian's skull told the truth about the vile swindlers who kept him down so they had everything in their pockets? Isn't that why Cathy had gone wild with credit cards? Life's a fixed game, so fuck it.

  Ian guessed that, at different times, all over the country, the continent, the vast globe, men and women had entertained much the same thoughts, usually too late, and, worse still, even when they were timely, with no means to do anything about them. So, life was also an insane trap. Even common as muck humanity knows there should be more to it than operating, tick tock, around the clock, the same routine, the same old dizzying circles, day after day until the very end… Ian emerged from his reverie with burning, bedevilled eyes and a furious urge to pull the plugs on the kids' amplifiers. They had to be warned! You can't dance your way out! That fantasy gamble never pays… He really was a fool. Look at their deathly fashion. Listen to their angsty rants. They already knew. He was the one with everything to learn over again.

  Ian had revelled in the gigs, impromptu parties, the exhilarating idea that he might become someone. What a tragedy he'd changed for the worse, ultimately regressing into another dull Joe who voiced his dissent by farting at late night TV… What was that name? John Clare! Who on earth…? Cloth-capped, half-blind Bill, his paternal grandfather, had heard a poetry anthology discussed on Radio Four and presented Ian with a copy for his eighteenth birthday. Mumbling token thanks, Ian hadn't a clue what he was supposed to do with a book like that until, some time later, he was struggling to put lyrics to a beautiful, haunting melody his fingers had stumbled across on his fret board. From page to page, there was so much he couldn't understand, and then, on three hundred and seventy, 'I Am.' Before his eyes the words were alive even though their antique phrasing sounded eccentric, too churchy, to his ear. He shifted them around, altered them, shaping a stunningly profound song. His band were enviously rapt when he first ran through it at a rehearsal in their dimly-lit garage, corrosive petrol smells causing him to half-cough the soaring refrain. The song grabbed attention whenever they performed it: a demo tape sold like proverbial hot cakes as a loyal crowd started hanging out at their gigs. And miffed that his lowly guitarist insisted on singing the crowd pleaser, the vocalist, Beggsy, socked Ian's jaw in a queue for some chips after a particularly rousing encore one Saturday night. Ian responded by squirting tomato ketchup in the green-eyed singer's mush. A split lip was nothing because everybody had mocked Beggsy and loved Ian's song. He never let on that he'd stolen the words, and people only seemed to notice his intensity from the first to the last note.

  Bloody poetry. On another night, when a gale drove rain against his window, Ian pored over the book, sometimes marvelling uncomprehendingly, sometimes, truth be told, resentfully, frustrated by his ignorance as much as by the actual words. What had these men meant? How had they lived? He scrutinised the black and white cover again: the Romantics. It had been mind-blowing to think of the vast scope of ideas that humankind had developed throughout history, but now, with the benefit of experience and hindsight, it seemed that men and women like him had one thing drummed into their heads: money makes the difference, so get into line and shut it. The more Ian considered his adult life, the clearer it became that he'd never stood a chance. Even marriage had been beyond his means. And he simply couldn't articulate how that felt.

  He had lost the open-face pocket watch that had been Grandpa Bill's prized possession. Hadn't he taken it in for a new spring and then never returned to the jeweller's shop, even after receiving a phone call to remind him to pick it up? Do it tomorrow, another day, next week, never; the shop closed down and something precious had slipped away before Ian realised its value wasn't to be measured in pounds. His mother's pastime had a depth that he'd never previously appreciated, then. Other than foggy memories and his parents' cautionary tales and heart-warming anecdotes, the poetry anthology was Ian's sole link to his grandparents, if the book was, as he guessed, packed up in the attic with his Telecaster. And that hadn't been at Cathy's bidding - she used to love listening to him strumming along. Little Alicia, too; she'd caught the music bug early on. There was no doubt about it; Ian had put his things out of sight and out of mind. Real men with a son on the way don't have time for their own innocent pleasures, he'd thought, scoffing at the suggestion of a guitar stand in the living room as if it was comparable to a toy box. With the spare room emptied, Ian decorated it in boys' blue, not for one moment thinking that the years would fly by quicker than the older generation could ever say, so that between then and now it seemed - contrary to what Ian knew - that Alicia and Davie had reached the verge of adulthood in the time it had taken the paint to dry. And their redundant dad? He had to learn to live with himself for the rest of his journey down the steep, craggy side of life's hill. So, the big question: who is Ian Randall, right here, right now? Just another loser trying to romanticise something about his life having found out his wife preferred screwing her boss? Didn't it say everything that Ian's single, half-notable shot at doing something different had involved stealing words from a man who'd expired in the madhouse?

