Peter May - Runaway

There was only really one thing left to address. But as if they all knew that these fond moments of precious reunion would be lost for ever once they did, none of them wanted to be the first to raise it.

By way of avoidance, Luke said, ‘So what were you doing stuck at a motorway services on the M1?’

Ricky’s theatrical sigh made Jack laugh, and he gave Luke a potted version of their entire, eventful trip down from Glasgow.

Luke listened in astonishment. When Jack had finished, and Luke stopped laughing, he said, ‘You guys are just as crazy as you were back then.’

‘So what’s it like, Luke?’ Jack said. ‘Living in London.’

It’s what they had set out to do all those years before, but only Luke had stayed.

Luke scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘It’s funny. Since we first arrived here in sixty-five, everything’s changed, but nothing has, if you know what I mean. Not really. London exists in that same old bubble. It’s still another country. A virtual city state, these days, fuelled by financial services and ignorant of anything that’s happening anywhere else in the country. If you live and work here, why would you care what happens elsewhere? Until the bloody Scots threatened to vote for independence and take the oil revenues away! Road signs point to The North . And the north is for holidays, or shooting or fishing. No one wants to know about unemployment, or food banks or pensioners in poverty. No one here wants to lift that stone to see what lies beneath.’ He shook his head. ‘But the truth is, London’s been good to me, and I could no more go back to Scotland now than fly in the air. This is my home.’

Which brought a thoughtful silence to the table, and Jack wondered fleetingly how it might have been if he, too, had stayed.

But the moment couldn’t be put off any longer.

Luke leaned on the table and examined their faces carefully. ‘Why are you here?’

With difficulty, Maurie fished his dog-eared newspaper cutting from the Herald out of an inside pocket and pushed it across the table to Luke. Luke read in silence, and they watched as his mouth fell slowly open.

‘How did I miss this?’ he said. But he didn’t expect an answer. He read on, then he looked up. ‘Who’d have believed that Flet was still alive all these years?’ When finally he’d finished reading, he looked puzzled. ‘This is what brought you back to London?’

No one else seemed willing to explain, so Jack said, ‘Maurie claims that it wasn’t Flet who killed that fella, after all. But he won’t say who did. Just that he knows who killed Flet.’

Jack could see a thousand questions forming themselves behind Luke’s eyes.

In the end, all Luke said was, ‘In that case, why wouldn’t you just go to the police?’

All heads turned towards Maurie.

The old lead singer of The Shuffle sighed, as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. ‘It’s too late for that now. Fifty years too late.’ He drew air into his lungs, as if summoning courage. ‘Before we left Glasgow I made a rendezvous to meet up with an old friend of ours tomorrow night.’

‘Who?’ Jack said

But Maurie just shook his head. ‘You’ll find that out when you get me there.’

‘Where?’ Luke asked. ‘Where do you want us to take you?’

Maurie lifted his chin, thrusting it out almost defiantly. ‘The Victoria Hall.’

Jack lay in the dark listening to Ricky’s slow, steady breathing and knew he was not asleep. They were in a back room on the second floor of Luke’s semi-detached townhouse in Hampstead Heath, Jack in the double bed, Ricky on a fold-down settee. Curtains were drawn on windows that looked down on to a substantial back garden and the heath beyond. Dave and Maurie had rooms on the floor below. Luke’s boys had been in large attic rooms he’d had built into the roof, before they grew up and moved out to establish their own lives and their own families. Now Luke rattled around in this big house on his own with his Jan, who had turned out to be a petite, very sweet lady in her early sixties with short-cropped hair the colour of brushed steel. Her strong features reflected a strong character that had been in evidence within moments of meeting her.

She had welcomed Luke’s old friends with open arms, diplomatically disguising the shock she must have felt when confronted with the dying Maurie. She made tea, and prepared rooms for them all, and chattered like a bird. But Jack could see that all her talk was just a way of covering her concern, and he caught her frequent glances at Luke, searching perhaps for some kind of reassurance. What did they want? How long would they be staying?

The house was beautifully maintained and impeccably furnished. At current London prices, Jack reckoned, it was probably worth somewhere between £1.5 million and £2 million. As someone who had spent his life counting other people’s money, it was clear to him that Luke had more of it than he could possibly imagine.

Depression settled on him like dust from an explosion as he lay in Luke’s bed, in Luke’s house, replaying the story of Luke’s success. Thinking about the woman Luke had met and married, the partnership they had forged from love to raise a happy family and create a successful business. It wasn’t that Jack was resentful, or even envious. He begrudged Luke none of it. But the contrast with his own sad story was so painfully stark that all the regrets of his life came flooding back to very nearly drown him. All the missed opportunities and squandered chances. The loss of Rachel. His unrealized dream of becoming a professional musician. Dropping out of university. Settling always for second best, because that was the path of least resistance. Leaving him now, in his late sixties, widowed and alone, treading the boards in the role of a non-speaking extra until it was his turn to exit the stage.

He was almost startled by Ricky’s voice coming unexpectedly out of the darkness. ‘I always thought,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why... but I always thought that, you know, old people were just annoying.’

Jack chuckled, glad to have a focus other than his own self-pity. ‘I suppose I can be pretty annoying at times.’

‘I didn’t mean you in particular. Though you can be more than annoying. Trust me. I meant old people in general.’

‘Of which I am one.’

‘Of which you are one.’

‘Well, you see, there’s the thing right there, Rick. I don’t think of myself as old. In my head I’m still the boy I was at seventeen. I just can’t do the things I did back then, and I get a shock when I look in the mirror. But I don’t see me as you do. In fact, I can look at fellas ten years my junior and think of them as “old boys”. I look at attractive young women and delude myself that they might still fancy me. It’s just a matter of perspective.’

He heard Ricky sigh. ‘Can I finish?’

‘Sorry, Rick.’

‘What I’m trying to say is that you never think of old people as having been young once. I mean, you know they were, but you just can’t picture it. All you see is the grey and the old, and you get fed up hearing how everything was so much better when they were young.’

Jack laughed. ‘You’ll be saying that yourself, some day.’

‘Aye, well, you see, that’s hard to imagine, too.’

Jack thought about it. ‘You never can. Not when you’re young. You think you’ll live for ever. You know you’ll die sometime. But it’s so far away, you can’t imagine that either. Then one day you’ll look in the mirror, and see forty-year-old Ricky staring back at you. And before you know it, it’ll be fifty-year-old Ricky, then sixty-year-old Ricky. And suddenly you’ll see the finish ahead of you, like buffers at the end of the line, and you’re hurtling towards them and there’s no way to stop the train. And everywhere you’ve been on your journey of life, the people you’ve loved, the things you’ve learned and seen, they’ll all be gone. In a moment. Just like they’d never been. And all you’ll want to do is grab folk by the shoulders and tell them that you’ve done extraordinary things. Like that old man at the lunch club in Leeds. Just so they’ll know you existed. Just so you won’t get airbrushed out of history, like you’d never been there in the first place.’