Non Pratt - Trouble

I look at my reflection, and a memory of a boy I thought I’d forgotten looks back at me. I’ve spent so much time hiding from him that I hadn’t realized he was simply lying in wait.

I change my socks. Neville would approve of the slightly subversive bright green ones I end up wearing. I pull on the leather jacket and leave, so focused on where I’m going that it’s not until I’m on the bus that I remember I didn’t double lock the front door. Oh well. Double locking a door seems pretty small compared to dying.

There is a world outside the window that drifts past me: workmen on a break, their tools on the ground and flasks clutched in hands with dirty fingernails; people waiting to cross the road; a young couple arguing, not holding hands; and a runner, bouncing from foot to foot impatient for a break in the traffic; primary-school kids playing in the park, enjoying a day of freedom…

I turn and look at the passengers: a man talking in too-loud French on his phone; two mums too busy talking to stop their toddlers from pressing their faces to the window and licking the glass; an elderly lady with soft white curls, eyes half closed behind glasses so clean they flash in the sunlight…

I feel so detached. Like I’m watching a TV drama with an especially self-pitying Smiths song playing as the camera pans the scene before me. Even the way the early morning sun shines through the window is casting a slight mist at the edges of my vision.

There’s something damp on my jawline and I reach up to touch it. When I take my fingers away, they’re damp from tears I didn’t know were falling. The mist in the corners of my vision has started to close in.

I get off a stop early. You shouldn’t turn up to a funeral crying — it’s like turning up to a date masturbating. I push my hands deep into the pockets of the jacket only to discover that there’s a hole in the lining in the corner of the lefthand pocket. I push my finger through and stroke the soft side of leather that no one but the manufacturer ever saw, then there’s a ripping sound and my whole hand slides through the hole and into the bottom corner of the jacket.

There’s something in there.

In the back of my wardrobe there is a dress that I have worn only once. It should still fit.

Shit. It really doesn’t.

I slump down onto the bed, supposedly stretchy dress rolled up under my armpits (which is as far as it’s likely to get). It’s navy anyway and I’m not sure that’s allowed at a funeral. I’m not sure I’m allowed at this funeral. I asked Gran if she was going, but it turns out they have memorial services on site at the home. Guess that makes sense or they’d have season tickets to the funeral parlour. Mum doesn’t do funerals — she thinks farewells should be private — so there’s no point asking her to come. It would just be me.

Looking for Aaron.

I don’t think I’d find him even if I walked right up to him and reached out for a hug. And if I can’t do that, then I don’t know why else I would go.

After the service I wait the rest of the day, sitting in the grounds reading my book until his ashes are ready to collect — they usually take longer, but when they saw that I was on my own, they hurried things up. I never expected to fulfil the promise I made to Neville only a few weeks ago — I’d thought we could work on getting him talking to his daughters before he… I was wrong.

It’s late afternoon by the time I catch a bus to the part of town where the Drunken Duchess resides. It’s a poky-looking place from the outside, a run-down Edwardian building with paint peeling from the window frames and brick dust loose enough that a customer’s sneeze could blow it off. The sign’s new, although it’s pretty ugly and you get a flash of the Duchess’s frilly bloomers as the sign swings in the breeze. Totally tasteless. Totally Neville.

“ID.”

It’s the first thing the barman says to me and I haven’t even sat down.

“My name’s Aaron Tyler,” I say. “I’m a friend of Neville Robson.” I put the ashes on the bar. They’re not in an urn because I didn’t know it was BYO on fancy receptacles and had to make do with the only thing the staff could find, but the barman barely reacts to the Tupperware box of human remains and keeps on polishing the glass he’s holding.

“Thought I recognized that jacket,” says someone to my left. “Come to sprinkle him in the beer garden, then?” I hadn’t noticed the old man sitting at the end of the bar, but he looks at least twice as old as Neville was.

“Yes,” I say.

“Doing it now?”

I nod, staying firmly where I am. All of a sudden I don’t feel very ready for this.

“Let him have a drink,” the old man says to the barman.

“How old are you, son?”

“Eighteen,” I reply.

“Yeah, when?” he says, picking up a new, less-sparkling glass.

“Yesterday.” I flicker a look up at him and we lock eyes for a second.

“Funny, seems like you think I was born then,” he says, wrist twisting as he polishes.

I reach into the hole in Neville’s pocket and take out what I found there. It’s a piece of paper. Actually it’s two. I unfold them carefully.

“What was his favourite drink?” I ask, scoring against the creases with my thumbnail.

“Whisky mac,” says the barman.

“This should cover a round or so,” I say and I lay down Neville’s legacy. Two fifty-pound notes.

Mum’s back from dropping Lola off at her friend’s house — after covering someone else’s shifts earlier in the week she’s got the afternoon off so we can go through all Lola’s old clothes and toys and work out which ones to keep out for the baby. She’s in the kitchen picking bits of straw off her jumper and looks up when I go down for a drink.

“Can you sweep the utility room floor? I knocked over a bag of bedding when I was topping up Fiver’s water—”

But when she sees I’ve been crying she steps over, guiding me to the table where I snivel whilst she makes me something warm and comforting to drink. Hot chocolate.

