Howard Linskey - The Drop

Death might be an inevitability but I don’t want to think about dying. Funerals always make me want to go out, get pissed and fuck somebody, just so I can prove to myself that I’m still here. Must be some sort of putting-two-fingers-up-at-death thing. I guess that’s not something I should admit to but you are what you are and there’s no changing it.

‘I feel as if you haven’t been here for me,’ said Laura as she leant forward on the couch to face me. Since the funeral we’d had a number of conversations about the way Laura had been feeling. Mostly she’d been feeling bad and it turned out this was usually my fault. I was beginning to wonder if she had been secretly visiting a therapist who had urged her to ‘tell your boyfriend how you feel. Make him feel shit instead’.

‘But I have been here for you,’ I protested. And I had. I mean, I wasn’t there every night obviously. I was still trying to find out what had happened to Cartwright and Bobby’s money but I wasn’t on it twenty-four-seven like I should have been. I’d made sure Bobby knew Laura’s mum had died and that she had gone a little bit mad as a result, so I was home quite a bit in the evenings even if I then went out again later, after she was tucked up in bed. He was okay about it, considering. Maybe it reminded him of losing his missus and how Sarah must have felt at the time. I had to tell Finney as well but they both agreed to keep it to themselves.

We’d had lots of long conversations, Laura and I, that dragged on for hours about how her mum’s death was such a shock and how she had always been there for her daughter and how Laura didn’t know how she was going to manage without her mother, which I didn’t really get, as Laura had been an adult for some considerable time now. I couldn’t really understand how her mum’s death had been such a shock either, considering the years of illness she’d had. It had been a bit of a shock to me admittedly but then, I’d thought the old bird was putting it on.

‘Yes,’ she said, as if I had somehow proven her point, ‘you’ve been here physically.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘But I don’t think you are really here mentally.’

She was right. I wasn’t – and with good reason. I was usually mulling over how to get myself out of the shit I was in and, to be fair to me, we had been talking about the same old stuff every night for ages. I’d made the same suggestions; take some time off work, go and see your old friends from Uni, stay with your big sister for a while? I’d also exhausted all the usual platitudes associated with bereavement. ‘Perhaps it was for the best Laura, you wouldn’t have wanted her to suffer Laura, she would have hated not being a hundred per cent Laura, but, after a while endlessly going through the same topic, who wouldn’t let their mind wander? Blokes aren’t like women. We don’t want to regurgitate everything a million bloody times.

I felt a bit pissed-off at Laura for saying I was unsupportive considering what I could see every time I looked up from my sofa. On one of my bookshelves a space had been cleared for the squat china urn that contained the last remnants of Mrs Angela Cooper.

‘Do you mind?’ she’d asked as she’d brought her mum’s ashes home from the crematorium, holding them like a little baby, ‘it’s only for a while.’

‘Of course not,’ I’d said because at that moment, she’d looked like any objection from me might very likely push her over the edge into some form of grief-related madness. So she’d moved my books and placed the urn on the shelf with great reverence. I had to stifle a grin. After all, a bookshelf was probably an appropriate place for Angela’s Ashes .

After a while though, their presence had started to irritate me. I couldn’t think of anything more morbid to have in my flat than my girlfriend’s late mother’s remains. Why couldn’t her big sister, her dim husband and their two overweight children take the bloody urn? It was meant to be a temporary home but just how temporary is temporary? A week, a month, two years? The problem was I couldn’t think of any subtle way of asking Laura, ‘when do you think you’ll be shifting your mother off my bookshelf then?’

I didn’t want to get into another row with Laura about my lack of support so I asked, ‘do you want me to stay home tomorrow night instead of going to the match?’

I’d hoped the offer of staying home would be big enough to placate her without actually having to go ahead and do it. I figured she would say something like ‘that’s really nice of you but you love the football, you should go.’ Then I could say, ‘are you really sure, I honestly don’t mind missing it just this once.’ If I was really lucky this might even lead to make-up sex. Any sex would have been preferable to the complete drought I was currently experiencing. Clearly funerals didn’t have the same effect on Laura’s libido as they did on mine.

What she actually said was, ‘do you mind not going?’

Yes, I thought.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Really?’ she asked

‘Course not,’ I said.

Shit.

I was driving through the city on my way home when Sarah called, ‘I need a hunky man,’ she told me.

‘Any particular reason,’ I asked, ‘or have your batteries gone?’

‘Cheeky,’ she said. ‘It’s a crisis.’

‘Broken a nail have we?’

‘No. I’ve got a flat tyre and I need a hunky man to rescue me. I’m a damsel in distress.’

‘You’re in luck, I’m doing a special offer on damsels this week. It’s two for the price of one. I’ll throw in a dragon slaying too if you ask me nicely.’

‘Sounds like good value, trouble is… ’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m down at the Metro Centre,’ she said, like she was wincing at the level of the favour she was asking, ‘you’re not by any chance passing through Gateshead on your white charger right now are you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh.’

‘But I could be.’

‘I knew there was a reason why I love you.’

‘You mean apart from my good looks, charm and raw sexuality?’

There was a slight pause for effect, ‘has someone been telling you you’re good looking?’

‘Do you want this tyre changing or not?’

‘Yes please!’ she trilled, ‘love ya.’

She told me where she was parked and I set off to the Metro Centre, a place I would normally have avoided like the plague. With its acres of shopping hell, all under one big roof, I’d normally rather have a tooth pulled than go there voluntarily.

When I pulled up beside her she climbed out of her car. She looked very good in her skinny jeans.

‘Those the jeans you’ve been banging on about?’

‘Seven Jeans,’ she sang and she swayed her bum round and out at me, slapping her rump like they do in the R &B videos, ‘you like?’

‘They’re okay.’

‘Just bought ‘em. Perfect fit, wore them out of the shop.’

I found that strangely sexy and I didn’t even know why. I think maybe it was because Laura would never have done something that spontaneous. I looked away from her and surveyed the problem, ‘yep,’ I announced solemnly, ‘your diagnosis is correct, that tyre is definitely flat.’

‘Thank you doctor, now are you going to change it for me?’

‘Nope.’

‘What? I thought this was damsel day. Am I not a damsel then?’

‘Yep, you’re a damsel right enough but, if I change that tyre for you, you are going to be late for the match.’

‘I’m already late for the match. I’ve had to phone ahead so they’ll save me some dinner in the box.’

‘I also phoned ahead. One of my guys is on his way down here. He will take your keys, change your tyre and drive your car home for you. As soon as he gets here, I’ll drive you to the match just in time for your prawn sandwiches. Your dad or Finney can run you back afterwards.’