*
I had hoped to pretend that Christmas wasn’t there, since I had no use for it. I told everyone I was going to stay with friends in Manchester. Then I holed up in Nan’s house with a generous pile of leftovers and library books, and did my best to keep warm. Tricky, since the only warm patch in Nan’s house was a small oasis around the gas fire: cold crept in like spiders from the skirting boards.
On Christmas Day, I opened Charlotte’s present (head to toe lily of the valley, bless) and ate a variety of rejected puddings. Not Christmas pudding, though, which I found wearisome and heavy, like Christmas itself. In my childhood, Christmas had simply been an excuse for my mother to drink more openly. She fobbed us off with selection boxes and cheap, fuzzy videos off the market. Karl and I quietly agreed that we hated Christmas and couldn’t wait to leave home. We spent hours planning the heaps of presents we’d buy ourselves, the games we’d play, the feasts we’d cook. In the end, though, I had left and Karl had stayed.
I curled up as best as I could in Nan’s bony armchair with a slab of caramel slice, and studied my library book: A Companion To Prescription Drugs. I hadn’t got far into it when there was a noise at the front door. Someone was pushing against it. There was a rattle and a faint, muffled clunk.
Putting the book down, I went quietly into the hall and picked up the cricket bat I kept there, just in case. I took a couple of deep breaths and then, at arm’s length, unsnipped the lock. The door flew open and Frank pitched inside, key in one hand, toolbox in the other.
“Didn’t expect you to be here,” he said, surprised. “Weren’t you up in town?”
“Change of plan.” As he looked down at the cricket bat, I added, “I thought you were a burglar.”
“They’d have to be daft. Nowt here worth nicking. Even that bat’s cracked.” I waited for his query. What was the bat doing down here instead of up in the junk room? But Frank didn’t ask.
“Did you come to fetch something?” I said, imagining a bag of presents forgotten in a cupboard. He shook his head.
“No. I’m just escaping for a bit. Sue’s gone to see her parents. She wanted me to go too, but I’ve never met them. Christmas Day didn’t seem the right time.”
“A bit too meaningful?”
He didn’t answer that. “So I thought I’d come and do some work on the house. There’s nowt but bloody crap on the telly. Thought I’d strip the front room. Been meaning to for ages.”
“Feel free,” I said.
“No, you won’t want the mess.”
“Do it,” I said. “I’ll give you a hand. I’m glad of the company.” I was slightly twitchy, having just been reminded of how alone I was in this dark house, in this quiet village. I liked solitude. Being lonely didn’t bother me. But feeling vulnerable did.
We pulled the furniture away from the wall and began to prise at Nan’s wallpaper, its lumpy leaves the colour of lichen, surely unfashionable even in the seventies. Nan didn’t approve.
“It’s got to be done,” I explained to her. “It needs it.”
“It does,” said Frank, a touch gloomily.
“Are you going to live here once it’s done up, Frank?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. Probably sell it.”
“But you’re in a flat now, aren’t you? Mightn’t Sue prefer a house?”
“Sue prefers modern. Not keen on this place. She fancies Tytherington. She has plans.”
“Oh.” I decided, with unreasonable haste, that I didn’t care for Sue or her plans.
The scrapers ripped and rasped for an hour or so, until we were ankle-deep in wallpaper peelings. Then we stopped for tea and tiramisu. In the kitchen, Frank eyed my pile of leftovers with approval.
“I see nowt’s going to waste.” He switched his gaze to the window. Out the back the flagstones were wet-black and shiny, the hillside beyond them threatening and grey. “Rain’s stopped,” he said. “Fancy a walk?”
I didn’t, not really, not under those polished marble clouds. But that didn’t seem a good reason to refuse, so I put on my crackling raincoat and the size ten wellies. We stomped across the back yard, over the wall and straight up the hill. It was barely raining: just letting us know. The ground oozed and clung around my feet. As I squelched up the slope after Frank I nearly lost a boot with every stride.
