Thicker Than Water

16

In England it’s not biology that’s destiny, it’s geography. London rules the roost and runs the show not because there’s something aristocratic and splendid in the Cockney gene pool but because the Thames flood plain provided the geographical trifecta of rich, fertile soil, a navigable river and a billion acres of forest to make ships out of. Spread your sails and sell your surplus to the world, then come home and throw together the mother of parliaments on your days off. Before long you’re not only ahead of the game, you’re making the bloody rules.

Taking the Richard Branson Express from Kings Cross up to Liverpool, you go out through a whole string of towns that were never in with a chance of becoming the capital of England because they could never get over the accidents of birth: inland, becalmed, bucolic, they surrendered their produce and then their souls to the great maw of London: went straight from farming communities to dormitory suburbs without a protest or a qualm. Now they’re trying to bottle nostalgia and sell it to the tourist trade, but it seems like fewer and fewer people are buying. Stands the church clock at ten to three? Well, that’s bloody British workmanship for you.

Then again, maybe I was just feeling jaundiced because the pain in my ribs wouldn’t go away even though I was popping ibuprofen like Smarties. And because the guy sitting just down the carriage from me was a werewolf.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean he was making a big thing about it. He wasn’t hairy and slavering and going for my throat. In fact, he was just a young guy in an FCUK tee-shirt with a spiked haircut that was black at the roots and blond at the tips. He didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, apart from the impressive upper-body musculature rising out of a dancer’s waist. But my death-sense spiked into jangling chords whenever he looked at me, which was often, and having to run for the train had left a faint film of sweat on his forehead, so he wasn’t a zombie. That meant he was either carrying a passenger of his own, like Rafi, or else he was a loup-garou. Odds favoured the latter.

He’d boarded the train at Bedford, along with a very striking young woman in salwar kameez who got out her laptop straight away and never once looked up from it, two gloomy, overweight guys in painters’ overalls, a half-dozen suit-and-tie grunts and a couple of amorous teenagers. He’d brought a four-pack of Tennent’s Extra by way of a picnic lunch, but once he realised he was sharing his space with an exorcist he forgot about the beer and fixed his state on me with feral fascination. I’ve never even got close to working out why this is, but the death-sense thing cuts both ways: we know when we’re in the presence of the risen, and they know when they’re looking at someone who can send them down again. Once Mister FCUK had reached that conclusion his gaze never left my face.

I’d have been very happy to pretend I’d seen nothing. He wasn’t hunting and neither was I. But something told me it wasn’t going to be that easy. The loup-garou held up one hand to me in what looked like a wave, all four fingers raised and spread. Then he popped a can of beer and drained it in a couple of swigs.

When it was empty he held up three fingers. Then he opened and polished off a second can, at a somewhat more relaxed pace. A countdown. First I’ll take my refreshment: then I’ll take you.

I pretended to take an interest in the scenery while the loup-garou worked on beer number three and I tried to make up my mind how to handle this unfortunate situation. I felt like shit: if anything, even stiffer and wearier than I had the night before. My dreams had been full of Kenny’s feeble, shrieking plea, and I’d drifted between sleep and waking with no clear sense of the boundaries.

Finally I got tired of calculating the odds.

I stood up, exaggerating my movements slightly like a mime artist doing ‘I’m going to take a little stroll now.’ I took my tin whistle out of the inside pocket of my coat, laid it down on the seat and walked away with my hands in my pockets.

I made a sortie to the dining car to buy a styrofoam container full of coffee-coloured beverage. Then instead of going back to my seat I loitered by the door in the little non-space between the carriages, leaning against the wall and looking out through the open window at the fields and trees strobing by. I had one hand on the window frame, the other holding my coffee cup.

After a few moments the door at my back hissed open. The ontologically challenged youth stepped through, the door sliding closed again behind him, and stood watching me, at the edge of my field of vision.

‘The whistle is your thing?’ the loup-garou snarled. His voice had a dry rasp to it, so loud that it sounded as though he had a skiffle board in his throat.

‘Yeah,’ I said, not looking round. ‘Music, generally, but the whistle’s the best medium I’ve found to work in. Key of D. I’m sure you understand.’

A half-second of silence, heavy with incomprehension.

‘Then why’d you leave it behind? You think I care two fucks about killing an unarmed man? Or was that your way of waving a little white flag?’

