Passing Time (9 page)

Next to him, Jake fidgeted on his feet and gave a loud sigh, his fifth in as many minutes.

“If you don’t want to be here,” Louis said with a trace of irritability, “no one’s forcing you to stay.”

“I said I’d come, didn’t I?” Jake scowled, pulling at the tie he said he’d borrowed from his father. This was how things were between them now. Jake still kept his bed warm at night, but a space had opened up down the center of the mattress neither of them dared breach.

“I’m sorry,” Jake said after an awkward silence. “I do want to be here. I want to support you.” He smiled a tight, unnatural smile. They’d barely spoken about what had happened between them the night his mother had died. Louis wasn’t ready to crush the remnants of their relationship. He was pretty sure Jake wasn’t either, despite the sourness of his recent mood, confirmed a moment later when a hand brushed against his. The gesture alone eased the atmosphere between them, and their silence grew marginally more bearable.

A few minutes later a taxi rolled up at the crematorium doors, and an elderly woman clambered out of the front seat, aided substantially by a harassed cabbie and a three-legged metal stick.

“You needn’t think you’re getting a tip,” she called after the driver, who ducked quickly back behind the wheel. “Would’ve got here quicker in the bloody hearse.”

The man lowered the window, stuck his head out, and yelled something vaguely eastern European before taking off at a speed more suited to a Grand Prix circuit.

The old woman probed the ground with her stick as if checking the tarmac was safe before stopping just shy of Louis’s feet. “You. You’re Vivian’s son,” she said, her eyes like marbles behind thick bifocals.

“Uh, yes.” He experienced the nagging suspicion he knew her from somewhere. “I’m Louis. This is Jake.”

“Martha Banks. I babysat you as a nipper.”

Mrs. Banks? The crazy cat lady from next door?

“You got your father’s eyes,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Wasn’t a compliment. Saw the notice in the paper.” Her gazed settled over his shoulder, and he turned as the doors fanned open. Mourners from the previous service poured out. “Didn’t you think of coming to me directly? Would’ve liked to be told.”

Louis hadn’t set foot in Albert Terrace since the day he’d left and had no real desire to see the street again. How was he to know Mrs. Banks still lived in the same house? How was he to know she was still alive? A notice in the obits was the best way of inform people about his mother. Was this ancient woman the only person who cared enough to turn up?

“Vi said you’d turned into one of them what’s-a-names. Fairies.”

“My mother told you I was gay?” His raised voice caused a few of the mourners to glance in his direction.

“Yep. Can’t say as you look like one.” She gave a mucus-rattling sniff and turned her squint on Jake. “He does.”

Jake’s mouth dropped open. Louis quickly took his arm. “Uh, we’re just friends,” he said.

Jake gave Louis a harsh glare and pulled his arm back. “Thanks, Louis. Thanks a bunch.” He pushed through the doors, leaving Louis to smile politely at his mother’s curious neighbor.

The service itself was a grim affair made worse by the fact that only the three mourners were present, and one of those under sufferance. Not much of a turnout for a sixty-year-old woman who’d once coveted the title of life and soul of every drinking establishment in town. No hymns or readings or flowers. Louis had made a sizable credit-card donation to the stroke unit at the hospital.

Once the coffin had passed through the curtains, Louis couldn’t wait to get out. He felt nothing for the woman who used to be his mother. He’d felt nothing all week, except cheated out of forgiving her and having her forgive him.

“I’ll tag along with you girls.” Mrs. Banks took Louis’s arm as he and Jake stood to leave.

“We’re not girls,” Jake muttered.

“That hair of yours says girl to me, laddo.” She forged forward with her stick. “Now what about this wake?”

“I decided against one,” Louis said as they emerged into the warm afternoon air.

She stopped in her tracks. “What do you mean, no wake? What kind of funeral is this?”

“The kind where the guy making the arrangements barely knew the deceased.”

Mrs. Banks eyed him for a while. Her voice softened. “You can take me for a port and lemon. Large one mind. This one yours?” She indicated with her stick toward a sleek gray Jag.

“No. Ours is on the far side of the car park.”

“What’s it doing all the way over there? You can’t expect my legs to carry me. Unless you’re volunteering to do the honors?” She glared at Jake, and Jake glared right back.

“Go and get the car,” Louis told him, half expecting to be snapped at again. Jake simply stuck out his jaw, spun on the balls of his feet, and huffed away.

“You should’ve come to see her,” Mrs. Banks said, staring after Jake’s retreating back.

Louis sighed. Now was not a good time to try to defend himself. “She didn’t want to know me. I wrote her several times over the years. I even sent her photos, but I—”

“Seen ’em,” she said with a sage nod.

Louis frowned. “My mother showed you photographs of me? Are you sure?”

“Many a time.” She sounded sure enough. “You and your special friend abroad. Not the laddo.” She gestured in Jake’s general direction with her stick. “You get around, don’t you, sonny?”

Did she mean get around as in travel? Or did she mean with men? She’d be right on the first count. Maybe right on the second, back in the day when Carter and he would share their bed with anyone who caught their eye. Or more precisely Carter’s eye.

“Should’ve been a wake,” she said. “Thought you people liked to party.”

“I’m afraid I’m not the partying kind,” Louis said, his mind still focused on the possibility his mother had actually read his letters and kept his photo. “I’m not much like my mother.”

Mrs. Banks gave him the benefit of an extra-harsh stare. “Your mother hadn’t taken a drink in twenty years.”