  Ian's
infatuation with Cathy the moment he set eyes on her in a taxi rank's queue had resembled a kind of insanity. He'd woke up on Sunday morning unable to believe he'd let her be driven away without speaking one word. And he couldn't get his dumb failure or the girl out of his head. His tutors at college quickly criticised the declining standard of his work and attendance, which sent his boss up the wall. 'So many lads out there would give their eye teeth for the chance to become a plumber! Don't you think you owe me anything?' Mr Tingle had blustered over the telephone when Ian phoned in sick to avoid a disciplinary. 'Have you got anything to say for yourself?'

  'Erm…' Just my luck you were chatting up the receptionist as I dialled. 'I…'

  'Don't bother turning in tomorrow, son. I don't want to set eyes on you again. Got that?'

  The loss of his job and his bottomless despondency deeply worried Ian's mother. She tried to persuade him to see the family doctor, suspecting her son had developed a rare autism or something comparably tragic. 'Leave me alone!' young Ian yelled, slamming the front door on the way out to roam the streets. His band did exactly that. After Ian had missed several rehearsals, Beggsy invited a guy with a perm, a denim suit and a red Strat to replace the plagiariser of 'I Am.' The band became denizens of club land for eighteen months, after which they were never heard of again.

  Practical, well-meaning Dad told his boy he'd have to get over it, and that's all there was to it, do you understand? It was a pep talk that only exposed common sense's limitations - the very next afternoon, Ian slunk around the town precinct, entertaining thoughts of a grisly suicide that would make everybody curse his pain. Envisioning a blade slashing his wrists, he looked up, and his expression of morbid ecstasy twisted into one of befuddled horror. How was he to know she painted her face and dressed like a woman on weekends, and slipped into school uniform through the week? She even had a pink satchel covered in Disney stickers and badges. Unable to quite believe his eyes, Ian ran after his imploding dream, his heart pounding and his legs as weak as the disintegrating walls of that castle in the air. 'Hey! Wait! Do you…?' He was speechless again. This time with the pitiful insight he'd blown everything for a girl he could baby-sit…

  'What?' Her big, shiny, oval eyes swept over his face. She half-smiled…

  Ian's memory of the meeting would flicker into black and white, as if it had been filmed in such a style for a reason he couldn't fathom. Cathy had always remembered his glassy-eyed, scarlet flush when he blurted, 'How old are you?'

  'Who's asking?' She bit a nail, varnished in glittery gold - the cause of a reprimand in biology, her last lesson of the school day. 'I mean, why would you want to know?'

  'Tell me!'

  'I'm sixteen,' she said, frowning, taking to her heels, frightened by his angsty snap. And why did he have a scar over his eye?

  'You'll be leaving school soon?' He couldn't stop himself from following her.

  'Who are you?' she beseeched, swinging round. His despairing expression touched a sympathetic nerve like a photograph of an injured puppy might. 'Yes,' she answered more softly, civilly. 'To go to college.'

  'I saw you one Saturday night and I wanted to ask you out…' What did he say next? He couldn't admit that he'd only found the courage to speak after weeks of torment. 'You got lost in the crowd.'

  'Well, I don't know you.' She stared at the floor, embarrassed, fidgeting with one of her pink satchel's buckles. Boys could be, well, so funny.

  'What about the cinema?'

  'I don't think so.'

  'You choose the film. I don't mind. Honestly.'

