CHAPTER 59
I called out to the girls slumped in various chairs.

“Any of you understand how to set this bloody thing to record?”

We had upgraded the television after the previous set had walked out of a back door and, by proxy, onto a mortuary slab, and it had all sorts of tricks I couldn’t get my head around. Chloe was the one who made the necessary button-pushes, finding the time for the programme and setting the machine up to capture the show for a later opportunity.

It didn’t look like it would be anything I would normally watch, but I would be able to skim through and find out what Mr Hemmings had to do with the man who had died. I remembered his generosity of spirit, and had a quiet thought that, just maybe, I might find a smile or two of memory.

In the end, I waited ten days before watching the show, and discovered that it was actually a combination eulogy and repeat of a rather odd panel show. The second part sounded like something I could happily skim, but the first part grabbed my attention almost immediately.

Barker had been in a tank in the Second World War, and there was the usual stock footage I had seen too many times, and then it cut to scenes of a wedding, where an old man in army uniform was leading a tall young woman in the full white meringue, apparently his daughter on her wedding day. The scene then cut to what had clearly been his funeral, where I spotted Mr Hemmings again, who clearly knew the daughter well.

She was interviewed for the next bit of the programme, along with her husband, and as her voice came from the television, I spotted several girls’ heads lift. Charlie was the first to react properly, grabbing the remote control and freezing the picture.

“Debbie?”

“Yes, love?”

“Look at her chin. Her neck. You thinking what I am?”

Tiff was nodding.

“Yeah, and her voice, isn’t it? One of us, isn’t she?”

“That’s her husband beside her, Tiff”

“Yeah, but the law, it’s changed, hasn’t it?”

I pressed ‘play’ again, and that voice: well, contralto was a polite term, but her husband seemed comfortable beside her. They spoke of how generous and decent her father had been, and there was some waffle about donations to the British Legion, before the original programme came on. It was the classic formula of introducing each of the panel with a shot of them going ‘normally about their daily life’, which in Barker’s case meant running some sort of boatyard, where the daughter ran the office, looking even more obviously trans than she had in the interview section. There were sections of the old men sitting and talking, interspersed with bits of them in Belgium, at some sort of civic reception, and Germany, where my blood started to chill.

They brought Mr Hemmings on then, along with his brother, and I remembered Mam’s comments then, about guilt and atonement, about a place she and Dad had lived close to in Germany, and after the brothers had told of trying to save so many people it had already been too late for, Barker and a man called Ernie spoke about a smell they could never escape. I found myself in tears, especially at the utter loss in Barker’s eyes as he spoke.

I almost missed another bit, but once again Charlie reacted and grabbed the god box, rewinding a little way.

“That man there, he just said something I nearly missed, and I think…”

She started it playing again, and it was a man in his sixties or late fifties speaking, not an ounce of fat on him, a heavy moustache under a broken nose. He was talking about some peacekeeping thing in Bosnia, and then, the words Charlie had caught.

“Not the place for us, not at all, and it was my mate, big Geordie lad, Mike. He shouldn’t have been there, you know? I mean, he were hard as nails, but sensitive with it, and what those bastards did to women, kids… He said it right, a job for coppers, not soldiers. We came back, and he just cleared off. Never saw him again, and then it were Iraq again, and that were almost a relief. I mean, it were still a horrible thing, but at least it were a bloody war and not women and kids, Sorry”

Charlie rewound and played the clip over again, before turning to me, eyes wide.

“That has to be that woman who was killed, Debbie. Mike? A Geordie? Sensitive? And that man there, he was a Marine, Falklands stuff”

Patricia spoke up then.

“Debbie, we all worked it out, that thing on the news. Sparky, yeah? What do we do?”

I sat in silence for a minute, as the girls whispered, Emma going to the kitchen to sort some hot drinks, before my decision was made.

“Got to let Sparky have a chance to watch this, girls. Can I ask a favour, from all of you? When he comes around, could you just leave the two of us on our own to watch this? Save embarrassing him. Dead girl was a friend of his”

I got a hug from each girl, and Serena handed me the tissue box for my tears. Three days later, I brought my homeless friend to the House for a repeat showing, and as the two parts unfolded, he sat silently, until the ‘day in the life’ part, which sat him upright.

“Fuck me, Debbie, that’s Chalky White!”

“I know, love. That’s part of why I asked you round. I can skip to the important bit if you’d prefer”

He shook his head.

“No. If you don’t mind, can I watch it through? Don’t get much telly where I live”

After the daily life scenes, he paused the show.

“Going to take a guess, but that woman’s too young to be his real daughter, and, well, she’s one of yours, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Don’t know her, but one of the people at the funeral was my surgeon. He’s in the programme as well, which is what caught my eye”

“Right… yeah, hear that? Chalky White, on one of the fireteams in D-Company when were down South, and in Bosnia. I think he was in a team with Mike and Stewie in the second---hang on”

He turned to stare at me.

“Is Mike in this show?”

I grimaced.

“Not in it, but he gets a mention. I thought you should have a chance of hearing it, that’s all, love”

“Okay2

That was all he said, but as the programme went on, and the old men spoke about blood on fresh snow, brains on a backpack, I took his hand and passed him the same tissue box I had needed. Chalky’s comments about Mike brought the first sobs, and I suddenly had a broken man in my arms.

The girls were good, as with only a couple of peeks in through the living door to see how we were doing, they left us alone. I sat with Sparky till gone eleven, and he made no argument at all when I insisted he use the space in the back yard to sleep. I didn’t feel safe letting him go off alone, and my relief was huge when I found him still there in the morning, and still breathing and able to eat breakfast with us.

“Sorry about last night, woman”

“Oh, sod off. I am still worried I did the wrong thing, showing you that”

He put a hand on my forearm, as we sat at the big table.

“No, Debbie. Just holding you to that promise, isn’t it? You ever go over there, you see if you can take me, okay? Got to go and say… I was going to say, pay my respects, isn’t it, but in the circumstances, be nice to just say hello to her. Wish I could have done that… Well. You understand”

I did, and if Bert had ever had a job that needed doing, I would have done so, but his work was almost entirely South Wales, and the opportunity never arose.

That television show turned out to be the equivalent of the Elliott book, as far as I was concerned. Stevie Elliott would have shown me that I hadn’t been the only one to suffer, if I hadn’t met Benny and the others in Mersey View, not to mention Tiff and Charlie. The telly programme let me see Dad in a new light, or rather a clearer one, and I could see some of my Dad in my builder.

I also saw myself, my inability to hold and be held, to love, and those impossibilities were almost identical with what war had done to Sparky, to Dad, and to my surgeon. The answer was clear to me, and it was a simple one: keep giving.

I just wished so many people weren’t so determined to drag down the shitty side of the balance.

Another cycle of the seasons, another set of exams, and another set of rituals, as we hit the mountains, Gemma looking after the two agoraphobes, and the Christmas observation in the usual place.

We didn’t go to the clubhouse for the New Year, though, as the mood simply wasn’t there, so soon as it was after Serena and her mother had been cremated.