The Illuminations

SELLY OAK

‘You’re in England now,’ the nurse said. ‘You’re not in Afghanistan any more, do you hear me?’ That was the first time he saw the room, though Scullion knew it wasn’t seeing in the normal sense because everything was blurred with a milky radiance. And then, one at a time, he counted the colours back into his life. She was moving tubes about his face. For minutes or days he saw her green tunic. She was chatty, the nurse, and her head came in and out of focus, lifting, prodding, reminding him of school. One day a pair of blue surgical gloves fluttered over him like a hawk. A yellow drink came with a straw but he couldn’t.

Three weeks in Critical Care. ‘You’re doing great,’ she said. ‘You’re in

Birmingham

.’ Scullion wanted to say this was a contradiction in terms but he couldn’t speak and didn’t know if his mouth was moving.

Try to be nice

Sunlight broke through the blinds one day, then he heard Madeleine, her voice by the bed and her hand smoothing his hair. He couldn’t afford to be miles away now that Madeleine was here, the spouse of doom, passing small pink sponges into his mouth.

‘Drink, darling,’ she said.

He smelt her perfume. Anaïs Anaïs.

It came in small bottles. He fell asleep. And when he woke up again he imagined he saw a goat’s bones on the sand and staring down from the mountain a boy with brown eyes. What if evil

came and held your hand and said you were in England?

She sat in Kehoe’s pub in one of the snugs. He saw her. It was twenty-five years ago and you couldn’t smoke a cigarette without Madeleine taking half of it and kissing it down to the filter. She had a perfect smile and he loved the way she knew more than she said about everything. She just laughed instead of boasting. He called her Kitty because she loved Parnell. Back in college they had sex every day and he remembered her spraying scent into her bathwater afterwards. Sitting in the bath with her knees up to her chest asking for a puff, she looked as if trouble had been banished from her life. Disaffection was never going to touch this sweet woman, the Kitty who gleamed and the Kitty who smoked.

He lay thinking of her. Heart monitors beeped in the distance and every day more detail arrived. Madeleine was always there in the morning and he began to wonder if she’d forgotten that she hated him. ‘Don’t you remember, Maddie,’ he said to himself, ‘the day you woke up without children? And your husband was off in the sand again looking for snakes and vermin. On tour again. He wasn’t the Charlie you’d known, was he? Him hiking round the world killing people because the government wished voters to see they were taking a strong line.’

Wasn’t

Charlie

, he thought.

‘We wanted different things didn’t we, Mad? I was fighting out in some shithole and you were booking rooms in expensive hotels. That’s right. We wanted different lives and we grew apart and these things happen to the very best of people, don’t they, Madeleine? And you just wanted someone to be kind and to look at you that way again.’ So she changed the locks and gave his books to Amnesty.

‘It’s hard,’ she said to her friends in wine bars, ‘but some men, you know, they’re nice in bed, they’re good to you, but they’re just an absence when it comes to it. Poor Charlie. He just wants to be with the tented people.’ And now she stroked his head and called him darling. This woman who would float for ever through his mind in summer dresses.

‘We tried to save the left leg. The other one was off when you arrived. But we had to amputate, old boy. It’s too bad. It’s just too bad, but you’ll recover.’

Scullion lifted a hand, bending one of three remaining fingers. ‘Yes,’ said Colonel Pettifer, the chief surgeon. ‘Both legs, old boy. You’ve lost an eye and your mouth is damaged, but we’ll fix that. And the fingers, obviously. But I wouldn’t worry too much about that.’

The heavy sedation wiped Scullion’s questions. For weeks he roamed in a field of floating reds, before he saw white carnations. A week later it was lines from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldiers knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

He spoke the words to his own face in County Westmeath, the clear eyes of his boyhood, and he knew the boy’s wonder would

only awaken to grief. He’d never given himself good advice and it was too late. Was that Madeleine holding the blunderer’s hand, counting the days, saying all would be well now between them?

‘Patience,’ the surgeon said.

‘The wounds are healing and it’s all about …’

‘… commitment to getting … that’s …’

‘And then you won’t know yourself.’

The tubes came out. One day: the theatre. A journey under lights and the operation on the mouth. The nurse said mud and dirt had been embedded in his gums, causing infection. Pettifer picked out the material with a silver tool and then he bent over to show him the grains on a swab. ‘Grass from an Afghan field.’ All the while Madeleine spoke about the good eye. He was in England now and many patients walk again.

A day came when his mouth had healed enough for him to try getting out a few words. He took his time. It was slow. And the first words he spoke were not curses or woes, not instant requests or questions about the legs. He simply said enough to make it clear that Madeleine should leave. He was sitting up and he could see the outline of her blonde hair, her white blouse, and he imagined her looking at the stumps of his legs and seeing that the whole man she disliked was gone.

Two weeks later he could say much more to the nurse. ‘No sentimentality. You can write it on the end of the bed.’

‘Like “Nil by mouth”?’ she said.

‘That’s right. Nil by sentiment.’

‘You’re back with us. Good-oh. Sentiment? I think you’ll find that sort of thing’s in short supply round here, Major. Shame about the lady, though. She was here for weeks.’

‘She comes from money,’ Scullion said. ‘Or they pretend they

have money. What they really have is debt. Those people live with so many lies they forget the money thing is false, too. And one day you just have to get away from them.’

‘Too much information,’ the nurse said.

The day he dismissed her, Madeleine went back to the family quarters and phoned her sister in County Clare. She was crying. ‘The thing Charlie will never understand’, she said, ‘is that he’ll always be all right because he’ll always have himself. He’ll never see it, but there’s a sort of complete selfishness in him.’

‘You did your best,’ her sister said.

‘He doesn’t have it in him to be pitied.’

THE TOLLYGUNGE CLUB

One day he smelt food. It was coming from the corridor and it marked the return of routine. ‘This is how it works,’ Pettifer said. ‘You’ll be going off to the High-Dependency Burns Unit. You’ll need skin grafts and a cataract operation to improve your good eye. After that, the real work begins — the legs. We’re going to seal them and then you’ll be off to Headley Court in Surrey. You’re not old, Major, but you’re not in the first flush. The training is hard work, let me tell you. It’s six months before you’re off the stubbies and walking on prosthetics.’

‘Prosthetics, really?’

‘Yes.’

‘We had better get a move on, Colonel,’ said Scullion. ‘It would be lovely to be able to walk to my own disciplinary hearing, don’t you think?’

Pettifer just smiled the way people smile when they don’t want

to get involved. ‘Keep fighting,’ he said. Scullion wasn’t sure if blushing was actually an option any more, but the words embarrassed him and he wished he could go to sleep.

