Rob

Nothing for years. Then, suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.

Robert Gillespie sits in his living room. He should probably open the curtains. It is two in the afternoon after all and looks to be a nice day out there. Instead he rolls himself a cigarette.

Ash drops onto the carpet and he grinds it in with his foot. Well, Alex Hargreaves had taken him by surprise. He hadn’t meant to be so quite so hostile but it was a bad start, turning up like that, got him jumpy. No one apart from Robert Gillespie has set foot in the house for the entire time he has lived there. Not even his sister, and technically, she owns the place.

To say that the house was a mess would be a considerable understatement. For the first year or so, well, the first six months, maybe, he made an effort, but after a while he began to wonder what the point was. Same with going upstairs to go to bed when there was a perfectly comfortable sofa and sleeping bag right there in the lounge and it only meant heating one room. Fire, TV, laptop, kettle, get all the essentials in one place, that’s the trick. He dragged the fridge into the living room a couple of winters ago, too.

First thing he thought when the door went yesterday was that the debt collectors had come for him. He knows people who took a chance, got on to the electoral roles to vote in the Referendum and are being hounded now by bailiffs and sheriffs for unpaid council tax and other outstanding debts, and the local council’s getting their cut, too. He was too smart to raise his head above that parapet, but he knows they have ways of tracing you, ways of intimidating you, punishing you, and that they need revenue. He should tone his online activities down a bit. He hasn’t done anything strictly illegal as far as he knows, said anything actionably defamatory or likely to incite, but then the definitions keep changing. Then another surge of dread and dismay up from the depths, worse than the bailiffs, maybe it was Howard, fucking Howard come to make some claim on him. He doesn’t want to see Howard again if he can help it.

Eventually he has his Gmail account up and as he waits for the first of the selected emails to open he decides to make a cup of instant coffee. It isn’t an especially big room, but even so, some days the distance from the sofa to the fridge seems immense, partly because the pain in his leg has flared up again, partly just because his sense of scale is diminishing. The kitchen is an ordeal away, upstairs an Everest, the front bedroom a distant country, and yet the whole of time and the whole of space are within easy reach, all there on the computer screen a foot away.

The kettle is empty, meaning he has to go all the way to the kitchen. Once a week he fills up a five litre plastic bottle of water that he uses to make coffee and tea, rehydrate the value pot noodles, moisten the bags of value muesli that he more or less subsists on these days, except for the occasional bit of toast.

He gets up and goes to fill the kettle, stands with it in one hand, the water running, gazing out of the window at the wildly overgrown garden, the dust and pollen rolling over it in the sunlight. It has actually stopped raining. There’s one last teabag in the box, meaning later he will have to go to the shop. He still owes them twenty quid for the tobacco he got on tick a month ago. Ah, now then. You thought that emailed fuck off to Alex Hargreaves would be the end of it, but he is a tenacious wee fucker, is he not?

He will have to go upstairs. That upstairs bathroom though, eh? He won’t be able to resist popping his head round the door for a peak at that, will he? See how the mould on the shower wall has been coming along.

I don’t wanna fucking think about the dead, he says out loud. Not the fucking dead.

Those cunts. He sits down on the floor, back against the cooker. Then again, he doesn’t want to think about the living either, fucking Howard, for instance. He could very happily get through to the end of his allotted though increasingly unlikely looking four score years and ten without clapping eyes on Howard again. He owes nothing to this shiny-faced, sharp-eyed little hustler with his brogues and his World War I flying ace haircut up from London, Alex Hargreaves, but he should probably have warned him off ever going back to see Howard.

Castleford. What was he thinking? They hatched some mad plans didn’t they, back then? Reality seemed to be there for the taking. Too long spent living in the Crescent, thought they could take on the whole world, transform it.

Ah, the glorious folly of youth.

Folly of youth, folly of age, folly after folly. The past. He’d get drunk if he had any money. Good job he is skint. Another smart move that.

The kettle boils, he pours, stirs to try to blend the floating granules in, winces his way back to the living room, sniffs the milk then pours some, breaks through the light crust and adds two heaped teaspoons of sugar from the sticky bag, sips at it, rinses it round his gums. Perfection.

The email has finally opened. Really, unbelievable it has taken so long. He responds to Alex Hargreaves, who has sent him seven emails since the day before. He’s keen.

He sends a message back.

I don’t know how successful you are going to be in this search around for Vernon’s work or trying to write whatever you plan to write about him. But you’re not going to find it without help or information. And I have that. So we need to cut some kind of deal.

So, then, upstairs.

He stands again and his left leg throbs, his knee a bit wobbly, a sharp point in his groin like someone trying to poke a crochet hook between the muscles. The front bedroom is an assault course of broken and unwanted furniture, boxes of crap, bags of clothes, his old bike, piles of records, magazines, tapes. He chartered a van to get it all up from Castleford, all this crap he can’t throw away. He was certainly dissolute enough with his other meagre possessions, his energy, his body, his mind, but things, objects, scraps and tatters, totems and tokens of his life, he has clung onto. He hasn’t taken care of them, or filed them away, merely dumped them in ever increasing mounds from one place to the next. And if he has to leave here? If his sister decides they need to sell the place? Will he take all this with him again to a bedsit? He’ll be up to his neck in it all, like that old dear in Happy Days.

He should bin it all, burn it all, but in through the doorway and taking down a lungful of damp musty air, out of breath from climbing a single flight of stairs, he feels the past overwhelm him, all rich and heady, spiced with rot, the damp and dust of ages. Suddenly he longs for the grave, for old stone and moss, the patient work of water on brick and bone.

Oh aye, poetic stuff.

Don’t get distracted, he tells himself, knowing familiar things will loom out to take hold of him, how easily he could sit going through piles of yellowed clippings or old journals, reading the track lists on old cassettes as the day disappears.

He knows the box he wants is in the wardrobe and he battles manfully forward through the siren song of the half-forgotten. Here it is, Vernon’s shoebox. Fucking Vernon. Two-decade old suppressed emotion roils through him. Fuck off now, he murmurs, teeth gritted. The past attacking him.

Get to fuck, now, will you! He pulls out carrier bags and assorted flotsam and ephemera, sticks it down on a patch of empty floor space behind him, lifts the lid, pulls out the brown A4 envelope, V. C. 96 1–5 3 written on the front in black felt tip. That’s the one. There’s any number of fascinating, heart breaking, memory-stirring odds and ends in there too, all set to provoke an intense and overwhelming concatenation of interlinked, sublime, ineffable reverie.

