CHAPTER 3
I managed to spin out my own house sale for two months, which rather pissed off the estate agents I had entrusted with my former home. They did know that I was covered by a bridging loan that was being paid by someone else, but they still wanted their percentage as soon as they could get it into the bank. In the end, I was up in Sheffield, Keith and Penny’s furniture in my old place, and a warm spot in my heart from what I had heard about my friend’s leave-taking.

I had managed to sort a last evening out in the Nickel Bag with some of my former colleagues, who were now by definition also Keith’s, and most definitely ‘former’, Andy Sellers and Ray Davenport. Andy, a rail-thin chain-smoker, was almost giggling over the departure.

“Yeah, so we had fucking Simes on, miserable fucker, and he’s been, they’ve both been, closing down the summer leave lists, all apart from the Sarahs, of course”

I shook my head, puzzled, and he grinned.

“Sorry. After your time, they are, pair of girls, and I mean girls, not that old, yeah, and he’s… Drooling after both of them, but we can’t work out which one Derek fancies, which one’s Simes’ little wank target, or if they’re both feeling the lust, equal opportunities shit. Where was I?”

I shrugged. By then, we were all on the downslope from ‘refreshed’ to ‘blotto’, and I was starting to find an alternate timescale.

“Leave lists, I think”

“Yeah. Right. So he’s been on one cause so many people have sodded off in the last year, and in goes Keefy Boy, and Johnny Trigg, he’s earwigging, and Keefy plonks this letter down on Simes’ desk, lets the cunt read it, and then, as he snarls out some shit about notice period, it’s ‘Got enough TOIL and annual leave bye-bye’, dumps his ID and keys and shit on top of it and walks out”

Ray almost spat out his mouthful of beer.

“Fuck yeah! I was on a late shift that day. Keith was gone when I got in, but Simes was still in full target-acquisition mode. Tried to pick a fight with Tom Sinclair—remember him?”

“The big Glaswegian sod?”

“The very one! Told Simes that if he ever spoke to him like that again, he’d be on hospital rations. Was magic! Just got one question, Mike. Well, two”

“They are?”

“How long’s he been planning this, and where’s he gone?”

I shook my head, smiling as I did so to ease the reply.

“Second question is simply ‘somewhere worth living”

Andy laughed, ruefully.

“Not fucking Luton, then. Knowing him, it’ll be somewhere lumpy”

“Not difficult to guess, really. As for the other question, long enough to make sure he really, really pissed off Derek and Simes”

Ray’s turn to laugh.

“That worked well, then! You coming down the Studio after this, Mike? Students are back. Be loads of gash there”

“Ah, not really my thing. Got loads to do with my own move, anyway”

The two men went on a tag-team effort about my own lost one, but as it was mostly tied to the easy availability of drunk students, I did my best to rune it out until they had both buggered off. I was still tender from Keith’s unintentionally barbed remark about their house being a shelter rather than a home, and that raw spot would always be there, because our house had always been a home, right up to her end. If it hadn’t been for the joint efforts of MacMillan and Marie Curie nurses, I would almost certainly have folded and joined Carolyn.

Leaving the house for my trip to Sheffield didn’t actually mean that final departure, of course, for it was still being used by people I loved, even if only as a repository for their stuff, but ‘final’ was how it felt.

Sod it. Lock the door, turn round, don’t look back. Crank up the bike, and sod those rear-view mirrors. Wind sting, not emotion, that was what pulled the tears from me.

It had always been a shared joke among the four of us that the one good thing about Luton was how easy it was to leave. Work through the town until I hit Waller Avenue, then past the washing machine factory, right at the lights and a short run to the M1 junction and a steady run north. I could do it on autopilot, almost, only really surfacing at the junction with the M6, and again at Junction 29, with muttered reminders to myself that I was going neither to North Wales nor to the Peak.

Some hours later, I pulled up outside the new place, easing the bike onto its centre stand on the little bit of hard standing under my new living room window, and starting the process of bringing a house to life. I stood for a while as the immersion heater started its job of giving me enough water before shaking my head.

Still light, still dry; I hauled off my leathers, changing into my old Fawcett rock pants, threw my older rock boots into a rucksack, and got back on the bike.

Burbage North gave me enough scope for an evening’s soloing, the sun warming the rock nicely, and I finished off with a solo of Amazon Crack, the jams solid enough to make me smile, while the grade was high enough to force me to stay in sharp focus. I finished off sitting on a block near the start of the path, as an older couple walked hand-in-hand down the lower path. A lovely evening, in so many ways, but. Always a but.