He spent the long afternoons thinking about a new life in India. He thought he could just about bear it in Calcutta, the slow, fading intensity, playing billiards at the Tollygunge Club with the gardeners, eating mangoes, reading Saki and drinking gin and tonic. He could see it so clearly he almost believed in it, a life of displaced authority in warm weather, a life of impotence. He was only two days in the Burns Unit when he asked for paper and started trying to write out the logistics. There was money from his parents’ old pub in Mullingar: he could pay for nurses. He could talk to strangers or start a charity or write a book. With his childish legs in front of him under the blanket, Scullion knew that his great companion had always been his imagination. He asked the welfare officer if she could bring him

The Jungle Book

He could see himself sitting under the twisted boughs of a banyan tree, hidden from the sun, recalling the Great Game, a blanket like this over his poor legs and a drink in his hand, the mind alive, his eyes scanning the horizon for elephants.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said. It was Luke standing in the doorway with a bottle of Talisker and a bag of cakes. He had walked all the way from Birmingham New Street thinking of what to say.

‘Is it yourself, Captain Campbell?’

‘It is.’

‘Well, fuck me with a flute band,’ Scullion said. Luke smiled and walked over to the bed. He thought better of shaking the major’s hand so he clapped his shoulder.

‘I’ll pass that request on to the regiment. I’m sure we could arrange for the old Western band to march up your hole while

playing “Amazing Grace”, if that’s what you really want. I mean, it’s quite a strange order but look at the fucken state of you. You can have anything you want.’

That was well done. Well managed, thought Scullion. He laughed and pulled himself up on the pillows. Luke was pleased to see he could still laugh and he realised, watching him struggle, how much he had always been intimidated by the major. He began speaking hospital small talk while Luke considered him, realising, while he listened, that he was now in a position of power over Scullion. Nobody else but Luke had fully witnessed the major’s meltdown. Nobody else knew how reckless he had been in making them go to that village or how his judgement had collapsed before the mortar attack. Scullion had abandoned the boys to danger more than once, they both knew it, and the facts of the matter told against them both. The facts ridiculed them as soldiers and mocked the legend of Scullion’s war. At that stage it hadn’t gone beyond blame into a collective sadness; indeed, it lay heavy on Scullion’s own head, on his features, his scarred mouth, twisted now as he stared from the bed and tried to talk.

‘Sit your arse down.’

‘How they treating you?’

‘They dance around. The nurses. Doctors. You’re lucky if you see the same one twice.’

They discussed the hours after he was hit. He didn’t remember the song or the tourniquet, the morphine, the airlift. He didn’t care so much about the weed-smoking or the gamer mentality in the field. It was all nothing in the end, the sound of a different drum. ‘We ran into some bad luck. Or I did. And the wee boy did,’ was all he wanted to say.

‘It was a fuck-up,’ Luke said.

‘We brought light to those people …’

His bad eye was leaking. Luke handed him a swab from the top of the bedside cabinet. Another silence. ‘You nearly died.’

‘One thing I’ve learned. When death smiles at you, Captain — you’ve just got to smile right back at it.’

Luke didn’t mind the fakery. The man was in pain. Or was he actually proud of all the sacrifices?

‘We achieved a lot,’ he said.

‘Fucking zero,’ Luke said.

‘We deployed with confidence.’

‘The mission to make the country stable has made it less so and only the Taliban rose in confidence.’

‘Ah, fuck it,’ Scullion said. They were silent for a minute and Scullion wished he could resurrect the banter that had drawn the boys together. But when he spoke he found he was grasping for something larger. ‘Some of us are just two-sided men, Luke. The moment we look at anything we see its exact opposite. It’s a way of life.’

‘I understand, sir. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘You think I failed.’

‘I think you’ve suffered.’

Scullion’s smile had something wrong in it. It took the world at its worst and gave it his blessing. ‘Holy fuck,’ he said. ‘I sent my bitch of a wife away. I lost my legs. One of my eyes is fucked for good. And you

think

I’ve suffered?’

‘It was a terrible tour.’

‘That happens.’

‘Not to me,’ Luke said.

‘You know, Luke: some things are simpler than others. Maybe you just chose the wrong career.’

‘I know I did.’

‘You’ll be appearing at the tribunal? And you’ll be talking to the journalists downstairs?’

‘I thought you liked the truth, Charlie? Wasn’t that your thing? Alexander the Great and all that? Truth and enlightenment? Pulling the savage peoples out of the dark ages? But now that a few papers want to ask what happened, it’s loyalty, is it? It’s sticking together for—’

‘The regiment!’ he shouted.

‘Oh, Charlie,’ Luke said. ‘Is that the best you can do?’

He walked to the cabinet to lift the cakes, setting them out slowly on a plate and placing it on the edge of the bed. ‘This has nothing to do with the regiment,’ he said. ‘It’s to do with a bunch of kids from different regiments being mistreated by their superior officers.’

‘Is that what the boys say?’

‘The boys don’t know what to say. They’ve gone back home to see their families and pine for another chance to be heroes.’ Luke took one of the cakes and picked at it.

‘You always had judging eyes,’ Scullion said.

‘Calm the fuck down, Charlie. I came on the train to see you and there’s no point talking shit.’

Scullion was one of those actors. He had any number of selves to call on and he didn’t favour one in particular. That’s why he could do things other people couldn’t do, because, to him, at some level, it was always another person doing it. He was always above it. ‘I don’t know what any of you want,’ he said. ‘You’re all the same.’

‘Is there anything you need, Charlie?’

‘I need a year. If I can make it to a year I’ll go to India and none of you will see me again.’

‘India?’

‘I’ve never been happy, Luke. That’s a lie. I was happy for a term at Trinity College Dublin. I think I told you. Me and Madeleine up the stairs listening to jazz records and that was it.’

‘What?’

‘That was it.’

‘You were happy?’

‘Yes.’

He spoke for a while about the early days when he thought he would live in London and write a book. For a summer he haunted Senate House and the reading room of the British Library.

‘Then you joined up.’

‘I did.’

‘Why didn’t you just stay in that world?’

‘It isn’t a world, Luke. People who read books aren’t reading them properly if they stop with the books. You’ve got to go out eventually and test it all against reality.’

‘You’re from another age.’

‘That’s what she said. What they all said. And I made the mistake once of thinking you were the same.’

‘I just missed my da’, Charlie. And I thought I could show the difference between right and wrong.’

‘We all did.’

‘That’s right. We all did.’

‘There was a generation of men wrecked by Ireland,’ Scullion said. ‘A fair few of us. I saw those dead construction workers in Teebane, the ones that were blown up by the IRA. I was young and I hoped at the time that I’d never see such carnage again. But time passes and I’ve seen more dead men than I ever imagined. Hundreds more. It makes you hard. I’ve been shot at from

buildings in places you don’t even know.’

He sat up straight and wiped his good eye. Luke imagined it was now trained only on the dark places.

‘You should go to India,’ Luke said. ‘Go if you can and look after yourself, Charlie.’

He put his head back on the pillows. ‘We never had children. We were too busy trying to work ourselves out and we missed the boat. We missed our chance. And maybe they would have been my cause. Maybe that’s what people do to …’

‘What?’

‘Gain a foothold. Make their own news.’

‘Maybe.’

‘She never forgave me. My army career was a nightmare to her and it killed our marriage.’

‘Maybe.’

It was obvious to Luke that something final was taking place. He tried with words and gestures to reassure his old boss, but his heart wasn’t in it, and his attitude clearly irked Scullion, who saw only disloyalty. Scullion suddenly winced: it was obvious the whole thing felt to him like pain, the dull unravelling of his command. Being unable to shout orders, he could only stammer, his bad temper entering in gasps.

‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, Campbell. What … what have you had?’ he asked. ‘Girlfriends? Silly girlfriends? You’ve never risked anything, never mind your happiness, never mind your legs.’

‘People get over things, Charlie.’

‘Good luck with that.’

A nurse and two men came in. ‘Time for your scan,’ the nurse said. ‘The porters will wheel you along.’ She started fussing with

wires and tubes and Luke stepped back. When he came forward again he placed a hand on the major’s arm.

‘You taught me things,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ Scullion said. ‘How to put trust in the wrong people? How to become a two-sided man?’

‘Maybe you’ll write something.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the one with the stories.’

‘History’s always told by the deputies,’ Scullion said. ‘Men like you. You’re just the right age for revenge.’ Luke stared at his old mentor. Decency or pity demanded that he allow the major the final insult.

‘Goodbye, sir.’

‘This is real life.’

‘Aye.’

Unspoken words softened the air. ‘Why don’t you wait here,’ Scullion said. ‘I won’t be long at this thing and you can just sit and wait for me.’ But Luke kept his eye on him as the bed turned and was sure the major understood they would never meet again. ‘My hand’s warm,’ Scullion said. ‘You don’t get this in your video games, sure you don’t, son.’ Luke felt the years slide away as the major withdrew his hand. A look of complete spite came into Charlie’s face and he blinked his crusted eye, then rested his head on the pillow as the bed moved off, steered by his new lieutenants. Luke could hear his old friend complain about the bumps as he vanished down the corridor, setting out on his long journey to India.

REALITY SHOW

Maureen was setting the table in the breakfast room and getting all het up about an episode of

EastEnders

Bloody napkins, she thought. The stress was too much, doing a lunch. It wasn’t even the whole family, but she didn’t do lunches. It was all because Esther was coming down from Edinburgh for one of her visits and she’d given her mother a stiff lecture on the phone about how normal it was, having your family round. Maureen felt it might be Esther’s idea of a Sunday but it wasn’t hers. It was a sheltered housing complex she lived in, not the Ritz.

Esther was like her father that way. She would just decide on a whim that everybody had to live according to new rules. Stanley used to come back from his jaunts, Maureen remembered, full of ideas about how they should eat more salad or start playing tennis. It would cause rifts between them that couldn’t be healed. The children could still remember the time their parents decided to buy a gas fire. They had arguments in every showroom in Ayrshire and collected dozens of leaflets. Every Saturday and Sunday for months was spent looking for a fire, but still they couldn’t agree and it somehow destroyed any good feeling between them. She wanted something plain like you might see in a modern office, and he wanted one with a flame, a novelty fire that could cheer you up. Their differences were silly but they became strangulating to the kids. Maureen then watched for bullying tactics in everything Stanley did: if he made a pot of soup, she would follow him around the kitchen with a damp cloth, cleaning the surfaces before he’d even had time to mess them up, pointing out how soup was his mother’s thing, waving away his cigarette smoke, his pleasures. Maureen was young then but she behaved as if her life

was a trial. And as Esther and her brothers grew up they realised their mother had never stopped being angry at their father. He was still a force of resistance for Maureen, a niggle, a source of objection that she couldn’t stand, and now, in her later years, his invisible fire still sent a chill over her living room.

Maureen was not at her best that Sunday. Her mind raced back and forth between bitterness and scorn, and lavishly, early that morning, she began to exert herself making sure the lunch would be difficult. Them with their Edinburgh dinner parties and what have you. Out of the blue they decide they want catering in the middle of the day, Maureen thought. ‘It’s not the kind of thing we do in Ayrshire,’ she whispered, ‘and I’ll be seventy on my next birthday. Them with their fancy cars and their pasta.’ Esther was always dropping little hints about how her father loved having them over to stay and how the new wife was into cookery books and growing her own tomatoes. Maureen liked to say the new wife would have her eyes opened one day.

She hadn’t seen Stanley for twenty-five years. Hadn’t clapped eyes on him. Yet she’d added to her dislike of him every day, now saying he hadn’t played a real part in the children’s lives, hadn’t got involved in all the struggles of bringing them up or setting them straight. She said Alexander’s drink problem was completely Stanley’s fault. She said Ian had never really worked himself out because he had no father to guide him. And Esther — don’t get me started, thought Maureen. Esther thinks it’s healthier to forgive the bad people than praise the ones who’ve been good to you. That’s Esther. Maureen held up one of the new spoons, polished it and then set it back down on the table. They pay her well as a therapist, she thought, to hurt her mother and pretend it’s all about honesty.

Esther arrived first and brought one of those sweet Italian loaves full of sultanas that Maureen secretly liked but always said was too rich. Scott and Jack, Esther’s two, gave their grandmother big, self-conscious hugs, and she wanted to tell them to take off their massive shoes. It was all problems of size when it came to the family, big hugs, massive shoes, the small thanks she got, the exorbitant need for Wi-Fi. ‘Can you not do without it for five minutes?’ she said to Scott when he asked what the password was. ‘We don’t have anything like that in here.’ She shook her head. ‘We’ve enough to do just trying to keep the place clean and tidy.’

With his gelled hair and his love-bite there was suddenly something quite lewd about Scott. She was sure he was playing with a Harry Potter doll the last time she saw him. You can’t keep up with them nowadays, she thought. One minute they’re using your handbag as a magic cave for their Lego figures and the next minute they’re advertising how they just had sex. No sooner did her family arrive in the living room than Maureen went into an anxious depression, their need for things belittling her somehow, taunting her, making her yearn for her normal afternoons when she was by herself. Esther’s youngest was silent except for the bleeps and melodies that came from a small red device in his lap.

‘You better turn that off,’ Maureen said. She gathered up the coats and started for the bedroom. ‘The fire alarm in this place is always going off and it’s because these gadgets interfere with the system and break it.’ Jack looked at his brother and the two of them just bit the laces around their necks and smiled into their sweatshirts.

Going off with the coats, Maureen was thinking of Stanley, realising how much better he seemed to her now that she never

saw him. He had once been as handsome as Tony Curtis. He was a fine boy when he was young and Maureen felt proud then to have him. He drove lorries all over Europe and would bring back bottles of perfume for Maureen that nobody else owned, and what a laugh he was. ‘My father had no time for him,’ she always said and her story never varied. ‘He saw him for what he was, but my mother, of course, she thought he was fabulous. Stanley would come in and ply all the old women with drink. He had trouble handing in his wages or staying at home for a week, mind you, but to everyone else he was the great Stan. He always had contraband, as he called it. This was before you could just drive to France to buy drink. He brought all these things from the Continent and my mother and the rest of them thought he was just the best in the world. He always had stories. They thought I was the queer one.’

