Graham Swift - Last Orders

He looks at me. He looks right into my face like he's looking for a little light too, like he's looking for his own face in mine, and it goes right through me, like I'm hollow, like I'm empty, that I haven't got his eyes, his voice, his bones, his way of holding his jaw and looking straight at you without so much as a bleeding blink.

Then it wouldn't be finished, it wouldn't have to finish.

It's like I'm not real, I aint ever been real. But Jack's real, he's realler than ever. Though he aint going to be real much longer.

He says, 'I want you to lend me some cash.'

I say, 'Cash?'

He says, 'Cash.'

I say, 'You need cash?'

He touches the drawer of his bedside cabinet. 'I've got my wallet right here, next to my watch and my comb.' He half pulls open the drawer, sort of cautious and secretive. It's as though his whole life's in there.

I say, 'You need cash in here?'

He says, 'I need cash, son.'

But it's like I'm like his father now. Bedtime, Jack, no more larking about, I've come to say night-night.

I look at him and shrug and reach for my inside pocket but he grabs hold of my hand.

He says, 'I was thinking of a thousand pounds.'

I say, 'A thousand pounds? You want a thousand pounds?'

He says, 'By Friday, let's say. And not a dicky-bird.'

He looks at me, I look at him. He's holding my hand. He says, 'Don't ask me, Vince, don't ask me. It's a request, it aint an order.'

I look at him. There's the sign dangling over his head:

NIL BY MOUTH.

I say, 'Lend?'

He said, 'Take the reins, Ray boy. Go on, take 'em for your dad.'

It said TRANK JOHNSON - SITES CLEARED' up there on the board behind the seat on the cart, and sometimes he used to let me sit there with him just for the ride. But he said I wasn't cut out for scrap. He said I should get myself a job behind a desk, with my brains, and I never knew if it was on account of my build or my brains or on account of a desk job being a higher calling anyway, to his mind. So that if I'd been born all muscle, it wouldn't have made no difference, he still wouldn't have let me unload the cart. He had Charlie Dixon for that.

He wasn't so beefy himself, just tall, with a body that hung all loose and dangly from his shoulders like a coat from a coat hanger, as if he could've done with being an inch or two nearer the ground. And I used to wonder, sometimes, how a tall man like him had produced a half-pint like me, and whether it was such a straight piece of production, not remembering my mother.

It wasn't that it was a trade to be ashamed of: scrap-metal merchant. He wasn't no rag-and-bone man. He didn't sit on that cart bellowing himself hoarse, couldn't have done anyway, what with his chest. He didn't tout, he did work by arrangement, contract. All the same.

So I got the job at the insurance house. He was proud of me being an office boy. And him his own boss. Boss of the scrap-heap. Then the war came and scrap metal was a full-swing industry and he could've done with my extra pair of hands, but I had to swap being an office boy for being a soldier. He said, 'A titch like you, they'll pass you over.' But they didn't. He said, 'Well, anyhow, it'll be easier for you to keep your head down. That's my advice to you, keep your head down.' I did. And after the war it wasn't me who wasn't there any more, it was him. It wasn't a bomb, it was his chest. But I went back to the office anyway. After camping out in the desert with Jack Dodds I went back to an office in Blackfriars. I had the yard and the two-up-two-down, no war damage. I was drawing rent on the one, from Charlie Dixon, to keep up the payments on the other. A man of property, you might say, but I went to work every day as a clerk. It was partly that I knew then that it didn't make no difference, what a man does and how he lives in his head are two different things. But it was partly the memory of him, as if he was watching.

He used to let me muck out and feed Duke and he used to let me sit beside him on that cart sometimes. But I wasn't to lift scrap. Clip-clop, clip-clop. The day came when he said I could take the reins and I took 'em and learnt the knack of driving a cart-horse. He said, 'Don't pull 'em, twitch 'em, and click your tongue more like you mean it.' And I never said to him, there's this job that little fellers can do, little fellers only. It's to do with horses.

This is Bermondsey, Ray boy. Where d'you think it is -Ascot?

I expect it was sitting there beside him, looking at Duke's backside, that I had my first dirty thoughts about women. It was what I had to go on. I suppose women might as well have been another kind of animal, for all the know-how I had of them. But it didn't work as a basis for proceeding, and when I took Daisy Dixon round to see Duke one Sunday, knowing that Duke wasn't there because the old man was on a special job, the smell of horse dung and horse piss didn't seem to rouse her animal nature. It didn't seem to have the desired effect. I'd put down clean straw specially. I said, 'Place all to ourselves.' And she says, going all short and shirty on me, 'So what am I going to do with these sugar lumps?'

Then ten years later, after Dad was long gone, along comes her younger sister Carol, wanting to know if I had it in mind to sell the yard, only her dad was worried, not knowing if he should buy that lorry, without the security of premises. I think, So why can't Charlie ask me this himself? And I think, Does she know I always fancied Daisy? What did Daisy tell her? I think, as she bends over to turn up the gas on the fire, She's got a good arse on her.

It was a horse-world, that's what it was. When I think of him sitting beside me up there on the cart I don't think of scrap metal, brass, copper, lead, cast-iron. I think of Duke. I think of the life of carters and pedlars. I see him lean forward, elbows on knees, after I've taken up the reins, and start to look around him as if he hadn't noticed the world passing by. I see him scratch his neck and reset his cap. I see him light up a snout, dicky chest or no dicky chest, and breathe out the first drag, bottom lip jutting, then rub his chin with the tip of his thumb, cigarette between his fingers, then run the ball of his thumb across his forehead, and I know I do all those things, without helping it, the same gestures, the same motions.

I should never have let Vince have that yard.

Sunday outings in the meat van, as if I don't remember.

As if I don't remember them dropping our Sally off -half asleep she'd be sometimes - and my Joan saying, 'Won't you come in for a cuppa?' And Amy saying, 'Best not, we'd better get Vince home to bed.' As if I don't remember the sand between Sally's toes and that toy bucket full of shells and bits of seaweed and dead crabs, and the smell of the seaside on her, in her hair, in her clothes, and the pints of calamine lotion Joan and I got through for her sunburn.

We'd have taken her ourselves, only we didn't have the train fare, and we didn't have no motor, of course. No motor, no shop, no house to speak of, scratching a bleeding living, that's what we was doing. I was better off in the Army if you ask me. And I remember that look Am/d give - but maybe I imagined it, it don't do credit to a woman like Amy - when she said, no, they wouldn't come in. Like it was because we lived in a prefab and they lived in bricks and mortar. Like Amy was getting above herself. She and Jack had been to the sea for the day and me and Joan had been to feed the ducks in Southwark Park.

Amy'd be standing there still holding on to Sally's hand and stroking her hair and stooping down to give her a kiss, so I'd feel like saying, "That's one thing we've got that you aint got.' But I didn't. I just watched Amy kissing my daughter, and Joan would suck in her breath.