‘Do you want another?’ she asked him.
‘I’ll get them. What are you having?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘I’ll get them,’ he repeated. He assumed he was better off than she was. He knew she was a lone parent, and somewhere in all the column inches, he had read that she was a care worker. Low-paid, on the bottom rung.
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘just a Coke.’
‘Nothing in it?’
She wrinkled her nose, thought about it. ‘Oh, go on then – rum. Thanks.’
The pub had been a good choice, he thought. A roomy, anonymous sort of a place. Not somewhere he might run into anyone he knew.
She was on the phone, texting, when he went back. She thanked him for her drink and finished the message. ‘My daughter, Ruby,’ she explained.
‘I remember.’ A fleeting impression, a lovely-looking girl. Willowy, beautiful eyes. ‘How old?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘When you got in touch, I thought it might be Luke.’
‘No, still under.’
He hadn’t meant that he thought Luke might have woken, but that he might have deteriorated. Why had he thought like that? Because he’d seen the state of the boy, perhaps, and couldn’t imagine him recovering? Or because his own situation was so dark it made him pessimistic?
‘It was out of character, for Jason,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t think he’d ever been in a fight in his life. Not a proper fight. He just wasn’t that sort of kid, you know?’
She nodded, did that thing with her hair again. ‘Well he wasn’t fighting,’ she said. ‘He was trying to stop it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Luke…’ She blew out a sigh, stretched her back, ‘he’s a handful. He’s had his moments, got into the odd scrap at school, but he’d never start anything. Selfdefence half the time. That and being too cocky for his own good.’ The words were harsh, but he heard the love behind them.
‘This trouble with Garrington…’ The name felt odd to say. ‘What was that about?’
‘Declan said that Garrington – they call him Gazza, actually…’
‘Oh, please,’ he moaned. The image of a pudgy footballer known for weeping and later for his chaotic personal life mushroomed in his mind, and then the thought that these nicknames, Gazza, Baz, Mozzer, were typical for young thugs.
She shrugged. ‘Well, he was having a go at some lass. Nasty – threats and that. Luke told him to pack it in.’
Andrew was surprised; he’d expected something more loutish, laddish. Not the chivalry she described. She seemed to read his thoughts, and there was an edge to her tone when she said, ‘He wasn’t looking for trouble; he was doing the right thing.’
But trouble had found him, trouble had caught up with him, dragging Jason in its wake.
The second pint was nearly gone, slipping down faster than the first. Andrew was aware of the softening in the set of his shoulders, the tension in his gut uncoiling some.
‘I keep thinking,’ she said. ‘If he hadn’t filmed it, would it have been okay? Would they have let it go? He always has to have the last word. Drives me mad.’ Her face fell suddenly, lines puckered her brow. ‘God, I’m sorry. Going on like this when you-’
‘It’s fine,’ Andrew said. ‘No one knows how to be, you know, how to talk to us. I laughed at something on the radio the other day. Laughed. I was mortified. How could I laugh? Even we don’t know how to be.’
‘I don’t think there are any rules,’ she said softly.
‘Maybe not.’
They talked a little longer, about their sons, the similarities and differences. Then he said he’d better leave. ‘Thanks for ringing.’
‘Something’s bound to happen soon,’ she said. ‘Now they know who he is.’
‘Yeah.’ He buttoned his coat and they walked out together.
He felt awkward again as they parted; the intimacies they had shared suddenly lost currency as they stood like strangers on the pavement. But once he was in the car on his own, he found himself replaying bits of the conversation, and recognized that for much of the time he had been comfortable in her company. That there had even been moments of pleasure in among all the chatter. Flashes where they were just two human beings communicating, and doing it reasonably well.
Jason’s shrine, the mementos and cards, glimmered with frost. Val had gone to bed when he got in. Andrew didn’t want to sleep yet. He took the whisky into the conservatory and sat there, opposite the cardboard coffin and the rowan tree, and drank himself numb.