“Caffeine…” I mumble, but the look I get says “Enough of that nonsense.”

“Talk to me, Han.” She’s sitting close enough that when I lean in my head rests comfortably on her shoulder. Mum doesn’t hesitate as she puts her arm around me and strokes my hair out of my face the way she did when I was little. I’ve never seen her do this to Lola and it feels special.

“What’s going on with you and Aaron?”

So she has noticed. I try not to tell her anything bad about Aaron because she doesn’t need an excuse to think less of him — the shag-happy sperm donor who got her teenage daughter pregnant. She’s made allowances and he’s won brownie points for standing by me, for helping me with school, for quietly becoming one of the family. But it wouldn’t take much for that to change. I don’t want it to change over this. I never want it to change.

So I tell her what I can, that he’s hurting, that I tried to help, but he wouldn’t let me in. That I thought he might have called this morning to ask me to come to the funeral with him. I don’t need to tell her that he didn’t.

“You’re not going to like what I’m about to say,” she says softly.

I hold my breath.

“Not everyone deals with things the way we think they should. You’re someone who shares everything. Mostly.” She doesn’t look at me, but I know what she’s thinking. “Aaron doesn’t strike me as that kind of person. He’s” — she pauses for a few seconds — “I don’t want to say ‘distanced’…”

Then don’t. I want to say. It sounds so cold and harsh. But it also sounds true.

“Robert’s like that too,” she says.

“He is?” I feel Mum’s cheek move as it rests on my head and I think she must be smiling.

“Robert is a lot older than Aaron. He’s learned that depths are better hidden behind a lot of affection and bravado. But there are things I still don’t know about him, or understand, and there are times when we fight and I don’t know how to reach him.”

Mum and Robert fight? I never think of them fighting. Not like Mum did with Dad.

“When Robert’s brother died I worried all the time about how he was feeling. I tried to make sure that I was here for Jay, so that Robert didn’t feel the pressure too much. I called his sister-in-law, to make sure that she was OK because I didn’t want Robert to have to call her and be reminded about losing his brother.”

This all makes sense to me.

“But I was doing all of this because it made me feel better. I was so involved in being the good wife that I never stopped to offer Robert what he wanted.”

“What did he want?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

I lift my head off her shoulder and look up. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I,” she says, with a sad smile.

The pub is filling up around me. I’ve downed three whisky macs and the walls are starting to slide. Someone sits next to me smelling of burgers and it makes me feel a little ill.

“Cider,” I say.

The barman ignores me and serves the guy next to me, who walks away with his drinks, taking his burger breath with him.

“Can I have a pint of cider, please?” I say. I know this is what I say because I’m concentrating on making the words sound exactly as they should. Not slurred. Not too careful. I know how to seem sober.

The barman is looking at me.

“What’s my name?” he asks.

His name? Oh yeah, we’ve had a conversation about names, about Neville’s brother Greville, and the man at the end of the bar introduced himself and then he made me try and guess the barman’s name. Which was… what?

“Ste,” I say in a flash of brilliance.

“Ste-ven,” he says, watching me suspiciously.

“He knows that,” says Old Man at the End of the Bar whose name I actually can’t remember. “He’s winding you up.”

“Cider for him too,” I say generously.

“Make that a Bombardiers,” Old Man corrects me.

“Bombadoodlers then,” I say carelessly. SteVEN the barman looks at me strangely, but serves our drinks.

I drink mine too quickly and feel a hiccup brewing ready to burst. I swallow it down as it rises and I feel the fizz of bile in the back of my nose. I sip more cider and look at the plastic box of ashes on the bar. Someone brings back some empty glasses. There’s a half-pint glass amongst them and I sploosh some cider into it and push it next to him.

“Cheers, Neville!” I declare and clink my pint against the mini one I’ve poured.

The barman wipes up the pool of cider I’ve dribbled on the bar as he collects the other empties. He leaves Neville’s drink where it is.

My pint glass is almost empty. Probably because half of it got poured into Neville’s. I need something else.

I can’t seem to not want to drink something. My hands need to hold something, my mouth needs to sip something, my throat needs to swallow something.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I say to the next person who walks up to the bar.

“OK.” It’s a girl. She has big boobs. They are not in any way subtly dressed and they are at eye-level to someone sitting slumped on a bar stool.

Neville would approve.

“Can you buy the drinks though?” I say to the boobs and hand their owner a twenty. “Cider for me. No. A vodka. No. Both. And whatever you fancy.”

“You?” she says with a smile.

“Me,” I repeat, a bit lost. She orders the drinks and the barman pretends he doesn’t know that the vodka and cider are for me. So much for his ethics on my sobriety.

“What’s that?” she says, looking past me to the box on the bar.

“Neville,” I reply.

“Neville?” She takes her drink and hands me the change. There’s not much, but there’s lots more in my pocket.

“Neville Robson,” I say. “Used to drink here.”

When I look at her, I see that her face has slipped in disgust as she realizes that I’m sitting here drinking with a dead guy. Her boobs have stayed pert though, so I content myself with a last glimpse of those puppies before she takes them with her back to the crowd in the corner. What time is it?

It’s half past six.