I gave him a look, keeping my expression more or less neutral. ‘Look,’ I said, mildly, ‘I’m off duty. Good news for both of us. Why don’t you buy yourself a few more beers, work on doing your liver a bit more damage, and at Lime Street we’ll wave each other goodbye? No harm, no foul. Sound good?’

The loup-garou stared at me. His lips peeled back from his teeth, which is never a good sign in a werewolf. I noticed that they consisted entirely of incisors.

‘You’re a toaster,’ he said, spitting out the word as if it was something unpleasant that he’d swallowed. I could have called that hate-speech, but exorcists coined the term themselves to describe their core business: ghost-toasting. Banishing the dead, with malice aforethought, whether they were threat or nuisance or just a drag on property values.

‘And you’re a fuckwit,’ I said, without heat. ‘Go and get drunk.’

‘I think I’d rather kill you,’ the loup-garou observed, leering. His face was flushed and his eyes, like animal eyes, had no whites. Part of that was just the animal and the human trying to reach a tense accommodation about what their shared body should look like, but I think he was substance-abusing too. I mean, besides the alcohol.

‘Have you done it before?’ I asked.

He laughed shortly — a single exhalation pushed out through his still-bared teeth. ‘Killed? Oh yeah.’

‘Taken on an exorcist,’ I said, with heavy emphasis. His face registered the word in a micro-momentary flicker of some emotion that I couldn’t quite pin down.

But he ignored the question, or at least fended it off by throwing one of his own. ‘You got any money?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ I pretended to take a sip of the coffee.

‘You pay me — a hundred, or a couple of hundred — maybe I’ll let you live.’

I sighed and shook my head. ‘You died young,’ I said, trying one last time. ‘The first time around, I mean. Probably because you got yourself into some stupid pissing contest like this one. Learn from your mistakes, eh? Let it lie in the long grass for once, and see if there’s another way besides the hard way.’

The loup-garou’s fingers were curved like claws now — and actual claws had slid into view at the tips of them. He took a step back, presumably because whatever animal his flesh had originally belonged to liked to go for the run-and-jump approach, and a train carriage barely gave him room for it.

I dumped the coffee in his face. I’d asked to have it scalding hot, and I’d made the girl at the counter in the dining car put it back in the microwave twice, until it was almost too hot to hold even through the styrofoam and the cardboard sleeve. This was why I’d only pantomimed drinking it earlier on: it was for offensive use only.

The loup-garou gave a gargling scream, ducking and covering reflexively even though it was too late. He must have been in agony, the near-boiling liquid blinding him and filling his exquisite senses with the roaring static of pain. I knew exactly how he felt, but it didn’t affect my game plan.

I let go of the door, which I’d already unlocked and was only holding closed with my free hand. As it swung open in the train’s slipstream, slamming against the flank-wall of the carriage, I kicked the loup-garou in the place where nothing male, whether living or undead or anywhere in between, likes to be kicked. Then I grabbed him by the shoulders, two-handed, and pitched him forward. A hooked foot in front of his made sure that he kept right on going, falling head over heels out into the rushing noise and the world we were leaving endlessly behind us.

It was over inside of five seconds. It had to be, because if I’d let him get those claws into play even once, this would have been my arterial swansong. Leaning out precariously I caught the window frame again and pulled the door closed, just as the connecting door to the carriage swung open and the Asian woman with the laptop poked her head out.

She stared at me in some surprise. ‘I heard a noise,’ she said, without much conviction.

I pointed to the door. ‘It wasn’t locked properly,’ I said. ‘It swung open, but I managed to get it closed again.’

She hesitated for a barely perceptible moment, perhaps noting my flushed face and trembling hands — or perhaps just seeing the spilled coffee on the floor. But she nodded and withdrew at last, if not satisfied then at least not wanting to make an issue of it. I waited a few moments, until my hammering heartbeat had returned almost to normal, and then went back to my seat.

The rest of the journey was without incident. I couldn’t shake off a sombre mood, though. I was thinking about kids: about Mark Seddon, and about Bic. Even about the cocky little bastard I’d just tangled with. I hadn’t picked the fight; and once I was in it, I’d won it in the only way I could think of. And he might even have survived, because loup-garous are as tough as weeds. If not, his spirit could find another animal host and start the make-over process all over again in its own sweet time.

I still felt like I’d just pulled a switchblade on a puppy dog. But then again, I hadn’t had the option of a rolled-up newspaper.

Pulling into Lime Street for the first time in so long gave me a peculiar kind of double vision.

