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  He goes into the kitchen and opens a drawer. From under magazines and cookbooks he takes out a card, then goes to sit down at the table and read again the letter that is tucked inside it.

  Mick,

  I am so sorry for your loss. I wouldn’t for a moment tell you I know what you’re going through because it’s different for all of us, but I know nothing can prepare you for when it happens. And when it does you need to know your friends are there for you, like you and Cathy were for me when John went.

  It’s not my place to say it Mick but you can’t blame yourself. We didn’t know in those days. How could we? There wasn’t all the studies like there are now. I know it’s a difficult situation for you because of Alan being in the management and now’s not the time for it either, but if you want I can tell you the people to go to if you’re thinking about going down the justice and compensation route. Like I say, I know you probably don’t want to think about any of this yet but they knew, Mick. Even back then. They should have done checks. For Christ’s sake, John used to come home in his overalls white as a baker and I’d shout at him for getting the dust in my carpets. It’s not about the money. It’s about justice. If you want to talk then please do give me a call. I’m on the same number. God knows, it might do me good myself. Take your time.

  All the best

  Alice

  After a moment, he slips the letter back inside the card and returns it to the drawer. The idea of it – justice – seems pure absurd. Alice is gone down that route and fair enough, that’s her decision, but the thought of it – how many thousands have died and still you’ve to tear yourself inside out dragging through the courts before any of these bastards will admit for a moment it’s their fault. And it’s no even him dead. Him that played snowballs with the stuff and came home with it stored in the turn-ups of his trousers. Justice is a word for it maybe, getting the payout, but it doesn’t feel sitting here like the right one, no the right one at all.

  He goes back through and flicks the tellybox on, settles himself into the cushions, and it isn’t long before he is away to sleep.

  She is there in his dreams again. They are that real – that’s what’s hard to get the head round. The two of them are washing and drying up. They’re eating chips. They’re arguing in the garden. Short dreams that come and go but don’t finish, carrying on one to the next but connected somehow, linked up, like a chain of islands each with their different goings on but the same backdrop all around, the same light, the same weather following through the dreams so that if in one of them the wind is blustering at her washing while she hangs it out, in the next she’ll be there in the crowd at a ship launch with everybody holding on top of their hats.

  The sun is on his face, and he spots the postie turning in through the gate. He gets sat up. The body feels heavy, solid. He listens to the footsteps on the concrete and the clank of the letterbox. He is awake, that’s obvious enough, but he has this sense of being detached from things. As if all these goings on around him – the sunshine, Phillip Schofield grinning on the television, the post tummelling onto the mat – they are all part of some other life, one that he can see, but he’s not involved in. Mental, really. But that’s what it’s like. And even though he knows fine well that she isn’t going to come down the stair and collect the post – open the door, chat with the postie – he can’t shake the feeling that she will; that she is part of this other life, this real one, which he is outside of.

  He will need to give work a call later, tell them when he’ll be back. They’ve said he can have as long as he wants, but obviously there’s the money to think about, and anyway there’s no use really him rotting about the house doing nothing.

  He gets up and goes over to look at the photo of Damien on top of the television. He’s a cutie, that’s for sure. Nay wonder they’re keen to get back to him, the wee sausage-fingers. He is grinning away under a massive floppy white sunhat, sat on a rug on a crowded beach, all these brown bodies, baggy shorts, bikinis in the background. His own fat little body though is whiter even than the sand, which you know will be his maw protecting him from the sun, no doubt wary of the wee man’s Scottish ancestry. You can see clear enough but that he’s an Australian. Even at six months, that’s clear enough. It’s the eyes, the same as his mother’s, big and happy, and no to mention the baggy shorts he’s got on already. He’s easy-oasy, you can tell. Not like Craig was. Jesus. Craig was never an Australian baby, that’s for certain, never mind he was born there. Even as a tiny wean, he was Scottish as thistles, that boy. Greeting or sulking the whole time, and these great red skin rashes he got at even the slightest bit of heat. It was as if he knew already he was a Weegie even before they moved back.

