Big Sky Read online

  Had he complained? No. In fact, that had been the refrain of his adult life. “Can’t complain.” A British stoic to the core. Mustn’t grumble. Like someone in an old-fashioned sitcom. He was making up for it now, even if only to himself, because he still felt impelled to put on a good face for the world, it seemed bad manners to do otherwise. “If you can’t say something nice,” his mother had tutored him, “then don’t say anything at all.”

  “One of each, please,” he said to the woman in the chip shop. Was there anything more wretched than an about-to-be-divorced middle-aged man ordering a single fish supper?

  “Do you want scraps with that?” the woman asked.

  “If you’ve got them, please. Thank you,” he said, grimacing inwardly. Yes, he was not blind to the irony of her question, he thought, as the woman shoveled up the crispy remnants of batter. That was all that was left of his life now. Scraps.

  “More?” she asked, the scoop still poised, prepared to be generous. The kindness of strangers. He should learn her name, Vince thought. He saw more of her than he did anyone else.

  “No, thanks. That’ll do.”

  “Thisldo” they had called their house, a jokey idea that seemed stupid now, but they had been a jokey kind of family once. A unit that functioned at the top of its game—barbecues in the back garden, friends round for drinks, trips to Alton Towers, foreign holidays at four-star resorts, a cruise or two. Living the dream, compared to a lot of people. The dream of a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, middle-class man.

  They had loaded up the trunk every weekend at Tesco’s and never stinted on Ashley’s dance classes, horse riding, birthday parties, tennis lessons. (School skiing trips. You needed a second mortgage for them!) And all the time he spent ferrying her to “sleepovers” and “playdates.” She didn’t come cheap. (Not that he was resentful. He loved her!)

  And driving lessons—hours, days, even, of his life that he would never get back, teaching both his wife and daughter to drive. Sitting in the passenger seat of his own car with one of them in the driving seat, neither of whom could tell left from right or even backward from forward. And then suddenly Ashley was in the back of a tuk-tuk and Wendy had a Honda with a UKIP sticker on the back that she zipped around in, looking for the new Mr. Right now that Vince was suddenly Mr. Wrong. Craig, the lifeboat man, had been jettisoned apparently in favor of the smorgasbord of Tinder. According to his wife, Vince could have had a whole Mr. Men series of his own—Mr. Boring, Mr. Overweight, Mr. Exhausted. And to add insult to injury, Wendy had gone back to her maiden name, as if he was to be erased entirely from existence.

  “Thisldo,” he snorted to himself. Now it didn’t do at all and even Sparky treated him like a stranger. Sparky was an indeterminate kind of lurcher that had chosen Wendy as its alpha male even though Vince was inordinately fond of it and was the one who had usually taken it for walks or cleaned up its crap or fed it its expensive food—which in retrospect seemed of a higher quality than the tins of supermarket-own-brand stew he had been reduced to buying nowadays for himself when he wasn’t dining on fish and chips. He should probably just buy dog food for himself instead of the stew, it couldn’t be any worse. He missed the dog more than he missed Wendy. In fact, he was surprised to find that he hardly missed Wendy at all, just the home comforts she had taken away from him. A man bereft of his home comforts was just a sad and lonely bastard.

  Vince had still been in the Signals when he met Wendy, at an Army mate’s wedding down south. He’d had a Balkans suntan and newly promoted sergeant’s stripes and she had giggled and said, “Oh, I do like a man in uniform,” and two years later they were at their own wedding and he was on civvy street, working for a telecoms firm, first as an engineer, running the IT, before moving into the suit-and-tie end of the business, in management, ten years ago. He thought of Craig, the lifeboat man, and wondered now if it had been the uniform all along that she had liked about Vince and not the man inside it.

  “My mother warned me not to marry you,” she had laughed as, exhausted and drunk, they had stripped themselves of their wedding finery in the bedroom of the hotel where they had their reception—a lackluster venue on the outskirts of Wendy’s home town of Croyden. As a seductive prelude to their first night as a married couple the words didn’t augur well. Her mother—a mean-spirited, lazy widow—had indulged in a disproportionate amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth over Wendy’s choice of husband. Sitting in the front pew in an appalling hat, she may as well have been at a funeral from her aspect of grief. In subsequent years she had strived hard for the award for “Most Critical Mother-in-Law in the World.” “Yeah, competition’s stiff for that one,” Tommy said, although he had managed two marriages with no mother-in-law in sight. It was a huge relief for Vince when she died a couple of years ago from a lingering cancer that transformed her into a martyr in Wendy’s eyes.

