My trouble is that I never do know what’s good for me.
I did think of abandoning the search for Liam, I honestly did. But once I had got safely back to my flat and calmed down and stopped shaking, the ongoing tiredness and slight ache in my groin convinced me I couldn’t. Whatever he might have got himself involved with, and however criminal it might be, if I’d issued him with a death sentence he deserved to know. The IRA might look after their own, but hey, so do the gang I’m a proud member of.
Besides, in the course of yet another sleepless night I developed a new theory: having met the sort of people Liam’s big talk and showing-off had got him involved with, I suspected he’d got scared and backed away from the whole thing. Decided to lie low for a while. Which was an especially comforting idea, because it meant it wasn’t actually me he was avoiding – just the thugs I’d run into yesterday. In fact, by not letting himself contact me for a while, might he not actually be doing his best to protect me?
Well, if so, it wasn’t his decision to make. I could look after myself. I’d come away unscathed from yesterday’s encounter, after all, save for a bit of a bump on the side of my head and a rapidly fading red circle in the middle of my forehead. All it had proved was the folly of trying to find him through that particular route.
And if Liam wanted to disappear, to lie low for a while, who better to help him than me? You might not know it to look at me now, but I’d spent four long years living on my wits on the streets of London, scraping through some encounters way more scary than yesterday’s. I could look after him. A postgraduate diploma had never seemed less important: I could leave it behind in a heartbeat. There was nothing else keeping me here. If we had to get away from London, start anew somewhere else, I was up for that. A life on the run, together – what could be more romantic?
To be honest I think I may still have been a bit feverish. But by the time I got up late the following morning, I had managed to convince myself that I needed to make contact with Liam more than ever, and that the only sensible way to do it was to stop mucking about in North London and go through the official route.
I didn’t go to Waterloo often, and I always forgot just how awful Cardboard City had become. It wasn’t just cardboard boxes any more: some of the more enterprising residents had put up fairly solid walls made out of pallets, and strung blankets and tarpaulins over the top of them, and the place was starting to look like one of the shantytowns you see on the news in Soweto – all of it just a few hundred yards across the river from Parliament and Downing Street. I suppose at least life was a bit more bearable for them at that time of year when it was warm, but the smell coming off the boxes and sleeping bags was enough to make you gag. I actually had to hold my breath to make it through the underpass, and could only shake my head at the guys who asked me for change, which was at least probably more of a response than they got from most of the commuters in their suits who walked past them every morning and evening as if they weren’t there. It was such a relief to emerge onto the South Bank that I went over and leaned on the railings for a while to breathe in lungfuls of briny Thames air. Somewhere on one of the higher levels by the Festival Hall a busker was playing – appropriately – ‘Here Comes The Sun’. It took me a second to realise that I was almost directly opposite the spot where Liam and I had sat that night when I first found out about Clarrie. When he had begun looking after me.
I walked along the riverbank towards County Hall with new determination. Across the water, Big Ben was showing five minutes to one, while, opposite, Ken Livingstone’s fortress defiantly displayed its own numbers: LONDON’S UNEMPLOYED MAY ’84 – 390,491 read the vast banner across its curved frontage. We were well into July by then, so I guessed some new numbers would be going up before too long.
I walked up the steps beneath it and passed through the grand archway with its statues into the building’s echoing entrance hall, welcomingly cool after the summer heat outside. There were two women sat behind the huge reception desk; both black; one young and one older.
‘Help you, sir?’ said the older one, immediately giving off infinitely more warmth than her counterpart back at the Poly had managed in our entire encounter.
‘I’m here to see Liam Delaney,’ I told her, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
‘What department?’
‘Grants.’ I knew that much.
She began to leaf through a thick internal telephone directory, then nodded and picked up the phone, giving me a nice smile as she did so. But it faded as she got no response from the other end. ‘He’s not answering,’ she confirmed after the best part of a minute had passed, and nodded to an ornate clock built in to the wall behind her counter. ‘Might have already gone for lunch?’