Walk away, Rob. Walk away, son.

He does, more or less, half bolting for the bedroom door, turning so quickly he almost stumbles on the bags he’s just put down behind him, sending a long, thin filament of pain down the inside of his leg and into his toes. Ah fuck, he cries out, and hobbles angrily to the landing. The pain peaks and subsides to a dull ache. He should go to the doctor and get some more painkillers, stronger ones. Officially, he’s on them for his back but any problems with that seem to have been supplanted by this leg thing now. He puts pressure on it and feels the ball in his groin balloon and chafe at his hipbone. It takes him ten minutes to get back to the living room, where he lies back on the sofa, duvet bunched up behind his head, massaging his thigh. His laptop pings; yet another message from Alex Hargreaves.

What kind of deal did you have in mind?

Very good. Something falls over in the room upstairs with a bang and the vibrations run down the stairs, soak through the floor, make the window glass tremble slightly in the frame and the letterbox creak expectantly. His heart leaps and then takes a while to settle down. He’s on edge alright, too much coffee maybe. He sits, listening. A car starts up a few streets away.

That reminds him. He should talk to Andy.

He needs money; he wishes he didn’t of course, but that voice is whispering away at him, asking him questions he would rather not be asked. How is it starting to look, the future you have set up for yourself with your heroic refusal, with your ruthless critique of everything existing, with your refusal to compromise, your refusal to play the game, your scorn for the blandishments of realism and your constant reiteration of your abiding commitment to radical change?

You’re fucked now, sitting in your mouldy house stuffed full of relics, moaning in the pub when you can scrape together enough for a pint, ranting online, scared to put the heating on in winter, wondering how you are going to eat next week, constantly trying to keep the Dole office off your back. Oh yes the cuts are coming, the culling, the council up to its neck in debt and selling everything off to the Scottish affiliates of USG.

Still there are glimmers of hope, even he can’t deny that, faint though they are.

Funny how he responded when Hargreaves mentioned trying to contact Vernon’s parents. He doesn’t know them, met them once or twice, they were around in the background when they stayed there, going out in the town to play in the old Labour club or at house parties or an outdoor rave once, some cold November night, Rob fucked on a handful of mushrooms, the rain coming down through the lights and into his face like arc welder sparks, burning holes through him, the steam rising off his body like smoke.

How old must they be now? Getting on, certainly. More or less a decade older than his own, but they got married, had kids young. That’s what he ran away from, the sense that at sixteen he was due to get married, get working, raise a few wains, sit silently in the living room watching telly or play the big man down the pub for the next sixty years.

Well, at least you dodged that Rob.

Maybe he should contact his own Mum and Dad too. His sister keeps telling him; they die and you’re on bad terms, you’ll regret it.

Still, fucked as his hometown might be, thank fuck he’s back north of the border. He looks south and shudders. No country for the likes of you any more Rob.

And what if you’d stayed with her? She loved you. Have you got the balls, Rob, to send that message on Facebook yet or will you lurk silently, angrily, despairingly in a lather of denial and loss? Still got her maiden name, eh? That thrilled you didn’t it, to see her photo again, to know she never married.

Worried that if you send her a friend request she’ll rightfully ignore it and then one more little hopeful fantasy will be closed down, and oh aye, you’ll be even more bereft than you had been.

Bereft! Nice word.

Is he in mourning? The thought leaps up at him. Can a person mourn for twenty years, mourn the death of a friend, the loss of a love, the erosion, the eradication of the future they were certain they were guaranteed? Can you mourn the death of a possible world and all the lives that could have thrived and flourished within it?

Am I grieving?

Anyway, anyway, enough of all that. Love, poetry, magic.

And besides, you’ve got fat, somehow. And your teeth are fucked. That’ll be the sugar in the coffee and a solid half-decade of lying on a sofa.

Still, at least he’s got a roof over his head. He came to an arrangement with his sister years ago when she inherited the house off his granddad that Rob would live in it, claim housing benefit, and they would split it 50/50, though it turns out his sister also has to pay tax on the income and so she makes a tiny sum really. Rob knows she could sell it or rent it out to a family, that she is doing him a favour, but he finds it hard to be grateful. He hasn’t seen her for over a year now anyway after he went there at Christmas and predictably had a row with Tommy about Independence and with his sister about the house.

Sainted grandfather, saintly sister who took care of the old man after his wife died, who stayed in Aberdeen and raised a family and invited him to tea and did all the good local, kindly things that family are supposed to do, not disappear at the age of sixteen to get fucked on drugs, squander their youth and young manhood in dissolution at the State’s expense and then get washed up on the wrong side of thirty back in your home town with nothing but a mouth full of bad attitudes and boring abstract arguments.

Still, the Crescent. There was a joy to those years for sure, a boundlessness, the luxury among the squalor of time, of space to experiment, of spontaneity, the magical properties of chance, of hundreds of people chasing a life beyond the grey, crumbling confines of the blocks themselves, blocks they transformed, walls knocked down to turn old flats into nightclubs, or art spaces, or day-care centres, or rehearsal rooms, or communal kitchens. The impromptu sharing of space, food, drugs, bodies, ideas, equipment, support, contacts, art, love, the circulation of needs met and support offered, everyone always knowing who got their Giro when, the money ending up as the next addition to the common weal so that somehow everyone stayed in fags and booze and drugs and food.

And then, well, if it hadn’t been for his sister, in fact, but for exactly that sense of family that he has always repudiated and which he still can’t bring himself to be fully grateful for he would be even less comfortably off than he is now. True enough, but he knows how they think about him, Jean, Tommy, the kids, his Ma and Pa, they think his life has gone wrong, that he is a lost cause, that he needs help and understanding, that he has problems and they can’t understand why he might think exactly the same way about them, in their bungalow or their detached four bedroom house up in Stonehaven. They think he’s parasitical: on the Government, on his relatives, on the industry and conformity and clear-sightedness of others, past and present, on Left or Right. His grandfather was a working man they tell him, he struggled along with his fellow workers for better pay and for rights, saved his money, made do and got by, went without, bought a house to raise his family in, and now Rob lives in the tail end of that legacy doesn’t he? What, his sister asked in their festive row, Rob a few sheets to the wind having liberally helped himself to Tommy’s stash of Glenlivet, do you think grandpa thought about us having a nice house and a garden, climbing the ladder? He was happy for us, that we could give our kids something he couldn’t give our Ma and Pa.

