At first the soldier had guessed that the old man and the boy were lovers. They boy bustled about, chivvying round the rather donnish gentleman. The Captain assumed that their contented flirtatiousness with each other meant they were partners. But they weren’t. The son, Colin, put him right on that count. Colin had laughed fit to burst. “Hear that, dad! He’s got us down as an old married couple!”
The father glanced over his ‘Scotsman’ and said something to the effect that it was often the way, when the child was stuck at home with the remaining parent. Captain Simon thought about this. It made it seem as if Colin was there seeing to his ailing father. If anything, though, it was the other way around. The boy was thin and white, wore a little goatee beard, and he was so obviously ill with that horrible disease.
Their bleary, brilliant camaraderie pleased Captain Simon and day after day he kept coming back to smoke with them. He found that he could roll a joint better than either of his neighbours, and he hoped his skills might bring him into their little gang. It had been a long time since Captain Simon was part of a gang.
One morning they sat drinking wine in the kitchen, placidly listening to the sounds in the hallway as the men laid the cable for fifty new TV channels. The old man was flipping through the satellite TV magazine, marking in red felt tip the things he couldn’t miss. Juggling the fifty channels.
‘‘You’ve got a new toy,” said his son, trying to read the listings upside down.
“You should be glad,” his father said gruffly. “So many new multi-millionaires go completely off the rails.”
“They get their heads turned,” smirked Colin, who loved clichés of every sort, and collected them.
“It’s true!” said the old man, whose own reason for loving clichés was that they were true. “You should be relieved I can still get pleasure out of simple things. Like having fifty TV channels to choose from.”
His son looked at the shows he had ticked in red. “And getting all hot and bothered over Charlie’s Angels.”
‘I’ll do no such thing!’ His mobile phone gave a trill. Captain Simon really liked that noise and often thought of asking how you went about getting yourself one of those phones. He knew it was something to do with subscribing to, belonging to, a web of some sort. He’d have liked to carry his phone in his inside pocket, to have that noise going close to his heart. Captain Simon enjoyed only the very nicest things.
The old man was impatient with whoever had called him. “You’re breaking up. This is useless. You sound demented, woman.” He sighed. ‘Your signal is nothing like strong enough.’ He switched her off and tossed the phone back onto the table. “Anne’s still on the train. And I couldn’t hear a word she was saying.”
Colin looked up sharply. ‘But she’s still on the way?’
“More’s the pity,” the old man said. He prodded the very last little bit of the joint at Captain Simon. “You haven’t met my darling ex-wife, have you?”
The Captain gulped. In the year he had come visiting he had never heard such a person mentioned.
“She’s a harridan,” said the old man. “A gorgon, a siren, a terrible monkfish of a woman. But, as she’ll no doubt tell you, she has the legs of an angel. What does she dance like, Colin?”
Colin said dutifully, “Like nothing on earth.”
“She’s coming here?” asked Captain Simon.
The old man harrumphed. “If she bets you that she can still do the splits, don’t take her up on her bet.” He went to fetch a fresh bottle from the cupboard under the eaves. ‘She’ll do herself an injury, showing off one day.” He straightened up suddenly. “Colin, could you fetch that for me?” The boy tutted and did as he was told. “The other thing, of course, is that she’s bringing your cousin with her.”
“Which one?” asked Colin.
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re all the same to me.”
Instinctively Captain Simon had taken out his handkerchief, flapped it once briskly in the air, and set about polishing up the brass of his buttons and epaulettes.
You can’t go anywhere without bumping someone you know. Mandy warned me once that the world was smaller than you ever thought.
When I was small my mother took me to department stores and we’d go up and down in escalators and all the lifts and the departments looked the same. She drilled me on what to do if we were split up. Especially in the Sales, which were ferocious. Sometimes Mam was easily distracted. She said, stand right still. Don’t go haring round and round and shouting after me. If you stay in one place, I’ll do the moving round. I’ll go to every floor every corner every nook every cranny. Soon I’ll be there. Soon I will find you.
So I’m not to worry about meeting new people. About going to new and bigger towns. Committing myself to brand new stuff doesn’t mean I’ll never get the old again. Everything but everything comes back.
On the train with Aunty Anne. Past Carlisle, I’m further north than I’ve ever been before. What am I expecting? To drop off the frozen crust of the world? The countryside looks the same. Brownish cows or horses grazing.
I feel jumpy jumpy. Not like me at all. You can take the girl out of Blackpool...You can take the girl out of Blackpool.
Aunty Anne picks up my small world theme.
“One of the reasons I had to get out of Scotland was that it’s smaller than you think, the bits that people live in. You see