Three years. Not so very long, really, if you count it in calendar terms: but in terms of what I’d lived through since, it was about two ice ages ago. The last time I’d walked out through those oversized doors and got the Mersey’s gusty, vinegary breath full in my face, it had been before Juliet. Before Rafi, even. Back when banishing the dead for fun and profit had seemed like a reasonable way of making a living.

Coming north had taken me a piddling two hundred miles closer to the Arctic circle, but the afternoon air had a slight chill in it all the same. A green double-decker in the livery of the MPTE rolled past me, and as I crossed the road I glimpsed first the tower of the Playhouse rising above Forster Square and then, off to the right, the heroic frontage of St George’s Hall. Amidst the welter of new roads and shitty poured-concrete frontages, they were like old friends standing on the fringes of a party where they didn’t know anybody.

I waited at the bus stop, out of sheer force of habit, for the number 93. I could have grabbed a cab, but I’d always gone in and out of town by bus. Neither of my parents had ever driven, and I hadn’t even taken lessons myself until I’d moved down to the Smoke.

I checked my itinerary off in my mind. I was looking for Anita, first and foremost: notwithstanding my own bad example, those born and bred in Liverpool 9 have a strong homing instinct, and this was my best guess as to where she would have come after life with Kenny lost its lustre. I was thinking that I’d shake down her brother Richard — Dick-Breath — and see if he knew where I could find her. If not, I’d get what I could by putting my questions to him instead.

I was also thinking of talking to some of the other Seddons if any of them had hung around in Walton. Kenny’s brothers Ronnie and Steven might know something about Kenny’s state of mind in recent weeks, and it was always possible he could have let something slip in a phone call or an e-mail.

Two women talking behind me in the queue disrupted my thoughts. After so long an absence, it was impossible not to tune in to the nasal poetry of Scouse.

‘He loves the bones of her, he does.’

‘Oh, aye. You’ve only got to look, haven’t you?’

‘But if he thinks she’s getting that money down the bingo, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.’

‘She’s a dirty mare.’

‘She’s a hoo-er, is what she is.’

That was how my mother always pronounced the word. Not whore: hoo-er. Two syllables, drawn out with censorious relish.

Concentrate on business.

Anita.

Kenny.

And one other outstanding item, which had to come first.

The bus took me out of town along St Anne’s Street, and then up through the asphalt and concrete runway which is all that remains of Scotland Road. As you drive out from the centre, Liverpool opens itelf up to you in concentric bands of squalor and almost-affluence — although for real affluence you had to swing all the way east to Woolton, and that was nowhere near my destination.

I got off two stops past where I should have done, at the Queen’s Drive flyover. Queen’s Drive is the Liverpool ring road, although Liverpool being a crescent-shaped city jammed in against the banks of the Mersey it’s really only half a ring. When John Brodie started building it in 1903, Walton was a village. By the time he downed tools and signed off on the job two and a half decades later, it had become a borough of the city, but there were streets behind St Mary’s Church that still kept that parochial charm. Other parts, particularly the streets around Walton Hospital, underwent a further metamorphosis into a slum, but as kids we had no standard of comparison. For all we knew, the queen had bedbugs too.

The hospital stands just outside of Queen’s Drive’s tight embrace, at the northern end of Breeze Hill. But when I got off the bus I turned the other way, past the church and on down County Road. In the mid-1980s the city council had finally decided to pull the beam out of its eye and had torn down the shithole where I’d been born, relocating most of the inhabitants either to a new development on the Walton Triangle or to council houses a couple of miles further in towards the centre.

A couple of miles. Tops. But geography is destiny in Liverpool, too, and for some reason the distances are strangely compressed. A hundred yards can be decisive in determining who you are, and what you are.

For my dad, who’d already lost his daughter and his marriage, moving out of Walton into Everton Valley was the third strike: the one that finally took him out of the game. It meant leaving behind an ecosystem as complex and fragile and non-portable as a coral reef: an ecosystem where kids tended to end up living in houses on the same street as their parents, or the next street over, where you could call on twenty or thirty cousins within a half-mile radius, and where every family had inherited alliances and feuds stretching back at least as far as the First World War.

Cut loose from that support mechanism, John Castor succumbed to colonic cancer and died within the space of a year. It was as though he’d made his mind up to it and saw no point in hanging about.

