Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

‘Please. I’ll help you get on your feet.’ He moved behind her and brushed his index finger across her back. ‘Barbara – you were more important to me than I think you realize. It grieves me to see you like this. And I want to help.’

She tilted her head back to look at him. She had difficulty hearing as he said:

‘There are few things in my life I remember fondly. It’s a short list. You’re near the top.’

She looked at the ceiling. Neither of them acknowledged the tears sliding from the corners of her eyes.

Sean Reilly’s retirement home was Hathaway’s big house on the outskirts of Varengeville-sur-mer, not far from the church where the artist Georges Braque was buried and the road ended at the cliff edge. Reilly lived there under the vague protection of the family of one of Dennis Hathaway’s old smuggling partners, Marcel Magnon, a man who had also known Reilly during the war.

When Hathaway’s boat docked at Dieppe they took the waiting car along the coast road. The tide was out and a score or so people were picking mussels from the rock pools.

The house had high walls around it with barbed wire along the top and security cameras set at intervals. Hathaway buzzed the intercom at the outer gate and it swung open. A man with a bulge under his jacket escorted them into the house. Barbara waited whilst Hathaway went ahead.

Hathaway was led down a corridor that smelt of floor wax, toilets and harsh disinfectant. The whole place smelt like a hospital. The smell was more intense in a large drawing room that had been converted into a hospital room.

Sean Reilly was propped up in a bed facing out through open French windows on to a long, landscaped garden. He looked up from the book he was reading. Smiled a winning smile, his false teeth too big in his skeletal head.

‘John.’

‘Mr Reilly.’

Reilly smiled again.

‘Sean.’

‘You’re looking well, Sean,’ Hathaway said.

‘I look like shit – and smell like it mostly, thanks to this bag. Sit me up higher, will you?’

Hathaway leaned over and pressed the button that lifted the top end of the bed. Reilly’s head and upper body rose towards him.

‘That OK?’

‘Grand. So what’s happening?’

Hathaway proffered the bottle of single malt.

‘I’m sure you’re not allowed to but flowers are frowned on by your warders – nurses – I recall and I don’t remember you having a sweet tooth.’

‘Hope it’s Irish.’

Hathaway smiled.

‘Of course.’

With difficulty, Reilly raised a hand.

‘There are a couple of pretty decent glasses over there.’

Hathaway walked over to the table beside the open windows and poured two hefty measures of the best Irish he’d been able to find.

He handed a glass to Reilly, pulled over a chair and sat beside him.

‘How’s things?’

Reilly looked beyond Hathaway.

‘I’ve been thinking about the past a lot. Things I did. Things I didn’t do.’

‘Not regretting things?’

Reilly grimaced.

‘No point. Just wondering how my life might have been different. Alternative lives.’

‘The road not travelled.’

Reilly smiled, nodded down at the book he’d been reading.

‘I’m enjoying stuff that makes me think.’

‘Jesus,’ Hathaway said. ‘I used to have that.’

‘It’s your copy. I found it lying around. Hope you don’t mind.’

‘ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bit late to turn hippy, isn’t it?’

Reilly smiled.

‘Did you know I started a philosophy degree at Trinity before the war? Then the war came and I went over the border and enlisted – don’t ask me why, that’s a long bloody story. And then, after the war, well, things had moved on for me.’

‘So you were going to be the new Bertrand Russell?’

‘Or James Joyce. I was all over the place. But then life took another course.’ He took a sip of the drink, closed his eye. His cheeks reddened within seconds. ‘That’s good. Slainte.’

‘Slainte.’

‘Never understood before why in Westerns cowboys would come into town dehydrated and go to the saloon and down whiskies. Wouldn’t a beer have been better?’

‘But?’

Reilly grinned again.

‘But this whiskey is just the drink for the thirsty man in the desert.’

Hathaway smiled, nodded down at the book and quoted from memory:

‘The truth knocks on the door and you say “Go away, I’m looking for the truth” and so it goes away.’

‘Personally, I’ve always thought truth overvalued.’ He passed his glass to Hathaway, his hand shaking. ‘Stephen Boyd was the best James Bond.’

Hathaway looked puzzled.

‘Who?’

‘Who?’ Reilly laughed. ‘The first one.’

‘Wasn’t that Sean Connery?’

‘Sean Connery? The guy who played Taggart? Runs the bar in Emmerdale now?’

Hathaway looked at Reilly’s glass.

‘That’s had a quick effect.’

‘I told you – I’ve been thinking about different ways life might have gone. But not just mine. Michael Caine didn’t get the posh part in Zulu, so the cockney actor who played Private Hook got all the attention, ended up doing The Ipcress File and went on to have Caine’s career.’

‘What happened to Caine?’

‘He did Steptoe and Son and now he’s a stallholder in EastEnders .’

‘And you?’

Reilly took another sip of his whiskey.

‘Me? I’m Seamus Heaney. Or Monet.’

‘Wouldn’t you have missed the action?’

Reilly looked away to one side. Hathaway put both glasses on a table beside Reilly’s old display cabinet. He glanced down at Reilly’s memorabilia. The guns, the knives, the medals. He recalled the first time he’d seen them, so many years before.

‘What’s happening with you?’ Reilly said eventually.

Hathaway turned.

‘There are some very bad men in town.’

Reilly cleared his throat and looked up at the ceiling.

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘I don’t mean the usual scum. These people have come from outside.’

‘What do they want?’

‘They want to kill,’ Hathaway said. ‘ Plus ca fucking change. You get rid of one set of scumbags and another one comes in.’

Hathaway leaned in.

‘I’ve seen enough films about this but I can’t believe it’s happening to me. I want out but I can’t seem to get out.’

‘You know that from your dad,’ Reilly said, fixing Hathaway with a watery stare.

Hathaway looked down.

‘Aye, well.’

‘Who’s coming after you?’

‘Foreigners. Serbians. Mad fuckers. Real hard bastards. The kind who burn your neighbour’s house down just because they live next door to you.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Long term? Everything. Short term? Revenge for the death of one of theirs and his pregnant girlfriend in that Milldean thing.’

‘The massacre?’

‘Yeah. They think it was targeted at their guy.’

‘Was it?’

Hathaway shrugged.

‘Not for me to say. But they’re here and they’re starting up their own mayhem.’

‘That man on the Ditchling Beacon?’

Hathaway smiled.

‘I see you’re keeping up with the Brighton news. Yeah. Stuck a skewer right up him. Came out next to his ear. Left him there to have a slow, painful death. What are things coming to?’

‘We’ve done our share.’

Hathaway looked at his father’s old ally and his own mentor.

‘True,’ he said. ‘True.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Reilly said.

‘What do you think I should do? I was so nearly out of it and now I’m being dragged back in.’

‘You know you’ve got to go pre-emptive, John. It’s the only way. Nuke the bastards.’