At least I’d managed to confirm he still worked there. ‘OK,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I might come back later.’
But at that moment I heard the sound of the phone being picked up at the other end, and someone saying ‘Grants department?’ I couldn’t make out the accent, but I could hear enough to know it wasn’t him.
‘Got a visitor for Liam Delaney?’
‘He’s not here,’ said the voice, and my heart sank.
‘Is he gonna be back soon?’ the receptionist asked.
There was a sigh I could hear from the other side of the desk. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
The receptionist looked as nonplussed by this response as I was, but she put a hand over the receiver and nodded in my direction: ‘What’s your name, dear?’
‘Tommy Wildeblood.’
She passed it on. ‘Wildeblood?’ There was a short silence, and then the voice said, ‘Ask him to wait; I’ll come down.’
Down went the receiver. ‘Have a seat, sir. Someone will be down to see you.’ She indicated a set of leather-cushioned benches behind me and expanded the gesture to summon forward the woman who was next in line.
Not knowing what was going on, I did as I was told. The seats were just as uncomfortable as they looked. There was a selection of the day’s papers on a wooden platform jutting out from their end, but apart from the Guardian they weren’t the ones you’d have expected: the Morning Star and the Labour Herald, which I had last seen Liam carrying over to the breakfast table back in Derbyshire. I picked up that day’s edition: ‘SCAPEGOATS!’ shrieked the main headline. It was all about how the government was cutting council budgets for services across the country while spending hundreds of thousands on police overtime to keep the striking miners in check.
I hadn’t got very far into the article before a voice from behind me said, ‘Tommy? It is you! What are you doing here?’
‘Neil?’
He looked different in a jacket and tie, and his beard had a lot more grey in it now, but the figure approaching me from the direction of the lifts was unmistakeably the chair of the CHE group I used to go to back when I first lived in London. What with moving back to Reading, and some awkwardness with an ex who was in the group, and a feeling that the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was slightly old hat these days, I had lost contact with them since I had been at university. But now I thought about it, I remembered that Neil, one of life’s born pen-pushers if ever there was one, worked for the GLC in some sort of administrative job.
‘I’m here looking for a friend of mine.’
‘Yes, that’s what they said on the phone.’
The penny dropped. ‘That was you?’
‘Uh-huh.’ He held out a hand, which I shook formally, appreciating he was at work, and that any greater display of familiarity might cause him trouble. ‘How do you know Liam? And do you know what’s happened to him?’
My heart sank. ‘Oh. That was what I came here to try to find out.’
Neil sighed. ‘We haven’t seen him in weeks. Not since he went on holiday. Do you know him well?’
I nodded. ‘I thought I did. We were’ – I lowered my voice – ‘kind of dating.’
‘Oh. Right. Gosh. I didn’t know he…’ I could see Neil rapidly re-thinking his view of his colleague, and quite liking the result.
‘No, he wasn’t really out. Yet,’ I added.
Neil glanced across at the big clock behind the reception desk. ‘Look, it’s my lunch hour. Shall we go out and have a chat somewhere?’
‘Sure.’ We walked over to the big double doors, sunlight streaming through their glass panels into the gloomy interior. The whole scale of the place, with its marble pillars and Gothic grandeur, seemed at odds with the newspapers on the table, the receptionists, and most of all Ken Livingstone himself.
‘So. You and Liam,’ said Neil meaningfully once we were safely out on the riverbank.
‘Yeah.’ I basked for a second, before recalling how things had ended and why I was here.
‘But you don’t know where he is?’ he repeated.
‘No.’ We turned to walk towards Westminster Bridge. ‘I thought things were going really well until about three weeks ago, and then…’ I blew a half-hearted raspberry.
‘Oh dear, I hope nothing’s happened to him,’ muttered Neil, looking genuinely anxious. He spotted the look of dismay on my face. ‘Sorry, it’s just – that’s when we last heard from him, too. I’m his line-manager. He had a holiday booked for a week from the 24th of June, but we were expecting him back at work at the beginning of this month and he just didn’t turn up. No word from him. I can’t get an answer on his home number at all.’