I was thankful when eventually he halted at a stone outcrop halfway up the hill. I tried not to pant as I stood beside him. He wasn’t panting.
We gazed down at the grey cross of Brocklow’s two streets. Further along, feeling their way around the corner of the hills, were the ragged fingers of Fylington. Otherwise, just farms. Proper farms, fortified against the yuppies with tin-roofed barns and plastic ranks of silage, rows of little black puddings on a muddy tablecloth.
Frank set off again suddenly towards the top, which to my dismay turned out not to be the top at all, but merely the first swell in a rising sea of moorland.
“That’s Shutlingsloe over there,” he said, pointing to a cone on the horizon. “Mam Tor’s over that way. Take you up it some time.”
“I think I’ve been to Mam Tor,” I said, dredging up memories of a school trip to Castleton. “Shivering mountain, is that right?”
“More like a bloody motorway these days,” said Frank. “That over there’s Wincle Minn. Nice pub near there, show you one day when you’re free. For professional interest like. And that way’s Wildboarclough, and Bottom o’ the Oven.” He grinned at me unexpectedly, his eyes creasing. Frank had never smiled at me properly before.
I was delighted. “There’s really a place called Bottom of the Oven?”
“Sure. Right up your street. There’s a pub there too. And you could try the Crag and the Smithy and the Highwayman.”
“What about the Cat and Fiddle?” I was proud of knowing of the Cat and Fiddle Inn, second highest in England according to Brendan, perched alone on its bleak road over the moor.
“Not much there,” said Frank, his smile abruptly gone and then so was he, leaping from tussock to tussock to avoid the worst of the mud. I wondered what I’d said.
“Watch out, it’s boggy,” he called. We stopped at a crumbling cliff face nearly a yard high: black peat crowned with brown heather. Ahead of us lay a stretch of bog splintered with black cracks. “Want to go on?”
I shook my head. “No thanks. It’s going to rain. But it’s nice here.” It wasn’t nice at all. It was grim and hostile and kept flinging panfuls of cold wind at me. I felt like the clouds were only a hand’s breadth above us: I could have reached up with a paintbrush to add more grey.
But it was a world away from Manchester; more like three thousand miles than thirty. No-one was ever going to follow me up here. Standing on the sullen brow of the moor, leaning on the wind, I felt more alive than I had for weeks. For the first time, I believed that a new life was truly possible. I had a future as well as a past; and the past would slide back into its place and gather dust. I could even glimpse a time when the trial wouldn’t matter any more.
I had a sudden, wild urge to confide in Frank. “It’s a far cry from where I used to live,” I said.
“It’s a far cry from everywhere. Shout as loud as you like, no one would hear you up here.”
“True.” I buttoned down my urge again. What was I thinking? It wasn’t a nice story, and it wouldn’t make Frank think better of me. Safer to tell no-one.
But Frank wasn’t nosy; that was what I liked about him. He had no hidden agenda, no expectations. He wasn’t about to ask me to cook a hundred and sixty sausages or demand to know who I fancied; and he was at home here on top of the hill. I glanced at the lines of hopeful resignation drawn on his face. Dark and vaguely Celtic.
“Frank? Why do they call you Charlie Dimmock?”
“Ah,” said Frank, staring across the surly moors, “that’s to do with a water feature I delivered to the club for Tommo once. He made me plumb it in at the bar and KK put a beer line through it.”
“And why i
s KK KK?”
“King Kong.” I should have guessed that one. “Niall’s Himself. And Flipper scored a try on a wet day and aquaplaned onto the next pitch.”
“But Bob is Bob,” I said.
He gave me a surprised look. “No, he’s a builder.”
“Oh. He didn’t build the club’s extension, though?”
“He only does big stuff,” said Frank.
“Does Brendan have a nickname?”
“Timothy Taylor.”
“Frank? I went into their room to get something and Rhoda’s got a load of drugs on her dressing table. I mean prescription drugs. Anti-nausea and some other stuff. Serious stuff.”
“Mm-hm.”
