Graham Swift - Last Orders

Sometimes it's just the glory of a horse.

I don't move a muscle when it passes the post. Or when they lead it round to the enclosure and the jockey dismounts and unsaddles and pats its head, and it dips its neck and snorts like it aint done nothing special. I don't move a muscle when they click up the result and the SPs to confirm. Shortened a shade, but I don't need no SPs.

Thirty-three to one.

Bernie says, 'Someone's lucky day.' And I say, 'Yep,' picking up my whisky glass, draining it, looking through the bleary bottom of it. Then I look at my watch and at Slattery's clock and put my empty glass on the bar and dismount my stool. "Well, must be getting along, Bern. See yer.' Bernie says, 'See yer,' taking the glass. It's hard to imagine Bernie not being there, like Slattery's clock, behind the bar.

Then I go out and I think, I should go straight to see him. Twenty minutes if I'm lucky, lucky even with the bus. I should go straight and tell him. But if he's got any sense, he'll know, he'H've tuned in. Lucky came good, he came good.

And there's his thousand pounds, left for safe keeping. He should have that back, I should take him that. And there's the little matter of how to hand over the winnings, on account of it can't be cash, though that's how he'H've pictured it, if he's pictured it, that's how Jack Dodds will have pictured it. Big wad of readies, shopkeeper's preferred. Thirty-four thousand smackers to stash in that bedside cabinet, like he's ringing up the till. Nursey, you'll never guess what I've got.

But it'll have to be a cheque, Jack. I used my own name, for convenience. Shall I make it out to you? Or to Amy?

So I returned to quarters and got out Jack's thousand and counted it, to be sure, though it hadn't been touched. Eight hundred in fifties and two hundred in twenties. Then I phoned that special number again, to make sure about pay-out, sounding pretty cool, I reckon, for a man who'd just won thirty-odd thousand pounds. I thought, The tax is on me, Jack, I'll give you a cheque with three clear noughts. Then I felt like I could hardly stand. I thought, I must've had one too many at the Coach, I shouldn'tVe gone on the scotch. Wasn't no need, was there, if I knew? And I shouldn't go into that place now, the HDU, breathing beer and whisky and wobbly on my pins. Breathing booze over Nurse Kelly.

So I made myself a strong cup of coffee and sat for a bit to steady up. Half an hour won't make no difference, and if he's got any sense— But instead of steadying up, I dropped off, I slipped away, in a twinkling, and next thing I knew the phone was ringing and it was an hour later though I didn't know it, and my coffee was standing where I'd put it, hardly touched and cold, and outside the sky was thick and grey and shaping up for rain. I picked up the phone and I knew the voice. It was Amy's voice. But it sounded strange and I couldn't make sense of what it was saying. She said, 'He's gone, Ray, he's gone.'

We come in on the Canterbury Road, past faded, peely bay-windowed terraces with that icing-on-an-old-cake look that buildings only have at the seaside. Hotels, B-and-Bs. Vacancies. The buildings look extra pale against the grey, piled-up sky, and against the clouds you can see little twirling specks of white, like broken-off flakes of the buildings, like scatterings of white being flung about by the wind. Seagulls. You can feel the wind, even in the Merc, bouncing up the side-streets and jolting into us, and we're all thinking, Any moment now we'll see it, we've got to see it, it can only be just over there. Then we see it, as we come over a brow and a gap opens up in the buildings: the sea, the sea. With the whole of Margate spread out below us, the front, the bay, the sands, with Cliftonville beyond, except you can't see the sands, or precious little of them, because the tide's right in, like Vie said it would be, and the sea's grey and thick and churny like the sky, with white spray flying up. And that long harbour wall out there on the far side of the bay, the only thing you can see that's like a pier, with the spray lashing up against it extra fierce: that looks like where we've got to go, that looks like where we've got to do it.

With a storm brewing.

Lenny says, 'Journey's end. 'AUelujah. I need a pee.'

Two extra pints in Canterbury.

He says, 'Looks like it's expecting us.'

Vie is sort of perking up, like he's coming into his rightful element. I'm thinking, You could get blown clean off that wall. I'm holding Jack again, in his bag, in his jar, and I hold on to him tighter, like I already need the extra ballast. Vince is looking all cool and careful and deliberate. He don't say nothing. He only had the one at the last port of call, but I reckon we're all glad we took a little extra on board to steady ourselves for what's to come. He drives on slowly down the hill, the sweep of the bay ahead of us, his eyes looking this way and that. It's not exactly thick with traffic or bulging with trippers. It's not season.

We join the front proper and he pulls up by the kerb, leaving the engine running. It seems he's heeded Lenny's little problem. Sudden sight of all this water. One thing it's not hard to find in a seaside resort is a public bog, and he's drawn up close to one, it looks like a blockhouse. But he don't stop at that. He opens his driver's door and gets out. There's a great gust of air. He walks round to the pavement, lifting his head and scanning the bay, his messed-up white shirt flapping like a flag, then he opens the passenger door for Lenny, courtesy itself, like a chauffeur. He cocks his head towards the blank-walled building on the other side of the pavement. 'Make yourself comfy, Lenny,' he says and it sounds as though he says it with a smile. It's like he wants things from now on to be proper and seemly, with no snags and upsets like a bursting bladder. 'Anyone else?' he says. But I'm not feeling the call. I switched to whisky, taking a tip from Vie.

Lenny edges out of his seat, all abashed and obedient. More raw air swirls round the car while his door's open but Vince, out on the pavement, doesn't seem to mind. It's as though he wanted the excuse to be the first of us to stand on the front at Margate and breathe in the briny. I twist my head round so I can see him hoisting back his shoulders and holding up his chin. You can hear the din of the waves. I hold on to Jack. Little pin-pricks of rain are peppering the windscreen and being dried off again almost immediately as if, despite the clouds, the sky's too het-up to start a real downpour. All wind and no piss. Lenny stands on the pavement and takes his own lungful of air, half like it does him a power of good and half like it hurts. He looks around, hunched and braced, and looks at Vince, straight and tall, looking around beside him. He says, 'Remember it, Big Boy? Remember it?'

So I walk into the hospital with the money in my inside pocket. Eight hundred in fifties, rest in twenties, rubber band, brown paper envelope. I think, There can't be many people who turn up at this place like they're hitting a casino. And I hope he understands it wasn't easy. He ought to know a thing or two about cash-flow, him of all people. He might think that kind of dosh is just pocket money to me, because I wear a four-hundred-quid suit, because I flog jalopies for readies on the spot, but he ought to know about margins, now specially. Sometimes cash flows and sometimes it don't. Right now it's hardly trickling.

So Hussein better.

And when am I getting it back? You can't deny a dying man a favour, any crazy thing he asks, but that don't mean. You can't take it with you when you go, but he will, he will.

I think, I might as well be taking this money to chuck it off the edge of a cliff.

But then I come out the lift and walk down the corridor, with the usual traffic of trolleys and wheelchairs, and there's that smell again that's getting so familiar you can smell it when it aint there. I'm standing in the showroom and I can smell it. I'm breathing in cars but I can smell it. Like the smell of the swab they give you after a jab, only scaled up, and beneath it the smell of something stale and thin and used up, like the smell of old tired papery skin. I suppose it's the smell of— I think of all the patients in this hospital, heads in beds, I wonder what the tot-up is, I wonder what today's takings are. And I think, I've done what he asked, I've only done what he asked, and if I don't ever touch this money again, still it's cleared my conscience, aint nothing on my conscience.