Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

Hathaway frowned.

‘I don’t need to impress her, Sean.’

‘I’m sure you don’t, but nevertheless a bit of impressing never goes amiss. Stores up points for the future, when your stock may have dipped. And I’m sure some of her literary friends will be stuffed full of opinion.’

Hathaway smiled and shuffled through the other books.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of proposing that the best of English literature is actually Irish, which I know is an Irish kind of thing to say. Ulysses is a mountain you need to come up on slow, when you’ve trained a bit, so to say. So here’s by way of a foothill.’

‘ Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce. You know he was a bicycle-seat sniffer?’

Reilly gave him a look.

‘Apparently.’ Hathaway said.

‘You’ll see I’ve chosen them all for their brevity, attention spans being what they are among young people today.’

‘Flann O’Brien?’ Hathaway said, holding up the next.

‘Sheer comic genius but he also understands the world better than any politician or priest.’

‘ At Swim Two Birds – strange title.’

‘Strange book. And your last one is a gift from God. W.B. Yeats. Read his “Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven” and she’ll be putty in your hands – though I’m sure she already is.’

Hathaway grinned and nodded.

‘Thanks, Sean. But I don’t quite understand…’

Sean took a drink and looked up at the moon.

‘I’m not sure I do. I just… your father isn’t a sensitive man.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You’re how old now?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Well, you can understand it. At your age most men of your dad’s generation were killing each other. But, still, the family business…’

‘What about it?’

Reilly’s eyes glittered.

‘It kills the soul,’ he said softly. ‘Before I took up soldiering I was all kinds of things. Maybe I’ll get back to some of them one day.’ He pushed out his lower lip. ‘But probably it’s too late.’

Hathaway put the books down on the floor beside him.

‘I’ll take a look at them, I promise.’ He gave a false smile. ‘If only to impress Elaine’s poncy friends.’

‘What I’m trying to say, John, is that I wasn’t really joking about the Mephistophelean pact. Once you fully commit to the family business, there’s no way back.’ He looked at Hathaway sharply. ‘But maybe it’s too late already.’

Hathaway watched him over the rim of his glass.

‘I don’t hear you talk about your sister much.’

‘Dawn? Dawn goes her own way, as always.’

‘From what I hear, she could do with some brotherly support.’

‘It was only an abortion, for God’s sake,’ Hathaway said. ‘Women have them every day.’

Reilly looked at him for a long moment, then dropped his eyes.

‘And Barbara? Do women get cancer every day?’

‘Probably. Is she why you’re really here? Did she send you?’

Reilly shook his head.

‘She has more class than that.’

‘Class? Running seedy Dutch brothels?’

‘They’re quite classy too, actually. The clientele are usually judges and senior politicians.’

Reilly leaned over and put his hand on Hathaway’s arm.

‘Don’t you owe her anything?’

‘The price of a few fucks?’ Hathaway said.

Reilly removed his arm and sat back. He looked into the sky again. A seagull swooped silently by, ghostly in the moonlight.

‘Maybe it’s too late for you already. Did you or Charlie shoot the Boroni brothers?’

Hathaway refilled their glasses.

‘Slainte,’ Reilly said, chinking his glass against Hathaway’s and keeping his eyes on him.

‘Charlie,’ Hathaway said.

Reilly gave a small nod.

‘But you both had guns?’

Hathaway’s turn to nod.

‘Did you get rid of them?’

‘Charlie did. Mine hadn’t been fired.’

‘Get rid of it. Some people say a gun is just a tool. And, of course, it is. But a gun is also a seducer. A gun wants to be fired. And, sooner or later, whoever has one will fire it.’

‘So what should I do if I don’t go into the family business?’

‘You’ve met this bright young girl, Elaine. Think about a future with her.’

‘In an ashram in India? Will that save my soul?’

Reilly gave a low laugh.

‘Your dad isn’t really Mephistopheles. Your soul is still safe.’

‘Is yours, Sean?’

Reilly looked into his glass.

‘No, there’s no hope for me. I’m for the fiery pit all right.’ He pointed at the books. ‘Books feed my spirit. Music too. But nothing can save my long-lost, long-damned soul.’ He started to rise. ‘But you give those books a try some time. If only to wean yourself off those penny dreadfuls you and your father favour.’

Hathaway nodded absently, still seated. Knowing what neither Sean nor any living being knew: that his soul had been lost years before and there was nothing he could ever do to save it.

A brisk wind blew along the promenade. The full-skirted frocks of the women crowded in the entrance to the West Pier billowed and fluttered. A couple of bonnets flew into the air and off into the sea. The soldiers in their puttees and tin helmets milled around, smoking and flirting with a gang of suffragettes.

A short, rotund man with long sideburns stood beside a camera talking earnestly to the man peering through its lens. He was wearing white slip-on shoes, a flat cap and black, shiny PVC coat. The entrance to the pier had ‘World War One’ written in neon in an arc over it. A sign below it read: ‘Songs, battles and a few jokes’.

The Avalons were clustered together in their American uniforms near a bunch of students in period costumes, who were to cheer them on as they entered the First World War by marching along the pier into the main theatre. A cricket ground scoreboard had been set up partway along the pier to provide the war’s results – lives lost and yards gained.

Charlie was scratching underneath his helmet.

‘This bloody thing is making my head itch.’

‘Did you ever see that anti-war film John Lennon did?’ Billy said.

They all shook their heads.

‘It was good,’ Billy said, looking down.

‘So that’s Big X,’ Dan said, looking over at Richard Attenborough in his PVC coat.

‘Brilliant in Brighton Rock when he was our age,’ Hathaway said. ‘Really chilling.’

As he spoke, he was straining to catch sight of Elaine among the other extras. His father was trying hard to get her a speaking part, but in the meantime she was playing one of dozens of Vanessa Redgrave’s suffragettes.

‘Oh, oh, oh, what a lovely war,’ Dan sang under his breath.

A month or so earlier, Hathaway had visited Elaine on campus sporting his new look, inspired by Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. Inevitably, her room door was open and, equally inevitably, a gang of people were lounging there listening to The Beatles’ White Album.

Hathaway in his three-piece herringbone suit looked around for Elaine. Everyone was barefoot, wearing T-shirts and sitting cross-legged, some sprawled on the cushions scattered over the floor. A couple of joints were being passed haphazardly around. A boy with a goatee beard and a long scarf twirled round his head offered one to Hathaway.

Hathaway shook his head. He was feeling like Thomas Crown dropped into an episode of The Monkees.

‘Is Elaine here?’

‘Is anybody really here?’ the man said drowsily. ‘We’re just figments of your imagination, man.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Hathaway raised his voice. ‘Anyone know where Elaine is?’