  “If only I’d listened to my poor mother,” Wendy said as she itemized the belongings he was allowed to take with him. Wendy who was getting so much money in the settlement that Vince barely had enough left for his golf-club fees.

  “Best I can do, Vince,” Steve Mellors said, shaking his head sadly. “Matrimonial law, it’s a minefield.” Steve was handling Vince’s divorce for him for free, as a favor, for which Vince was more than grateful. Steve was a corporate lawyer over in Leeds, and didn’t usually “dabble in divorce.” Neither do I, Vince thought, neither do I.

  Vince shared history with Steve Mellors—they had gone to the same school, in Dewsbury, home of the coarse recycled-wool industry known as shoddy. Appropriate, Vince thought, considering how his life was turning out. After school their paths had diverged markedly. Steve’s took him to Leeds to do Law while Vince went straight into the Army, at his father’s behest, “to get a decent trade.” His father owned a plumbing business, he was the business, he’d never even taken on an apprentice. His father was a nice man, a patient man, who never raised his voice to Vince or his mother, did the football pools every Friday, and came home with a box of cakes every Saturday from the baker’s next to his shop. Lemon squares and sponge drops. Never grumbled. It was in the genes.

  His father hadn’t encouraged Vince to follow him into the plumbing business. “You’ll spend half your life up to your elbows in other people’s shit, son.” And Vince had indeed gotten a trade, the Signals was good for that. He had rarely been deployed to the heart of a conflict. Ulster, the Gulf, Bosnia—Vince had been behind the lines in a support unit, fiddling with technical equipment or trying to resuscitate ailing software. It was only in his last deployment in Kosovo that he had gone in with the frontline troops and come under fire. He had tasted conflict and he hadn’t liked it. Hadn’t liked the fallout from war either—the women, the children, even the dogs, who constituted “collateral damage.” After Kosovo he decided to get out of the Army. Unlike a lot of the other guys, he had never regretted leaving.

  Steve Mellors had always been the clever, popular one. It had been enough for Vince to be his sidekick and let some of Steve’s self-assured aura rub off on him. Watson to Steve’s Holmes, Tenzing to his Hillary. In Vince’s animal lexicon, Steve would have been a young lion in those days.

  They used to ride their bikes home from school together along the canal towpath, a lot of larking around, until one day Steve hit a bump, went head over handlebars, banged his head on the dried-mud towpath, and toppled into the water. Slipped under. “Just like that,” Vince said later in the retelling of the incident, doing his best Tommy Cooper impression. He used to be the class jester. Something that was hard to believe now.

  Vince waited for Steve to resurface, to swim to the bank—he was a good swimmer—but there was nothing, just a few bubbles rising to the surface as if it was a fish down there, not a person.

  Vince jumped in the canal and pulled his friend out. He laid him down on the bank and after a couple of seconds half the canal gushed back out of his mouth and he sat up and said, “Fuck.” He had a bruise the size of a duck e
gg on his forehead from where he had knocked himself unconscious, but apart from that he seemed fine.

  It hadn’t seemed a particularly heroic act to Vince at the time, he’d done a lifesaving class at the local swimming pool so he was hardly going to stand there and watch his friend drown. It made a bond between them (saving someone’s life would do that, he supposed) because they had stayed in touch, however tangentially—sporadic Christmas cards, mostly. They both, in their different ways, shared the trait of loyalty—not always a good thing, as far as Vince could see. He had been loyal to Wendy, he had been loyal to Sparky. Had they been loyal to him in return? No. And, sadly, he had no doubt that Ashley would take her mother’s side in the divorce. They were two peas in a pod.

  He had reconnected in person with Steve at a school reunion a couple of years ago, a hellish event that confirmed Wendy’s belief that men didn’t grow up, they just got bigger. And balder. And fatter. Not Steve, though, he had the look of a thoroughbred who groomed himself every morning, nothing shoddy about Steve. “Are you keeping your portrait in the attic, then, Steve?” someone said at the school reunion. He laughed the comment off (“Tennis and the love of a good woman”) but Vince could see that he preened himself a little at the compliment. Girls and money—those had always been the twin targets that Steve had aimed for, Vince supposed, and it seemed he had hit bull’s-eyes in both.