And what about all those who can’t get it?

Well, she asked, what are you doing about that, who are you fighting for? At least I work, she said, at least I vote.

Vote, work, save, already he has a broad and general disgust and anger roaming around in him. These people don’t understand how to live; it is as simple as that, these inauthentic lives, conservative, complacent, consumerist. He’s both angry and melancholy, their problem is, their blessing is, they have never known the ecstatic, they have never tasted real freedom, the wild depths of the mind, the bliss of communal transport and communion. Once a man has plumbed the depths, soared to such heights, there is no going back to the drab, minor satisfactions of a well-built life.

So they had an argument in which, as usual, they failed to understand even the basic, foundational terms of his analysis. No big deal, he thought, par for the course, water off a wee duck’s back and all that. Still, this year he got a card, thoughtful as ever, but no invite.

Maybe it was the row, maybe something else, the kids, maybe. Jessica. Maybe he made her uncomfortable, the creepy Uncle with his stubble and his smell of damp and his split shoes and his unhealthy lusts. She’ll be seventeen now. Probably better he doesn’t go round. Plus he still owes them money, of course.

Maybe he’s being paranoid, but there’s a distinct possibility that soon enough he will have to find alternative accommodation. That could be costly and he is holding nothing, no assets, no contacts, no favours owed, no cards in his hand, except one.

He lights a roll-up and sits back on the sofa. Imagine a couple of grand, that could make a difference. It would be a cushion at least. Good for emergencies. Imagine five grand. He can sort out Vernon’s Ma and Pa with a slice of it too, if they need it.

Here he is, forty-five years old and dreaming of five grand.

Maybe he could doss at Paula Adonor’s place for a day or two down in London. Maybe he can meet up with Hargreaves, sell him what he can salvage. He knows what Hargreaves wants to do with it, he has had a look at his website and his Amazon page and his Twitter feed and his blog and his reviews, in which several people pointed out his debt to previous authors, including some surprisingly similar passages in his smart-arse novel of ideas Gilligan’s Century to Peter Watson’s A Terrible Beauty, leading Hargreaves to write a defence of his work connecting it to remix culture and the art of sampling.

Oh aye, Rob knows, he wasn’t born yesterday. Hargreaves is not going to write anything about Vernon, he’s going to try and pass his work off as his own. He contemplates opening the envelope V. C. 96 1–5 3 and reading it himself, just so he will know when the cunt brings it out and starts talking up his swerve toward experiment and originality and modernism and the need to innovate in form in order to innovate in thought.

And maybe he has had it right all along, eh? With his car and his house and his wife and his contacts and his contracts and he’s twenty-eight years old and what did Vernon get? Fuck all. What would he have now if he was still around? Fuck all.

He thumps peg-legged up the stairs and takes a sticky-looking leak before the long car journey starts, feels some point deep within his abdomen crack and pulse with the simple act of pissing.

He better set off early, with the pace he can manage at the moment.

Should he drop Paula Adonor a line? Test the water? There’s no love lost there, is there? Never was. He can’t imagine she is itching to see her old pal Rob again, though he’s sure she’ll be impeccably well mannered. That’s your Southern English middle-class right there, isn’t it? Masters of hypocrisy. He bets she gets on fine with Alex Hargreaves, aye, whereas Rob prides himself on his innate Caledonian capacity to call a cunt a cunt.

Still, she’s not the one who’ll be asking him for a favour, is she? It has been twenty years and the last time they spoke when she was trying to find out where Vernon was a few months after he’d last been seen by anyone they knew he hadn’t been much help, hadn’t much cared. He was too busy trying to persuade Castleford to revolutionise its consciousness through esoteric literature and E.

She blames him, he knows, for dragging Vernon down, for pushing him too far, for, yes, well, they were, weren’t they, locked into something close to madness in the last few months before they got kicked out of Hulme Crescent. A kind of fevered desperation took hold and they maybe really believed they could get out of the world that was spinning in to sweep them up. The world they knew was ending and they couldn’t bear to think what kind of lives they would have outside or beyond it. It got extreme, Howard especially.

Ah, no, he doesn’t want to think about those last months, weeks, days, hours, what Vernon might have got up to alone there, what he might have fallen victim to when he was travelling. Well, it wasn’t much the Crescent but it was his home for what, the best part of a decade, straight down to Manc from Aberdeen, then ten solid years of squatting. Squatting like a dragon on time’s hoard. Aye they stole that line from a poem and stuck it on a tune later, didn’t they?

Fuck it, better off dead than end up like this, like I have. We should have just sat in that block and let the wrecking balls and the bulldozers plough us under.

It’s too hot in here, fucking global warming. I’m defrosting. Where’s the painkillers? Fucking Alex Hargreaves unsettling the delicate balance of my hard won half-life, my death in life, my analgesic drift. Eyes closed his hands pad around on the sofa cushions till he finds the bottle, unscrews it, necks a couple.

At least his painkillers are still free.

That’s better. Maybe Nick can put him up for a day or two; he’s down on the coast, close enough. Aye, he always got on alright with Nick. He’s sure Nick has done well enough for himself, he’s got himself a wee wifey and a couple of bairns and a hoos ‘n’ all.

Oh yeah, that Nick, through no exact strategy, with no gifts, no flair or determination, just a certain dogged competence compounded through years of turning up, uncomplainingly putting in the hours and sensibly and prudently decanting his capital into property and shares and pensions, will be sitting more than pretty by now.

Andy is waiting for him when he rounds the corner by the Bonny Prince.

Would he call him a friend? Well, maybe neither of them would go that far. They worked together a few years ago when Rob was obliged, through one of the council’s periodic crackdowns on malingerers such as himself, to take a job in one of the big warehouses round the port as an all purpose, very slow gopher for one of the subsidiary companies to Shell, the upshot of the whole experience being that he fucked his back up and then got a benefit boost by being able to register for disability living allowance. Andy, running some trans-national, multi-year, billion-pound project, used to come over sometimes to check stock. They struck up a conversation about the book that was conspicuously sticking out of Rob’s back pocket, one of the Alan McFairlaine mysteries they turned out to have a shared passion for. He read quite a few of them during that stint of work experience, claiming chronic constipation and disappearing off to the toilet for hours on end to power through them.

