Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

Of course, there was no such thing as job security any more. I was on a fixed-term contract, and I’d known for some time that my term was coming to an end. The writing had been on the wall, and it didn’t take a genius to read it. After all, I’d been one of those whose task had been to put the best possible gloss on cuts and redundancies in other areas. My contract ended in three weeks’ time. And since I was owed fourteen days of my annual leave, I’d effectively already left the job. All that remained for me to do was turn up at the office for one last day, clear my desk and accept the ritual presentation from my colleagues.

So that was how I ended up back home in Lichfield. It was the last place on earth I wanted to be, but the flat in Stafford had become a luxury I could no longer pay for and would soon have no need for, once winningbid.uk.com went into profit.

There were no outright recriminations from my father that I’d failed to stick to a career, no ‘we told you so’, just a continuous cool, unspoken atmosphere of disapproval. My mother had died a few months before, the sudden onset of stomach cancer taking her away before my father even knew what was happening. I looked after him for a while, a duty I could never have imagined until it happened and there seemed to be no choice. But he faded rapidly. It was a heart attack that took him one night as he watched television in his armchair. I’d been at the pub with some friends, and I found him cold and stiff when I let myself back into the house at about half past eleven. ‘The Big Match’ was still blaring away on the TV screen.

At least, everyone said it was a heart attack. But they hadn’t seen him droop and fade once my mother had gone. They didn’t see the disappointment and resignation in his eyes when he looked at me every day. The fact is, my father hadn’t thought it worthwhile to carry on living. Not for my sake, anyway.

His death had helped me financially, of course. With no prospect of another full-time job after my contract ended and winningbid.uk.com draining every spare penny, my dead parents were now subsidising the cost of my board and lodging, as if I was a teenager who’d just left school, rather than a man in his thirties. The small amount of money that came to me in my father’s will would have to keep me going for the next twelve months.

Meanwhile, I was trying to cover my options by earning a bit of extra money as a freelance journalist, and that was hardly lucrative. Even my modest lifestyle was gradually eating into those few thousand pounds my father had left me. The car was getting old, the household bills were piling up, and I spent too much over the bar of my local, the Stowe Arms. By the time I said goodbye to my colleagues at Stafford, I would be practically penniless. Thank God there was no mortgage to pay on the house in Stowe Pool Lane.

But things would change. Life would get better soon. When our dot-com was the success that Dan and I planned, all of this would be forgotten.

When I got back home after leaving Samuel Longden at the bus station, I parked the Escort under the car port and went in through the back door — a habit I’d got into, because this route wasn’t overlooked by the windows of the house next door. Rachel might sometimes be seen lurking in the back garden, but in winter she couldn’t be out there all the time.

My parents’ aged black cat, Boswell, hovered around me in the kitchen until I fed him his Whiskas, then I sprinkled some fish food into the heated tank in the sitting room. The fish had been my father’s hobby. They’re supposed to be relaxing, but I can’t say I ever noticed any beneficial effect on his temper.

I went into the front room, which I’ve converted into a makeshift office, with a computer on the table and a few bookshelves. I pulled the South Staffordshire phone book out of the sideboard and ran my finger down the ‘L’s until I found ‘Longden, Samuel’ next to an address in Whittington, a village five miles east of Lichfield.

Then I went out again and drove up Beacon Street to Safeway, where I filled the car up with petrol, wincing as my credit card crept another £30 nearer to its limit. I wandered around the aisles of the supermarket with a wire basket for a while, forcing myself to stock up with the essentials — coffee, milk and toilet paper, and enough frozen meals to last me a week.

I didn’t want to go back to the house after that. It was getting dark, and when I looked at my watch it occurred to me the work party from Fosseway Lock site would be in the pub by now after their day’s work. I wanted to know how it was that Samuel had come to find me. The person to ask was Andrew Hadfield. It was probably time I bought him a drink anyway, to keep him sweet. Finances would just about stretch that far.

The canal work parties normally retired to the Pipe Hill Inn on Walsall Road. Not every pub appreciates a score of sweaty, muddy labourers trampling over their carpets, but the Pipe Hill was also used by walkers heading for the Heart of England Way. I found Andrew in the middle of a small group of WRG volunteers, many of them women. The people on these weekend parties tended to be teachers and office workers, whose idea of fun was getting up to their knees in mud on their days off. During the summer, there were two-week camps when dozens of volunteers came from Italy, Germany, the USA and Spain to spend their holidays labouring.

‘Chris. Nice to see you again. Come and join the party.’

Andrew looked as though he’d already sunk a few pints of Marston’s Bitter. The high colour in his narrow face from a day out in the open was heightened by the beer. He was in blue jeans and an open-necked red-check work shirt, showing off his lean hips and wiry arms. During the week he commuted on the train from City Station to his architecture practice in Birmingham. But at weekends he seemed to have made it part of his job with the restoration trust to help supervise these work parties. Looking at the flushed faces and bright eyes of some of the women around him now, I wondered if they were the reason for his dedication.

I bought a round of drinks, noting that the women seemed to be getting through a large quantity of Smirnoff Mules and Metz, judging by the empty bottles on the table. I slid Andrew’s pint across and managed to squeeze into a spot opposite him. The bodies close around me smelled of sweat and soil, overlaid with cigarette smoke and the mingled sweetness of alcohol and feminine scents.

‘Had a good day, then?’ I asked.

‘Brilliant!’ they all said, practically in unison. One or two of them looked meaningfully at Andrew and laughed. He grinned at me, and I half-expected a conspiratorial wink.

‘We’re getting on well. We really got down to business today, didn’t we, girls?’

More laughter. I smiled tolerantly. They were a group who’d bonded by tackling a hard physical task, not to mention roughing it at night in a youth centre somewhere, and were now relaxing together. They deserved their fun. But in the process they’d become an intimate little unit of the kind that always makes someone outside the group feel uncomfortable, an unwelcome intruder who doesn’t even understand their language.

‘You know what you can do with your shovel,’ said a female voice. General hysterics followed, and I tried to laugh along with the in-joke.

‘I wanted to ask you about the old man, Andrew,’ I said finally, when the crowd thinned out for a trip to the loo.

‘Who? Oh, Mr Longden. Quite a touching reunion, Chris. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so gob-smacked. I take it the old chap came as a bit of a surprise?’

‘Like a bolt out of the blue.’

‘And other journalistic clichés, no doubt.’