Standing in her bedroom, with the coats in her arms and the window clear and polished in front of her, Maureen wanted to scream. In the next room they were bustling about, talking and upsetting her cushions and opening the fridge, and it all felt to her like an invasion. She hugged the warm coats and wished they were her nearest-and-dearest: she could just lay them down for the afternoon and then brush them off and send them home. But the actual people? Maybe it’s me, she said to herself, maybe it’s my problem, but I just wasn’t cut out for that way of life. Families and what have you. They would put years on you. She felt guilty when she thought about it later, but there was no getting away from it: her family made her feel like she couldn’t really breathe. Her mother had always made her feel the exact same way, as if she had so many things to prove. And she didn’t have the means to prove them so she might as well not try. ‘Stanley lights up a

room,’ her mother said to her one Hogmanay. ‘But you’ve always got so much on your plate, Maureen.’ She used to dream he went to Spain with her mother and her mother’s friends. Her father was never in the photographs that appeared in the dream, but years after her divorce, long after the kids had families of their own, she would see Stanley drinking sangria from a leather bottle in a bright yellow place in her mind.

The bedroom felt like an old, reliable friend. Maureen looked at the pillows and the mirror and almost whispered to them, speaking out her frustration. ‘I mean it when I say I’m lonely,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s true in the night, but when they come I don’t like it.’ The sentence mortified her but she added more. ‘When they take off their coats I feel mugged by everything they expect.’ She knew it wasn’t fair, that in her mind she lived like a servant when in reality she ruled like a queen. But she couldn’t change, she would never change, and it was her habit now to say they were ‘hurting’ her if they complained. ‘And why would anybody hurt a person who lived on her own?’ She could tell Esther thought this was some kind of strategy to get her own way.

‘See the family: I could run a mile.’ This is what she used to say to Anne next door. ‘I could see them far enough.’

‘What’s wrong?’ Anne said. ‘Don’t you enjoy your family? They all seem so nice.’

‘They’re a handful, Anne. I’m not kidding you. It’s not easy. You don’t know the half of it.’

For years her children had witnessed it on their mother’s face, how put-upon she felt by them, how aggressed by their basic wishes. They tried to understand it. Family life, to her, was a complication best left to television. She liked greeting cards because she could buy them on her own and send them on her own, and

she despatched all responsibility when she posted those cards.

The soaps were her haunting counsel. She watched them and got ideas about how the members of her own family were less than they should be. She said it broke her heart, but, in a sense, she liked it when people let her down. It made her feel justified. Alexander was an alcoholic and a genuine worry to everyone, and there was nothing she could do. He was angry and messed up, his life was out of shape, so he just blamed his mother. She could see that. The other two, Ian and Esther, confused her much more. They had spent years trying to supply her with a new perspective, to little effect. They kept trying and they kept hoping their lives would please her but Maureen had formed a heady resistance to their idea of family bliss. Esther reminded Ian it was a condition she suffered as well as a decision she made. And if she ever took the trouble to compare herself to her own mother, she would see that the same pattern had been repeated. Old Sadie had liked who she was with her friends but not who she was with her family. She hardly ever invited them round, and she, too, hated finding her cushions on the floor. Maureen sometimes felt like a person being punished for no reason.

Stanley said people didn’t really know her. Maureen remembered Esther repeating what he’d said as if it was news from God. ‘Your mother used to be light-hearted and full of fun,’ he also said. Maureen didn’t want to hear it from Esther, but it was true. The children think they know everything but they don’t know the half of it. ‘I used to make cakes and there’d be flour everywhere,’ Maureen said to herself in the bedroom, ‘and halfway to Carlisle he’d open his piece-box and find these perfect wee cakes.’ Maureen knew that Esther had brought it up — what Stanley said — in the hope that the information would boost her mother’s self-esteem.

It’s one of Esther’s favourite expressions, said Maureen, and some of us don’t need boosts and don’t want self-esteem, we just want peace and quiet at the weekend and for the past to stay in the past.

She counted to ten in front of the window. Ian was coming down the path with his daughter and his face was serious, but when they came in she heard the usual cheers. Esther always had to kiss everyone and now she would be greeting her older brother. She’d be lifting the little one and squeezing the poor wee thing to death. It would soon be over, Maureen thought, laying down the coats. The audio books were by the bed and Maureen looked forward to that. You get to a certain age and it’s just too late to start changing. ‘Hello, son,’ she said when Ian entered the bedroom with more coats.

‘Cold out there,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s November for you.’ She looked down to see her newest grandchild padding in behind her father. ‘And look at this wee lady with her chubby face. Ah, Bonnie. Come here till I see you, darlin’; take your shoes off now, there’s a good girl.’ Bonnie came waddling forward in her winter wraps with her fingers out like twigs, and, when she lifted her, a real smile broke over Maureen’s face. She patted down the fluffy hair and smelled the winter on her granddaughter’s cheeks. ‘Have you been a good girl? Have you? Have you been a good girl? Well, Bonnie, my wee pet, I’ve got a treat for you, so I have. Yes I have.’

‘Don’t give her sweets, Mum,’ Ian said.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘No. We don’t give her sweets.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. Just a wee sweetie, eh. She deserves a wee sweetie just like any other kid.’

Ian wondered why she didn’t just say ‘fuck you’. It would’ve

been easier in a way if she had. Fuck you and your plans and your decisions that are different from mine. Fuck them. And fuck you for coming in here thinking I should respect them, because I don’t, I think they’re nonsense. As well as that I think you lot are all out of touch with normality. All children want a sweetie and what kind of grandmother would I be if I denied my wee granddaughter a sweetie? It’s you and Esther. You’re that stressed you can’t let your kids be at peace.

Why didn’t she just say it and be done with it?

She pulled open the drawer and picked out a bar of Highland Toffee and a Kinder Surprise. She didn’t hand them to Bonnie but placed them on top of the chest of drawers next to a framed picture of Stanley and the children at Butlin’s in 1973. She turned to Ian to see what he was going to do about it and he flushed before he spoke.

‘Mum,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason we don’t want the kids to have these things. It’s because we had four or five fillings each before we left primary school. And because our dad had his first heart attack at the age of fifty-two. So it’s not really a matter of whether Bonnie

deserves

a wee sweetie, because what she deserves much more, my daughter, is to not grow up with a mouthful of scabby teeth and then have heart disease at an age when healthy people are thinking about running a marathon. That’s my choice as a parent. Okay? Is that all right with you?’

‘Oh shut up, Ian. I’m not in the mood today.’

Bonnie emerged from the bedroom with the chocolate egg and Esther could see that Ian and their mother had already had an argument. She noticed the slow progress of Maureen’s befuddlement and a slight limp as she made her way to the kitchen counter and handed the plates to Jack. She wished she could just go

and hug her mother and tell her this was a happy occasion but it was years too late. That’s what happens. She looked at Maureen as if she suddenly had a clear idea of her and took the plates herself from Jack. ‘I’ll help you, Jigger,’ she said.

‘This Parmesan’s smelly,’ Scott said.

‘Don’t say smelly, Scooter.’ That was Esther. She didn’t like the boys to use words like smelly or toilet. Something could smell strange or you might visit the loo, but smelly was definitely out of bounds and so was belly when you could say tummy.

‘It was all they had in Tesco’s,’ Maureen said.