There’s a cup of coffee sitting steaming in the cup holder in front of the passenger seat, a typically thoughtful, generous gesture. It tastes good, good and strong with plenty of sugar in. Andy has kept Rob in beer and whiskey and curries and cups of coffee through the long Aberdeen winters for a few years now, waving away his repeated apologies for being skint, for not being able to contribute, go Dutch, telling him that the pleasure is all his, that to have access to someone as erudite, as articulate and eloquent as Rob, is payment enough.

Andy skipped formal academic education too, and a sense of intellectual inferiority and an exaggerated reverence for bookishness seem to haunt him, though Rob is no less an auto-didact than he. Rob seems, he imagines, more secure, more bullish. Well, that’s Rob isn’t it, never betray any sign of uncertainty or weakness, go straight for the throat, get in straight with the head, no fucking around.

The car is warm and comfortable. Robert Gillespie is in a car so infrequently it feels like a mysterious, alien technology to him, sumptuous, something from a different world. He can understand on some dim level how a person can love a car. He pulls a paperback out of the inside pocket of his coat and drops it down on the floor in front of the passenger seat, shifts his legs around; throb, creak, needle.

What are you reading? Andy asks.

Re-reading. Manly P. Hall. The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Came across it again. We used to pour over this when we were young ‘uns.

Alright, not heard of that one, he says.

You reading anything at the moment?

I am having a crack at Montaigne’s essays.

Oh right he says, checks himself. Good choice. How’s it going? Maybe it’s the translation?

Oh aye, it is a wee bit dense, archaic.

Andy checks the rear-view mirror as Robert Gillespie settles back in the seat.

It’s not long before they are out of town, the coffee finished, the open road.

Beautiful day! Andy says. Beautiful countryside.

Oh aye, Rob says.

Beautiful country, really, Scotland. We should be OK weather-wise all the way down.

Rob nods. Mind if I pop a CD on? Not heard it for a while.

Go for it, Andy says.

He pulls a CD out of his inside pocket and slides into the machine, a thin slot in the moulded black plastic, the mechanism pulling it hungry and noiselessly out of his hands. It’s true he hasn’t heard it for many years, just left it sitting in a pile of old CDs, vinyl and cassettes in the living room, but he remembers every pause, twist and shift, knows that it starts with a Seventies art-rock sample, “we lie unburied yet / we’ve been dead all this time”, cut and looped, multi-tracked, distorted and stretched before it segues into Trap 9’s Dentine. Legendary tune.

It’s been a while since I’ve been south of the border actually. Things are looking a bit grim down there at the moment, right?

Andy shrugs. There are just no jobs outside of London, are there?

No chance of a revolution then? Anti-Scottish sentiment is at an all time high in the South, I hear.

Andy chuckles. As long as you stay up North you should be alright. I know a couple of lads I have a drink with in Lancaster and they are part of some new Party that talks about more independence for the North.

The air conditioning comes on, the arrow on the GPS display shifts gently around, the radio suddenly boosts up the volume for a traffic alert, Andy’s phone pings and a second later Rob’s buzzes in his pocket.

He pulls it out and flips open the screen, ten quid pay as you go, cheapest on the market.

The text is from Alex Hargreaves.

Love the music but basically interested in text, esp what I think is a longer work under the title (maybe) V. C. 96 1–5.

Ah-fucking-ha, he knew it, he knew it. Is that likely? He asks. Independence for the North? He texts back.

Can get this. Need to talk money though.

Anyhow, he says, folding the phone away, it keeps flooding down there, pretty soon there’ll be nothing south of Birmingham as it is.

The CD is on track three now.

And where do you see yourself in, say, ten years’ time, Andy?

Well, I will probably still be in England, but I hope to be retired in ten years’ time anyway. I can’t see me persuading our Toni to move abroad. She might go to Marbella, but she will want to be close to her Mum and Dad anyway. But if I was younger I would get out, or if I wanted to have some opportunities, whatever age. We’ll be alright, but everyone is going to be a lot worse off in the future as far as I can tell, and energy costs, he makes a noise like a plane taking off. No. Basically if you didn’t make money in the last twenty years I can’t see how you are going to make any now. If making money is your thing of course, he says. Then, after a pause, ah, Blue Magick!

Oh yeah, Rob says. The vocal sample from Call You to Mind comes suddenly surging up from the depth of the mix, a dark stew of decayed beats and strafing basslines.

And so did you decide.

He almost winces, remembers this track, this sample, Vernon saying, spliff in his mouth, shirtless and skinny, back from god knows where; one for your old age, Rob!

With death of glory in sight

He knows what’s coming next. He hates that fucking song anyway. Hippies.

The bravest thing was to hide

Well, did you Rob?

They take a series of long, looping roads, The Secret Teachings of All Ages shifting gently back and forth in the recess at the front of the BMW’s passenger seat.

Lancaster station.

He has been here before, once or twice, on his travels back and forth, back in the day, and something bittersweet is lodged in his throat, fumes tickling at the back of his eyes. Andy dropped him off with a pat on the back and a brief hug, told him to look after himself, said he’d see him back up in Aberdeen in a few weeks, and Rob discovered that somehow he’d snuck a fifty pound note into the copy of The Secret Teachings; must have been when they stopped for a piss break. He’s a good guy, Andy, even if politically they don’t agree.

He sits waiting for his connection to Barrow in Furness, the dim light of the station concourse, the soupily warm day beyond it.

A couple of pigeons strut and squabble over pastry crumbs at his feet. The sky darkens. Here comes the rain, again. Sudden, torrential, he watches it bouncing off the tracks, clattering on the station roof, senses the slight wave of fear that ripples through the people waiting on the station. There will be delays, people finding themselves stranded.

The train pulls in, the rain really hammering down now, the announcement coming in over the tannoy. He heaves himself up out of his seat: pins and needles. It is four o’clock and a gaggle of school kids run through the station and jump on the train. Rob keeps his eyes down and selects a carriage further toward the front.

He found their phone number on a scrap of faded paper folded into the back of an old diary that he has carried around with him for years. He knew where it was straight away when he needed to get the number, as though he had known somehow, all through the years, that this moment would come; the chance for atonement.

