Drowned Lives

4

When I got back home after leaving Samuel Longden at the bus station, I parked the Escort under the car port and went in through the back door — a habit I’d got into, because this route wasn’t overlooked by the windows of the house next door. Rachel might sometimes be seen lurking in the back garden, but in winter she couldn’t be out there all the time.

My parents’ aged black cat, Boswell, hovered around me in the kitchen until I fed him his Whiskas, then I sprinkled some fish food into the heated tank in the sitting room. The fish had been my father’s hobby. They’re supposed to be relaxing, but I can’t say I ever noticed any beneficial effect on his temper.

I went into the front room, which I’ve converted into a makeshift office, with a computer on the table and a few bookshelves. I pulled the South Staffordshire phone book out of the sideboard and ran my finger down the ‘L’s until I found ‘Longden, Samuel’ next to an address in Whittington, a village five miles east of Lichfield.

Then I went out again and drove up Beacon Street to Safeway, where I filled the car up with petrol, wincing as my credit card crept another £30 nearer to its limit. I wandered around the aisles of the supermarket with a wire basket for a while, forcing myself to stock up with the essentials — coffee, milk and toilet paper, and enough frozen meals to last me a week.

I didn’t want to go back to the house after that. It was getting dark, and when I looked at my watch it occurred to me the work party from Fosseway Lock site would be in the pub by now after their day’s work. I wanted to know how it was that Samuel had come to find me. The person to ask was Andrew Hadfield. It was probably time I bought him a drink anyway, to keep him sweet. Finances would just about stretch that far.

The canal work parties normally retired to the Pipe Hill Inn on Walsall Road. Not every pub appreciates a score of sweaty, muddy labourers trampling over their carpets, but the Pipe Hill was also used by walkers heading for the Heart of England Way. I found Andrew in the middle of a small group of WRG volunteers, many of them women. The people on these weekend parties tended to be teachers and office workers, whose idea of fun was getting up to their knees in mud on their days off. During the summer, there were two-week camps when dozens of volunteers came from Italy, Germany, the USA and Spain to spend their holidays labouring.

‘Chris. Nice to see you again. Come and join the party.’

Andrew looked as though he’d already sunk a few pints of Marston’s Bitter. The high colour in his narrow face from a day out in the open was heightened by the beer. He was in blue jeans and an open-necked red-check work shirt, showing off his lean hips and wiry arms. During the week he commuted on the train from City Station to his architecture practice in Birmingham. But at weekends he seemed to have made it part of his job with the restoration trust to help supervise these work parties. Looking at the flushed faces and bright eyes of some of the women around him now, I wondered if they were the reason for his dedication.

I bought a round of drinks, noting that the women seemed to be getting through a large quantity of Smirnoff Mules and Metz, judging by the empty bottles on the table. I slid Andrew’s pint across and managed to squeeze into a spot opposite him. The bodies close around me smelled of sweat and soil, overlaid with cigarette smoke and the mingled sweetness of alcohol and feminine scents.

‘Had a good day, then?’ I asked.

‘Brilliant!’ they all said, practically in unison. One or two of them looked meaningfully at Andrew and laughed. He grinned at me, and I half-expected a conspiratorial wink.

‘We’re getting on well. We really got down to business today, didn’t we, girls?’

More laughter. I smiled tolerantly. They were a group who’d bonded by tackling a hard physical task, not to mention roughing it at night in a youth centre somewhere, and were now relaxing together. They deserved their fun. But in the process they’d become an intimate little unit of the kind that always makes someone outside the group feel uncomfortable, an unwelcome intruder who doesn’t even understand their language.

‘You know what you can do with your shovel,’ said a female voice. General hysterics followed, and I tried to laugh along with the in-joke.

‘I wanted to ask you about the old man, Andrew,’ I said finally, when the crowd thinned out for a trip to the loo.

‘Who? Oh, Mr Longden. Quite a touching reunion, Chris. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so gob-smacked. I take it the old chap came as a bit of a surprise?’

‘Like a bolt out of the blue.’

‘And other journalistic clichés, no doubt.’

‘I wondered how you happened to meet him.’

‘Actually, I’d seen him hanging around the lock site a few times. We get the occasional spectator, you know. Asking their damn fool questions usually. You know — “who let all the water out?”, that sort of thing. It’s no problem really — we like people to know what we’re doing. But this old chap wasn’t that sort. He was different.’

The loo party returned and fussed about taking orders for another round of drinks. I let one of them persuade me to have another half of Marston’s. That would be my limit, at least while I was driving, and until I could get to my local back home.

‘How do you mean, different?’ I said.

‘Well...’ Andrew frowned as he thought about it. But his concentration slipped as he watched the women at the bar, and I had to drag him back to the conversation.

‘The old man, Andrew.’

‘Yeah. Well, he never said anything for a while. In fact, he didn’t move around much, just stood there propped on his stick in that old overcoat. No matter how cold it was, he would stand there, staring. He didn’t look well to me. Physically, I mean. A bit frail. Almost as if he wasn’t all there, too. But he’s an old friend of the family, isn’t he, Chris? You must know him.’

He looked puzzled at my insistence, and I could see he was starting to get bored with the subject.

‘But how did you get talking to him, Andrew? If he wasn’t asking questions?’

‘Oh.’ He waved a hand vaguely at the rest of the group. ‘One day a couple of the girls got in conversation with him. He was interested in the history of the canal. But way back, you know — right back to when it was built. They were out of their depth. And so was I, to be honest. Then somebody mentioned your name. “Chris Buckley might know stuff like that. You should talk to him,” they said.’

I tried to picture the moment. Had the old man looked surprised to hear my name mentioned? Or had it been what he was expecting?

‘I can tell you, he got so excited, I thought he was going to have a seizure on the spot,’ said Andrew. ‘And then today he came back again, and there you were. Cue the great reunion. Fate, eh, Chris?’

‘Yes.’

But was it really fate? Or something more deliberate, with little left to chance? You might say I have a cynical and suspicious nature. But I had the feeling I was the object of some clever manoeuvring by a person who knew exactly what he was doing. And the manipulation had started even before we’d met.

I drained my beer and told Andrew I had to be going.

‘Sure you won’t have another? We’ll be here for a while yet. The girls are just getting into the swing.’

‘No, I’m driving.’

‘Oh, so I see.’ Andrew peered out of the window and sneered at my old Escort parked near his bright red Jaguar XJS. ‘I suppose you have to save your energy for pedalling.’

I didn’t humour him with an answer, but my ears grew warm at the giggles from around the table. They were all well on their way to getting drunk, and I was far from it. The world seems a harsh and lonely place when you’re the only one sober.

‘This old family friend of yours, Chris,’ said Andrew as I stood up to leave. Suddenly he looked more clear-headed, and his eyes were assessing me. ‘Do you think he might have a bit of money, then?’

I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. His question had struck straight to the heart of what I’d been thinking all afternoon, but hadn’t yet admitted to myself. Suddenly I’d found an elderly friend of the family in a frail condition. A man who was almost like an uncle, and who was, by his own admission, not poor. ‘There’s only you left,’ he’d said. Only me left for what? That was the question. It’s a sad fact that poverty can make you see the chance of money in everything.

‘Well, like I say,’ grinned Andrew, seeing my expression, ‘it could be fate.’