  No that the two of them had coped that much the better, being honest. He can mind well enough, even looking at this beautiful beach here, how it had been; how they’d become more unhappy the longer they stayed out there. Port Melbourne. It had seemed like a dream at first, Cathy stood queuing on the dock in her new dress, a whole shop’s worth of creams in her handbag. After ’72 and then the final ship completion at John Brown’s, all the closures and the lay-offs everywhere, here was something to feel hopeful about at last. Free passage. Settling-in allowance. Secure job. Hallefuckinglullah. And it was a decent life too – sixty dollars a week, and no freezing your balls off like on the yards at home – although, that said, it did get sometimes too much the other way, and you’d be there in the plating shed thinking you were going to die of the heat. Stable work but. Strong unions. The wife got a job as a shorthand typist for a shipping firm and for a few years they were happy, they really were. There was the card schools on Fridays and the trips to the beach for the women – a giggling procession of them wrapped up like nuns, they were that feart of the sun. A whole clan of Weegies down there eventually, all staying together within a few streets. The Tartan Terrace. It was bloody true. Didn’t last but, didn’t last. After Robbie was born, and Cathy pure homesick to get back, biting his ear the whole time to tell him Alan had another job lined up for him, at Govan, where he was a manager the now. The funny thing as well: it probably made it the worse having all they Glaswegians around. That just made her long for the place even more, made it all the more obvious that this wasn’t home, however much she tried to re-create it. Plus the heat. They never could quite get used to the heat.

  Robbie has managed though. He’s adapted much better than they ever did. Strange to think about it now, all the fights they’d had about him moving out there – he was only eighteen, what was he going to do? How was he going to live? – but he’s proved them all wrong, that’s for sure. He picks up the photograph and puts it on the small table by the settee. Tomorrow, after he’s gave work a call, he’ll go up the high street and get a wee frame for it. A good plan; that’s definitely what he’ll do. He is just sitting down again when the sparrow flies right up to the window, perches there, looking in. Here ye are, fat arse. He hops about a moment, and flies off. Poor wee guy, he’s been waiting for something to eat round the other side, but he’s been forgot about again. A feeling of guilt comes on him, and it’s enough to make him get up and go through the kitchen to find the poor bird something to eat.

  He empties the last of the bread onto the grass and stays there a moment, waiting for the sparrow. He doesn’t come, of course. He’s waiting himself, for Mick to clear off back inside, so after a minute Mick turns and gets leaving. He glances over the fence at next door’s washing on the line, a baby-sized Rangers kit inamongst the socks and pants. Without even thinking about it he is looking in their garden, and he sees a cot and then the woman next door sat outside her kitchen with her Bristols out. Christ. He ducks down and turns straight around to look the other direction toward the houses on the other side. Fucksake – did she see him? If she did she’s going to think he was spying on her, and how’s that going to look? The wife’s dead less than a fortnight and he’s got his tit-goggles on already. He wonders then if in fact she knows about Cathy, if any of the
neighbours do. Maybe they don’t. But what does that matter – it doesn’t – it’s no like they spent much time with any of them all these years that they’ve stayed here. There’s no noise of her moving about on the other side of the fence, luckily. He starts walking, slowly, stooped, back into the house.

  Bloody hell. Still, you’ve got to laugh. He opens the fridge, but it’s almost empty. Some sausages left though, so he pulls them out and gets a fryer going on the hob. Cathy would knot herself at that story, guaranteed. It’s pretty funny, really. The sparrow is there out the window now, and he minds that’s the last of the bread, so a sandwich is out the question. When the sausages are ready, he puts them straight onto a plate with a dollop of tommy sauce. He’s no that hungry anyway.

  He brings the bedding down and sleeps that night on the settee. It’s pretty comfortable. More so for him than it would have been for Craig, clearly, himself being a good few inches the shorter. He stays there into the next morning, the sheets pulled over him most of the time because he’s getting the occasional shivers, even though the sun is streaming through the gap in the curtains. He lays there and tries willing himself to phone in to work. He should tell them he’ll be back by the end of the week. Crazy but he feels genuine nervous about it, even picking up the phone. Like he’s a teenager who’s met a lassie at the dancing, and he feels all jookery-pokery about ringing her. He minds that first time he called Cathy. Nervous as hell waiting for next door to finish on the line. All they prompts of jokes and conversation ideas written on the back of the Record, and his maw eavesdropping through the curtain of their room and kitchen.

