December (15 page)

      
Lights were blinking on in the village. It looked like a much
bigger place at night; you could see all the lights from up here, the pub and
the church hall and that.

      
Previously there'd been trees, mostly saplings and half-grown
conifers planted by the developers, this specialist firm that built the house
around the shell of a ruined barn in '92. In a couple of years the new trees
would have been blocking the village lights, giving Tom and Shelley more
privacy.

      
Except Tom didn't want that. Privacy, sure; this had to be important,
he never came
out
. But he couldn't be
shut in by nature, needed to see the lights at night.

      
Also, for some reason, he didn't like big trees.

      
So the trees had gone, the young ones dug up and given away,
the others chopped, a big fence put in. Shelley hadn't been happy about all
this, and some local conservation type also kicked up, raising, at the same
time, the issue of Weasel's mobile home. To cool the protests, they'd agreed to
conceal the caravan with bushes and larch-lap, but they were still getting hostile
looks from the green-anorak brigade.

      
Tom didn't care. He never had to see any of them, on account
of never going out. He'd found his place and he wasn't moving.

      
The Weasel saw Tom's hulking shadow blocking out the kitchen
light, waving its arms about like King Kong.

      
He remembered standing on this very spot about a year ago when
the house was only half-built, watching the dowsers, two serious geezers gliding
around the site with their forked twigs and their, whatdoyoucallems, on strings
- pendulums. Seeing if it was safe for Tom to live here, with no ancient vibes
and stuff.

      
Poor paranoid bastard.

'No bleeding way,' Tom
Storey said. 'And this, darlin'... this is my last word. OK?'

      
She didn't reply. Tom's tone turned threatening.
'I said ... is that
OK?' Spittle at the corner
of his mouth.

      
He looked away, shut his lips tight, clearly regretting it. He
was like a big, stupid dog, growled at you then wagged his tail apologetically.

      
She watched him glaring over her shoulder out of the wide
kitchen window at the lights in the village houses which might have been a hundred
miles away across what she always thought of as his moat. It was after five and
going rapidly dark. Shelley knew she was going to hate the long nights.

      
Tom said, more quietly, 'Toffee-nosed gits in monkey suits?' He
sniffed hard. '
You
go.'

      
'Honey ...' Shelley sighed, wiping her hands on her butcher's
apron. 'I think - I really think you're living in the past. Dinner parties are
- I mean, nobody's going to turn a hair
if
you show up as you are now. Obviously, I'd
prefer you in a suit, you know? Just for once?'

      
'Oh.' Tom faced her now, unsteadily, across the heavy pine
kitchen table. 'You would prefer me in a
suit
.'
His big hands flat on the tabletop, but quivering. 'I ain't
got
a bleeding suit, have I? In fact, I
ain't never ...'

      
'I'll buy you one,' Shelley, steeling herself for the
inevitable response, took a tin from the Welsh dresser, began spooning out the decaff.

      
'Like fuck you will!'

      
'Tom.' Shelley swallowed. 'It's not been a wonderful year, all
right? If things don't show a clear improvement by the end of January,
Cirencester's got to go, and it's a good shop, potentially.'

      
'So you close it down. How you gonna sell it? Nuffink moving,
nowhere.'

      
'No, look ... what I'm saying is, Tom, I need this. It's on a
plate. I'll probably never get a chance like this again. I need Broadbank. He
owns seventeen supermarkets and he's expanding. He's a gift.'

      
'So go, doll, just
go
.
What's your problem?

      
You
are my problem,
she wanted to scream at him. You have been my problem for much of my adult
life. She turned away, but could still see him reflected in the shiny hotplate
covers on the Aga, his yellow-white hair sprouting in harsh tufts and his mouth
vanishing into his moustache. The face was distended by a big scratch he'd once
made with a saucepan, in anger.

      
He tried to smash Agas with stainless steel saucepans. He'd
never laid a finger on her. He was forty-seven years old. He was a child.

      
Shelley said calmly, 'He rang again, Tom. He suggested
Tuesday. He said he was particularly looking forward to seeing
you
. He said a friend of his was coming
who's ...' Oh God ' …who's a long-standing fan of yours.'

      
'Oh well,' Tom said. 'That's different, innit?' She saw the
table starting to rock under the pressure of his great hands. 'You know how I
love to meet my old fans. Autograph an album or two. Talk about the classic
gigs, how I used to know the actual Lee Gibson.'

      
'Tom, please ...'

      
'No more congenial way to spend an evening, sweetheart.
Analyse the techniques of Clapton and Knopfler, discuss the merits of the Telecaster
against the Les Paul. Explain in detail why I ain't done a gig in ten years.
Oh, what jolly fun, what …'

      
'Stop it!'

      
'Anyway.' Tom's mouth smiled. 'Let me make it simple for you.
What you do is, you ring him back, tonight, and you say, Mr Broadarse, you say,
my husband has asked me to convey best wishes to you and his express desire for
you to go and stuff yourself right up …'
      
'You f—' Shelley slammed the coffee
tin on the dresser. Bit her lip, stared at the floor. 'Oaf.'

      
Tom was swaying, fish-eyed. Shelley said, 'You know what this
is
, don't you? This is clinical
agoraphobia. You're a very sick man, Tom, you know that?'
      
'You just don't...'