  'Why do you want to take me?'

  'I…' Say something! '…Just do. I mean… I think we could…' He grinned hopefully, gormlessly, sticking his hands in his jeans' pockets for fear that he'd stupidly flap them around in his battle to get through to her. 'It's a great idea.'

  A second froze. Its passing almost felt like an age.

  He almost swooned over as she prettily glanced up at him and reached inside her navy blazer for a biro. She placed cool, soft fingers on his wrist to pull his right hand from his pocket. He trembled at her blond hair's fresh, summery scent as she bent over, under his chin, to print her phone number on the flesh of the back of his hand. The nib stopped digging in. 'Ring me about eight,' she said. 'I've a bus to catch.'

  He stood motionless, mesmerised, until she had passed the pharmacy's entrance on the street corner and disappeared round it. Then he gazed at the blanket grey sky, searching for further evidence that his mother's god existed.

  Cathy had always found it difficult to say why she'd readily given her number to a gauche stranger she met on the street one overcast day. At school, her blossoming loveliness had stirred love and hate in such unstable, capricious measures she'd become mystified by people and their motives, finding it difficult to trust anyone outside home. It was clear that some vindictive beast always wanted to pick a fight, so maybe her handsome admirer's scar had consciously or subconsciously tempted her to take up his offer. Wouldn't a young man willing to stand his ground give her shelter? Wouldn't someone who'd endured hurt understand her? Whenever she looked back at it like that, Cathy knew she'd been the loneliest teenager, and that would more than explain why, at eight o'clock that night, she'd raced down the stairs to beat her parents to the ringing phone in the hall.

  Ian didn't take in a minute of Cathy's chosen romantic comedy. On the back row of the dark theatre, he could only think of holding her soft, warm hand and getting hold of some money. He knew from his parents' fraught squabbling whenever they were short that love alone is not enough. For that matter, he knew he couldn't keep borrowing from Dad. Intimidated by the helplessness that would accompany tomorrow's empty pockets, Ian sneaked yearning glances rather than kisses, while his perfect date popped Maltesers into her mouth and innocently laughed at silly and corny punchlines alike. The smitten young man needn't have worried so much: his luck looked up. Through a friend, Uncle Joe landed his nephew a labouring job on a building site. Nobody gets rich on a dogsbody's lot, but Ian scraped together something to cover board, smokes and courting. Every other weekend, come wind, rain or shine, the two lovebirds caught a train or a coach to a coastal town or a theme park, for experiencing the world together was what it was all about. And what a slap-up Indian meal Ian treated his one and only to when she completed her exams and left school behind.

  Cathy had fallen for Ian with the naïve, careless ease that is characteristic of adolescence, and their families met the announcement of their engagement with a mixture of proud delight and world-weary scepticism. Yet, despite the bride-to-be's tender years, her folks saw that Ian had the heart of an honest grafter; given time, he'd get on if any young man could. Could they hope for much better for their princess, heiress to nothing? The area hadn't recovered from the closure of its mines, and the government seemed to be rubbing in the depression. Many in the community felt that it was being punished for a long, bitter strike that had opposed the privileged politicians and what was seen as their industrial vandalism. In light of that, any job might be considered a good one, and Ian had successfully applied to a brewery in Leeds. The knot was tied a month after Cathy finished college.

  She had worn her white dress with true traditional innocence, and many a tear was shed in the pews. The bounteous wedding reception, resounding with heartfelt laughter and song, was a perfect aphrodisiac to the most thrilling night of their young lives. In those early days, it seemed their honeymoon, which started in a hotel looking across at Scarborough castle's ruins and out to the glistening, sparkling sea, would go on to the fairytale happy ever after. Alicia's birth brought immense joy and Davie's wailing arrival doubled it. And then? Did Cathy distance herself from her husband when her parents died in sorrowful, quick succession? He didn't think so. His wife was understandably devastated for quite some time, but he'd supported her the best he could. The change had been so gradual, it was imperceptible. And yet, as if in a blink, everything was different
. They were no longer the hero and heroine who lived and loved in a romantic bubble floating above the grotty real world. It had burst their illusion, sucked them in, and nothing was good enough anymore.

