Exit Page 15

  Skipper took it from him and examined it suspiciously. ‘Do I have to pay for it?’

  ‘No,’ said Felix.

  ‘Who pays for it then?’

  ‘Nobody pays for it,’ said Felix. ‘Social services.’

  ‘Well, which is it? Nobody? Or social services?’

  ‘Social services. I only meant, you don’t have to pay for it.’

  Skipper observed him with an icy blue eye from under a frosted brow, then glared at the stick, as if he might not want it if it was free. He looked at it from all angles and banged it on the side of the bed several times and finally he nodded and held out his hand, and Felix went to shake it.

  But instead of shaking his hand, Skipper gripped it like a vice and dragged him closer so he could look him square in the face.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ he hissed, and hit him with the stick.

  Felix lurched backwards, trying to yank his hand free.

  ‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘Wait!’

  But Skipper didn’t wait and Skipper didn’t let go. Skipper stumbled awkwardly out of bed, helped by his wincing grip on Felix’s hand, and when he’d achieved his feet, he hit him again. Harder this time, and on the head.

  ‘You killed my boy!’ he yelled, while Toff and Mabel yapped and circled them. ‘You killed Albert!’

  ‘The gas was in the wrong place!’ cried Felix. ‘It was a mistake!’

  ‘A mistake?’ hissed Skipper hoarsely. ‘You killed my son!’

  Felix shielded his head and the man hit him in the elbows while he tried to grab the stick, but without any luck. He had never been in a fight before and knew he was making a very bad job of the one he was in now. He could have pushed Skipper Cann over, but even through the fog of war, he didn’t want to hurt him. However, that kindness was doing him no favours. Skipper was older than him and terribly frail. But he was also enraged – whereas Felix was only sorry he’d ever come.

  He finally gripped the business end of the walking stick and tried to wrestle it away from his assailant in a series of jerks that only succeeded in unbalancing them both and – after an odd, tottering tango around the end of the bed – they both fell over and hit the floor with matching grunts.

  Felix lay breathless, looking at the yellowing ceiling, while Mabel panted foully on his face and the sound of the TV and vacuum cleaner leaked loudly through the floor. Felix turned his head fractionally, grimacing at a dart of pain in his neck, to see the old man lying beside him, staring blankly upwards. For a dreadful moment Felix thought he’d killed him this time, but then Skipper blinked, and he breathed a long sigh of relief.

  ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘Bollocks to your sorry,’ wheezed Skipper. ‘You can take your sorry and shove it up your arse.’

  Felix nodded at the ceiling. It was stippled Artex, with thousands of tiny meringue stalactites dripping from it.

  ‘We should get up,’ he sighed. ‘Can you get up?’

  Skipper said nothing.

  ‘I hope I can,’ Felix muttered. It had been a long time since he’d got up off the floor. It took him a few goes but he finally rolled on to his side and then his elbows, and from there he managed to lever himself up on his hands and get one knee, and then one foot, underneath him and, using the chest of drawers, hauled himself to his feet like an infant.

  ‘Made it,’ he panted with satisfaction. He turned and reached a hand out to Skipper, who slapped it away, but then made no effort to get up under his own steam – just lay there with his pyjama top popped open from the struggle, showing his pale, bony chest.

  Felix put out his hand again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let me help you.’

  Skipper Cann ignored his hand. ‘I fell asleep,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. I was waiting for you and then I just . . . fell asleep.’

  Felix slowly withdrew his hand. The older man went on tentatively, as if he was discovering all this for the first time.

  ‘I should’ve heard you come in for the gas. Could’ve stopped you. But I fell asleep and now . . . now they’re burying Albert . . .’ Skipper started to cry – a hoarse, dry sound that betrayed years of neglect in the machinery of weeping.

  Felix sat down on the bed.

  Toff crept over to his prone master and lay pressed against his ribs while he wheezed and rattled. Tears oiled his eyes, drained away through the ancient wrinkles, and dripped from his cheeks on to the swirly green rug. Felix wished he would stop sobbing because he was starting to feel the pressure in his own eyes that he remembered so well from Jamie’s funeral, and beyond.

  Not now, he told himself fiercely. Not now.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I lost my son too.’

  ‘I don’t care about your son,’ said Skipper. ‘I care about my son.’

  Of course he did – and Felix felt ashamed that he’d thought it might help to tell him about Jamie. Of course it wouldn’t help. Nothing would help. Not even time, whose billing as a great healer was vastly overrated, in his experience. So he said nothing more – just stared through the window at the fuzzy fields and the misty sky beyond them while behind him Skipper Cann cried himself down to a sniff and a sigh.

  When all was finally still once more, Felix held out his hand again to his fallen foe. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

  This time Skipper lifted his hand and Felix helped him to sit and then – with grunts and staggers from the pair of them – grappled him upright and steered him back to his bed, where they both plumped down, catching their breath. Toff jumped up between them and looked from one to the other like a nervous umpire, alert to transgressions.