  ‘Hello, Muir’s Private Hire.’

  ‘Oh, hello, Lynsey? It’s Mick Little.’

  ‘Mick, how are ye?’

  ‘Fine. I’m fine. See I’m just calling to say when I’ll be back.’

  ‘Aw, right.’ There is the noise of the dispatch radio in the background. ‘Look, Mick, don’t worry about that. It’s no problem. We don’t need you.’

  ‘No, really, it’s nay bother. I can be in Thursday – actually, the morrow, I could come in the morrow.’

  A storm of static on the radio and then a voice he doesn’t recognize.

  ‘Mick, do ye want to speak to Malc? He’s just come in the door.’

  ‘Naw, it’s alright.’

  ‘Okay. How are ye anyway? The family are there staying, I heard.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That’s good. Must be a comfort eh?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Look, Mick, take care of yourself, and take as much time as ye need, alright? We don’t need you in, really we don’t.’

  ‘Right, okay. I’ll see you, well.’

  ‘See you, Mick.’

  That’s that done, then. His heart is beating quite hard as he puts the phone down and leaves the lobby into the living room. There he is again, the bloody sparrow. He for one knows what Mick’s been up to, lazing on the couch, even if nobody else does. Come on well, ye greedy wee bugger, come on.

  There’s an unopened box of thin toast biscuits in the cupboard, something the Highlanders must’ve got in. He takes it outside, keeping crouched down, and breaks up the toasts, emptying the whole of one plastic packet onto the grass. He shakes out the crumbs, then he unsnibs the shed lock for one of the fold-out chairs and puts it up against the back of the kitchen. Better sat out here than sweating indoors. He opens another packet and eats a toast. Quite nice. He eats a couple more. There is the sound of a chair scraping on the other side of the fence. A moment later, and there’s another. Impossible to know exactly why he does it but he slowly lifts his chair a touch closer, quietly, until he can see a tiny sliver through a crack between the fence slats. Part of her arm is visible. A bit of magazine. It’s no that he’s being a pervert, that’s no it at all, it’s – he doesn’t know what it is – but he goes in a little closer so the angle widens and there, again, is her breasts. One of them, anyway. Christsake, man, what are ye doing? But he stays looking, transfixed, with a kind of wonder, no really even aware of himself doing it, as if him and the breast are existing in two different worlds and somehow it’s not actually happening.

  A breast. It’s pure jolted him. When was the last time he’d touched one? Actually touched one, except to sponge underneath? He hasn’t thought of sex, he realizes, in a very long while. Not really. Not in a real way. The illness ate away at his own desire for it the same as it ate away at everything else. After a certain point, as she got worse, the need to get her comfortable, to stop her being in pain, it started overpowering all the rest. Even just the physical desire to be touching each other – not just the sexual ways, and let’s be honest it’s no like they’d been jumping all over each other exactly for quite a long time – but even just needing to be touched, you lose it. You forget. He turns away from the fence. No that it was like that at first though. He’d felt it keenly enough then. The fear of losing all that, their physical needs for each other, as it started becoming visible, even a couple of months in, that the disease was taking hold. She wouldn’t let him see her. She started getting changed in the bathroom, and wore his trackie bottoms to bed. When once, near the beginning, he tried to touch her, she had turned away from him, sobbing, and after that he didn’t try again for fear of upsetting her.

  So that tit in the fence, it’s a surprise. He gets up from the chair, looking the other direction – a man two gardens down the way sat with his giant white belly out, drinking a can – and goes back in the house.

