Runaway (9 page)

Jack shook his head in disgust. ‘Where’d you hear that? Your father?’

Ricky pressed his lips together and declined to reply, which in itself answered his grandfather’s question.

‘You know nothing, son. Sitting here in my house, with your big TV screen and your computer games, spoiled rotten by pampering parents who fill your head full of nonsense. I’m ashamed of my own daughter. My father, and his before him, must be turning in their graves.’

Ricky’s plump face glowed beetroot red beneath his black curls. ‘And what would you know about anything? Failed at everything you ever did, my dad says. Failed student, failed musician, and forty years behind the counter at a bank. I suppose you must have learned a lot about the world from the other side of a glass screen.’

Sometimes words said in anger carry hurt beyond real intention, and Ricky was just being defensive, Jack knew. But words meant to cause pain very often do so because they express a truth that the conventions of politeness avoid. Jack had spent a lifetime avoiding what he knew only too well. But, still, it was almost painful beyond hurt to have it thrown in his face by his own grandson.

If Ricky had any remorse he wasn’t showing it. He turned surly instead. Perhaps as a way of concealing his regret.

‘And why do you keep calling me
Rick
?
It’s
Ricky
!’

Jack had always called his grandson Rick. It seemed fonder, somehow.

‘Anyway, what are you doing here? You know my folks are out all day.’

Jack took a few moments to calm himself. ‘I didn’t come to see your parents.’

The hint of a frown gathered faintly around Ricky’s brows. He glanced at his grandfather, but was reluctant now to meet his eye.

Jack said, ‘Maybe you heard about the time I ran away when I was a kid? Me and the rest of the boys in my group.’

Ricky sighed. ‘Once or twice.’ He lifted his games controller from the seat beside him and pretended to be fiddling with it. ‘Probably the only interesting thing you ever did in your life.’

‘Aye, well, I was five years younger than you when I did it. And you still haven’t done anything interesting.’

Time to hurt back. And the jibe didn’t miss its mark. He saw Ricky’s lips pale as he drew them in. But the boy said nothing. Jack let a silence hang between them for a while, like the motes of dust suspended in the sunlight falling through the window.

Finally he said, ‘So, anyway, we’re doing it again.’

Ricky flicked sullen eyes in his direction. ‘Doing what?’

‘Running away to London. Those of us who are left, that is.’

Ricky forgot his sulk and his eyes opened wider. ‘Running away? At your age? Why would you do that?’

Jack shrugged. ‘Unfinished business, son.’ Then he hesitated. ‘Only thing is . . . we’ve no transport.’

Suddenly Ricky realized why his grandfather was there. He breathed his annoyance. ‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘You’re not borrowing my car.’

And the way he was so possessive about ownership of it made Jack wonder if he realized just how lucky he was to have parents who not only tolerated his lethargy, but who spoiled him by buying him his own wheels. Not a new car, admittedly. A second-hand Nissan Micra. But wheels nonetheless.

‘I don’t want to borrow it.’

Which momentarily took the wind out of the boy’s sails.

‘I want to borrow you to drive it for us.’

Ricky’s eyes opened wider. ‘You’re having a laugh, right?’

‘No, I’m serious. Just for a few days. A week at the most. We’ll pay you for the petrol.’

‘No. Way.’ A long pause. ‘And anyway, my folks would never let me.’

‘You’re twenty-two years old, Ricky.’

‘You don’t know my dad.’

‘Oh, I think I do.’

‘He’d never let me in a million years. Particularly if it was a favour to you.’

Jack pursed his lips, containing his anger.

‘So there’s no point in even asking. He wouldn’t hear of it.’

Which was Ricky’s way of deflecting personal responsibility.

Jack sighed. He hadn’t wanted to do this. ‘I think he would be even less pleased to hear about those websites you visit when they’re both asleep.’

Ricky blushed to the roots of his hair. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Jack shook his head. ‘Look, son, I might be old, but I’m not daft. I was working with computers before you were born. And you don’t spend nearly two years sharing the same house with someone without knowing the kind of websites they frequent. You were careful enough around your folks. But I was just some stupid old man. Invisible. What would I know?’ Jack let that sink in. ‘All those videos of naked women with . . . well, how can I put it delicately? A little something extra?’

If it was possible, Ricky’s colour deepened. ‘I was just surfing, that’s all!’ he said, but his voice was trembling with embarrassment and uncertainty, and he added lamely, ‘I was curious.’

Jack spread his hands in front of him, and made a face of resignation. ‘I know that, Rick. Young men . . . well, they have to explore a little before they know what it is that suits them. And I’m not saying that’s what suits you. In fact, I’m not here to judge you at all. All I’m saying is, I’m not sure your dad would be so understanding.’ He waited a beat before turning the knife. ‘Or your mother.’

Ricky closed his eyes. ‘I’m not! I mean . . . I’m not like that.’

‘Of course you’re not.’

Jack almost felt sorry for him. The boy was clinically obese. He never set foot over the door, except for his Friday afternoon visits to his grampa. When was he ever going to get a girl who wasn’t made of pixels, whether she had something extra or not? He saw the slump of his grandson’s shoulders.

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

Ricky took a deep breath. ‘We’re not telling my dad. Or my mum. Alright? They’d only stop me from doing it. We’ll just go.’