Atonement? Well, that is the word that came to him. Vernon’s mother had sounded wary on the phone at first, then brightened when she remembered who he was and had listened to what he had to say, that he’d had enquiries about someone wanting to do something with Vernon’s work. Vernon’s work? She sounded bemused. The music he made, his sketches and notes, his writing, he explained. Publish it? Yes, possibly. Release it, display it, make it appear in some form anyway. Rob, as one of his closest friends around that time, was helping them to compile his output.

Christine had that half-embarrassed air talking about these things, it was all so beyond her, Vernon’s University friends and people from London and the world of art. Of course she would dig it out for him, of course he could come down and look at it, only Jack wasn’t so well at the moment, chemotherapy on a Monday and sick with the side effects for a few days. He would love to have a chat too, she was sure, only would Rob mind waiting till later in the week, was that possible? Rob felt a catch in his chest at the implication that he was important somehow, busy, that she didn’t like to ask and was prepared to accept things on his terms, and he wanted to say to her, listen, I am no one and I am coming down there to steal from you anyway, to take what your son left in your safekeeping, the son who someone should have been looking after, supporting, helping out. I am going to take it off you and sell it on to someone else, to some lazy, entitled, talentless London cunt who can’t come up with any ideas himself and wants to live off the labour of others.

He didn’t say that, though, simply arranged the best time to come down, sensed she wanted time to get the place looking right, anxious about clever people visiting her house and looking down on her perhaps. All Vernon’s things she said, were away up in the attic, they would take some digging out and she couldn’t get up there herself to do it. It might not be an easy job getting all that lot down, it might need a day or two. She was happy to put him up for the weekend. Rob agreed, felt rude refusing, though he would have liked to be away sooner, told himself that any money he made he would divide among them anyway. They are in no position to do anything with Vernon’s work. If I don’t act as the intermediary eventually Hargreaves will track them down, maybe they will get nothing at all, except a bit of smooth talking.

So that’s his excuse is it? He shifts his legs around, can’t get comfortable, the painkillers up in his bag in the luggage rack, can’t face getting up to get them, decides to just ignore it.

He remembers Vernon, naked, blue lipped on the lino covered floor, unconscious for three days during the cold winter of ’95, Rob and Howard out of their minds on some hideous cocktail of pills, tabs and powders, terrified that this time he was dead, but unable to get themselves together enough to call an ambulance, Howard spending hours squatting over him, his belly straining against the fabric of his t-shirt, staring at Vernon’s profile and muttering away angrily.

Jesus. They went too far. Still, he didn’t die, did he? But he was weak and feverish for a fortnight, lying on the mattress in the living room, clothes heaped up on him to keep him warm, drinking the Lemsip Howard shoplifted from the Co-Op on Barton Lane. He lost even more weight then, he was fucking thin, his cheeks hollowed, his eyes ringed, so pale he took on a greyish tinge. Even then he kept scribbling in his books, sketching out what he had seen on his travels. He said that it was good Howard kept looking at him, that without someone watching him, guaranteeing his existence, he might have disappeared for good this time, they might have nodded off and awoken to find he had melted away in the cold, nothing left of him but a shadow on the floor.

If they had still had access to Nick’s equipment no doubt he would have produced something amazing too, back from that long a trip. Aye well, but Nick had gone, Paula too, they had prospects, possibilities, but he and Vernon … Is he angry? Well, of course he’s angry, he’s always been angry for the ones who get left behind, who stay stuck, pathetically, in lives others can enter and leave at will. Hargreaves is one of them, of course. One of the worst sort, at least with Nick and Paula they were all friends for a while and looking back, for them it was a wise move to get out while they could. Crash and burn time, the Crescent going, everyone had been scattered already.

He kicks his legs out, winces, shifts, his guts churning, his heart so soured he can taste it in the back of his throat.

The train hits Morecambe Bay, the tide in, the water up perilously close to the tracks, the scraped, silvered sky low and bellying closer, the sea dimpling furiously. All very biblical.

Atonement for what?

The house smells as though someone is dying in it despite the fact that she has made every effort to spray and scrub and hoover it away. He can detect it, filtering down from the upstairs bedroom, almost feel it, the dim panicked pulse of a life collapsing in on itself. Christine has brought out the best tea things on a tray and set them up in the living room. He recognises the same three-piece suite they had twenty years ago when he was last here, wrecked and stumbling about. She came to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the two of them to keep the noise down, people had work tomorrow.

He wishes he was worth the effort she’s made, looked a little more presentable at least, wasn’t so obviously a mess. He shouldn’t have said he’d stay the night, should’ve just got in, got the stuff and got out of there as quickly as possible.

She has questions, of course, how often does she get to talk about her child, her son? And now with her husband almost gone too, though he has never wanted to talk about him, just presses his lips together and shakes his head. She’s eager, he can tell, to hear stories, anecdotes, scraps and snippets of the life he had, utterly unknown to her after he went away to Manchester, drifted, never came back.

There are things he could tell them that they wouldn’t believe, how Vernon used to go into a kind of trance and as long as they were around and could see him he appeared to stay, solidly, physically in the world but if they left him for too long he disappeared, just wasn’t there anymore, and would reappear later, in strange places. After a while, he began to disappear sooner and for longer, until he could will it, and they would leave cassettes running in the same room as him, recording, and when he returned they would be filled with the most extraordinary sounds, the music of another world. Sometimes he would go to Nick’s shitty old computer set up and emerge later with these insane tracks, with sounds that seemed to have been dragged back somehow into the present or raised up from some primal floor. He was gifted, a voyager, one who travels, projects, and whose life is foreshortened by his gift, this privileged access to realms outside and beyond us.

Do you know these things about your son? These incredible things that at a distance of twenty years even Rob doubts can really have been true.

Was his life foreshortened by his gift? Well, you and Howard didn’t help matters, did you Rob? Maybe he would have been better off going away with Paula Adonor. You did your best to sabotage that relationship, didn’t you? Maybe he needed her help.

He feels, taking the teacup in one shaky hand and careful not to spill anything, a surge of guilt, explicit, unmuffled guilt.

Aye, he should have been down here sooner, he should have come down after Vernon vanished, to offer a few words of comfort, to condole with them. It’s hot in here, has she got the heating on? He’s sweating. He’s tempted to take off his jumper, one of his layers, his many layers, and yet he finds he too has questions of his own as the conversation progresses.