I was travelling backwards in time as I walked: County Road was my bathysphere. From my father’s death, I descended a decade or so to my parents’ break-up. Probably that would have happened a lot sooner, too, if they’d been living in Everton back then. Probably conservatism is a kind of social cement. The kind of conservatism that comes without a capital letter, I mean: we all know what the other kind is. At any rate, my mother’s infidelities and my dad’s heroic binge drinking might have made their marriage shake like a Tokyo skyscraper, but it took actually walking in on Mum in flagrante to make Dad finally call time, and even then it was all nuance. You find your wife naked with another man, you beat him senseless and throw him through the bedroom window onto the shed, that’s understood. But the ‘don’t darken my door’ routine was probably for form’s sake. Mum just chose to take it literally this time.

My life, and Matt’s life, became a strange and fractured thing after that. Mum went away, we lived with Dad. Matt went away, and I still lived with Dad but it was more like two guys just sharing rooms, seeing each other occasionally and finding they had less and less to say to each other when they did. Then Mum came back, which raised the possibility of us all being a proper family again, but she moved in with her lover, Terry Lackland, instead and it just meant that Dad’s bad temper got an additional scary edge to it, and that there was one more place where I didn’t really feel at home.

Now Dad was dead, and Terry was dead, and none of it meant anything any more. Except that the impassable terrain was still there between us shell-shocked survivors. The débris. I was walking on it now.

Mum’s house was ex-council, now owned by a private landlord called the Inner City Partnership. Mentioning their name was a quick way to elicit a spectacular torrent of abuse from her, but there was no denying that this was a step — if not a whole damn staircase — up from Arthur Street. The door wasn’t covered by a slab of particle board, for one thing. And it had a bell.

I rang, and silence answered. After a while, I rang again.

Mum answered on the fourth ring, just as I was giving up. She opened the door and stared at me for a moment or two, blank-faced and bleary-eyed, before recognition kicked in.

It was hard for me, too. In my mind, Barbie Castor always has a heroic, larger-than-life stature, as one of those Walton women of whom it was said, with approval and respect, ‘she fights like a man’. As a kid I used to look up to her in a literal and physical sense too, but her generous build and rugged independence made her the sort of person who it was easy to hide behind, easy to shelter in and rely on. Even her walking out on us hadn’t tarnished that image of her: if anything it had helped, because just when I was hitting my iconoclastic teens she wasn’t around any more to be measured against reality and found wanting. Consequently, when I thought of her at all, I saw her from the ten-year-old Felix’s perspective, which meant looking up from close to ground level.

Mum was still big, but — like one of those packages sold by weight, not volume — her contents had shifted in transit between the past and the present. Her bulk had a softer edge to it now, and her short-sleeved top showed me that some of the definition had gone from her finely muscled upper arms. It had gone from her face, too, her eyes passing over me once and then twice rather than pinning me to the wall until she was good and done with me.

‘Felix,’ she said, with a rising inflection, and then again, with slightly more conviction, ‘Felix!’ She took me in her arms, briefly but with feeling.

‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. Anything was going to sound banal under the circumstances, so I settled for, ‘How’s it going?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. Come on in.’

She led the way into the living room, which in true Walton style opened directly off the street with nothing in the way of a porch or hall. It was a room that exemplified my mother’s virtues: four-square, clean, and without a book or an ornament to be seen, apart from her much-loved print of Edward John Poynter’s Faithful Unto Death — which shows a Roman soldier remaining at his post, nervous but steadfast, as the ashes of Vesuvius rain down around him. The picture has taken on a darker and darker yellow-brown cast over the years, caused by nicotine deposits staining the glass despite regular and vigorous polishing.

There was a single armchair and a narrow two-seater sofa, both in gaudily patterned fabrics, a portable TV about the size of a matchbox with an indoor aerial sitting on top of it, and a coffee table much marked with the whitened rings left by a thousand cups of hot tea — which brought to mind, rather too vividly, the young loup-garou on the train. There were no teacups on it now, though: just two bottles of Worthington’s pale ale, one empty and one half-full, and a glass with beer froth around the rim.

‘Bit early in the day, Mum,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

‘Away, away with rum,’ my mother said, quoting Mike Harding’s mock-temperance song: that was always her answer, whenever anyone commented on her drinking. She’s not an alcoholic, not by her own definition: she never lets herself get drunker than the business of the day requires. ‘You’ll be sticking to tea, then, will you, love?’ she added, with a meaningful roll of her eyes.