  Felix took out his hanky and blew his nose, while Skipper hung his head over his own flaccid chest. His pyjamas hung open off the knives of his shoulders. He took for ever to find a button and then a buttonhole and then to fumble one through the other.

  ‘I’m outta shape,’ he wheezed, ‘or I’da ripped you apart.’

  Felix nodded as if that were true. Then he said gently, ‘You’ve done those up wrong.’

  Skipper stared down at his lopsided pyjamas for a long, long time, chewing his gums.

  ‘I used to be something,’ he whispered. ‘Now I’m nothing.’

  Felix felt jolted by the familiar.

  Without you I am nothing . . .

  They were both nothing. Two old men who’d outlived their usefulness. Often Felix wondered how useful he’d ever been.

  Fixit Felix.

  He could fix a fence, but he couldn’t fix Jamie; couldn’t stop Margaret’s descent into hell . . .

  ‘I brought this to show you.’ Felix retrieved Skipper’s broken walking stick from where he’d dropped it in the fracas.

  Felix held it out to him but Skipper made no move to take it.

  ‘See the break? Here? It looks to me as if it’s been sawn through.’

  Skipper glanced at it and looked away. ‘So?’

  ‘I just thought . . .’ Felix stopped and sighed. ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  Skipper shrugged. ‘You got any more of that gas with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’re no help to me.’

  Skipper looked out of the window at the near horizon of hills that blocked his view of the sea. ‘Get me back in bed.’

  Felix picked up the older man’s featherlight legs, and pivoted him slowly on his backside until he was propped back on his pillows, then covered him with the rumpled blankets. He held on to the footboard to steady himself as he folded over to pick up Margaret’s walking stick for the last time. He laid it on the bed and Skipper gripped the handle and Felix didn’t flinch. If the old man hit him again, well . . . he probably deserved it.

  ‘Come on, Mabel.’

  She trotted to the door and Felix followed her and reached for the handle.

  ‘He s
aid it’d be quick.’

  Felix turned. ‘Pardon?’

  The old man chewed his gums for a moment, then found the words. ‘Geoffrey said. With that gas . . .’

  Felix felt ashamed again. He wasn’t the only one who needed answers to important questions. ‘Very quick,’ he said. ‘And completely painless.’

  Skipper didn’t look at him. He jerked his chin almost imperceptibly at the sky. ‘Still . . .’ he said.

  Felix understood. Still the son was dead. Still the father was alive, and both of those things were still his fault.

  ‘I’m truly sorry,’ he said, but Skipper just kept looking out of the window. The rage in him had burned off, and left behind only sad, grey ashes.

  ‘Get out,’ he said wearily. ‘If you come here again, I’ll kill you.’

  When he got home, Felix studied the lump on his head in the bathroom mirror. It was just where his hairline used to be, and had a nasty cut in the middle.

  He pressed the lump and winced, and didn’t press it again.

  You should see the other guy, he thought ruefully. That was what men said, wasn’t it? When they’d won a fight? Felix had never said it, of course, but he thought it was something that every man ought to get the chance to say, just once in his lifetime.

  But there was nobody who cared enough about him to ask what had happened to his head.

  And even if there had been, Felix would never have said you should see the other guy.

  Not when the other guy had been lying on the floor, crying for his dead son.

  Suspicion

  Skipper Cann woke in the darkness, tingling with fear.

  There was somebody in his room. A scuff on the floor. A shadow in the corner. A creak.

  His hand closed around his stick. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s only me, Skip.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  Skipper reached for the lamp and switched it on. ‘What time is it?’ He peered at the clock. Twelve fifteen. When had he gone to sleep? How? On the day they’d buried his son . . .

  ‘Just gone midnight,’ said Reggie. ‘Did you eat?’

  Skipper waved the idea of it away. He was never hungry these days. Hayley had made him a cheese sandwich at lunchtime but he hadn’t touched it. The cancer was the only hungry thing about him now, eating him from the inside out, and it had had nearly all it could get.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Reggie was at the open wardrobe, beyond the puddle of light under the bedside lamp.

  ‘I was just putting away the tie you lent me.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  Reggie shrugged. ‘Yeah, sorry. I should have just waited till morning, but I came in to make sure you were all right, so . . .’

  Skipper struggled into a sitting position against his pillow. The day just gone was coming back to him, but from very far away. This was how it happened lately, like his brain took a while to remember the way the world was.

  Even when he’d rather not remember . . .

  He rubbed his eyes. ‘Been asleep for ages. Always bloody sleeping. Sleep for England.’

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Reggie.

  ‘I’ll come down,’ said Skipper.

  ‘Downstairs ? What? Now?’

  He hadn’t been downstairs for a long time.

  ‘Gimme a hand.’

  Reggie helped Skipper into his slippers and a ratty old robe. Skipper smelled beer on his breath.

  ‘You been to the pub?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You already bumped the car once.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  Skipper let it go. Reggie had had a rough day.

  He let his grandson help him downstairs, slowly and full of old aches and new. They stopped once and just sat on the stairs with the little dog between them, eager to go anywhere as long as it was where his master was going.