I had to spell it out. “Cancer drugs.”
He gave me a sharp look. “Oh, aye? You been researching? What did you find out?”
“Ovarian cancer?”
“Aye, that’s the one.”
“She never told me.”
“She didn’t tell anyone for a while,” said Frank. “She didn’t tell Brendan for weeks, not until she had to. Didn’t want to worry him. Of course he was worried sick anyway, he knew summat was up.”
“Jesus. Imagine trying to cope with that on your own.”
“Rhoda doesn’t like being dependent. She’s not told many people about the cancer. Can’t stand the fuss.”
“It’s not a nice one to get,” I said.
“None of them are. But no.”
“And there are the girls.” I didn’t like them much myself, but I recognised Rhoda’s fierceness over their welfare. I had seen it even in my mother when the health visitor tried to tell her there was something wrong with Mikey, who was unusually slow to walk, talk and everything else. “What’s the outlook?”
“Not sure. Brendan’ll tell me if he needs to.” He glanced up. “There’s rain coming over, we’d better get down.”
We began to scramble back across the bog and heather; it was harder going down than up. The hill wanted to throw me off. Below us, the infrequent cars had their lights on. Christmas visitors, doing their duties. A motorbike buzzed through Brocklow like a hornet, making Frank’s head jerk up.
Without giving myself time to think, I asked, “What’s with the motorbike, Frank?” He didn’t answer for several strides.
“I used to keep it at the yard,” he said eventually, “till some bugger broke in and nicked the wheels and a pair of leaded windows. So then I moved it into the house.”
“You’re going to fix it up, are you?”
“Nah.” I thought that was it, but a few paces on he continued, “It belonged to a mate of mine. Dean.”
Another five or six steps further, he added, “Dean got killed. Came off at a bend on the Cat and Fiddle.”
“Sorry,” I said, uselessly.
“Aye. He were a good lad. Dean liked that road, with all the hairpins. I was never keen. My bike wasn’t as powerful as theirs. I always ended up trailing behind. The fourth motorcyclist.”
“I know,” I said. I’d seen them: the groups of motorcycles hurtling past the Woolpack of a weekend, three or four of them in a tight, snarling bunch, and one lonely weakling whining away a hundred yards behind. I waited for Frank to go on with the story, but he just said,
“I kept the bike because Dean’s mum never wanted to see it again, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid. She’s dead now, and his dad’s gone doolally, and his sister doesn’t want to be reminded. So it’s up to me.”
“How long ago did it happen?”
“Fifteen years,” said Frank, without needing to work it out. “Dean was nineteen.”
That staggered me a bit. “That’s, um… must have been terrible,” I said, inanely.
“Was.” He slithered down a muddy bit of slope, and regained his balance. “Cut me up for a fair while,” he said to the mud. “Brendan had to take me in hand. Him and Bob dragged me down the club, got me playing, kept me going.”
“Rugby rescued you?”
“Aye, if you like. One way of putting it.” It began to rain hard: huge thunderous drops that knocked back the heather and ran down my head like cold groping fingers. When we reached the back wall we vaulted over into the yard and ran inside, shedding pools of water onto the lino.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Will you stay to eat?”
“As long as it’s not turkey.”
I did a stir-fry of leftover roast beef, green beans and carrots in plum sauce. It wasn’t brilliant, but it wasn’t turkey. We talked not about Dean but about Nan: how she pretended to despise all things foreign, how Frank found hoards of travel brochures in the cupboard after her death, which set him wondering. Then we scraped the parlour for a while longer, until half the room was blotchy plaster, before stopping to clear away the shreds.
“I’ll be going,” said Frank. “Sue’ll be back shortly.” He thanked me gravely for his tea, and left.
I picked up the scraper again, but Nan was against it. Just look at the state of her good carpet, she said.
I didn’t answer. For the first time, I was made uncomfortable by Nan’s mutterings. I wasn’t dead: not yet, not quite. I shouldn’t be listening. I took my library books and half a pound of Stilton up to bed.