  Kill A Killjoy had rumbled and thrashed on like a hellish industrial machine. Familiar with the real thing's deafening grind, Ian had been able to lose himself and wander nostalgically, searching for something salvageable like a man on a lonely beach after a storm. His hands empty, he had the unnerving suspicion that, should he climb to the peak of the highest dune and peer inland, a desert would stretch as far as his eyes could see, imperfectly paralleling the moody, heaving, grey ocean that sulkily kissed the horizon behind him. Realising he'd visited the forlorn shore during restless, feverish nights, he blinked at his image in the mirror alongside the optics, impressing upon himself that he was now wide awake. As the guitarist launched into a lightning-fingered, wailing solo, Ian carried his beer across the wooden floor. 'Mind if I join you kids?' he asked the band's followers every bit as awkwardly as that day he'd approached Cathy on the precinct.

  'Can't stop you,' replied the waif-like girl. Though her death white powder face, blood red lipstick and lacy black dress emanated a spectral aura, her purple Doc Martens and chewing gum belonged to the here and now. And so did her attitude. 'You're going to tell us that you work for a major record label. You'll sign the band if we do you a few special favours.' She put her arm round her female friend's shoulders. She wore equally ghoulish make up and a matching black and purple witch wig; their hairpieces' straight, silky tresses were shiny like black cats' fur. 'Right?'

  'I'm a punter,' Ian muttered, taking a stool. 'Besides…' No, he wouldn't say that.

  'What?' She strained her ears against the music, punctuated by a furious drum roll, crashing cymbals.

  'I used to play guitar in a band when I was your age,' Ian half-shouted.

  'That sucks,' smirked the kid who'd grabbed the stool between the girls and Ian. His flattened nose spoke of nasty business, for which he owned the mean, piercing blue eyes. His scruffy black overcoat lent him the charisma of a pauper's undertaker. Ruffling his sooty, spiky hair, he said spitefully, 'Another old fart who thinks he identifies with the kids. Rats.'

  'I don't own a buss pass yet,' Ian said, uneasily. He looked in the direction of the pogoing musicians. 'What do you make of the band?'

  'They're not as good as LoveDeath.' The undertaker's snarl revealed chipped buck teeth. 'I don't suppose you've had the pleasure.'

  'You don't know half of it,' Ian replied, his cryptic smile stained by tobacco.

  'We've got one who's escaped from Broadmoor,' the undertaker snickered, turning to the girl whose tiny leather skirt rode up beyond the scarlet garters she wore over laddered black leggings.

  'Seen enough?' she asked Ian, narked.

  'He obviously isn't getting any,' her friend in the ghostly lacy dress remarked with a scornful cackle.

  As much as panning him, Ian figured the girls were performing for the glowering undertaker's benefit. It's a rough old world, Ian reflected, no matter where you are, you've always got to watch your back. The girls moved their stools to the far side of the group, next to the skinny, bespectacled lad with a purple Mohican and a studded brow. He nervously swigged his bottled beer. The blond, chubby lad with the skull T-shirt hungrily eyed red garter girl's long legs, which she peevishly crossed.

  Kill A Killjoy pounded another impenetrable rant to its climax, bam, bam, bam, BAM! As the applause petered out, a fist threateningly banged on the table, splashing the undertaker's red alcopop up the insides of its bottle. Ian stared at the lager that had slopped out of his glass onto the table. 'The poster didn't say anything about a private gig, son,' he said, calmly, looking up.

  'No?'

  'No.'

  'Huh.' The kid jumped up. Feeling around in his overcoat's pockets, he strode across the floorboards in the direction of the gents. Kill A Killjoy's vocalist gave Ian the evil eye while the guitarist retuned his instrument.

  'Time to go outside, old boy,' the undertaker leered on his return, midway through the next three-minute noise fest. He indicated 'to the exit' with his thumb, and chubby in the skull T-shirt was up and on his way. Bending over, the undertaker pushed his face in Ian's. His breathe faintly whiffed of stale smoke and spearmint. 'You scared?'

