Graham, my father-in-law, asking whether he could visit next day. The second was from Alison. ‘Bob,’ she’d begun, but gone no further before hanging up. I called her back from my bedroom extension. She sounded impatient when she answered.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘What for?’ she snapped, then took a deep breath. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I should be apologising. You caught me on my way out the door, that’s all.’
‘You rang me.’
‘Yes, then I lost the bottle to say what I meant to.’
‘You want to try again?’
‘Mmm.’ She’d begun to sound like herself again. ‘It’s another sorry, for my ridiculous performance at the Sheraton, flouncing off like that just because I catch you with a poppet on your arm. I wanted to warn you before she finds my knickers drying in your bathroom, that’s all.’
I laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I checked. Alison,’ I said, quickly, before she took me seriously, ‘do you want to know who she is?’
‘If you want to tell me.’
I did. ‘She caught the six o’clock train home,’ I finished, ‘after she’d promised Alex a copy of the hit single of the year, on top of the autographed piccie.’
‘And now I feel like an idiot,’ she moaned. ‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Just as well we’re not serious about each other, eh?’
‘I wasn’t kidding about that, Bob.’
‘Me neither. Now that’s off our chests, do you want to come out here tomorrow night?’
‘Let’s see how hung-over I am in the morning after a session with Leona.’
‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘Call me when your head clears.’
Before changing to go out, I phoned Thornie to confirm his visit. Alex was pleased when I told her; we had virtually no extended family (she didn’t know that she had an uncle on my side) and that made her cherish her grandfather and aunt even more.
He was an early riser, was Grandpa Graham. Alex and I had barely cleared away the breakfast things when he arrived, at ten thirty, having driven all the way from Carluke, by a slightly longer route than necessary. He never drove past the accident site; instead he took the A198 to Dirleton Toll, and stopped off at the cemetery to lay flowers on Myra’s grave, before heading for Gullane.
Alex was looking out for him, and went to greet him as his car pulled up outside. I strolled out after her. ‘Hey, Thornie, how you doing?’ I asked, as we shook hands. He was sixty-eight, but his grip was still strong, a relic of his younger days as a steel worker, before moving up to management, and a reminder that he had spent most of his retirement on Lanark golf course. ‘Have you brought your clubs?’ I asked, rhetorically, I assumed, for he always did whether I’d told him to or not.
‘No,’ he replied, taking me completely by surprise.
‘What’s wrong?’ Something had to be.
He nodded towards his granddaughter, who was leading the way down the path. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
The day was warming up, and the early summer that often comes to Scotland in May was holding firm, so I decided that the garden was in play again. ‘Alex,’ I said, ‘you’re on coffee duty… proper coffee too, not instant.’
‘Aw, Dad.’
‘No arguments. It’s your turn. And don’t use the stuff in the packet either. I bought some beans in the deli; grind them and use them.’
Thornton came to help me as I fetched the chairs from the shed, and set them around the patio table. As he unfolded the third, I took a closer look at him; I couldn’t miss the dark circles under his eyes, a new addition to his weather-beaten features, and noticed for the first time that his breathing was laboured. ‘Tell me,’ I murmured, as we sat.
He looked at me, and smiled. ‘Did it ever occur to you that statistics are always about other people?’
It hadn’t, since I lived with crime stats, and targets, but I nodded nonetheless.
‘I thought that, until I heard someone on telly discussing road accident figures after my daughter had died, and I realised that she was one of them. In time, her mother fell ill, and became one too. Even after that, though… we’re bombarded with statistics, so many that we disregard them. For example, there are the figures about smoking, and what it does to people. Not to you yourself, though, always other people. I often used to wonder whether it was one particular cigarette that did the damage, and eventually I decided that it was, and that the odds against you pulling that one from the packet were still pretty long. When I go to the bookie’s, Bob, I always back favourites, yet I’m not a rich man, so I should know that they don’t always pay off.’
By that time, I knew what he was going to tell me, but I waited, I let him take his time. ‘Mine’s finally come up, son,’ he said. ‘I’ve drawn the fatal fag. I’ve been diagnosed with lung cancer.’
I looked up at the blue sky, expecting to see dark clouds moving across it, but it was clear and unblemished. ‘What are they going to do about it?’ I asked him. ‘Surgery?’
‘They say no. They say it’s a big tumour and that it’s already spread to my lymphatic system; when that happens, the knife isn’t an option, they say.’
‘Who’s saying this, exactly?’
‘It seems to be the unanimous view. I asked to see a surgeon as well as the physician who examined me first, but she told me the same thing; so did my GP. Instead, they want to give me chemotherapy, and maybe radiotherapy as well.’
‘Good,’ I exclaimed. ‘That means they’re being positive about your chances.’
‘That’s the buzz word, Bob,’ he murmured. ‘Positivity. They said that about Mina, even as they told me she was going to die within a week. But, now that I’m a statistic myself, I’m more interested in them, ye see. I really interrogated my GP, like you do with a baddie, but he stuck to the party line, then he started to go on about prolonging life. So I went to the library. You can get on this internet thing there. It’s got a lot of information, and the library people show you how to look for it. What it told me is that statistically… back to that word again… I’m a rank outsider, twenty to one against lasting even a couple of years. I’ve never backed a twenty-to-one shot in my life, son. And that’s with the treatment,’ he added, ‘which is no picnic, as I saw when Mina was ill. The chemotherapy makes you sick without other drugs to control it, and they don’t always work.’ He touched his silver head. ‘The radiation makes you sick too, and it makes your hair fall out. So what will I be if I have it? A baldy old man that can’t stop throwing up, and can’t get any further than the practice putting green on the golf course.’
‘You’ve got to try, though,’ I insisted.
‘Why? Jean, and Alexis, and you are all I’ve got to live for. But I don’t want any of you, least of all that wee one in there, to see me like that. I wouldn’t wish it on you, and I’ve got too much pride to want to look in the mirror and see a bloke I don’t recognise staring back at me. So I’m going to take the other option. They call it palliative care; that means giving me painkillers and such as and when I need them, and keeping me as comfortable as possible, while the disease runs its course.’
‘And how long will that be?’
‘That’s the beauty of it,’ he chuckled, an action that triggered a long, racking cough; it hurt me just to hear it, so God knows what it did to him. ‘It might be longer than if I had the treatment. They can’t say for sure that it won’t. However, when I pressed my own doctor, he guessed three months, maximum.’
I was struggling to take it in. Three days earlier, I’d looked, close to, at Marlon Watson’s broken body and accepted it as part of my daily routine, yet this, out of the blue, was overwhelming. ‘Jesus, Thornie,’ I murmured, feeling close to tears. ‘What are we going to tell Alex?’
‘Well, what are you going to tell me?’ she asked as she emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray, with a coffee pot, three mugs, a milk jug and a packet of the chocolate ginger biscuits that I thought I’d stashed out of her sight.
‘That Grandpa’s going away for a while,’ Thornton replied.
‘Away?’ she repeated, looking at him, full of curiosity as she held the tray for me to unload it. ‘Where?’
‘Places I’ve never been. I’ve decided to go on one last great journey.’
‘To where?’ she persisted.
‘That’s the beauty of magical mystery tours,’ Thornie had been a Beatles fan from their earliest days, ‘you