  ‘I remember when you were small enough, I had to hold your hand going down these stairs.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Remember the sled?’

  Reggie laughed. ‘Yeah!’

  They’d called it the sled but it was just a bit of thick cardboard from the box the washing machine had been delivered in. With a clear run Reggie could hit the front door. He’d had a clear run often enough to leave a mark, which Skipper had never painted over.

  He was glad his grandson remembered it.

  Good times.

  They continued the descent.

  In the kitchen, Reggie lowered him on to a chair and filled the kettle and put it on the hob, and Skipper smelled that winter-kitchen smell of the gas, and the tiny hiss that just like that made him feel like a boy again, with his mother at the stove; his socks drying on the grill; the bare bulb reflected in the black, school-morning window.

  Like it was yesterday. Better than yesterday. Yesterday could be a bit of a blur.

  Skipper cleared a space for his elbow among the detritus on the table next to the phone. ‘How was the funeral?’

  ‘Fine. It was fine.’

  They didn’t look at each other. Reggie cracked two eggs into a pan and they both watched them spit and splutter.

  ‘What the vicar say?’

  ‘Nice things.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Skipper.

  Reggie put bread in the toaster and pushed the handle down hard.

  ‘Did the blokes from the shop go?’

  ‘No.’

  Skipper nodded.

  ‘Why would they?’ shrugged Reggie.

  Skipper chewed his gums. ‘Albert done the best he could, Reg.’

  ‘His best was rubbish.’

  ‘Bought you that car.’

  ‘That he couldn’t afford! So we’re left paying his bills, as usual. Like mugs. You on a pension and me with a crap job. He was a shitty father, Skip, and that doesn’t change just because he’s dead.’ Reggie rattled open a drawer. ‘Where’s the fucking forks? Shit!’

  He found a fork and slammed the drawer shut. The toast popped up. He tossed it on to a plate and squashed it roughly under butter.

  Skipper just watched him. Toff jumped on to his lap and he stroked the dog’s ears. ‘Fella came to see me today.’

  ‘Yeah? Who?’

  ‘The one who done it.’

  ‘Done what?’

  Skipper jerked a thumb at the ceiling. ‘The Exiteer.’

  Reggie stopped. ‘He came back ?’

  Skipper nodded. ‘Said he were sorry. Said it were a mistake. Then we had a fight.’

  ‘You what ?’ Reggie was aghast. ‘You had a fight ? What kind of a fight?’

  ‘A fight fight. I were going to make a citizen’s arrest. I woulda had him too, ’cept I’m out of shape from being stuck in bed for so long. But I got him a couple of good whops with my new stick!’

  ‘What new stick?’

  ‘He brung me a new stick.’

  Reggie frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Old one broke. He says it were deliberate.’

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  ‘About the stick?’

  ‘About the fight! About the man who killed Dad!’

  Skipper shook his head. ‘I took a pill after. Knocked me out till just now. You do it, Reg. My teeth are upstairs.’ He held out the telephone.

  Reggie took it. ‘That woman copper said that right off the bat, you know? That it might have been a mistake. Can’t believe the cheeky bastard came back though.’

  Skipper nodded. ‘Are you calling or what?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Reggie patted his pockets. ‘I’ve got that card she gave me somewhere. It’s got a direct line on it. What did he look like?’

  ‘Taller than me. Big fella. And a lot younger too!’

&nb
sp; ‘How young?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Skipper with a dismissive wave. ‘But he had a dog.’

  ‘A dog ?’

  ‘Called Mabel.’

  An uneasy silence descended on Reggie Cann. ‘Mabel?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t believe me!’ said Skipper.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Call then!’

  ‘I will.’ Reggie put a card on the counter and peered at it as he dialled. He asked for DCI King but she wasn’t there, so he asked for Detective Constable Shapland instead and recounted the story while Skipper watched him closely.

  ‘Did he say his name?’ Reggie asked him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What colour hair did he have?’

  ‘Grey,’ said Skipper.

  ‘Grey,’ Reggie told Shapland.

  ‘Balding.’

  ‘Balding where?’

  ‘On his head.’

  ‘No, from the front or a patch in the middle or what?’

  ‘The front. And tell him about the stick.’

  ‘Yeah, apparently Skipper’s stick broke and this bloke said it had been sawn through. No, I haven’t seen it . . . Where’s the stick now, Skip?’

  ‘I think he took it with him.’

  Reggie rolled his eyes before relaying that information, then he said goodbye and thank you and rang off.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Skipper.

  ‘Said it was really helpful. He said the description’s so specific that if he’s in their files they’re sure to find him.’

  ‘If he’s in their files,’ said Skipper warily. ‘And if he’s not?’

  ‘They’ll get him, Skip, don’t you worry. Best to leave it to the police now. They’ve got all the details.’ He handed Skipper tea in his favourite mug:

  FISHERMEN HAVE MUGS THIS BIG!

  Then he slid the eggs out of the pan and on to the toast. ‘You want me to take you back to bed?’

  ‘I’m all right for a bit,’ said Skipper. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m going to watch telly. You coming?’