  'What's this about, son?'

  'See what some ape did the last time I went to see Kill A Killjoy? Look at my nose and my teeth. I don't want jumping for nothing again.'

  'I'm just having a steady few, my lad.' Ian put his hand on the kid's shoulder. 'You can take it easy.'

  'You would say that.' He ducked away from Ian's consolatory hand. 'But we're not talking about a punch up; we're talking about smoking some peace.' He pulled a lengthy, unlit reefer from his overcoat sleeve and swished it under Ian's nose. 'Up for it?'

  'You what?' Did scumbags try to push that stuff onto Davie?

  'Thought an old guitar-slinger would have appreciated party games.'

  'Maybe you thought wrong.'

  'How many times do you live?' The kid turned and swaggered towards the exit. For a few seconds Ian glared after him, and then he took a drink of his beer and got up.

  Fine drizzle was falling; the patio's crazy-paving had a slippery sheen under the lights on the pub's façade. Curry house spiciness flavoured the air's biting freshness. The dope-smoking duo was sat with hunched shoulders under an umbrella at a bench-table. Three other tables nearer the pub's entrance were empty, their umbrellas closed. 'No expense spared on the smoking shelter,' the chubby kid griped, shivering in his T-shirt as Ian joined them.

  'No shit, Sherlock.' His spiky friend produced a silver Zippo from his overcoat and lit up.

  The backfiring fizz of a passing motorcycle briefly competed with Kill A Killjoy's muffled, grungy racket. The trio exchanged blank looks. The ice that needed breaking felt thick enough to require a polar explorer's pick. Everything was about finding his feet again, Ian realised.

  'Who beat you?' he asked, causing one kid to wince and the other to leer. So he'd started out again by putting both feet in it.

  'Nothing you can do about it, so keep it out,' the kid in the overcoat defensively snapped.

  'Some underage animal called Liam proved to be…'

  'Will you shut it, fatso? Here: put that in your gob.'

  The chubby lad took the joint and almost choked on his first drag. 'Jesus, why do you use that cheap tobacco?'

  'Because it's cheap, dummy. If you can't take it, give it to the old guitar man before you waste it. And I've told you - I only lost because I was wrecked.'

  'He was fast and mean like a tiger.'

  'I would have won!'

  'Whatever.'

  It had just got colder; the ice thicker.

  'The name's Ian,' Ian said.

  'I'm Keith and this is Christian,' said chubby Keith. He took another drag and coughed like he was turning his lungs inside out. Conceding a defeat of his own, Keith sheepishly passed on the reefer.

  'You ok?' Ian asked, taking it.

  'Doesn't everybody love smoking the finest combination of sawdust and bear shit collected from the woods?'

  'You're just not rock and roll.'

  'Get lost, Christian.'

  Ian exhaled dirty, coarse smoke. The joint was packed with what they called skunk, going on the evidence his nostrils had detected.

  'Ha! See! Even an old guitar man shows you how it's done.'

  'Less of the old. Maybe this dog hasn't had his day yet, eh? I've still got it in me to…'

  'Hurry up. We don't want to leave Pete alone with the girls for too long or our days are numbered. we're sick of hearing about his intelligence.'

  'His sensitivity.'

  'Generosity.'

  'He's such a good listener.'

  'He doesn't want you just for that.'

  Smoking with the boys had been an initiation ceremon
y. Sitting with his spinning head in his hands, Ian remembered precisely why being in with the crowd isn't always so hot. And what had he said about getting on track as opposed to in a mess? Isn't it some fool who can't trust himself? Eventually, after much vertiginous turmoil, he beat the compulsion to vomit and forced himself to look up. Dazzled by the room's strange glow, his eyes met those of the elfish barmaid. Just what he didn't need. It was so obvious. A CCTV recording of the little session outdoors had prompted her to pick up the phone, triggering a series of sorry events that would culminate in a headline in the local rag. Ammunition for Cathy if she wanted to… Jesus, he hadn't tried to contact the kids since he'd left home. How would it all look?