‘I will for now,’ I said, hedging my bets.

She went through into the kitchen, and I stayed behind in the living room. Channelling Sherlock Holmes, I looked around for fag ends. But if Mum had started smoking again, she wouldn’t need anything as formal as an actual ashtray, and in any case I would have noticed as soon as I walked into the room: because it would have had that smell — somewhere between despair and dysentery — that smoking rooms in old hotels have.

Lots of empty beer bottles on the mantelpiece, though. Putting them there was an atavistic impulse: when I was growing up they’d served the same function as clothes pegs, holding Matt’s and my smalls in place while they dried in the warm air coming up from the fire. Now the fire was a log-effect gas burner, and the bottles just looked like old soldiers who know that the ceasefire has sounded and are waiting for the order to stand down.

Mum came back into the room, carrying a mug of milky tea in which a teabag still floated. She’d never really been into the idea that we eat first with our eyes. She handed it to me, then kissed me on the cheek, putting her hands on my shoulders and squeezing tight.

I cast around for something to say, but found nothing. I wasn’t even sure if she knew, until she buried her face in my shoulder and let out a single, throat-tearing sob. Mum never cried: not actual tears. Maybe when Matt got his ordination, but tears of pride are different. The world had never wrung one millilitre of tribute out of her in any other way; and even now, her eyes were dry as she raised them to stare into mine. Hollow, troubled, red-rimmed, but dry.

‘If it had been you, Felix, I would have understood.’

‘Cheers, Mum,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean that I wouldn’t have cared, love. But Matty’s world is different from yours. It always was.’ She shook her head, giving it up. ‘I just don’t see how this could have happened,’ she said mournfully.

‘He didn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I can tell you that much.’

Mum flared up, but not against me: against the world that was misjudging her son. ‘I bloody well know that!’ she said. ‘Didn’t I raise him? Isn’t he mine? Of course he didn’t bloody do it!’

‘Well, okay then,’ I said. ‘Just making the point, that’s all.’

Mum sat down heavily in the armchair, picked up her glass and took a deep swig of beer, then refilled the glass with what was left in the bottle. I took the sofa, which meant I had to sit on the edge of a cushion, balanced on a single buttock, in order to face her. I put the mug of tea down on the table’s bare wood, adding another ring to the many already there. Maybe you could use them to tell its age.

Mum was looking at me with a solemn, musing expression, the heat of her anger gone as quickly as it had come. ‘Three years,’ she said, softly. ‘Three years, Fix.’

‘I did call,’ I countered, but it was a feeble defence. The last time had been more than a year before, to ask her how she was doing when Matt had told me she was recovering from a chest infection. It had turned out to be low-grade pneumonia, and I’d still found reasons not to come up and visit. Given the distances involved, there was no defence. From London to Liverpool is three hours or so with good traffic: in America people drive further than that to pick up a carton of milk.

So I brought her up to speed on my life, going light on the succubi, zombies and were-beasts and heavy on my recent wanderings after Pen kicked me out of her house. I know my audience, you see: Mum favours Matt because he went to God and I went to the devil. So when she asked me if I was seeing anyone, I ducked the whole story of my infatuation with Juliet, and how a demon from Hell had ditched me for a Sapphic fling with a church warden. ‘I’ve been seeing a nurse,’ I told her, which was unassailable truth and could be said without blushing.

All of this was really just a way of not talking about Matt, and when I ran out of anecdotes that were fit to print, I found I still wasn’t ready to go there.

‘You getting out much?’ I asked, throwing the ball of procrastination into her court.

Mum shook her head emphatically. ‘What for, Fix? I’ve got everything I need here in this room. I watch the telly, listen to the radio. Put a bet on, when it’s the flat season. You know me and my accumulators. Three cross doubles . . .’ ‘. . . And a treble,’ I finished. ‘The mini-Yankee. Yeah, I remember. Still listening to Sing Something Simple?’

‘It’s not on any more,’ she said. ‘But there’s still Billy Butler on a Saturday.’

Billy Butler, and his Sony bronze award-winning show, Hold Your Plums. It used to have Matt and me giggling our heads off when we were kids. Only Scousers could come up with a radio quiz based on a fruit machine, with a robotic voice telling you what was showing on each reel.

‘Billy Butler,’ I said. ‘Christ.’ It was the only comment that seemed to fit.