The new job was a challenge, in ways that were so close to my feelings on Amazon Crack. I knew I could do it, I was confident in the moves, but the difference between a solo and a lead was paralleled in the work, as I was no longer following someone else’s guidance in completing a task, but setting my own. I was deep in some issue regarding accounting protocols for the recycling of waste cooking oils when there was a cough at my shoulder.

“Mngff?”

“Hi. Mike, isn’t it?”

“Er, yeah. Sorry. Miles away”

“Pretty obviously! Seen what time it is?”

“Um—shit! Sorry. Best get this lot put away, mate”

“Cool”

“Pardon? “

“No, ‘Kul’. Short for Kulwinder”

I took his hand, then grinned as I caught on.

“You do that deliberately, don’t you? To every new chum?”

He shrugged, doing his best to look innocent, but still grinning through his beard.

“Don’t know what you mean! Anyway, a few of us are off to the bar down the road. They do good mocktails, if you prefer”

“What on Earth is one of them?”

“Cocktail, just without the boozohol”

“Ah! How many?”

“Usually six or seven. Gives us a chance to unwind before heading back to the soom beaus and hoom beaus”

That is what it sounded like, but je laughed again before explaining.

“Rider Haggard, filtered through a former colleague who was Welsh. She or He Who Must Be Obeyed. You married, er, Mike?”

“Er, sort of sore point. Widowed”

“Of shit. Sorry!”

“Oh, don’t be, Kul. Getting used to it, really. Part of why I made the break. Anyway, get these books locked up, and offski? How far?”

“Oh, about two, three hundred yards. You won’t need the bike”

It was actually quite fun, seven of us ending up sharing a pile of bags of crisps, before I succumbed to what the landlord, who was certainly not from Sheffield, called a ‘pie floater’, consisting of a meat pie on a pile of mushy peas. Kul was shaking his head, while one of the women, Betty, made a comment about food groups.

“Got everything there in terms of what a man needs, Mike. Lard, grease, fat, burnt crispy bits and stuff to make you fart. All it’s missing is the alcohol”

“Well, I AM on the waste cooking fat account! Getting a sort of hands--- I mean, tongues-on experience”

“Hmmm. Which end of the office do you sit at, and do the windows open?”

I found myself laughing happily, for the first time since I had waved goodbye to Keith, and Betty simply grinned back.

“Where are you from, Mike?”

“Originally from Sussex, but I moved from there a long time ago”

“Where to?”

“Place I don’t want to name. Speak of the Devil, sort of thing, or the p-word in cycling. Let’s just say it is north of London, starts with an ‘L’ and rhymes with Boot On”

Kul reached out to pat my shoulder, clearly in Manly Sympathy.

“I was once there, on my way from somewhere to visit family in Leicester, and I had to change trains. Some things were not meant to be borne by mortal men. Or, sorry Bets, women. But what’s the cycling p-word?”

“Ah, rhymes with ‘juncture’. Caused by faeries, that’s ‘F-A-E’, with sharp teeth and claws. Say the p-word, and they descend and wreak havoc, or at least holes. Need propitiating, or whatever the word is. Dancing widdershins round a willow, naked, allegedly”

The evening continued like that, before people started slipping away to their own homes, SWMBOs or HWMBOs, and I sat with a proper pint before making my own move. It was my first full confirmation that I had, most definitely, made the right choice.

It set a pattern that I found more than comfortable, as it wasn’t so much a mirror of the atmosphere in Luton as a sort of photo-negative. In Luton, people went from work straight to the pub, where they fought their taste buds to get their bodies outside as much alcohol as they could, as quickly as possible. Their humour was all points-scoring rather than actual jokes, and my new colleagues were so, so different.

I had mentally slapped myself when that thought first hit me, for, in reality, I hardly knew these people; not yet, anyway.

I found a new direction a month later, when a letter arrived from Keith: they had actually got the property they had been looking at, and the final chapter in the life I had shared with Carolyn was coming to an end. I rang him from work the next day, and that was when the reality of our lives started throwing stones and spanners at our plans.

I had just put the phone down after speaking to Keith, when I realised Kul was at my shoulder again.

“Problems?”

“Sort of”

“Anything I could help with?”

“Doubt it. It’s a house move. My old place, well, a mate has his stuff stored there, and it needs moving”

“You not sold it yet?”

“Will do, once his stuff’s out”

“Let me guess: he can’t afford a removal company?”

“Spot on. And he’s just taken on a new business; no chance of getting time off. I’m going to hire a wagon, but, well. House full of furniture”

“Right… When are you doing this?”

“This coming weekend”

“Could you pass me the phone?”

That Friday, after pulling in some favours that seemed to be given freely rather than Luton-style, I drove from Luton to Bethesda, Keith and Penny’s stuff piled in the van I had hired, Kul and his sixteen-year-old son beside me on the bench seat.

Definitely better than Luton.