  'Christian!' Ian hissed. 'She's been on the blower to the boys in blue.'

  'What's that, guitar man?'

  'Vice!'

  'Get it while you can, hur hur.'

  'The law are on…' Ian profusely sweated with the effort of keeping his swirling head up. 'What's so funny?'

  'Your colour. Or lack of. You're throwing a whitey.'

  'That's why I need your help.' Then something terrible dawned on Ian. 'You didn't have to set me up to get rid of me.'

  'Get on top of it,' Christian giggled. 'The gear's made you paranoid.'

  'I'm warning you - I'm not a man to mess around.'

  'I can see you're dangerous. We're under the threat of drowning in puke.' Christian's blue peepers shone gleefully. 'Didn't you try grass when you were a rock-god in the making?'

  Ian couldn't take it. His head fell between his knees. He dragged in deep breaths of the air he fleetingly suspected Kill A Killjoy's noise was poisoning. He was innocent! He'd wanted some fun! And these corrupted kids had gone and planted illegal shit on him! Woozily forcing himself to his feet, Ian patted up and down his body, a DIY search. Christian laughed so hard he rocked back into Keith, who spluttered his lager down his T-shirt when he beheld Ian's panic. 'You'll laugh on the other side of…' Ian dropped to his seat, suddenly recalling an occasion he'd smoked the stuff with his band and become so freaked out he'd refused to take to the stage. Everybody's mean, beady eyes would be on him! And to think he'd tormented Alicia about stage fright. Somehow he had to put things right with his girl. But how could he forgive her for taking bribes to lie to her own flesh and blood? Had she really done it? Cathy hadn't even attempted to clear it up. What did that tell him? That everybody was against him?

  Over at the bar, the girl in the ghostly, lacy dress was joking with the elfish barmaid. For no apparent reason, Ian sniggered, laughed, and set off Christian and Keith again. 'Oh my god, stop it,' Ian begged, holding his sides.

  'You started…'

  'Yes, you…' Keith was bent double on his stool. 'My sides…'

  'Just stop it, ha ha!'

  The funniest thing was that nothing was funny, and you've got to laugh when life gets like that or else. Kill A Killjoy blasted out white noise profanities and tears of absurdity streamed down the cheeks of the trio. Pete with the Mohican and red garter girl started giggling. Wiping his eyes, Ian realised his nausea had passed. His hysteria vanished, instantly replaced by a cool aloofness in which he knew he could control his mind - its paranoia - by staying perfectly still. When everything washes over you, it doesn't really touch you, and therefore you can't be harmed. Kill A Killjoy's over-amplified trash inexplicably developed an outlandish, intense, hypnotic serenity. Ian listened with a beatific expression that no one who'd known him in recent years would have recognised. He grew convinced he was a clear, sustained note surfing the room on white noise sound waves…

  A heavy, bluesy jam abruptly ended when the drummer kicked over his kit and held his sticks aloft. His fellow musicians bowed, cheekily raising middle-digits, their amplifiers droning and screeching with feedback. The bleached-haired vocalist mouthed 'Ha!' down the mic when the bassist's top hat slipped off, revealing a greasy, untamed mop. The applause and Christian's whistles quickly died away. The band was already packing up when the barmaid presented its members with a tray of bottled lagers. Ian's legs felt like marshmallow, causing him to grin like a goon as he approached Kill A Killjoy.

  'What do you want, clown?' The lean, aquiline-nosed guitarist hunched his shoulders in his oversized leather jacket, wannabe tough guy style. He took a slug of lager and gargled before swallowing.

  'A fabulous effort, lads,' Ian enthused.

  Nobody grinned back at him.

  'You hear that?' The stocky vocalist unplugged his microphone from the PA, winking at the gruff axeman. 'You sure we don't need a keyboard player?'

  'Some real songs?'

  'A kazooist?'

  'You need to keep trying and keep it your thing.'