‘You’re better buying it fresh,’ Scott said. He always got more sophisticated when his father wasn’t there. Esther considered it a sign of maturity or something, probably meaning he would cope better at university. They sat down. Maureen wasn’t eating what was on her plate. At times she thought she should have tried much harder to keep Stanley. Tried much harder to please him and make him happy. When it came to it, she let him go as if her disappointment in him — her sudden hatred — was simple confirmation that men weren’t worth a button. She liked to tell herself that everything would have been different with the children if she’d had a man in the house. Perhaps Stanley would’ve protected her against their need to be special all the time.

She lifted a fork. ‘I don’t know why you wanted Italian,’ she said. ‘Every time you have your lunch nowadays you’ve got to decide which country you’re going to.’

Esther looked at her mother and chewed her food a few times more than was necessary. ‘There’s certainly a lot more choice nowadays,’ she said.

‘You call it choice. I call it harassment,’ Maureen said. ‘It’s like the bloody Olympic Games in that Tesco’s. Italian. Chinese.

They’ve got a whole bloody aisle of Polish stuff.’

‘Well, there’s a lot of them living here,’ Ian said.

‘Too many,’ replied Maureen.

‘I don’t know where we’d be without them. Half the building sites would be lying empty for a start. And taxi drivers. You couldn’t get a British guy to get out of his bed on a Saturday morning if the town was on fire. These Eastern Europeans will work all night.’

‘Taking jobs,’ Maureen said. ‘And bringing their giant jars of vegetables over here. And biscuits. It’s not even biscuits they eat. Those things are like bars of soap. You’d get bubbles in your mouth if you sat down to eat one with a cup of tea.’

Over the years, Ian had come to accept her complaints as a kind of sickness, a complete resistance to the idea of forward movement, and he only blew up when it seemed directly to affect his own child. Esther, on the other hand, had an obvious pact with Scott and Jack, to be themselves no matter what Maureen said or did, but Esther could get nervous. She knew, for instance, that her mother would find it difficult when she began a story about the cocktails they had every weekend at tea time.

‘Cocktails,’ Maureen said. ‘You all think you’re film stars and this is Scotland, not bloody New York.’

‘Dad made me a mojito,’ Jack said.

‘A mosquito?’ said Maureen.

‘There was hardly anything in it,’ Esther said.

‘Well, if you want to get them started on drink that early, it’s up to you. I’m just telling you it’s the slippery slope.’

‘It was just a bit of fun, Mum.’

‘That’s how it started with your brother.’

‘Let’s not go there,’ Ian said.

‘Take it from me,’ Maureen said. ‘Giving drink to young men is not a wise move. Alexander was at it far too young. And your father, the great man, was giving him pints of lager when the boy was about fifteen years old. Somebody saw him down the street the other day with a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag. The middle of the afternoon when all the men are at their work. Vodka! I was mortified.’

Esther looked at Ian. She knew it was going to be like this. She knew she would be sharing looks with her brother, rolling her eyes at the dawning of impossibility over the lunch table. She sipped her fizzy water and saw that her mother would never change and that the healthiest prospect was just to love her as she was. And that’s how she played it. She mustn’t be brutalised by her mother’s frustrations and she counselled herself always to seek new ways to think well of her. Love is hard work and you don’t get anywhere just by feeding your resentments. She thought she could steal a little goodness back just by stopping to remember how lovely her mother had been to the woman next door. She once read a paper that said if you love someone then you’re always ready to let them start again.

Maybe they’d like the ice-cream, thought Maureen. People always cheer up when it comes to the sweet. ‘I’m sorry I’m not very good at these things,’ she said suddenly to them all at the table. Ian and Esther smiled and said everything was great and both of them seemed relieved to see her relax enough to say what she’d said. Sometimes you just have to accept that the people you care about are different from you, thought Maureen, but walking to the kitchen she realised she had a tear in her eye. The visit wouldn’t last for ever and neither would her nice memories of Stanley, but there it was. As she opened the fridge she knew she’d

never have chosen anyone else, even as the chill of the icebox softly caressed her hand.

ARIEL

Luke walked from the car and skipped over a puddle and smiled for no reason at the windows of the building. He looked along the seafront to where the prom disappeared into the thick of Ardrossan and took out a cigarette. The car ferry was halfway out and the seagulls wafted it on, before banking away like bombers and heading up to Largs. In the morning the coast always looked as if it was drying out, as if each town was in recovery from the bad weather and the night’s racket. Feeling for his lighter he found his wallet and took out the picture of 5 Platoon up against a wall at the barracks in Salisbury. The major’s eyes seemed fixed on something miles away.

It was the second time Luke had discovered Anne in the laundry room and this time she sat facing the machine with the suds splashing up on the glass. He stood at the door watching her and noticed a smile, the smile she had developed long ago, an expression that he couldn’t read. After a moment, she sighed. ‘I like to wash and iron a man’s shirt,’ she said.

‘That’s not very feminist,’ he joked.

She looked up. ‘I had a job in New York.’

Luke went over and put his hand on her shoulder. She held a box of Ariel washing capsules in her lap and something in her attitude suggested she understood how to cope around a washing machine. She took a tissue from her sleeve and rubbed her nose with it, then she turned it over and used the clean side to

wipe her eyes. Luke watched her and thought only an old person would do that. He would know he was getting old when he used both sides of a tissue. ‘You used to come here before the war,’ she said.

He paused.

‘I did. It’s your grandson, Luke.’

‘I know who you are. You’re the one with the flat in Glasgow and the uniform.’

‘You’re doing your washing.’

She inclined her head to look at him. ‘You’re the one with the imagination,’ she said. ‘A boy and a half. And why shouldn’t we take pictures of a pile of old dishes if that’s what we want to do?’

‘No reason,’ he said.

‘Exactly. There’s beauty in it …’

‘Yes.’

‘Art.’

‘I agree. There’s an art to telling the truth.’

‘That’s what the boys used to say — Harry and the boys. That was the style, I don’t mind telling you. Get out of the studio!’

‘Test your theories outside.’

‘I’ve met you before,’ she said. ‘And you’re quite right. No doubt about it. Go outside and see the people who have their hands in the sink.’

‘You’re talking about photography?’

‘Everyday things,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said, tapping the box in her lap and sniffing. ‘When I lived up in Glasgow there was heaps of washing to be done. Heaps. I think there were a hundred rooms in that house and a hundred chests of drawers in every room. It was

a very big house. And I was quite young to be carrying all that washing up the stairs.’

‘You came from America.’

‘I came from Canada. Then America. Then Glasgow.’

‘Glasgow must have been some place in those days,’ he said. ‘Remember those Annan pictures we saw of the tenements?’

She paused to catch her thoughts. She smiled. ‘They were ghosts,’ she said, ‘those Annan kids.’

‘But you understood the pictures — the light.’

She turned and waved a playful finger. ‘So did you, Sonny Jim. That’s the darkroom for you. That’s why you’re number one.’

Luke had gathered from his mother and from the warden that they were going to move Anne out. They said she couldn’t manage any more and even the Memory Club wasn’t helping, though she still had bursts of clarity. It was time to place her in better care, they said, and Anne wasn’t really absorbing this information so they would be better just cracking on. There were a lot of things to box up. It was hard, too sad. The books and the photographic stuff would need a van to themselves. Luke was talking to the people in Canada about her photographs and various papers and they put him on to a person at McMaster University, a nice woman with an Irish name, who was going to be in charge of whatever they did.