      
'Understand. I know, I know. It's all you ever say.'

      
She turned away from him. In the Aga's covers, she saw him start
to shake and splutter, a big vein burrowing under his forehead like a
sand-worm.

      
'And one day,' she said softly into the stove, 'you will
have
to leave.'

      
'The men in white coats? That what you're saying? Gonna have
me committed, are we?'

      
Tom,' she said through clenched teeth. 'You
are ill.'

      
'Piss off. Day after day I get this shit. Night after bleeding
night.' He was trembling badly; sometimes she wondered if there
was
something seriously, physically
wrong coming on. Parkinson's or something.

      
'Tom ...'

      
'Shut it! I don't have to take this ... bleeding sixth-form
psychology. You don't know nuffink. You ain't been frew
nuffink.'

      
Ain't been frew nuffink. How many thousand times had he thrown
this at her? Never spelling it out. Never saying,
you can't see the things I can see
. Certainly never itemising the
things he could see and she couldn't.

      
'No.' Shelley crushed three fingers of her left hand in her
tight fist. 'You don't have to take it, this is true. And neither do
I …'

      
She looked up. Tom had gone quiet.

      
Shelley saw that his daughter was watching them solemnly from
the doorway.
      
'Dad,' Vanessa said. 'Weasel's
here.'

      
'Just what we needed,' Shelley said. 'Get rid of him.'

      
Through the kitchen window she saw him at the door, a sinewy little
man with a smile which somebody, Dave Reilly probably, used to compare to a
vandalised cemetery. Except at weekends or when invited, Weasel never came up
to the house after work. He sat in his caravan and played music and probably smoked
dope; it was an understanding and a good one.

      
So this was not Weasel's time, and he knew it, but here he
was, leering grotesquely through the window, an LP record under his arm.

      
The anger fell away, and Shelley - big, busty, bustling Shelley
Love - felt suddenly rather fearful.

Vanessa. ..

      
The kid opened the door for Weasel, gave him a grin, not quite
so wide as usual.

      
Triffic little girl, nearly fourteen years old now. Beautiful
kid. Not in the usual sense, but because of what she was.

      
This
was the reason
Shelley stayed with Tom, despite all his shit. Vanessa was everything to
Shelley.

      
Everything but her own child.

      
'How are ya, Princess?'

      
'All right, thank you, Weasel.' Vanessa was wearing black
jeans and a big white sweater with a black cat motif, her brown hair was cut
short and curly and she wore plastic rainbow hoop earrings that matched her big
glasses.

      
'Dad and Shelley have had another row,' Vanessa said solemnly.

      
The Weasel smiled. These kids, their minds were less subtle.
Operated on less wavelengths, not the same range, something like that. Anything
bothering them, they came right out with it, hearts on their sleeves.

      
'Come in, then. Weasel,' she said impatiently.

      
The Weasel was as careful about Vanessa as Tom was, both of
them blaming themselves. Obviously the big crash would never have happened if
Tom hadn't been left without his personal roadie that night. If Weasel hadn't
been in hospital with hepatitis; (occupational hazard). And if ...
      
'Fanks, Princess.'

      
... What the hell; she was all right, was Vanessa. Everybody
liked her; how many people could say that?

      
He followed her inside and stood outside the kitchen door
while she went in. 'Tell your old man,' he said.

      
When the doctors told Tom that the baby they'd pulled out of
Debs before she died was Down's Syndrome, the big guy had gone on this six-day
bender, hoping to drown himself. The chick in Publicity at Epidemic Records had
pulled him out and into a private clinic Max Goff paid for - guilt money, Max feeling
responsible too, poor dead megalomaniac.

      
Everybody felt responsible for Vanessa; the kid would've grown
up some kind of icon in a glass case, but for the chick in Publicity, who threw
in some love on top of
 
everybody else's
money. The chick was
called
Love,
very apt.

      
Had a cool head, too, over those enormous bristols, enough
common sense to unscramble Tom's finances and nail Epidemic to the wall for
compensation. And then - having negotiated herself out of a job and realising Tom
wasn't going to be earning rock star's money for a good long time, if ever
again - she'd invested the loot in a health food shop in Cheltenham, where she was
born, and they'd lived over the shop for a while and tried not to look back.
      
The Weasel, meanwhile, coming out
of hospital to find himself skint and jobless, had drifted back into what he'd
been doing before, which, basically, amounted to rescuing wealthy overprivileged
people from the soul-destroying consequences of their own acquisitiveness - this
was how Dave Reilly had described it when they were pissed up one night, the Weasel,
delighted, getting him to write it down.
      
But the Old Bill was still calling
it burglary. When he was finally nicked, after a good run, around the end of
'87, he was looking at eighteen months.

      
Served twelve. Time for a new start. When they let him out of
Wandsworth, he'd figured his best bet would be a small shop, nothing too
ambitious.

      
So he's jemmying away round the back of a little tobacconist's
when the alarm goes off, right? Suddenly, a great light is shining down on him
- this super-powerful wall-mounted security spot. But it has the same effect as
if this was the Damascus bypass ... hey, man, what the fuck am I
doing
here?

      
And the Weasel, a changed man, is off on his toes,
empty-handed, never to offend from that day to this, instead to embark on a
search for Tom Storey that has - as Dave Reilly puts it - the epic quality of
Lassie's journey home.