‘You and me both,’ I confirmed, my voice echoing hollowly as we entered the underpass beneath the bridge. So he definitely wasn’t only avoiding me. That was good. I’d tried his number once again that morning before I came out and got nothing – not even the ringing noise, only a dead line.
Hang on though. Holiday? Liam hadn’t said anything about going on holiday when we had last talked. He’d said he would call me in a few days, and he hadn’t precisely ruled out coming on the Pride march, either – but if he had a week’s holiday booked he must have known perfectly well he wouldn’t be around for either. So had he been planning his flit even before that night on the beach? The thought made me feel hollow inside.
‘D’you know where he was going on his holiday?’
‘Malta, I think.’ There were fewer tourists along this stretch of the river, and Neil steered us towards an empty bench looking over towards parliament – the cast-iron twin of the one Liam and I had sat on on the opposite bank not so long ago. ‘He’s got some friends over there – you probably know.’ He took in my shake of the head and carried on. ‘Well, apparently he goes to stay with them quite often. This was the second time this year. He sent us a postcard last time; I think it’s still on the noticeboard.’
I had never heard anything about Malta. Wasn’t that the sort of thing you would mention, if you had friends on a Mediterranean island who were happy to put you up? I’d have jumped at the chance of a free holiday. Unless, of course, they were the sort of friends you wouldn’t take a boyfriend over to meet.
Maybe, though, the point was that they were the sort of friends you could go and hide out with when you’d got yourself in trouble and you didn’t know how to extricate yourself? I didn’t know much about Malta, but it was a very long way from London. And even further from Northern Ireland.
But if it was where Liam had gone, then my chances of personally tracking him down were precisely nil. I didn’t even have a passport, let alone the money to think about flying abroad. How much must it cost to get to Malta, anyway?
‘Two holidays in one year?’ I mused out loud. ‘They must be paying you a fortune there!’
Neil pursed his lips. ‘I was a bit surprised. I mean, obviously I know what his salary is, and it’s hardly…but he said his friends let him stay for free, and he has another friend who’s a travel agent who sorts out cheap flights for him. And he said because he was organising this one at the last minute he managed to get him a real bargain on the tickets. I was a bit surprised,’ he repeated.
‘And you haven’t had a postcard this time?’
‘No, nothing. He went off on the Friday – the 22nd it must have been – saying he’d see us all in a week, and that was the last anyone heard from him.’
The 22nd was the day we drove back from Derek’s: that very morning Liam and I had been messing about in the back seat of his car not very far from here. Obviously I didn’t tell Neil that.
‘I think he did have some personal stuff going on,’ Neil volunteered. ‘He had a day off for a family funeral that same week too. I thought he might need more time off to go over to Northern Ireland, but he said it was being held over here and he could get there and back in a day. I think that was actually the day before he left.’
‘Yes, it was,’ I confirmed. ‘We went together. That was the last time I saw him.’ I felt strangely touched that Liam had described Clarrie’s ceremony as a family event, even though I knew he had probably only said it to ensure he could definitely get the time off work.
I squinted across the river. You could make out tiny figures on the river terrace outside parliament, soaking up the sun at taxpayers’ expense. They were too far away to be able to recognise individuals, though it crossed my mind that you’d probably be able to pick out Mrs Thatcher with that great helmet of hair if she happened to be among them. But you’d be too far away to do anything about it.
‘He didn’t say anything to you about a trip?’ Neil prompted.
‘No. Nothing.’ I looked down at my hands, avoiding his eye, aware that it made me sound pathetic.
‘I do hope nothing’s happened to him. I mean, we’d have heard about a plane crash, or anything like that, wouldn’t we?’ He caught sight of my reaction and hastily added, ‘Sorry! I’m sure there hasn’t…just, you know, ruling things out.’
‘Sure,’ I muttered.
‘I’m sure there’s a totally rational explanation,’ Neil continued, over-compensating.
