Voz grinned at me and for a second he was just little ratty, giggly Voz again, who used to cry actual tears when he laughed. ‘I reckon Butler always fancied you, Robyn. I bet he was well jealous of you, Joe.’
Joe smiled at me. ‘Well, yes, I was a very lucky boy.’
‘I always remember that time up at Black Horse Quarry, when you jumped in. D’you remember?’ Voz said, adding, ‘When you nearly died?’
‘How could I forget?’ said Joe.
‘That was a competition for Butler, that was.’ Voz said, pointing decisively. ‘I’ll never forget his face, standing at the top of that hundred-footer. Absolutely gutted that you had the balls to jump and he didn’t.’
‘Yeah, well, turned out he was the sensible one, didn’t it?’ said Joe. ‘I might well have died if Robbie hadn’t saved me that day.’
‘Och,’ I said, modestly. ‘No …’
One of the twins in the buggy started to cry then, thank God. ‘Right, well, I’d better get these rug rats home,’ said Voz. ‘You take care.’
The moment Voz trundled off with his army of children, Joe’s face collapsed. I remember that effort too.
‘Tired?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’ He took my hand. ‘Look, don’t go, Robbie. Come back for the wake.’
Robbie. Nobody but Joe ever called me Robbie.
‘I can’t, Joe. I have to get back to London.’
‘So do I,’ he said.
‘You’re in London now?’
‘Well, Manchester, but you see,’ he said, pointing, ‘that stopped you. You didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know I lived in Manchester. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’
‘Joe,’ I sighed. Didn’t he get that I wasn’t just some unfeeling cow but that I was trying to make a polite exit here without having to go into one?
‘Come on, I haven’t seen you for three years. I don’t want to go back on my own and face all those people.’
Then it clicked.
It was a funeral, his mother’s funeral. What was I doing?
‘Only plus of being a vicar’s son,’ Joe used to say, ‘is that you get a big house’; and it was big compared to the houses most kids who went to our school lived in, but not, I noticed, anywhere near as big as I remembered it from the last time I was in it, years ago. Still, I’d always loved Joe’s house, maybe because it was what ours might have been if Mum and Dad had spent less on socializing and throwing parties, and more on doing the house up (but then, ‘You can’t take it with you when you go,’ Mum used to say. Obviously, she didn’t expect to go quite so soon).
Our house was big too: ‘The big pink house in Kilterdale.’ But it was a wreck. Mum and Dad had bought it when I was six, for a pittance, with some big plans (Dad in particular was good at those) to do it up and turn it into a ‘palace fit for a King!’ It was always the party house – there was nothing to spoil, after all, since nothing had been done – and every summer, we’d hold the King Family Extravaganza, where Mum and Dad would dress up as some famous couple – Sonny and Cher, Marge and Homer, Torvill and Dean – and Dad would serve hot dogs and beer from his old ice-cream van. The big renovation plans began, finally, when I was eleven, but then Dad’s work dried up and they’d always spent so much on socializing, on living for the now instead of thinking about the future (good job, as it turns out) that they couldn’t finish. One year, we had to move into a caravan in the driveway, because we couldn’t afford to finish off the plumbing. Leah (who was fourteen at the time and very unamused by the whole situation) would shout at the top of her voice things like: ‘If I have to shove anyone else’s shit down this septic tank, I am going to throw it at them!’ I dread to think what people on that street thought of us.
It was a shock to the system then, dragged up amidst such chaos (and a lot of fun), to meet Joe, whose house was a vision of sombre, deep contemplation – at least, that was what I imagined. The first time I went there, his dad was wearing his dog collar. We all had tea and biscuits in the living room, making polite smalltalk to the background sound of the grandfather clock ticking away. I bit into a ginger nut and Joe looked at me like I’d just flashed my bra:
‘Oh, no’ he said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You didn’t say Grace, and we always says Grace before we eat anything.’
I felt sick. They let me suffer for a good ten seconds before they all started killing themselves laughing. So that was the kind of ‘good’ church family they were. That was the kind of home the Sawyers had.
The vicarage was an Edwardian villa-type affair, with huge front windows and a big conservatory off the back. The front doors were open when I got there after the funeral, so you could see right through the sun-flooded hall of the house to the lawn, where people were milling in the sun, drinking cups of tea. The scene was very tame – mind you, I’m not sure what I expected: a free bar, like at Mum’s (recipe for disaster in retrospect)? Most people were over fifty and very sedate. I was a bit disappointed the probation lot hadn’t turned up; they’d have livened things up a bit.
I did a quick scan for alcohol and could see none, which panicked me. Then I spotted Mrs Murphy, our old deputy head, and panicked even more – this was exactly why I’d worried about coming: blasts-from-the-past absolutely everywhere. I looked around for Joe, but couldn’t see him, and so I took myself off to the buffet table, before finding a quiet corner, where I was immediately joined by a woman who’d just got back from a Christian Aid mission in Somalia. I’d just put an entire mini pork pie into my mouth when she started telling me about all the horrors there, so all I could do was nod. She left soon after and so I went for a wander, to find Joe, and hopefully some alcohol. I ventured into the cool, dark hall, where one woman – angular and the colour of digestive biscuits – was talking at the top of her voice to an audience, who looked as if they’d not so much gathered, as been passing through and seized against their will.
‘I’ll never forget when Marion came to my Zumba class,’ she was saying. ‘It was last summer. Or was it the summer before? Or was it the one before then?’
Why was it always the one who knew the deceased the least, who talked the loudest at funerals?
I went on to the kitchen, where people were poring over clip-frame pictures of Marion, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at. Old Potty was there with his Mexican-wave eyebrows. I was contemplating slipping out, texting Joe later, then I saw Mrs Murphy looking dangerously like she was making a beeline for me, and decided on a tactical toilet break. I sloped upstairs.
The house had hardly changed in eighteen years. It had the same smell: furniture, polish and books. The wide, dark staircase seemed modest enough now, whereas it used to seem so grand to me, so full of mystique, probably because it led to Joe’s bedroom, which was the only place we could be alone, doing whatever we did in there – learning Zeppelin lyrics off by heart, discussing Potty’s eyebrows … Joe’s mum occasionally walking past with the Hoover.
‘Joseph, leave your door open, please, otherwise Robyn will have to go home!’
Behind that door, we’d be sitting, holding our breath, often in various stages of undress. It seemed like an age ago, another life ago. Like it didn’t even happen.
There was the same mahogany side table at the top of the stairs, with the photos on top. I paused to look at the one of all four boys, an