CHAPTER 64
The double garage had been a sound choice. When we had narrowed our search to a couple of properties, that had been the clincher. Our estate agent (neither of us believed in imaginary estates) had been full of humour, repeating a phrase I had heard more than once before.

When the original houses were built, he said, you’d sometimes see your next door neighbour. As time went on, that compressed to hearing them, and with the current developments, where there was what seemed like six feet or so between your own eavesdrop and next door’s guttering, you could just about smell those across the property line.

I had, in effect, been put through a crash course in Australian house styles, including the ‘Queenslander’, in which the inhabitants didn’t sleep above their livestock but over their vehicles.

Once again, I was blessing my luck in the friends I had found. Once our citizenship had been sorted, and the ensuing hangovers had eased, we had indulged in a Skype session with the Woodruffs, who seemed to have an absolutely huge conservatory from what I could see on screen. I had really struggled to see any trace of the former miserable drunk I had known, as she simply slumped against her man and made rude jokes.

“So you’re staying, then?”

“Steph, if you spent a little time here, you’d want to do the same!"

“Aussie bolts, Rhodes”

“Midges, Woodruff”

“Snakes, spiders, sharks, crocodiles, octopuses, Rhodes”

“Fair point, Woodruff”

“So what’s the plan?”

I dragged my serious head back to me.

“We have a couple of places we like, but it’s the chain thing”

“Plus all your worldly goods in Sheffield?”

“In a nutshell”

“So it’s just the chain, then”

“Sorry?”

She had waved a hand at her husband.

“Sometimes, Geoff surprises me. No, Kul, put your mind away! Not like that. Well, sometimes like that…. Where was I? Oh yes. Geoff had words with Keith and Penny, and they asked Bets in Sheffield, and she spoke to your big boss. They’re springing for a shipping container. Sea freight, aye?”

I was dumbstruck, but she continued.

“We have four families, plus friends, who will be happy to clear your house for you, so you better tell me where you keep the inflatable sheep”

Kul muttered something about the Welsh, she made a bad joke about a leisure centre, and I was struck once more by how happy she was, how utterly comfortable in her skin and with her lover. One sharp pang, one memory of dimples, and then Maz squeezed my knee. Steph was still going.

“It’s T.O.R.R., C3 baggage, so---- start again, woman. Australia and the UK have similar Customs schemes for moving home: transfer of residence relief. Used to be covered in a book of instructions, volume C3, so ‘C3 Baggage’. You make a declaration, container goes to a Customs shed for a look over by their Cussers, then as long as there’s nothing dutiable, and it’s all used stuff, that’s it. My boss used to run a baggage repository. Our plan is to clear your place, you sign off what needs signing, container goes on ship, and sits in the warehouse until you’re in the hew house. Oh, and T.O.R.R. covers motor vehicles as well, so your bike can come over with your sex toys”

Kul sniggered yet again

“Some people think motor bikes ARE sex toys”

“Yeah, but petrol stinks. Mine runs on ale and curry… Bit too far even for me, that. Moving on: does that suit, Mike?”

I looked at Maz, and she nodded, a little wide-eyed, and Steph cheered.

“A man who understands about sharing! Yay! And I—what, Geoff?”

That last wasn’t abrupt, but simple acknowledgement of her man. He waved at the screen, and by proxy us.

“Just realising that if I point at your image on screen, it isn’t like waving at you. Maryam: we’re making plans for Mike, but what is your own situation?”

“Not much to tell. I…”

She took a few deep breaths, then tried to smile at the camera.

“In short, I’m a widow. My late husband and I were like so many in Singapore in that we rented. Big apartment block, eleventh floor. I have stuff in storage there, but not much. I say all that, and I start to feel like I’m sponging off Mike”

Geoff looked sharply at his wife, then back at his own webcam.

“This place was Steph’s, her family’s, yeah? I was renting in Horsham, so I brought nothing to the place”

Steph sat up a little.

“You brought yourself, love. More than enough”

“Absolutely, my love. Anyway, Maz, what I meant was that it doesn’t matter what you bring as long as you bring yourself”

It was my turn to squeeze her knee and smile, and we had closed that chat with some much firmer planning.

My container had arrived a month later, and to my surprise, my house went in only two more. Once it was all sorted and the proceeds banked, we started looking again, because of course the place we had been hoping for had already been sold. We stuck with our chosen estate agent, though, and she came up trumps with a property in Scarborough. Not a huge expanse of land, but not so close to next door so as to trigger our olfactory sense. And it had a double garage, a couple of patches of lawn, a patio ‘for the barbie’ and a reasonably short ride to the beach, which, oddly, was called Brighton. Our saleswoman had mentioned that the beaches there had parking issues, and Maz had given her the sunniest of smiles.

“We have a bike!”

Deal done, contracts et cetera all done, and then we started the job of transferring my now-cleared-through-Customs stuff from container to house.