‘I’m happy, Luke,’ Anne said. She just said it. He lowered his head and thought of Scullion and the boy in Bad Kichan, and he found himself exhaling slowly as he took Anne’s hand. When she said she was happy it gave him the final push he needed to announce the excursion and defend her against whatever doubts. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘You and me. I’ve got a new car. We’re going to pack some things and go to Blackpool.

You always used to talk to me about it, remember, the lights and the trams and all that?’

‘Blackpool,’ she said.

‘We’re going to go and see the Illuminations.’

‘Nice, that. Will we take the train?’

Glasgow Central to Preston. And Harry would be waiting for me, if he could get away. Or it didn’t matter if you had to manage by yourself. Work is work. You wouldn’t believe the concentration. Masking is a technique whereby you hold back some of the light from one or two areas by placing a mask on the printing paper itself. It will affect the image you see and the reality you observe.

She asked again: ‘The train?’

‘I have a car,’ Luke said. ‘Now, listen. I’m going to work it all out and we’re going together. You and me.’

‘We’ll pack some things.’

‘We will so, Gran.’

‘We’ll pack some things and there’s always lots to do in Blackpool.’

Luke had phoned his mother. ‘There’s a flat,’ she said. ‘Part of a flat or a room, anyway, and you’ll find the number in her address book. She never wanted me to know about it. It’s hers, the flat. And it doesn’t matter any more. Just go. It’s a lovely idea.’

‘It’s tomorrow they’re coming, right?’ Luke asked.

‘Tomorrow, yes. Monday,’ said Alice.

‘We’ll go tomorrow, then.’

‘You want me to come along?’

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but just drive over here and help the cleaners once we’ve gone. I’ll spirit her away.’

‘All right,’ Alice said. ‘God bless.’

THE DIFFERENCE

Luke was sitting out by the exotic plants that everybody called the jungle. His gran was having a nap and he wanted to arrange things. He hadn’t spoken to Flannigan in a while and was out of touch with the boys and hadn’t said anything about his visit to Scullion in Birmingham. ‘So what about it, Flange?’ he said on the phone. ‘Do you think your fucken heap-of-shit car will make it out of Liverpool?’

‘What you doing?’

‘I’ll be in Blackpool.’

‘Don’t sweat it, lad. I’ll be zooming past all the horror-pigs on the road to get to the land of Kiss Me Quick. Just hit me up with the time and the place.’

They hadn’t talked about the tour or the tribunal or any of the stuff that was in the papers. It just wasn’t part of their training to pore over things. ‘Shit happens’ was the other motto, but, at the end of the call, the young private altered his tone and there was a pause.

‘What is it?’ Luke asked.

‘I dunno, man. Flashbacks. She said I woke up shouting in the night and like fucken crying and shit.’

‘And did you?’

‘I did, yeah. It was like I was losing my nut. My head just full of Scullion, man, the boss lying there ripped to fuck. Remember his eyes?’

‘Go on.’

‘Blood, sir. His eyes were full of blood. Fucken leg blown off and blood pouring down the fucker’s cheeks.’

‘Aye,’ Luke said. ‘It was messy.’

‘That’s the difference,’ Flannigan said. ‘You’re out. I’m nineteen. What the fuck am I going to do if I don’t have the army?’

Luke didn’t know what to say. He didn’t yet know how to talk about the visit to Selly Oak or how to share the details of his own flashbacks. When he came into Lochranza Court that afternoon he had been spooked right away by a Remembrance Day appeal box sitting in reception. And when he was telling Anne about the night he went out on the town, the night he drank too much, her voice rallied and she said what he’d heard older people say to boys with hangovers, ‘Hell mend you.’

‘What, Gran?’ He shivered. He’d thought she had said ‘

Helmand

you.’

‘I better go, Flange.’

‘You stayed so long, sir. Why did you stay so long in the army if you hated it that much?’

He wondered, as he often did, whether he should tell the truth or reach for something he half-believed. He had never really lived in a world where things could be said, but he said it now, in a lowered voice, as if posting an old letter he’d never got round to sending. ‘I kept thinking I’d meet my dad and we’d change the world.’ Luke wondered if Flannigan was just far too young to believe it, but it didn’t matter, he’d said what he’d said and the kid went on to something else.

‘It didn’t feel real, being in Afghan,’ he said. ‘It was so fucken hot all the time.’

‘I know it’s a loser thing to say,’ Luke said, ‘but I stopped believing in it, Flange. I was never like that in Iraq.’

‘Other people believe in it, sir. We just do our job.’

Luke paused to take that in. ‘I hope I haven’t embarrassed you, mate.’

‘Don’t be daft, sir.’

‘Okay. I’ll buzz you from Blackpool.’

‘Roger that,’ Flannigan said.

Luke was sitting on the wall looking at the plants when the two boys came up. ‘Is that the new iPhone?’ Scott asked. Luke’s phone was sitting beside him.

‘Yep. Top of the range.’

‘Aw, man. I want that, like,

so

badly.’ Luke knew they must be the grandsons of Anne’s nice friend Maureen. It was weird for him to think that they weren’t much younger than most of the guys in his section. The two boys spoke very easily: one of them said he wanted to be a DJ and the other said he’d study medicine if he could get in.

‘I’d never join the army,’ Jack said. ‘No offence.’

They spoke about phones and laptops and sounded very keen on cool things. ‘Wait here,’ Luke said, after a second’s hesitation. ‘Just wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.’ He went out to the car park, opened the boot and lifted out a black bag of stuff and brought it back to the boys. They opened it and gasped: two Xboxes, all the wires, handsets, mouthpieces, manuals, and a jumble of Nintendos and games.

‘Aw, man. Awesome!’ Jack said. The boys looked at each other with big smiles and Luke felt sure it was right to return it all to the realm of fun. They put their long arms into the bag and pulled things out and from the bottom Scott produced a paperback book, Kipling’s

Kim

.

‘This stuff is so cool.’

‘Don’t stay up all night,’ Luke said.

SHEILA

Anne woke and didn’t know where she was. All the houses had become one house and one time. She could have been downstairs as a child in Canada or was she inside the doll’s house, lighted with the bulb Daddy put there at Christmas? She felt for a moment she might be in the parlour in Hamilton waiting for the doctor, her mother bad with the shakes, and red leaves spinning in the yard. She blinked and heard a rumble under the boards.

Jane Street

She thought of the rugs she’d left in storage near Battery Park. A voice that came from the stairs made her think she must be in Glasgow, the big house, snow outside, Anne watching from the top window as the little girls in round hats made their way to school. She turned her head on the pillow and smiled to think of it. She pictured Blackpool, the darkroom at the top of the stairs. And she knew he would come. Harry would come and they’d put on a lamp and have a drink.

She sat on the edge of the bed. It was nice to have a place and a young man to help you take down a box. That’s right, she said: the boy Alice had and he’s now a leader of something. Luke. He wears the uniform and has to go out on night flights and what have you. He comes here and it takes an hour or two if the roads aren’t bad. And when she thought of bad roads and night-time all the stories drained away.