  He had morphed into “Stephen” these days, although Vince found it hard to call him that. It was Steve who had introduced Vince to “my good friends” Tommy and Andy. They made an odd trio—the lion, the bear, and the fox, like something out of Aesop’s Fables. In Vince’s hierarchy of friends, Tommy and Andy and Steve would be friend friends. There was a pecking order at work, though, Vince soon realized. Steve looked down on Tommy because Steve was better educated. Tommy looked down on Andy because Tommy had a gorgeous wife, and Andy looked down on him because, well, because he was Vince. Vince had no one to look down on. Except himself.

  “Andy and Tommy live in your neck of the woods,” Steve said. “You should get to know them. They might be useful to you.” (For what? Vince had wondered.) And it was Steve, too, who had proposed him for the Belvedere Golf Club.

  In Vince’s complex hierarchy of friendship, Steve was a school friend, not a friend friend—too much time had elapsed, too many experiences hadn’t been shared. “Old school chum,” Steve had said, thumping him (rather hard) on the back when he introduced him to Tommy and Andy. It made Vince feel young for a moment and then it made him feel old. “This guy saved my life,” Steve said to Tommy and Andy, “and I mean literally. You could say that I owe him everything.”

  “Long time ago now,” Vince said, staring modestly at his feet. He didn’t think they’d ever used the word “chum” when they were in Dewsbury. He doubted that anyone in West Yorkshire ever had. It was a word more suited to the playing fields of Eton than the shoddy capital of the North.

  Steve lived now in an old farmhouse outside Malton with an attractive, sophisticated wife called Sophie, a strapping rugby-playing teenage son called Jamie, and a pony-obsessed, rather sullen daughter called Ida. “Princess Ida,” Sophie laughed as if that was some kind of family joke. “It’s a Gilbert and Sullivan opera,” she explained when she saw Wendy looking blank. (“Pretentious cow,” Wendy said in the evening’s debrief later.)

  They’d been invited over for dinner, him and Wendy, but it had been a slightly awkward evening, just the four of them, that had left Wendy feeling churlish because Vince hadn’t done as well in his life as his old “chum.”

  “Showing off, if you ask me,” Wendy said. “Silver cutlery, crystal glasses, damask tablecloth,” she inventoried. “I thought it was supposed to be a simple kitchen-table supper.” (What was that? Vince wondered. Something she’d read about in a color supplement?) He, too, had been a little surprised at Steve’s lifestyle, but you could hardly hold it against a man for doing well.

  They had forgotten to take a gift with them and arrived with a last-minute bottle of wine and bunch of flowers from a garage en route as well as a hastily chosen box of After Eights. (“How lovely,” Sophie murmured.)

  They’d had a little tabby called Sophie, gotten as a kitten before Ashley was born. She had died only a couple of years ago and Vince still missed her undemanding companionship. Every time Steve mentioned his wife, Vince was reminded of the cat, although the name was the only thing she had in common with Steve’s svelte spouse, apart from a penchant for a brindled colorway. Before her marriage, Sophie had been a high-ranking accountant “with Deloitte,” but she had given up work to look after her family. “It’s a full-time job, after all, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Tell me about it,” Wendy said. In retrospect, Vince could see that his wife had inherited her mother’s predisposition to martyrdom.

  He had castigated himself for not bringing better wine but was relieved in the end because Steve made a big deal out of the “Pommard, 2011” he was decanting, even though to Vince it tasted like any old red you could have grabbed off the shelf in Tesco’s.

  “And her, Sophie,” Wendy said disdainfully (no sisterhood for Wendy), “she was wearing Dries Van Noten, while the best I can do is Marks and Spencer’s Autograph.” Although Vince didn’t understand the specifics of this sentence, he understood the implication. It wasn’t the best Wendy could do, it was the best Vince had done on her behalf.

  They had reciprocated, rather reluctantly. Wendy had cooked some kind of fancy lamb dish and an even fancier dessert. Thisldo had a poky dining room that was only used on high days and holidays and the Ercol dining table was usually covered with Vince’s paperwork (not anymore!), which had to be cleared away. Wendy had fretted uncharacteristically about flowers and “tapered dinner candles” and cloth napkins, all of which Vince had to go and find on his way to a “proper” wine merchant.