Of course Rod had a licence to drive heavy goods vehicles, and knew a man who knew a man with a truck, and rather than a never-ending process of gradual transferral of belongings from box to building. Rod simply left the container on our new driveway for 25 hours while our entire staff, plus families, emptied, transferred, reassembled and stashed my previous life’s detritus.

Of course we had a barbie!

My old bike looked a little sad, having sat unused for far too long, but as it was neither registered nor insured in Australia, I resisted the temptation to have a little run out on it and simply added to my list of ‘Things To Do When I Get The Time’.

I also had to spend a few minutes alone in the bathroom, as my little voice was throwing a major tantrum about betrayal and bad faith, abandonment and adultery, but I was finding that easier to deal with each day I woke next to Maryam.

Her own belongings arrived the Friday after mine, and they were minimal, only needing the two of us for the transfer, and mostly consisting of one double bed, a couple of armchairs, several bookshelves, some seriously expensive cooking gear, a collection of telescopes that surprised me it their variety, books (not all about birds) and clothing.

There were also photo albums.

Maryam looked at me as we found places on the now-vertical shelves for her books, and winced.

“Alan loved stargazing, and he was also very into what he called ‘proper’ photographs. The Pentax and the old Leica are his, as is the reflector telescope. I suppose… Was. Were his”

I took her in my arms, looking past her head to one of the bedrooms.

“Both beds as well, love. Am I right?”

She nodded into my chest.

“Feels like betrayal, doesn’t it?”

“Yup. Having the same thoughts. He’d take me for a pint, remember?”

Another swaddled nod.

“Could we be slobby tonight, please? This is so… We need to relax ourselves, lay those ghosts”

“Shut the voices up?”

“Exactly. We pop up to Coles, get some wine and beer in, and there’s an Italian place down the road who can do us a couple of messy pizze”

“Being very proper and exact with the Italian plural, Ms MBR”

“Well, get the OCD bit out of the way, eat at the Italian place and we keep our hands free for later. Don’t mess the photos up with grease”

She drew in a long, slow breath, then let it sigh out.

“I want to talk you through my life, love. Are you up to that? I think we need to”

In the end, the Italian restaurant was full, it being a Friday evening, so we ordered the pizzas for collection, and I took the Beemer up to the supermarket to top up our booze supply. The ‘pizze’ were waiting for me on my return, along with a large mixed salad. Maz had set up my laptop so that it ran through the TV screen, and when she saw that I had noticed the link, she winced.

“Paper photos, love, but I also have some discs with pictures on. If we look at some of our past, each of us, it might help shut our consciences up. I am so nervous…”

The pizzas went quickly, along with half of the salad, and then we made sure our hands were clean before Maz picked up three of her albums and a couple of discs, one of which she settled in the DVD drive under my, our, TV.

“Some old photos, Mike, and then some of my own. Some duplication”

We settled back into the settee after I had poured a glass each, and she opened the first album.

“These are photos taken by Alan’s grandfather, and some by his Dad. Singapore…”

She pulled her own laptop to her, opening a maps page, and started talking through the pictures.

“This was the family home, in the Wessex Estate”

The pictures were almost all monochrome, but she pulled up a ‘street view’ of the place as it was in our time, while showing me a black and white still that clearly showed the same building.

“Alan said that the window there with the columns was his Dad’s bedroom. Apparently the tree you can see in the pic had a couple of swings on”

“Boys’ tree to climb?”

She actually laughed out loud, as if taken by surprise.

“Oh dear me no! Covered in ants, our trees. No fun at all. Now this is…”

She seemed to relax as we worked through the old shots, and then turned to another album.

“This is one of Al’s. He wanted to get as many comparison pics as possible, finding out where his grandfather had taken the picture and then duplicating it as best he could, so of course he took two cameras, the Leica with black and white film and the Pentax for colour. This is the house again…”

I could see her hands starting to tremble as she picked up the third album.

“These are pictures of his Dad and grandparents on holiday. There was a leave centre called Sandycroft, where all the Forces families would go for beer, bingo and beach, and as I told you…”

She nearly dropped the album, so I took it off her and started my own process of turning the pages, knowing already that there would be no matching album of Alan’s photos, because he hadn’t survived to take them. Maryam showed me the ‘street view’ available on the beach, the old NAAFI bar clearly unchanged, and then closed the album with a bang before switching on her own disc-based photo show.

I suspect she was having her own voices harangue her, and from the set of her jaw, they were particularly strident, especially when she arrived at pictures of their wedding. Her voice was as matter-of-fact as she could make it, with a string of variations on “And this is…” until she simply broke down and wept.

I held her as she sobbed, the TV screen showing what was very clearly a bloody happy couple, her husband looking almost astonished at his good luck, and as she calmed down and returned to me, I took the remote and switched off the disc feed. My laptop was within reach…

“This, my love, was on top of Foel Grach. You can see her dimples well in this one”