  'First-class, dude.' The vocalist rested his elbow on Ian's shoulder. 'I take back my song dedication. You're a gem, completely cuckoo, but a gem.'

  'Awesome.' Ian startled the kid with a fraternal hug. 'I used to…' He held his tongue and let go. Going on about how he used to do his thing in a band would lead to mockery. It was these kids' time now. 'Just, yeah, like I say, make sure you don't give up.' He knelt down, helping the drummer to fit a tom-tom into its battered, slightly out of shape case. 'There she goes.'

  'Much obliged.' The drummer tipped his cobwebby top hat.

  'Keep away from my guitar pedals. I don't want them auctioning on E-bay.'

  'I hear you, boss. I'll go drink my beer.'

  'You do that.'

  Their regular audience was ready to leave. 'You rocked it,' 'Mad and bad,' 'Can't wait while next time,' they congratulated Kill A Killjoy while ambling over to the bar to say their goodbyes to the elf girl, who was a friend, apparently.

  'See you around, guitar man,' Christian shouted using his hands like a megaphone. Keith raised a comradely fist. Ian raised his pint. The girls and Pete with a purple Mohican smiled faintly before looking away. They filed out into the night.

  The fire exit opened onto a small yard where the band's van was parked. The guitarist's bad attitude flashed when Ian picked up the bass drum case: 'Hey dude, do you need your fucking head looking at?'

  'Maybe you should cut your throat.'

  'You threatening me?'

  'With a bass drum? I'm having fun, dingbat.'

  'What?'

  'Kill a killjoy.'

  'Shit,' the drummer said, pushing the guitarist in the back, 'he's stealing our lines.'

  Having felt a spasm in his bad back, Ian left the big amps to the musicians. In no time everything was packed in their white rust bucket.

  'I can smell something odd.' Ian sniffed under his armpits. 'Where's it coming from?'

  'It used to be a fishmonger's delivery van,' the vocalist answered with a laugh. 'You only catch a whiff when you're stoned,' he added, opening the door to jump in the passenger seat beside the bassist-cum-driver.

  'Like hell you do.' Removing his top hat, the drummer climbed in the shadowy back between amps. 'Shut the doors, will you? You have to give them a slam.'

  'Aren't you forgetting your cuddly colleague?'

  'The git on guitar? Devo's staying with Imogen, his girlfriend who works the bar.'

  'He's the clever so-and-so who gets the chick if not the big fee, eh?'

  'Something like that.'

  'Pleasant journey.' Ian banged the doors closed and the engine spluttered to life, belching black smoke through the exhaust. Pulling out onto the open road, the van's horn sounded as Ian stepped from the yard onto the pavement.

  Like the shiny, wet precinct that echoed his footsteps, the bus station was empty bar two canoodling teenagers waiting for a no. 145. The digital clock indicated that, at five to eleven, Ian's last service had left five minutes earlier. He'd half-expected it; so, a late train?

  A few hundred yards down a sloping street to the ruined castle's boundary walls, and then left, up a short, twisting, lonely lane, the illumined train station - two platforms with Perspex shelters and a basic iron bridge over the tracks -
came into view. Ian noted the absence of other late travellers and the timetable, when he floated over to it, confirmed that the last train had been and gone. What now? A taxi he could ill-afford or a return to his parents' place for an interrogation like he wasn't a grown man? Some choice, but a-ha! Couldn't he really do with some exercise? Dan's house was just a few back-to-back streets from the neighbouring town's station - any freight trains would sound a rhythm-on-the-rails warning in plenty of time. Ian rolled a couple of cigarettes and stuck one behind each ear. Sitting on the edge of the cold, damp platform, he lowered himself to the ballast; it stabbed into the soles of his trainers, hurting his feet until he'd hobbled onto a smooth sleeper. Lifting his waterproof's collar, Ian looked ahead into the blackness that led out of town. He took a deep breath. 'You'll catch your death of it if you don't move it,' he said aloud, stepping to the next sleeper in the direction of the dark.