  In the end, Vince’s verdict was that it was a pleasant enough evening. Sophie had arrived with roses “from the garden” and Steve was clutching a bottle of “Dom,” ready chilled, and they managed to avoid politics and religion (although who talked about religion these days?) and when Brexit had momentarily reared its ugly head Vince managed to quash it quickly back down.

  Vince tried to focus. Be the ball. He took his shot and chunked it.

  “Keep up, Vince!” Andy Bragg yelled at him as they hauled their carts across the green. “Eighteenth’s in sight, last one pays.”

  It was a beautiful afternoon. Vince struggled to appreciate it despite the cloud of despondency hanging over him. From here, high up on the cliff, the whole of the town was visible, the castle on the cliff, the sweep of the North Bay. A great blue sky as far as you could see.

  “Makes a man glad to be alive,” Tommy Holroyd said as he lined his own ball up. He was a good golfer, three under par at the moment. Thwack!

  “Good shot,” Vince said generously.

  And All Things Nice

  Crystal was sneaking a cigarette in the conservatory. There had been a bake sale at Candy’s playgroup, they had one every month. It helped to pay for outings and the rent for the church hall. Everyone made something except for Crystal, who doubted that the other mothers would appreciate her “vegan zucchini mud cake” or “gluten-free parsnip cupcakes”—she was a zealous convert to “clean eating.” To make up for her perceived shortcomings she bought tons of other people’s sickly offerings and then binned them when she got home or let Candy feed them to the ducks. Crystal felt bad for the ducks, they should be eating pondweed or whatever it was that ducks ate.

  Today she had brought home flapjacks, a Victoria sponge, and something labeled as a “traybake fluffle slice.” Crystal couldn’t even begin to imagine what that might be. Was “fluffle” even a word? She’d have to ask her stepson, Harry. Whatever it was, it looked figging awful. Crystal had made a massive effort not to swear after Candy was born. There was a whole list of stupid substitutes online. Sugar, fudge, fig, fiddlesticks, crackers. The “c” word—carrots. Yes, she
had been on fucking Mumsnet. Figging Mumsnet. There you go, you see—it was hard work retraining yourself. It turned out you could take the girl out of Hull but you couldn’t take Hull out of the woman.

  Tommy didn’t think swearing and smoking were “ladylike,” although what Tommy knew about ladies could be written on a postage stamp. If he’d wanted a lady perhaps he should have gone shopping for one at a tea dance or a WI meeting or wherever it was you found them, and not in a nail bar in the ailing back streets of a seaside town.

  Before she became Mrs. Thomas Holroyd, Crystal had clawed her way up, hand over hand, to reach the dizzying heights of nail technician. She had run Nail It! for an owner she never saw. A big gruff bloke called Jason called in every week and, opposite to what would happen in a regular business, deposited cash rather than collecting it. He wasn’t what you would call a conversationalist. She wasn’t stupid, she knew it was a front. Was there a nail bar or tanning salon in the world that wasn’t? But she had kept her mouth shut and run a nice place, although you had to wonder why the Inland Revenue didn’t question the fact that she was shifting so much money. And it was just Crystal, no trafficked Vietnamese kids enslaved to the file and polish, like you saw in other places. “More trouble than they’re worth,” Jason said, as if he knew about these things.

  For work, Crystal had worn a spotless white uniform—tunic and trousers, not the sexy-nurse kind of outfit that you could get for hen nights—and kept everything clinically clean. She was good at what she did—acrylics, gels, shellac, nail art—and was proud of the attention she gave to her job, even if trade was sparse. It was the first thing she’d ever done that didn’t involve selling her body in one way or another. Marriage to Tommy was a financial transaction too, of course, but to Crystal’s way of thinking, you could be lap dancing for the fat sweaty patron of a so-called gentlemen’s club or you could be greeting Tommy Holroyd with a peck on the cheek and hanging his jacket up before laying his dinner before him. It was all part of the same spectrum as far as Crystal was concerned, but she knew which end of it she preferred. And, to quote Tina Turner, what does love have to do with it? Fig all, that was what.