What was Vernon like as a boy?

He was shy, she said, you know we could never find him, he always used to disappear off, he was so quiet sometimes you would just forget about him and he would steal off, even when he was a baby, he used to get out of his crib somehow and we could never figure out how.

Rob smiled, almost chuckled. And the last time they saw him?

Well, she said, he just turned up out of the blue. I was looking out of the back kitchen window and suddenly, typical of him really, she half laughs, I saw him coming out of the outhouse back there and I said, Vernon, what are you doing in there, you know, and he said well I thought I’d just have a look and see if you left the key in the usual place because I didn’t want to disturb you and I said, disturb us, son? You wouldn’t be disturbing us, we want to see you, but why didn’t you phone, let us know, I had nothing in and he didn’t stay long anyway. I think he was on his way up to see you love. He was thin, I think he was dossing down on people’s floors or in a van or something at that point and his Dad was at work so he gave me a hug anyway and left all his stuff here for us to store, then he went off.

What about you, love?

Aye well he caught me when I was up in Aberdeen and living back at my Mum and Dad’s for a wee while.

I wish he had just come back here to stay with us. I don’t understand why he didn’t come home.

I think he was ashamed. He felt he’d disappointed you.

Well, we would rather have had him here, we would rather have had him still with us, love, she says, her eyes wide.

Well, that wasn’t the happiest of times for any of us, lots of conflict between me and my old folk.

Don’t you get on, love?

Not so well, no. We’re not close.

She nods sympathetically. Rob shifts in his seat.

Well, she says hurriedly, you’ll want to have a look at Vernon’s things.

It’s all up in the attic. She hasn’t been up there for years, Jack can’t get up there anymore, in his condition, she thought maybe it was best if Rob went up to have a good root around, save her trying to get stuff up and down the stepladder, which she never feels safe on anyway.

Sure, sure, Rob tells her, pained at the idea of climbing steps and carrying ladders, lugging bags and boxes around. He goes out to the garage and gets the ladder, Christine chattering anxiously behind him the whole time, up the stairs to the landing, detaching and telescoping the two halves, locking it in place then climbing the paint splotched rungs and gingerly easing the attic door aside.

Watch your eyes for dust love, Christine advises him as he pushes up on the recessed panel and a film of grey and white grit falls softly down into the creases of his screwed up face. He lifts it and puts it to one side on a square of bare hardboard, finds the light switch and turns on the bare, dim bulb hanging from a cord nailed to one of the roof beams.

Here we are, a series of neatly stacked boxes. All Vernon’s old comics are up there from when he was a boy, and records and books, oh and there’s even toys he used to have, there’s a Snoopy up there somewhere but I don’t suppose that’s what you’re looking for, is it, love? Anyway, I’ll make some tea, Jack will want a cup anyway, and with that she is heading back down the stairs, leaving Rob crouched in the attic’s tented shadows, his heart pounding from the exertion, from a sense of trespassing, from anticipation.

In one of the big wooden drawers stacked up behind the bags of clothes and bedding he finds the shoebox, the lid split at the corners and held together with a couple of elastic bands that snap the moment he tries to ease them off. He opens the box and sees the envelope there labelled V. C. 96 1–5 4, lifts it out, sees that underneath there’s a video cassette with a post-it note stuck to the front, a single word on it.

Rob.

The hair stands up on the back of his neck, he heard Vernon’s voice then, clear as day, call his name, and an image flashes up in his mind of someone squatting down in the shadows behind him. He waits, nothing but the sound of the father’s laboured breathing in his sickbed below, the mother down in the kitchen busying herself yet again with the tea things. He turns and there is no one there, of course.

Vernon, he says, and shakes his head. What are you up to, what have you been doing? Picks up the video, strokes it with his thumb.

They have said he could stay in Vernon’s old room if he wanted too, and somehow sensing that it would comfort them to have the room used again, to have someone in there, just for the night, he agreed.

He can’t sleep, that video, left for him, he knows what it will be, Beaconfields.

Eyes closed he tries to recall the day. Even dipping a toe back into the past, sensations surge through him. Bright fragments, each with its own special heat and light, its own density and weight, its own half exultant, half pained corona of light, the infinitely variegated shapes and tastes of loss.

He turns over in the bed and opens his eyes, sighs out loud. The rain comes on suddenly, against the window, bouncing off the road.

And if Vernon were still alive would that make it all alright somehow? Would the world be different, less regrettable, less bitter, more filled with joy, would universal brotherhood reign? Better never to have loved life and believed in change than to be abandoned to this desolation. Night thoughts, crowding back in on him now. He has no laptop, no endless stream of text and tweets and uploads to distract him, he feels smothered suddenly in memory, half drowned in his own past, and halfway there, soon enough he will be like Jack next door, bedbound, dazed, drugged up, almost fully sunk. Is that what life is? A short bewildering surge upward, and then a long, baffled submergence.

He was in the back of the van all the way down from Manchester smoking weed with Sarah and Jerry, Nick driving, Paula and Vernon crammed into the front seat, everyone in a good mood, and then they crested that hill and they saw the valley below them, the rave already up and running, the bowl half full and cars down there pulling in. Vernon turns off the tape player, they wind the windows down, the air rushing past, everyone’s hair flying about, the thud of the bass bellying up between the valley walls. Then Jerry is rubbing Rob’s head and saying in an exaggerated Manchester accent, oh my god, yes, my son, come on, and Vernon looking back says, these times, these times, these times, his eyes misted and, oh, the future!

His phone beeps and he fumbles it up off the bedside table. A message from Alex Hargreaves. What time is it? 1.32. Why is he sending out messages at this time? Rob drops the phone back on the table, hears Vernon’s father struggle out of bed and shuffle to the toilet, moving slowly along the dim landing, worries that he’s woken him. Tomorrow, if he feels well enough, if he can manage any food, they will try to have breakfast together.

The last time he saw Jack he was a big man, robust, argumentative, a talker, natural Shop Steward material. He’s made an effort, given they have a guest, shaved, put on a shirt though the collar is far too big now and it’s loose on him around the shoulders. It’s a shock to see him like this, a few weeks or months from death, when in Rob’s memory he is a solid, almost fearsome figure.

Jack raises a forkful of beans to his mouth, hand shaky, no appetite at all, sips at his tea asks how things are going up in Scotland, what the work situation is up there.