‘Oh aye,’ Mum agreed. ‘I never change, me. I’ve had enough changes in my life, Fix. I’m happy with what I’ve got, these days.’

What you’ve got is nothing, Mum, I thought but didn’t say. Everyone you used to know is dead or somewhere else. And you’re stuck here in Walton like a fly caught in amber. Although pale ale doesn’t quite have that golden-brown lustre to it. It’s more the colour of piss.

‘Ever see anyone from Arthur Street?’ I asked.

This time Mum didn’t answer. She looked at me thoughtfully, waiting for more. ‘Anyone from the old days, I mean,’ I clarified.

Still nothing. She took another long swig from her glass.

‘I know a lot of people moved to the Triangle,’ I went on. ‘After they knocked down–’

‘What are you here for, Fix?’ Mum asked, putting down her empty glass. ‘Really?’

‘You mean besides seeing you?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

‘It’s about Matt,’ I said, bluntly. ‘You know who it is he’s meant to have attacked?’

‘Kenny Seddon.’

‘So I was thinking I’d shake the tree a bit. Talk to some people who might know more than I do about what Kenny was up to before–’

‘Before someone sliced him up like a bacon joint.’

‘Well, essentially. Yeah.’

Mum nodded, straight-faced. ‘Go on, then. Who’s on your list?’

‘Anita and Richie Yeats,’ I said. ‘And Kenny’s brothers, Ronnie and Steve. Do you have any idea where they ended up?’

‘The Yeatses are over in Bootle now,’ Mum said, counting them off on her fingers. ‘That’s Eddie and Rita Yeats, I mean — Rita Brydon as was. I haven’t seen Anita in donkey’s years. Richie was living with them, or so Ernie Hampson said, but I heard they gave him down the banks and showed him the door.’

Her expression told me that something momentous was being left unsaid. ‘Why was that, then?’ I asked. ‘Gave him down the banks for what?’

Mum pursed her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know. A grown man, and he’s never done a day’s bloody work in his life. He’s a waster, Fix, and there’s nothing down for him. Some people are never going to do any good for themselves if you give them a hundred years. And he’s — you know . . .’ Mum made the limp-wrist gesture.

‘He’s gay?’ I said blankly.

Mum pursed her lips and nodded.

‘You’re saying they kicked him out because he’s gay?’

Mum stood her ground. ‘Well, you don’t want your son bringing strange men into the house, do you?’ she demanded. ‘Some of these people–’

‘Thanks for the tip, Mum,’ I said, cutting her off. And thinking of Juliet I added, ‘At least he didn’t go outside his own species.’

I think the homophobia must be a generational thing: it’s certainly not class or geography, because you can meet the same bullshit in Hampstead just as easily. I remembered now that Richie had made some non-standard life choices even as a kid — he was the only boy in my circle of acquaintances with a skipping rope — but I’d never read anything into that. Maybe someone else had, though: maybe the nickname Dick-Breath was more than just a whimsical jeu de mots.

‘Now Ronnie Seddon –’ another finger went down ‘he was selling drugs at the Palm Tree, until he tried to sell them to a couple of plain-clothes coppers, so that was the end of him. He got three years in Walton. Mind you, there’s more drugs in there than there is anywhere else, from what I hear, so he’s probably happy. Teresa Size’s lad, Philip, was saying they smuggle them in over the wall from the cemetery on Hornby Road. They use catapults, he said. Just tie Jiffy bags full of heroin to old batteries and shoot them in with catapults.’

Mum recounted this with relish. Her favourite reading matter had always been true crime, although she preferred a good murder to any amount of aggravated robbery.

‘Then there’s Steven Seddon,’ she said. ‘He was at the docks for a while, back when they still had a few ships coming in every now and then. But he gave that up in the end and went to some night-school thing. He’s at a law office in the Cunard, now, and he wears a suit. I’ve seen him waiting for the bus up at the broo, looking like Lord Muck. I wouldn’t trust him with a bloody paper clip.’

‘Would any of them still drink at the Breeze?’ I asked.

Mum made a sour face. ‘Richie might, though it’s a bloody mystery to me why anyone would go back to that place. Harold Keighley is the most miserable bastard of a landlord I’ve ever met, God forgive my language. He opens the doors when he puts the towel up, so the place gets as cold as a fridge.’

The description made me grin: I remembered those winter nights when the determination to finish your last drink clashed with the onset of hypothermia. ‘Does he still do that, then?’ I asked.