There was fog and snow over Germany.

You can forget you’re by the seaside. And good God: you have to keep your wits about you in these places, Saltcoats, Manhattan. You had to keep your chin up. She thought she heard the phone ringing and then Luke appeared in the doorway with a cup of tea. ‘Are we going to Blackpool?’ she asked as he put the cup down.

‘Yes, we are,’ he said. ‘First thing.’ Sometimes her old artistic sense would jump out at him, as if it had waited.

‘I hope you had a camera in that country you were in,’ she said ‘Because that’s a place for documentary.’

‘It was all too real,’ he said, ‘though we struggled to know it.’

‘You know fine well what’s real. Did you and me not argue all day and half the night about it?’

‘About what?’

‘You know fine well. If you want a good photograph stop messing about with models and start marching to a different tune.’

‘Lovely.’

‘That’s what we believe.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Me and you and the rest of them.’

Later, in the other room, Luke lifted Anne’s address book and sat in an armchair by the window. It felt good in his hands. He was amazed by the thickness of the book, all the names and numbers, scribbled or crossed out with different pens. Postcards were stuffed between the pages, images of young women he’d never met, a snap of him as a cadet, and, filed under T, an old black-and-white photo of a small boy. There were people in the address book from other countries, many in England: he realised as he flipped through the book that these were his grandmother’s mystery people. Whole pages were crossed out and the word ‘DEAD’ was written in bold. His mother had told him to find the name Harry Blake and look for a Blackpool number. There were a lot of numbers for Harry, most of them with Manchester telephone codes, and though Harry was dead, none of his numbers was scored out.

‘Who is it?’ the voice said. He was speaking to a woman with a very thick Lancashire accent.

‘My name is Luke Campbell. You don’t know me. But I’m phoning on behalf of Mrs Anne Quirk.’

‘Say again, love.’

‘Anne Quirk. The photographer. She used to come a lot to the house, I believe. Not recently. From Glasgow. She looked after her aunts and would come for a break.’

‘Mrs Blake!’

Luke hesitated. He looked at the address book and saw Harry’s name again and took a breath. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh, Lord Jesus.

Mrs Blake!

’

‘I’m her grandson. I’m afraid she hasn’t been well. I was thinking of bringing her to Blackpool, to get her away for a week.’

‘I knew something was going to happen today.’

The lady was cheerful and Luke thought from her voice that she was probably middle-aged. ‘It’s been ever such a long time since Mrs Blake were down.’

‘Are you the landlady?’

‘I’m Sheila, chuck. It was my mother that ran the house when Mrs Blake was down a lot. Oh, darling. I’m talking the 1970s and the 1980s now. Happen it’s five years at least since we saw her. How is she?’

‘She’s not bad,’ he said. ‘She’s forgetful. But things are changing with her flat up here. I’m phoning from Scotland.’

‘From Glasgow?’

‘No, from Saltcoats. Down at the coast. She’s been living in a sheltered flat down here for years now.’

‘Oh, aye. She flitted. I’m remembering now.’

‘Did she come a lot?’

‘Oh, when I was a girl, love. Mrs Blake would be down here doing her work. Times have changed and we’re not getting any

younger. But her room’s still here any time she wants it.’

‘Her room?’

‘Oh, aye, love. Mrs Blake’s room. She’s always had a room up the top of the house. Some of her things are still locked in the cupboards. It was always her room. Since before my time — during my mother’s time. It’s a little studio flat, actually. It belongs to her and just sits there.’

‘There’s nobody in it?’

‘No, love. Mrs Blake was always happy for us to put guests in there during the season, you know, but we’d always keep it clean for her. We’re not busy nowadays.’ Sheila chuckled. ‘We used to call it the darkroom. Was full of old photographs and trays and that. Aye, it was the darkroom. My mother would say, “Away up with the key and dust the darkroom, I think Mrs Blake’s coming.” Aw, I’m set up. You’re coming down? I always loved Mrs Blake. You’ve made me feel all funny.’

Luke got all the details and answered the lady’s questions about sheets and towels. ‘Don’t you worry, chuck. It will all be ship-shape for Mrs Blake. God love her. The Illuminations are coming on later than usual this year, you probably know. Hurry down. It’ll be lovely to see you both when you arrive. Only the other day my sister was asking about Mrs Blake and I told her, I said, I didn’t even have a number. Aw, it’s made me go all funny. My mother always said, “Now Mrs Blake has paid for the flat, it’s where she works, she’s paid for it, Sheila, so don’t forget to keep it good.” Aw, what did you say your name was?’

He sat up through the night reading her letters, discovering his grandmother’s younger self, a brilliant artist, someone ready to change the world. He examined the stamps, shuffled the blue pages, a privileged onlooker, wanting to make the connections

and miss nothing that might bring her story to him as something he could keep. He saw her slow-burning heartache, her avowals of independence, her return to him, Harry Blake, whose divided nature dominated her life. His grandmother confronted him with an eerie, special power, this person he had loved all his life. He witnessed her spirit survive a series of trials he had never known about, and it made him love her more, while doubting the strength and consistency of men, including himself. He read the whole night long and in the morning he felt ready for the journey.

BEST BEFORE

She didn’t know the word for it. Every time they left she felt the same way but she didn’t know the word. It wasn’t relief and it wasn’t regret, but it contained both, the feeling she had when they gathered their stuff and took their coats and drove their cars up the Shore Road. Maureen would often stand at the window and wish she could call them back, start again, only better this time and happier. But the feeling only lasted until she dampened a cloth and she was now back in her own world, where no one could expect her to care about olives or fancy drinks.

Next morning she went to Anne’s door and was surprised when the young man opened it. ‘I just thought I’d pop in to see if Anne was all right,’ she said, slipping the skeleton key into her pocket. ‘And I brought in a wee plate of food in case she was hungry. It’s nice stuff: Italian ham and these are called sun-dried tomatoes.’ Luke brought her into the room and she immediately sensed a change.

‘How are you feeling, son, now that you’re back?’

‘Everything’s good, Mrs Ward.’

‘Call me Maureen. You’ll make me feel old.’ She blushed because the young man had travelled the world and he probably hadn’t time for neighbours. But her eye scanned the room and took in the bags and the ashtray. She didn’t know how she would cope when Mrs Quirk went into a home. ‘I’ll miss her terrible,’ she said to herself and it showed on her face.

‘I saw your family yesterday,’ Luke said. ‘Those big lads’ll cause you a bit of trouble, eh?’

‘Oh, they’re lovely boys,’ she said. ‘So well spoken. I mean, compared to how we were at that age. Very polite. They love to cook. Very busy lives they all have. They live in Edinburgh. My family’s always busy with their jobs and everything.’

‘Nice to see them, though.’

‘Oh, aye. It’s a breath of fresh air.’

Luke sat Maureen down and explained. He said Anne couldn’t look after herself any more. He knew they had tried, Maureen and the warden, to keep her here, but unfortunately the time had come to move her into a nursing home. He was going to take her down south and while they were away the flat would be cleared. As he spoke, the tears welled up in Maureen’s eyes and she pinched her lips. ‘I’m not really sure,’ he said, ‘that Blackpool’s the right place to take her. But she wants to go.’