Louis waited for this new information sink in. “You mean she quit?”

“The same day you abandoned her.”

“I didn’t abandon her.” Louis frowned. “You know what she was like. The way she was.” He paused, his breath trapped in his chest. “I needed a parent, and she was never that to me.”

The old woman said nothing but simply watched Louis try to conceal his grief a moment before speaking up again. “Forget the port. You take me home.” She patted his hand. “Got something for you there.”

Before he could ask what exactly it was she had for him, Jake pulled up so close Louis had to shuffle back to avoid the tires.

“This is your car?” Mrs. Banks squinted at the small, buglike vehicle with a disdainful curl of her fleshy lips.

“Jake’s.” Louis opened the passenger door for her.

“Figures.”

With Louis’s help she eased herself inside. Louis sat in the back with her stick digging into his thigh while Mrs. Banks barked directions at Jake. Louis wondered how much this woman was to be believed. She seemed sincere enough, if rather blunt. Why hadn’t his mother answered his letter or his calls? He’d done everything over the years except fly in for a visit. His father had convinced him doing so would be a bad idea by claiming if she hadn’t wanted him at fifteen, she wasn’t likely to want him at twenty-five or thirty. So he hadn’t gone. And now it was too late.

They arrived on a street lined with familiar rows of Victorian terraces, a street Louis had last seen from a taxi’s rear window. A shiver tingled the length of his spine. Nothing much had changed, not in all these years. The cars parked along the curb were more modern, of course, and more plentiful. The little grocery shop across the road had been converted to a house, but apart from that, he might’ve just stepped back in time twenty years. He’d never expected to set foot in this street again.

He helped Mrs. Banks up her front path to her door. She instructed him to wait while she disappeared inside, leaving the door wide and the stench of cat hanging on the breeze.

Jake remained in the car while Louis stood on the path in his brand-new black mourning suit, eyeing the street and trying not to think back to playing in the road at three in the morning waiting for his mother to come home. He also tried desperately hard to keep his back turned to the house next door.

A few moments later, perhaps out of boredom, Jake joined him on the path.

“What’s she doing?” He peered through the open doorway into the murky hall beyond.

Louis shrugged. “Fetching something.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“She didn’t say.”

Jake glanced down the street. “Where did you used to live?”

Louis gestured to the house where he grew up. “Not much, is it?” He thought back to the cold February when they couldn’t afford coal for the fire, to the mold mottling the walls. Watching Jake scan the house piqued his own curiosity, and he turned around.

The first thing he noticed were the Victorian sash windows, once so badly rotted they wouldn’t open. They were now double glazed. Clean net curtains concealed the rooms behind. A small lawn made up the front garden. Summer flowers bloomed along the border, and a family of gnomes huddled together on the grass. Gnomes? Since when had his mother taken a fancy to gnomes? She’d never bothered about the garden when Louis was a child. He was the one who ended up trying to cut the foot-long grass with a pair of scissors because they didn’t own a mower. Somewhere along the line his mother must have got hold of one. Perhaps around the same time she’d taken a liking to the gnomes. They weren’t exactly Louis’s cup of tea, but, still, apart from those little ceramic people, nothing struck Louis as sinister about the place anymore. He barely even recognized it.

“Shit!” Jake took a step back, his heel pressing hard on Louis’s toes.

“Ouch! What the…?”

Jake pointed to a couple of cats slinking along Mrs. Bank’s hall. One parked itself in the doorway while the other ventured as far as the path before settling down to eye them with lazy suspicion.

“I don’t like cats,” he said as a tremor rattled through his body.

“Hey.” Louis reached around Jake’s waist, mildly amused that such a strapping guy could ooze fear like a cold sweat over such a harmless creature. “Remind me never to show you the tigers at the zoo.”

“Cats are evil,” Jake said quietly.

“Not evil. But they can smell fear like it’s a big chunk of rib-eye. Full of meaty goodness.” Louis nuzzled his neck and nipped the skin, inhaled the sweet-smelling aftershave. The world around him fell away. God, how he’d missed this. Holding him, touching him. He slipped his arms around Jake’s waist, and Jake leaned back against him. They stood that way until a kid on a bike sped past and bellowed “bum bandits” at them from across the road.

“Nice neighborhood,” Jake said.

“Some things will never change.” Louis released him. “Why don’t you go wait in the car? I’ll deal with Mrs. Banks and her cats.”

“You mind?” Jake turned to face him.

“No.” He touched Jake’s cheek and leaned in for a kiss, but Jake shied away. He walked off down the path and got back into the car. He was probably still smarting over that ‘just friends’ comment Louis had made about them to Martha Banks. Louis wished he could take that back, but still…friends was about all they had been this past week.

A few moments later Mrs. Banks came inching back down the hall. The cats got up and wound their way back into the house as if, upon Jake’s retreat, their mission had been accomplished.

“Here.” She raised a veiny claw and dropped a set of keys into his palm. “Your mother’s spare set. The house belongs to you now. Go see what kind of a woman your mother was. Not the same one you left behind.”

He had known he’d have to see about getting a set of keys for the house sooner or later, but he’d been delaying the inevitable. “Thanks.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” she said in her most pleasant voice yet. “You and your laddo, you stop by anytime you like. Except Tuesday evenings I’m at whist. Friday afternoons I’m at day center. Any other time, you’re welcome.”