Rob tries to stay neutral on it all, independence, referendums, political hopes and fears, but even as he talks he can tell that Jack is hardly listening, exhausted with the effort of getting down the stairs, of sitting up in the chair. Breakfast half-eaten he excuses himself, goes back to bed, tells Christine he can make it up there on his own, doesn’t matter how long it takes him, important he stays mobile as long as he can. She’ll bring him up a cup of tea.

They try to make small talk as they finish off their food, but both of them are aware how long it is taking him to get back up to bed, the pause halfway up the stairs that seems to last forever. He can feel Christine’s edginess wondering if she should go out to check on him, give him a hand. The speed with which he’s losing weight, losing strength, soon he will be bed bound. How will she get him to the toilet? He’s lighter but still heavy, too heavy, and she doesn’t know if she can get help with that, the nurse and the home help will come round once a week but he’ll need round the clock care, how will she provide that on her own? Thank god she’s still healthy enough, but what if something happens to her, if she falls, breaks her arm, she’s not young and at this age anything can happen, come out of the blue. She has her sister round the corner, her niece and nephew, but how much can she bother them?

Rob can see she’s agitated. Let me wash those pots, he says. Oh no, love that’s alright, you’re a guest, she says.

No really that was great, first home-cooked breakfast I’ve had in a while.

Oh right well, she says and smiles, obviously preoccupied.

He hasn’t done much pot washing recently either, looks at the pots and pans, rolls up his sleeves, knows he should check the train times, get together more stuff out of Vernon’s trove upstairs, itemise it, see what value any of it might have.

A few plates in the draining rack and suddenly he senses Christine hovering at his back.

Could you read something for me love? I can’t make head nor tail of it. She has several sheets of paper in her hand, her glasses on, peering over them apologetically at him

I need to go to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, but they’re so busy these days, booked up solid.

It’s about the house, she says.

Well I’m no expert, he says.

You see it says there that I owe them money but that’s not right is it? Her voice tails off and then whispers back. I mean I can’t say anything to our Jack, I don’t want to worry him. He already worries enough about what I’ll do when he’s gone.

Alright, he says, well I’ll wash these pots and we’ll have a cup of tea and take a look at it.

Have you taken out some kind of a loan he asks? Is that what it is?

Well they are buying the house back from me.

Who are?

Well, this agency, here, they’re connected to the bank. She lowers her voice though it’s impossible for Jack to hear them, lowers it perhaps through the shame of having borrowed, having debts, she’s old enough for that still to carry a sense of stigma.

Well you know. With the cuts, she said. We can’t just get all this treatment for free. She glances away, out to the garden. It’s criminal, she says. All his life he’s paid in. Forty years. He never smoked or drank, he kept himself fit and there’s plenty that haven’t and now he needs treatment and we have to pay, you see. Well I daren’t tell him, I don’t want to upset him.

Sorry, Rob says. I still don’t quite follow.

Well the bank is buying the house back from me, every month they give me a lump sum and after I am gone, I mean I have no one to leave it to, the bank gets the house minus the cost of the funeral and whatnot.

I see. Rob says. I see.

But here they are telling me that the money they are going to give me is going to go down.

Right. Rob wipes his hands on his trousers, turns from the sink, takes the pages from her and scans them, flicking through some densely written pages of terms and conditions.

Have you got the internet here?

She laughs. Oh no, I can’t be doing with all that at my age. Well, I’m sorry to bother you with it love.

Really, Rob says, you need to talk to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. I am sure it’s some kind of mistake.

She still looks troubled.

I mean this house is all we’ve got she says. And you have to pay for everything now. Your pension won’t cover it. You don’t even own your home now, pay back the bank for years then find you have to sell it back to them to fund your retirement. And then if something goes wrong you end up owing them. That can’t be right, can it?

Rob is going through the items he’s brought down from the loft in the back bedroom, here’s V. C. 96 1–5 3 and his own section V. C. 96 1–5 2. He has a number of texts from Alex Hargreaves he doesn’t bother reading, responds to his most recent one, sent 37 minutes before, saying he has the middle two parts of the novel. He’s tempted to open the envelope and have a look at the text but something stops him. It doesn’t feel right somehow. He promised he would wait. And yet he’s prepared to sell it?

He decides against telling her that he has found a videotape. They might want to watch it and perhaps they are better off not seeing their son again, suddenly, young, alive. Rob is not sure he can bear to watch it either, especially not if there is footage of all of them, the old crew in there too, a sudden confrontation with his younger self, twenty years erased just like that. He has vague memories of Vernon messing about with the video camera, getting Rob, wrecked off his face in some dazzling midsummer sunlight, to talk to himself, his future self.

Not that, he hopes, not that.

No, he’ll keep quiet about the video. It is intended for him anyway, there may be unusual, arcane things on it he wouldn’t want his parents to see or know about, especially at this late stage. He tucks the cassette away under the clothes in his bag and waits till later to watch it. He sits in the room for a few hours going through things, Christine bringing him up a cup of tea, offering him a dinner he gratefully accepts.

Then when she has gone to bed he squats down and pushes the tape into the video player, the small of his back throbbing, out of breath from having grappled around the back of the TV to switch the scart socket from the DVD player.

There it all is though, he knew it would be, Beaconfields, that legendary day, caught in all its glory, over three hours’ worth of tape. A cultural artefact in its own right. Vernon interviewing, or at least asking questions of, everyone he can get his hands on. Rob too, he winces to see himself, there, eyeballs out on stalks and gaunter, waxier than anyone really ought to be outside a mortuary. Christ, and here’s Vernon, talking into the camera, he doesn’t look too bad, looks straight enough, this is for posterity, Vernon says and Rob off camera snaps back immediately fuck posterity, what you gonna do, curl up with your pipe and slippers in your old age and reminisce about how, once, you really lived?

We are not going to get old, mate, Vernon says.

Too right, too right, Rob says. When you’ve reached your peak it’s time to die!

Ahh yes, brave words, and yet, here he is. Whereas Vernon. He fast-forwards.

Brave words, really? They came easily enough. Words do come easy, eh? Talk is cheap. Ah now, here, he presses stop, play. Vernon has set the camera up on a tripod off in quiet corner of the field and is squatting thoughtfully, hands on his knees, his hair swept over to one side.