‘It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots, Fix,’ she said sententiously. ‘And Keighley doesn’t even change his bloody underwear more than twice a year.’

Mum got up and went into the kitchen again, coming back with two bottles of pale this time. She opened both with a kitchen tin opener — one of the old kind that have two hooked blades, one large and one small, and look like exotic torture implements. She handed a bottle to me, and I took it because I knew if I refused she’d drink them both herself.

We drank, and reminisced, as evening fell outside. At half past seven there was a pause while Mum watched Coronation Street and I made a foray to the off-licence at the top of the street. Then we drank and reminisced some more.

‘Mum,’ I said, when I judged that she was mellow enough to roll with the impact, ‘Matt left home around the same time I did, didn’t he?’

Mum nodded. ‘Same year,’ she confirmed. ‘His first parish was in Birmingham. Our Lady of Zion. You went to Oxford in September, and Matty left in December. He gave his first sermon two weeks before Christmas. You remember? We all came up for it.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. But he was ordained in April. So what was he doing in between times?’

Mum gave me a look that was a couple of centuries too ripe to be merely old-fashioned. ‘He was learning to be a priest,’ she said. ‘He’d been ordained, aye, so he wasn’t a deacon any more, but it isn’t like an assembly line, Fix. They had all sorts of things he had to do first. Seminars, he called them. A seminar here and a seminar there. All up and down the country, he was, and living out of a suitcase. Except it wasn’t a suitcase, it was just a big shapeless bag with two handles that he got from the Army and Navy. Six feet long.’ She illustrated with her hands. ‘He looked like he was carrying a bloody bazooka, honest to God. If it was nowadays, someone would think he was a terrorist and shoot him.’

That brought her too close to the painful subject of Matt’s current situation, so she shied away from it again. ‘He was everywhere,’ she concluded. ‘Running around like a blue-arsed fly.’

‘But he was still living at the seminary? Over in Skem?’

‘In Upholland? No, after that big — you know, passing-out parade thing, where the bishop put the oil on him, and gave him his Jezebel — they needed his room for someone else. He stayed there until the autumn, when they had the new lads in, then he came back here.’

‘Jezebel’ was Mum’s mispronunciation of chasuble, the sleeveless robe that a priest wears on top of all his other vestments when he does the business at Mass. I was never sure whether it was a joke or an actual mistake: after all, her mangled renderings of song lyrics, including turning Fun Boy Three’s ‘Our Lips are Sealed’ into ‘Olives to See You’, were legendary.

But what made my ears prick up was the revelation that Matt had come back home in between the seminary and his first ministry. I was already off out in the world by that time, screwing up my degree course, and I don’t think I came home once in the first two terms.

‘Back to Walton?’ I asked, making sure I was getting this straight.

‘Back to this house, Fix. Where else was he going to go?’

I nodded, conceding the point. ‘So he was around for three months,’ I said. ‘Back in circulation. Looking up old friends.’

Mum sniffed. ‘I don’t know about that. He saw some of them, aye, but he wasn’t going to walk in the Breeze and stand at the bar with them, was he? It’s not that kind of life, when you’re a man of the cloth. You’ve got to stand aloof.’

The conversation veered off in other directions, by virtue of some unspoken agreement that passed between us. Nostalgia and beer are a potent combination in themselves; and when Mum got the photo album out and cracked it open in the middle we had the emotional perfect storm. There we all were: Matt and me in short trousers, Dad all tanned and handsome — ‘a dark horse’, my grandma used to call him, with mingled disapproval and admiration — and Mum looking like a million dollars.

‘Where did it go?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘We just–’ I couldn’t find a word for it, so I pantomimed it instead — holding my hand in front of my face with the fingers pursed together, then opening it wide. ‘Where did that come from? One minute we’re a family, the next we’re . . . in the wind.’

Mum didn’t answer. She just turned a few pages in the book back and folded it open at a page we hadn’t seen yet. There were three photos on the page: the first, Mum holding a baby, the baby all swathed in pink blankets and pink bonnet and pink everything; the second, the three Castor siblings in school uniforms, wearing the pained grimaces children always put on when they’re told to smile; and the third, Katie by herself, aged four, smiling a smile that was altogether more believable — a smile with secret, solemn little-kid thoughts behind it.

I stared at the photos, suddenly sober despite the seven or eight beers I’d downed.

‘It took a while,’ Mum said, her tone soft. ‘It didn’t happen all at once.’