Jack nodded. ‘We can leave them a note on your pillow, son. And don’t worry about it, they’ll blame me. Everyone always does.’

_II

When he got back from the medical supplies store in Shawlands, Jack put a holdall on his bed and began filling it with enough socks and underwear to last him a week. He figured a couple of days to get there, a couple of days to get back, and three days in London to do whatever it was Maurie had to do.

And yet he couldn’t shake off the feeling that somehow he was packing for the last time, and that it didn’t really matter what he put in the holdall, he was never going to need it. All in stark contrast to the thoughtless optimism with which he had packed his bag fifty years ago, almost to the day. Then, the future had stretched ahead into unforeseeable distance, full of optimism and possibility. The notion of running out of socks had never even occurred to him.

When he had finished, he dropped his bag by the front door and wandered back into the living room. The school across the way was closed up for the day, its pupils long since gone home. When he had first moved into the flats the sound of children playing during breaks in their classes had seemed like music. But the siren call of youth had served, in the end, only to reinforce how far behind him his own childhood lay, and how close he was to the rocks of old age on which he would inevitably founder and die.

He picked up the photograph of Jenny and remembered how they had said goodbye that night. And here he was, all these years later, embarking on the same fruitless journey. One that could only, he suspected, end badly. And he recalled the words of his old history teacher.
The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history
.

He stood the photo frame back on the bookcase and gazed out through the trees across the lawns beyond. He remembered, the day he had moved in, thinking, ‘This is the view I’ll take with me to my grave.’ That this was what it had all narrowed down to. Four walls and a landscape. And he had found himself infused, then and now, with an almost overwhelming sense of regret – for many of the things he had done, but most of all for those he had not.

His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Ricky’s Micra in the car park below. The boy swung it through a three-point turn, then glanced up towards Jack’s window as he sat idling on the tarmac. Jack gave him a small wave and wondered what on earth he was leading his grandson into. But as he took his walking stick from the stand in the hall and lifted his holdall, he thought that anything would be better for him than sitting in a darkened room playing computer games.

And as for himself? What the hell? After sixty-seven years it was time to start living.

He hurried down the stairs and out into the car park. Ricky looked pale and nervous behind the window of the driver’s door. Jack glanced back towards the top floor of the flats, and saw Fiona watching him from her window.

But by the time he had thrown his bag into the boot and turned to wave, she was gone. And the empty space she’d left behind her seemed big enough to swallow him.

Just as fifty years before, they sat outside Dave’s house with the engine running, Ricky drumming his fingers nervously on the wheel, exactly as Jeff had done. But five minutes after the appointed time, there was still no sign of Dave.

Finally Jack said, ‘Turn her off, son. I think we’d better go in and look for him.’

The house had undergone several facelifts in the half-century that had passed. The front garden wasn’t much, but the grass was neatly cut, and there were rose bushes in the flower beds. Gone was the rotten old boat on the drive, to be replaced by a Vauxhall Corsa. A new garage built on to the side of the house had a bedroom extension above it.

As they approached the front door, they heard voices raised in anger coming from inside. The door itself was an elaborate construction of wrought iron and glass, a pretentious adornment to the mean little semi that it opened into.

‘Maybe we’d be better waiting in the car,’ Ricky whispered nervously.

Jack cast him a look. ‘Not so brave without a semi-automatic in your hands, eh?’

He knocked on the door, but the sound of his knuckles on the glass was overwhelmed by the shouting on the other side of it. He tried the handle and pushed the door open. As it swung into the hall it interrupted the squalid scene of domestic disharmony that was unravelling there.

Dave’s daughter-in-law stood at the foot of the stairs, shouting at the two men in her life to ‘
Stop!
’

Dave had been a big man in his day, but Donnie was bigger. He had the lapels of his father’s coat grasped in huge fists. Dave was almost lifted off his feet and banged up against the wall. Donnie’s face was inches from his father’s as he shouted at him, spittle gathering on wet lips. Jack could see a large bruise on Dave’s cheekbone, below the eye. A small canvas rucksack leaned against the wall by the front door.

It was as if someone had pressed a pause button and frozen the action, and then all heads turned towards the door. The silence that accompanied the moment seemed endless.

Until broken by Donnie. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

Jack’s voice sounded oddly calm and, as a result, carried a strangely threatening note. ‘I want you to let your father go, and treat him with a little respect.’

Almost in spite of himself, Donnie released his father’s lapels and turned his anger on Jack. ‘Respect? He’s a drunk and a thief, and gets all the respect he deserves. And anyway, it’s none of your fucking business.’

‘Yes, it is.’

Steel in Jack’s voice now as Ricky moved almost imperceptibly to put his grandfather between Donnie and himself and watch the unfolding scene from over his shoulder.

‘What is it with you people? I stood in this very house more than fifty years ago and watched your grandfather punch and kick his own son. And I stood by and did nothing about it, because I was too young and too scared. All these years on, and nothing’s changed. Except it’s the son beating up the father. That violent gene must have skipped a generation, because Dave’s the gentlest man I ever knew. And he doesn’t deserve this.’

Donnie’s face turned ugly as he pulled a wad of banknotes from his pocket, all scrunched up in his big fist, and waved it at Jack. ‘Aye, well, your gentle fucking pal was stealing from his own family.’