‘Don’t mind me, son.’

‘It’s all right, Mrs Ward. You’ve been so good to my gran. And to my mum and me, as well. I want to thank you for the letters you wrote for her when I was out on service. It meant a lot.’

She cried very quietly, as people do who are used to crying and don’t think it’s a big deal. She just dabbed her eyes and pursed

her lips after everything she said. ‘Oh, it wasn’t a bother to me,’ she said. ‘She’s the best wee neighbour I ever had. A lovely lady was Mrs Quirk. And it’s true, she wasn’t herself and it’s only been getting worse, hasn’t it?’

Luke’s phone rang and he put up a finger and went into the hall to deal with whatever it was. Anne was lying awake when Maureen put her head into the bedroom. ‘Hello, Anne,’ she said.

‘Hello.’

Maureen lifted the blinds and talked about Scott and Jack and the family’s lovely visit. She tucked Anne in and lifted an empty mug and when she came back from the kitchen Anne had her eyes closed again. Maureen continued to tidy, finding plenty to say to her sleeping friend. She heard when Luke was off the phone. Before leaving the room she folded some clothes over the chair and tidied the top of the bedside cabinet, bending down to pick up something from the floor, a severed picture of a little girl.

She had good days and bad days. The rabbit was the start of it all getting worse. Luke said he’d heard about it from his mother and saw it on the chair. ‘I used to worry about the rabbit,’ Maureen said, ‘but really she wasn’t so bad at first. She was still

at herself

Still trying to put two and two together. But she’s tired now, isn’t she?’

‘She’s still with us, Maureen.’

‘I know,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘The laughs we used to have in here. She’d have us all in knots. I’m not kidding you. The whole place. She could tell a story, God love her.’

‘I’m gathering her things.’

‘Right y’are. I’m going to help you get her ready for Blackpool, if that’s all right.’

They spent the morning together. Luke squatted down by the fridge inspecting the stuff inside, the two shelves stacked with tins of soup and old jars of marmalade and whatever. ‘Don’t bother with that. I’ll do all this with your mum during the week,’ Maureen said. ‘We’ll organise everything. Just take what you need for the journey.’

‘We’re going to gather her work,’ Luke said, ‘the best of her photographs for an exhibition.’

‘That’s the people in Canada. The curator. I saw that letter. Has your mother come round to it?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘It’s so nice to have family, isn’t it? Like Anne has you. I don’t know where I’d be without my three. My daughter’s a therapist. She stuck in at the school and now she’s got a lovely house in Edinburgh. Ian, my eldest, he’s a wonderful father. Very high up in IBM. He’s all for computers. And the other one, Alexander, he’s a nice guy, too. A bit of a rogue. You don’t get two the same, do you?’

‘I’m sure you don’t, Mrs Ward.’

‘They all drive. My God, it’s like a car showroom out there when they all come to visit. But I often look at my three and say, well, you didn’t do too badly. It was a struggle but they turned out nice.’

They worked in silence for a while, then Luke said not to take down too many things before they went, so’s not to alarm Anne just as they were setting out. ‘You might want this,’ Maureen said, handing him the photo of George Formby that had been pinned above the kettle. It had been there during all the time she had known Anne, looking down on them at night as they heated the soup and unfolded their lives.

THE VODKAS

Anne was squinting at the light and talking about holidays she had once taken with Harry. She would make comments and then go silent for whole stretches of the road. Luke found the moments of clarity really exciting. It was hard to admit that she was probably quite content generally and not just when she was talking sense and making him feel better. She seemed to admire the passing vehicles and she pointed without words at the mist over the houses on the road to Lesmahagow.

What is an adult? He’d always wondered. Was it a person who can speak when silent and who invents life, as opposed to just living it? At the wheel, Luke told himself she was the most adult person he had ever known. Some people would argue the opposite: that she had never grown up, that she had never faced things. But he was a happy student again, learning, over the miles, how to read a person by finding what character was available. She was brazen with words and actions no matter how baffled she seemed. No matter how far away she seemed, no matter how lost, she was with him, and he was determined to go with her as she slipped through the past into some brand-new element of the present.

‘There’s a reason I like you,’ she said. She added nothing for a moment and then said it again. ‘There’s a good reason.’

‘And what would that be?’ he asked.

‘You can read into things.’

‘How so?’

‘Stop fishing for compliments.’

‘I’m not!’

‘Well, then.’

‘Well, what?’

‘Then. Some people see a painting. They don’t know what it is.

Like that one of the place where the bombs fell.’

‘What painting is that?’

‘By the man who made his girlfriends have two faces.’

‘Picasso.’

‘That’s the one. He painted a town.’

‘Guernica.’

‘Is that what it’s called?’

‘Yes, Franco bombed it.’

‘I don’t know what I was saying.’

‘About how some people look at the painting of the bombed town.’

‘They don’t see the truth. They just see the paint.’

He took a deep breath. He knew as she reached for the words that she was uncovering the old ground of their sympathy. She’d used the example to him way back in the past — of how some people looked at

Guernica

and admired its form but couldn’t understand why it couldn’t just be an aerial photograph. But form told its own story, she used to say. And now she was struggling to say it again as the road vanished behind them.

‘I don’t know what it was about,’ she said. ‘Something about the man in Spain who never went on holiday because he hated photographs.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘It’s nice to have that, a person in your family who knows what you’re talking about when you say about your work.’

‘That’s nicely put.’

‘It’s important,’ she said.

‘I agree.’

‘Deep down,’ she said.

‘Drumlanrig Castle’ flashed onto the windscreen with a load

of rain and grit. The wet cows in the fields got him thinking of those animals Scullion had liked to talk about, the extinct ones, the Asiatic cheetah, the goitered gazelle. When they passed another service station he thought of the melon stalls by the road in Helmand but the windscreen was now streaked with salt and he turned to her as she woke again.

‘Vodka,’ she said.

‘Vodka? Well, not in here, Gran. I would’ve brought a hip-flask if I knew you were going to go all karaoke.’

‘And tonic,’ she said. ‘Do we have that?’

After twenty minutes or so he turned off the motorway and stopped in Moffat. ‘Turn around when possible,’ the GPS said. Anne looked down at the voice and he turned it off.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Just the map,’ he said. ‘We’re on a detour.’ He drove into the town and parked across from a cashmere shop. He noticed how curious Anne’s eyes were and how young they seemed for a woman in her eighties. ‘Let me put your gloves on.’

‘Cold hands,’ she said.

The hotel wasn’t busy that afternoon and they got a nice table by the window. Luke came back with two vodkas and tonic and she smiled. ‘I don’t like that,’ she said, poking at the lemon with a finger. He took it out and put it in his own glass and clinked hers.

‘I’m glad you’ve got your gloves on,’ Luke said. ‘I don’t want you leaving any fingerprints. I don’t want people knowing I took my granny away and got her drunk.’

‘People sing,’ she said.

‘Have you been here before?’

‘This isn’t Blackpool, is it?’

‘No, Gran. You’ll know it when you see it.’