  There’s a jumble of post on the mat. He gives a flick through it. A couple of flyers for a new pizza carry-out; more browns; what looks like a few extra condolence cards. He leaves the lot where it is on the mat and goes back through to the living room. Still this leaden feeling about him, lying in his stomach like a brick. The sausages? No. That was yesterday, and he’d only ate one of them. In fact he should get eating something, and that’s maybe it even – the lack of eating anything – because he hasn’t ate a full meal since Robbie and Jenna left. He’s no hungry but, that’s the problem. He’ll think about it soon, he resolves, but for now he stays on the settee. Coming inside has made him feel a bit of a chill, so he gathers the covers over him and tries getting warm and comfortable. There’s this sense he’s got as though he’s waiting for something to happen. Everything is dulled, even his hunger. He really is not hungry. Which is a new one. Normally he’s a genuine trougher.

  He wakes, taking a moment to understand by the light outside and by a dim calculation of the TV schedule what time it is. About six, he guesses. Hungry or not hungry, that means all he’s ate in two days is a sausage and a couple of toast biscuits, which is a pure nonsense, clearly.

  Fridge: empty, apart from the parmesan. Cupboards: a few bottles of things, a tin of tomatoes and the toast biscuits. He eats all of one packet, chewing drily, and leaves the last couple for emergencies and the sparrow. That’ll do as a starter, he decides, looking out at the garden, and the gloaming coming on, the shed door no shut properly. There is the new pizza carry-out, he minds, but straight away gives the idea a bye: he hasn’t enough cash on his tail, and as well the thought of going out, of walking on the high street and queuing up in the place with its new bright neons and the brand spanking plastic no yet covered in scratches and stuck with chinex. The effort even of thinking about doing that bears on him like a weight. But just at that moment he has a brainwave. The freezer. He’s forgot about it until now and, getting open the door for a look in, it’s easy to see how – it being something of a no-go area, the seal covered all around with a huge furry moulding of ice, like frozen moss. Still, there’s things in here. There’s all kinds of bags and boxes, although you can’t see what any of it is because it’s all glazed over with a thin dust of ice like a postie’s frost, so he puts his hand in and gets brushing it off. Waffles, choc ices, boil-in-the-bag fish in sauce – no thank you very much – peas, the wife’s crispy pancakes, which it’s more than his life is worth stealing from her –

  There
is a sudden tug at his stomach, a recoil, like the instant of a fall before the insides catch up. His hands are shaking. A dizzy confused sick sensation and he has to grip the side of the fridge-freezer to steady himself.

  Crispy pancakes. Bingo tea.

  There are peas gone over the floor, but he stays pressed against the fridge without moving. His stomach is aching, and he feels sick. And then he is – a dry, coughed-up retch of thin, clinging dribble. Jesus Christ. He didn’t see this coming; he’d’ve been the better going down the new pizza take-out, all things considered, and he starts to chuckle, his forehead juddering against the freezer. See maybe he would’ve been done in there too, how could you know? They wouldn’t have known how to deal with it if he had, that’s for sure, looking confused at each other in their smart new caps and uniforms – this wouldn’t be in the training.

  The box is soft and battered the now, almost a year old. It needs chucking out but as soon as he has the thought he gets the dry boak in his throat again. Bingo tea: crispy pancakes, beans, tinned potatoes, tommy sauce. Her sat eating it and the strange chemically smell of those terrible fucking tatties, then off to the bus and a kiss for him and the boys. Now ye’ll no let these two stay up the night, eh? I want them in their beds when I’m back. And always the wee grin between them as she leaves, because she knows well enough there’ll be a pair of bahookies scootling up the stair when she comes in. He can see her, clear as anything. Her face, beaming, drunk. Mick, I’ve bloody gone and won – footering in her bag for the money – I’ve only bloody gone and won, see, and she pulls it out with a great daft smile like a magician’s assistant. His eyeballs feel cold; he closes them. She won two hundred quid once. They spent a few days in Wemyss Bay and bought a mini television for the kitchen. He can’t mind her winning that much any other time. Just little wins, tiddlies – ten or twenty pound – and she’d never share it, that money, it was hers, she’d declare with glee, and she’d buy herself tights and Barbara Taylor Bradfords.