One day I am going to get out there and not be able to make my way back. Or it might take a long time, years, decades, centuries. But I will be back one day. In a matter of seconds. In the blink of an eye. All that time will have passed.

Memories of Vernon, back from one of his trips, Rob excitedly asking him where he had been, and Vernon saying, it is like orbiting a black hole, slowly pulled further and further in, I seem to have been away for a second, a brief, dark flash of time but here hours have gone by.

And then it became days, weeks, years, perhaps. Perhaps it is true, that for a moment they lost sight of him, that out on the road somewhere, the night so dark even god could not see him, he slipped through the mesh of things and has spent all this time struggling back to us. Any day now, any day. Any moment could be the moment.

Perhaps it’s this moment, here, now, his heart thuds, the wind funnelled through the narrow street, the sound of rain, almost like fingers, drumming there, at the window.

Waiting, waiting.

Nothing.

Traffic chaos. Floods all up the line, massive delays, advised against travelling.

Christine’s tutting over it all, peering over her glasses at the muted TV. Good job you’re not trying to get up to London today love, she says

Aye, he says, sips at his tea, checks his texts. Alex Hargreaves has agreed to five grand, but needs to see the work, wants it scanned and sent. Christine goes off to do another fry up. Now someone else is here she might as well take the opportunity to make a full breakfast, she sometimes fancies one herself but it seems such a lot of effort for just one person, the sad single egg and sausage, half a tin of beans, a slice of toast. She will have to get used to that, she thinks, cooking for one. It doesn’t seem worth it, living only for yourself, does it?

Rob’s appetite’s come back and he relishes the food, the fat and salt, the grease, delicious. They both sit back satisfied, he offers to make the next cup of tea and against Christine’s insistence gathers the pots together to wash. She comes in behind him and starts putting things back in the fridge.

Would he mind, she asks, going into town for her, getting a bit of shopping in? She’ll pay the bus fare of course, it’s just that she can’t leave Jack alone upstairs, he’s so weak now, needs help toileting himself, she says with downcast eyes, and it’s such a shame, he was always so independent, proud.

Dying, she says, takes all your pride away, and then rushes on past those sad eventualities to take refuge in practical things, daily necessities. The nurse can’t come today to watch over him, it turns out, and she can’t ask Rob to do it and besides Jack won’t want anyone seeing him like that anyway, so defenceless, dependent. It’s only a few things from Morrisons.

He wouldn’t mind, he’d be glad to, but he insists on paying. She gives him a plastic mac to wear and a shopping list and detailed instructions of where to get off the bus that he duly follows, then wanders up the hill from the supermarket car park to look at the shipyard and the enormous Trident sheds. The last time he saw these he was tripping on a handful of mushrooms and they had looked to him like temples of an alien culture, raised gleaming in the centre of the dark red brick and granite town. He takes a deep breath, leans against a low wall, the other side a mess of empty packets and broken bottles, a high fence, the docks.

A middle-aged man goes past with a dog, nods at him. Rob nods back. Rain begins to fall. London, a couple of hours away, seems a distant planet.

The pain in his hips is subdued enough for him to go and look for an internet cafe around the centre of the town. He gets a latte, takes the pages out of the envelopes and puts them into the photocopier feeder, can’t bring himself to read any of it somehow, sends it to himself as a PDF, pays 50p for an hour online, forwards it to Hargreaves. Then he Googles reverse mortgage and USG, comes up with a whole set of warning articles, forum posts, a welter of opinions and snippets of advice from all kinds of sources. Now this doesn’t look too good. There’s an article about gullible pensioners signing up to reverse mortgaging schemes offering generous monthly payments predicated on rising house prices and a fixed income stream, and how the monthly pay-outs are based on continuously assessed valuations of house prices in your area, leading, the article says, “to the perverse situation in which many elderly people have had to go out to work in order to make up the shortfall in payments until the value of the house picks up again”. So you have an income stream as long as your house is rising in value, set at a baseline valuation, if it falls below that, you have to give them money.

Around the quietly echoing supermarket squinting at the list then back on the bus, hood up, carrier bag on his knees, wondering how to give her the bad news.

Five grand, maybe he should have asked for more. Maybe that will be enough to tide them over.

I think, he says, another cup of tea in his hand now, I think if you sign up to this, if the bank buys your house, then it releases the money to you in stages, but you have agreed, if the house goes down in value, to make up the difference.

She looks confused. So they buy it and then if it goes down I have to pay them?

His phone buzzes and he glances at it. Hargreaves again. Leave me alone, man.

The income is derived from the valuation of your house at a given point, not its value.

I mean houses are going down everywhere round here, the Yard’s losing jobs. Lay-offs, she says. I mean, people wouldn’t need to borrow money if they had spare. How can they be expected to pay more than they, when they came round, they told me, it will help you with the cost of your husband’s treatment Mrs Crane, help me pay for mine when I need it, fingers crossed I won’t, help me pay the bill in, in a home, a care home, you know.

She’s flummoxed. It was Sue Wilke’s lad that came round and told me all about it. I wondered at the time though, how they knew Jack was ill.

The vultures, the fucking vultures. They sense death and they’re in to pick over the remains.

Ach, he says. If you know the lad I am sure it’s nothing to worry about. Probably some kind of error.

He can well imagine that the salesmen were out in force, sensing a downturn on its way, locking them into negative repayments, plus the eventual repossession of the houses. Guaranteed profit on the upside and the downside. Savvy. Smart cunts to a man. The bricks and mortar you have put your trust in have become liquid, volatile; no one and nothing can escape risk these days.

Well, they’re coming to see me tomorrow they said. I’ve been on the phone to them all week but they never answer. Finally they picked up the phone, said they would come down to explain the arrangement to me this weekend.

Do you need someone to have a look at a few things for you?

Sort out this bank stuff, see where we are with that and so on?

Oh love I couldn’t ask you to do that.

Well, that’s fine he says. I can spare another day. There’s probably no getting anywhere anyhow and I feel, he says, and the words come easily to him, that I owe it to you.

Oh no, love she says. No, no you don’t owe us anything.

Aye well, he says. I was friends with your lad. Maybe I could have been a better friend to him than I was. Whatever you may think about it. I want to do something. I feel I owe it to you.

Oh well, she says. She looks relieved. Well that would give me a bit of peace of mind.

Aye, Rob says. Peace of mind. Aye. It might give me a bit of that too.