Jonathan Coe: Number 11

Of course, I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I did not know that the shadow of death, in all its terrible finality, had arrived so suddenly, without invitation, and was hanging over the two of them. But I noticed something, at least: I noticed that Gran and Grandad seemed closer to each other than any grown-ups I had ever seen before, and this closeness manifested itself, not only as a constant need to be in physical proximity, a refusal to let each other out of their sight, but also as a perpetual state of — for want of a better phrase — loving irritation. Almost every word that the one spoke to the other would touch some nerve, provoke some petulant spasm in response; but this was testament only to the state of near-unbearable anxiety in which they were both living, to the renewed awareness of love that had been kindled by the prospect of losing each other.

As I said, I didn’t understand any of this; but I was aware of its outward manifestations. What really annoyed me about Alison, over the first few days of our visit, was how insensitive she seemed to be to what was happening around her. Seeing my grandparents sitting in the garden one afternoon, sipping from their mugs of tea and holding hands lightly across the space between their plastic chairs, she said, ‘Look at those two. Let’s hope we never get to be like that, eh?’, and she never missed an opportunity to remark on how old and decrepit they appeared to her.

We had little in common, I soon realized: the significant friendship was between our mothers, not between Alison and me. At school we were not together often enough to irritate one another; here, sharing a house and indeed a bedroom, our relationship was already under strain. Another thing that had started to annoy me was the way she picked up on everything I was feeling and tried to make it her own. The death of David Kelly was a typical example.

‘What are you doing?’ she’d asked me on Saturday morning, when she found me in the living room after breakfast trying to make head or tail of Grandad’s Daily Telegraph.

It was pretty obvious what I was doing. ‘I’m reading the paper.’

‘Since when have you cared about the news?’

‘Did you even know there’s been a war in the last few months?’

‘’Course I did,’ said Alison. ‘But there are always wars. My mum says war is stupid and people are stupid.’

‘Well, we had no choice this time. We had to go to war, because Iraq had nuclear weapons aimed at us and they could have nuked us in forty-five minutes.’

‘Come off it. Who says?’

‘Tony Blair.’

For the first time, Alison seemed to be showing a flicker of interest. She pointed at the front page of the newspaper. ‘So who’s this guy, then?’

I explained who David Kelly was — to the best of my knowledge and ability — and something of the circumstances in which he’d died. Halfway through my somewhat garbled explanation I could tell that Alison was losing interest again; but she could sense that I was troubled by this story, and she wanted to share in this disquiet, either as a way of getting close to me or in order to appropriate it for herself, to claim it as hers. So she seized upon one detail: the discovery of Dr Kelly’s body, propped up against a tree in that lonely patch of hilltop woodland.

‘Wow, that’s scary,’ she said — missing the whole point, as far as I was concerned. ‘Imagine that. You’re out for a stroll one morning, walking your dog or something, and suddenly … you find that, smack in the middle of your path.’

‘Nobody really knows why he did it, though,’ I said. ‘Grandad says it’s Tony Blair’s fault but he hates Tony Blair anyway …’

Alison didn’t care. All she wanted to talk about was this single image, which seemed to play in her mind like some scene out of a horror movie.

‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘That would so freak me out. Finding a dead body like that. Right in the middle of nowhere.’

I stared at her, feeling a sudden wave of hatred. She was using that word again — inside my grandparents’ house. I wanted to say something and was furious with myself that the words wouldn’t come. I was a coward. A scaredy cat.

Alison owned a device which seemed to me, at the time, to be literally magical. It was called an iPod and even though it was not much bigger than a matchbox it was apparently capable of storing thousands and thousands of songs so that you could take them anywhere with you and listen to them any time that you wanted. It was a beautiful clean white colour and had a little wheel in the middle which clicked when you turned it with your finger.

Nevertheless I thought it rather sad that, with all this storage capacity, Alison only ever seemed to listen to one album. She listened to it over and over and when she wasn’t listening to it she made me listen to it instead.

‘Your mum’s got a nice voice,’ I assured her, easing the slightly waxy earphones out of my ears and handing the machine back. In truth I hadn’t cared much for the song she’d played me for the umpteenth time. Precociously, I was more interested in classical music in those days, and my favourite CD at home was a recording of Fauré’s Requiem .

‘She sang that song on Top of the Pops , you know,’ said Alison.

‘Yes, you told me.’

‘She’s pretty famous.’

‘I know. You said. Only …’ (I had been meaning to say this for some time, but hadn’t been able to think of a way of putting it tactfully) ‘… only, this was a few years ago, wasn’t it?’

‘So?’ Alison pouted, and put the iPod away in the little satchel she was carrying with her. ‘She still sings, you know. Makes demos and stuff. You can always get back in the game.’

It was quite late in the evening, and we were sitting at the foot of the Black Tower, our backs against its glistening brickwork. We had become quite fearless, over the last few days, about exploring by ourselves and staying out until it was almost dark. Most times we would head for Westwood, which we knew well by now, although as children of the city we could still not quite get used to the idea that this sprawling tract of moor and woodland was ours to roam, freely and at will. We liked to come here because we were hoping to get another glimpse of the Mad Bird Woman, whom I had described to Alison in some detail, her image having been stamped indelibly on my memory ever since that one transient encounter four years ago. According to Gran and Grandad she still lived in Beverley, in a big house which had been left to her by the wheelchair-bound old lady when she died. Her real name, it seemed, was Miss Barton.

‘It sounds as if people don’t like her very much,’ I told Alison. ‘They say she shouldn’t have been given the house. Gran said there was something fishy about it.’

‘Fishy? What does that mean?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Maybe … Maybe she murdered the old woman. To get her hands on the house.’

Typical Alison, I thought. Silly and over the top. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said, at which Alison fell silent. Worrying that I might have offended her, and wanting to keep the conversation going, I added: ‘She doesn’t have the bird any more either.’

‘Probably doesn’t come up here much, then,’ said Alison, getting to her feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘All right.’ There was a television show I wanted to get home to see, one of my favourite comedy programmes. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock anyway.’

‘Eleven o’clock in Corfu,’ Alison said, failing to quicken her pace so that I had to slow down in order to fall back into step beside her. ‘Almost bedtime. I wonder if either of our mums has got lucky yet.’