‘Would you say Liam was happy at work?’ I asked, keen to push some of the discomfort back in his direction.
He pulled a face. ‘I think so. Yes, I think he enjoyed his job. He didn’t have that much experience when he joined, but we put him through an accountancy course, and he was always keen to learn. If anything… Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
‘What?’
He shook his head. ‘Oh, I don’t know. He could be a bit over-zealous, is all. And that’s not really fair, it was just…well, there was an incident not long before, well, when I had to have words with him. I’ve been a bit worried that might be why he left, to be honest.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, it was one particular grant that he had a…a personal interest in. I mean, it would have gone through anyway – it met all the criteria and the ethnic minorities committee had given it the nod. But it wasn’t down for fulfilment until the next funding round, so he really ought to have waited.’
I stifled a smile, remembering Neil’s keenness for doing everything by the book from our CHE meetings. He had even insisted on typing up the minutes and distributing carbon copies the following week, until he realised most of us left them behind.
I took a lucky punt. ‘Was it the Irish centre in Holloway?’
He nodded, unsurprised. ‘Yes. Well, as I say it was pencilled in for the next quarter’s funding round, but Liam took it upon himself to go over my head. And before I know it, I’ve got John McDonnell in my office asking me why it hasn’t gone through yet. He’s the finance chair.’
‘Yeah, Liam mentioned him.’ That much was true, at least. He’d made it sound like they were quite matey.
‘So of course that meant we had to find the funds in this round, which meant rearranging everything and disappointing someone else, and I’ve had to start from scratch all over again with next quarter’s figures.’ Neil looked put out, but secretly I suspected there was nothing he would enjoy more.
‘So you had to tell him off?
‘Well, not tell him off, no. It’s very much a non-hierarchical set-up, but’ – Neil pursed his lips – ‘I did let him know in no uncertain terms that I didn’t appreciate him, er, bypassing me, and that there were proper ways and means of going about things. So I wondered if that’s what made him…’ he tailed off, obviously not wanting to say ‘disappear’.
‘How long had he worked with you?’
‘Oh…’ Neil furrowed his brow. ‘Two years, maybe? I’d have to check. He was definitely with us when there was all that nonsense about the Babies Against The Bomb grant.’ He caught my smirk. ‘You remember that, do you? A lot of fuss about nothing. It was only £800, and they actually had perfectly sensible objectives, but of course the Tory press weren’t interested in that.’
Fascinating though this was, I steered the conversation in a different direction. ‘If you were checking, do you think you’d be able to let me have his home address, too? Just so I can check he’s OK?’ If Liam had really run off to Malta then, yes, I would have to accept that that was the end of it – but I wasn’t going to give up until I’d pursued every single other possibility. If he was just holed up at home, hiding from the guys I’d met the previous day, then surely he’d welcome me turning up on his doorstep to rescue him and take him away from all this?
Neil’s face fell. ‘I’m not sure, Tommy. I don’t think that’s the sort of information we could give out. There are privacy issues, you know.’
I pushed it. ‘Please? If I was to go round and check he’s OK, it would put your mind at rest. And it would surely be more of an invasion of his privacy to have his boss turn up on his doorstep, wouldn’t it?’
I don’t think the old Neil I knew from CHE would have done it – at least, not without an official request signed in triplicate. But he must have been mellowing in middle-age, or something. Maybe he’d finally persuaded someone to shag him. ‘Well, I suppose that’s true,’ he said doubtfully.
‘That’s great,’ I said, standing up before he had the chance to change his mind again. ‘I’ll go round this afternoon, and call you as soon as I’ve got any news.’
‘Oh…all right.’ He still sounded dubious as he rose from the bench and I began to hustle him back towards County Hall. ‘Best if I give you my home number though, rather than the office. You can leave a message with Simon.’
‘Simon?’
‘Simon’s my partner,’ he said, blushing slightly beneath his beard and looking like the cat that had got the cream. Which went to prove two things: one, that I was a very good judge of psychology; and two, that if even Neil was managing to hold down a relationship, I was doing even worse than I had thought.