Katy Regan - The Story of You

Joe had been diagnosed as hyperactive when he was little, and was never allowed sweets or stuff like Kia-Ora. By the time I met him, at sixteen, he was still bouncing off the walls most of the time, but I’d always loved that about him – his energy.

I said, ‘He didn’t improve with age.’

‘How do you know?’ said Joe. ‘You haven’t spent any time with me for sixteen years.’ He was looking at me, quite intently. I couldn’t help think that comment was loaded. ‘Anyway, this is Robyn.’ He said, eventually.

‘Robyn, eh?’ said Betty. ‘That’s a funny name for such a bonny girl. Is she the lucky lady?’

‘No, no …’ Joe said. ‘There is no lucky lady at the moment, Bet.’

So he was no longer with Kate?

‘Robyn’s a friend. A very old, good friend.’ His gaze was intense enough for it to make me look away.

‘She’s a l’il corker, too. Look at all that lovely thick hair,’ Betty said.

‘Now you’re making me blush, Betty,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I still blush,’ said Bet, ‘and I’m eighty-six!’

Betty eventually gave Joe her condolences and shuffled off. I really did have to be getting back to Dad and Denise’s, even though an evening with them – Dad watching Gardener’s World , Denise bringing him endless, elaborate snacks, didn’t exactly fill me with glee. I opened my mouth to say as much when, from out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thickset bald bloke making his way over. He had one child by the hand and was pushing a twin buggy – with twins in it – with the other. Stopping, he slapped an arm around Joe. ‘Hey, Sawyer!’ It was only when he was right up close that I realized it was Voz. ‘You did really well, mate. I wouldn’t have been able to stand up there and do that.’

‘Cheers, Voz,’ said Joe, giving Voz a manly back-slapping hug in return. ‘That means a lot.’

‘All right, Vozzy?’ I said. I was adopting my old matey, blasé school tones, when really I was shocked. I hadn’t seen Voz for years – since that day Joe nearly drowned at the Black Horse Quarry. Who was this beefcake before me? What had happened to runty Voz?

‘All right, Kingy. How are you?’ For some reason, I was touched that he’d used my nickname. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘You have!’ I said. Joe sniggered. ‘I mean … you look like you’ve been busy.’

He giggled. When Voz used to giggle, he used to look like a cute rat; now he looked like a cute fat rat, all his pointy, ratty features concentrated in the middle of a big round face.

‘Yep, this is Paige.’ The chubby blonde child holding his hand stared back gormlessly at us. ‘Paige is eight.’ ( Eight? What had I produced in the last eight years?) ‘And these little monsters are Tate and Logan.’

Tate and Logan? Bloody hell.

‘That’s my missus, Lindsay, over there.’ He pointed to a pretty, dark-haired girl chatting to Joe’s brother. ‘We’ve got another on the way in January.’

‘Wow, Anthony, are you going for world domination?’ asked Joe. ‘An assembly line of Vozzies keeping the whole of the northwest in wallpaper?’ (Voz’s dad owned the Wojkovich Wallcoverings empire.)

‘You’ve got to get cracking while you can.’ Voz laughed. ‘Any of you got kids yet?’

‘No, no …’ said Joe.

‘Not that you know of, eh, Sawyer?’

‘And what about you, Kingy?’ said Voz, when nobody said anything. ‘I hear you work up on the funny farm?’

‘Yep. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh?’ I smiled.

‘So are you like a shrink? A psychiatrist?’ Voz asked.

‘Well, no, I can’t prescribe the drugs, but I can administer them.’

‘What, someone leaves you in charge with a needle ?’ Voz seemed genuinely alarmed by this.

‘Yes, and in people’s own homes. I visit people at home who have mental-health problems.’

‘Can you do something about my missus? She’s got a few mental-health problems.’

‘I tell you what – because it’s you, Voz – I’ll do a two-for-one.’

Voz turned round at the sound of two girls talking loudly. ‘That’s Saul Butler’s wife, isn’t it?’ he said, gesturing to the one with red, bob-length hair. ‘Is Butler not here, Joe?’

I looked quickly to Joe.

‘No, I invited him – his kids all went to one of the playgroups Mum ran.’

So Saul Butler had kids?

‘But he never got back to me, so – you know – his loss.’

Voz grinned at me and for a second he was just little ratty, giggly Voz again, who used to cry actual tears when he laughed. ‘I reckon Butler always fancied you, Robyn. I bet he was well jealous of you, Joe.’

Joe smiled at me. ‘Well, yes, I was a very lucky boy.’

‘I always remember that time up at Black Horse Quarry, when you jumped in. D’you remember?’ Voz said, adding, ‘When you nearly died?’

‘How could I forget?’ said Joe.

‘That was a competition for Butler, that was.’ Voz said, pointing decisively. ‘I’ll never forget his face, standing at the top of that hundred-footer. Absolutely gutted that you had the balls to jump and he didn’t.’

‘Yeah, well, turned out he was the sensible one, didn’t it?’ said Joe. ‘I might well have died if Robbie hadn’t saved me that day.’

‘Och,’ I said, modestly. ‘No …’

One of the twins in the buggy started to cry then, thank God. ‘Right, well, I’d better get these rug rats home,’ said Voz. ‘You take care.’

The moment Voz trundled off with his army of children, Joe’s face collapsed. I remember that effort too.

‘Tired?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ He took my hand. ‘Look, don’t go, Robbie. Come back for the wake.’

Robbie. Nobody but Joe ever called me Robbie.

‘I can’t, Joe. I have to get back to London.’

‘So do I,’ he said.

‘You’re in London now?’

‘Well, Manchester, but you see ,’ he said, pointing, ‘that stopped you. You didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know I lived in Manchester. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’

‘ Joe ,’ I sighed. Didn’t he get that I wasn’t just some unfeeling cow but that I was trying to make a polite exit here without having to go into one?

‘Come on, I haven’t seen you for three years. I don’t want to go back on my own and face all those people.’

Then it clicked.

It was a funeral, his mother’s funeral. What was I doing ?

‘Only plus of being a vicar’s son,’ Joe used to say, ‘is that you get a big house’; and it was big compared to the houses most kids who went to our school lived in, but not, I noticed, anywhere near as big as I remembered it from the last time I was in it, years ago. Still, I’d always loved Joe’s house, maybe because it was what ours might have been if Mum and Dad had spent less on socializing and throwing parties, and more on doing the house up (but then, ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Mum used to say. Obviously, she didn’t expect to go quite so soon).

Our house was big too: ‘The big pink house in Kilterdale.’ But it was a wreck. Mum and Dad had bought it when I was six, for a pittance, with some big plans (Dad in particular was good at those) to do it up and turn it into a ‘palace fit for a King!’ It was always the party house – there was nothing to spoil, after all, since nothing had been done – and every summer, we’d hold the King Family Extravaganza, where Mum and Dad would dress up as some famous couple – Sonny and Cher, Marge and Homer, Torvill and Dean – and Dad would serve hot dogs and beer from his old ice-cream van. The big renovation plans began, finally, when I was eleven, but then Dad’s work dried up and they’d always spent so much on socializing, on living for the now instead of thinking about the future (good job, as it turns out) that they couldn’t finish. One year, we had to move into a caravan in the driveway, because we couldn’t afford to finish off the plumbing. Leah (who was fourteen at the time and very unamused by the whole situation) would shout at the top of her voice things like: ‘If I have to shove anyone else’s shit down this septic tank, I am going to throw it at them !’ I dread to think what people on that street thought of us.