The Facts of Life and Death (3 page)

‘Wow!’ said Ruby.

He grinned and tipped his brim in her direction.

‘Why, thank you, Miss Ruby,’ he drawled, making her giggle.

He sat on the bed and pulled on his cowboy boots. Black with fancy white stitching. Mummy had found them in a charity shop, but they fitted like gloves.

‘You need spurs,’ Ruby said.

‘You think so?’

Of course she did; she’d heard
him
say so often enough.

‘Mummy has new shoes,’ she pointed out.

‘Well,’ shrugged Daddy, but didn’t go on.

Her father never said it in so many words, but they both understood that if her mother’s work weren’t so
seasonal
they would all have things that they wanted. In the season she worked almost every night and some days. In the winter she only did weekends, and they ate so much fish that Ruby could smell it on her pillow.

Daddy pulled open the drawer once again and took out the black leather gunbelt. He hitched it loosely, so that the holster hung low on his hip.

‘Can I tie the string?’ said Ruby, kneeling up beside his leg.

The leather thong was difficult to wrestle into a knot and turned into a loose half a bow.

‘Nice tyin’, young ’un.’

Ruby beamed at up him. ‘Sure, JT.’ She tried the accent, but it wound itself around her tongue like a cat and came out in a miaow.

Daddy used to have a gun in his gunbelt. Not a real one, but that didn’t matter – the government had made all the Gunslingers hand in their guns just because one stupid man shot some people miles away. And the man wasn’t even a cowboy, so it was really unfair.

But even without a gun, something about Daddy’s hat and his cowboy voice and his unshaven jaw always excited Ruby in a way she couldn’t put into words. He looked like a film star. Even the pale scars that curved through his eyebrow and across his right cheek looked good on Cowboy Night. In Ruby’s eyes they almost made him better. More
dangerous
.

‘John?’ her mother called up the stairs. ‘It’s quarter past.’

Daddy rolled his eyes at Ruby, and Ruby rolled them back. Nanna and Granpa came at half past. Granpa made her sit on his lap, and Nanna’s idea of sweets was fruit.

‘Can I come with you?’ It burst out of Ruby. She’d learned not to ask often, but she hadn’t asked for
ages.

Daddy stopped adjusting his belt, and made a face in the mirror that looked like consideration. She held her breath.

‘Not this time, Rubes,’ he said.

‘When?’ she said, emboldened by the pause.

‘When you’re older.’ He always said the same thing.

‘I’m older
now.
I’m getting older all the
time
.’

There was a silent moment when Ruby thought she’d gone too far. But then he turned towards her and grinned.

‘No, you’re not!’ he said, and started to tickle her. ‘You’re not getting older!’

She giggled and rolled. He’d forgotten his cowboy accent, and the only burr in his voice was a West Country one, as he made her suffer with joy.

‘You’re my little cowboy,’ he said as she shrieked. ‘You’ll
always
be my little cowboy.’

‘John? They’ll be here any minute.’

Daddy stopped tickling and sighed, and Ruby flopped on to the bed, wheezing and still giggling on the out-breaths.

‘Big Nose and Ping Pong are on the warpath,’ Daddy whispered, and Ruby laughed. They called them that – just between themselves – because Granpa’s nose
was
big, and Nanna’s eyes were as poppy as ping-pong balls.

He straightened up. ‘I guess I’ll be headin’ out then,’ he said, back in character. ‘You have fun now, y’hear?’

Ruby made a face.
‘How
old must I be before I can come with you?’

Daddy adjusted his belt for a long time, and when he spoke, it wasn’t in his cowboy voice.

‘Don’t rush to grow up, Rubes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing good waiting for you there.’

He tilted his hat so it was low over his eyes. Then he got his accent back. ‘You stay home, Miss Ruby. Stay out of trouble.’

At the door, Daddy spun on his heel like a gunslinger, and drew on Ruby.

‘Pow! Pow-pow!’

Instead of a six-shooter he pulled a Mars bar from his holster and lobbed it gently to her. She gasped with delight – then shushed as he raised a secretive finger to his lips.

‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ he said.

Then he tipped his hat to her one last time and jig-jogged down the stairs, whistling ‘Red River Valley’, because it was her favourite song.

Ruby’s smile faded with the tune.

How could Daddy say she shouldn’t rush to grow up? It was all right for
him
to say! He’d probably forgotten what it was even
like
to be little, with all the fatness and the bullies and the homework.

She thought of all the good stuff waiting for her when she got older. The first thing she would do was buy a pony so that when she got a job she could ride it to work and to the shops and hitch it up outside so she could see it from the window. And with the money she made from doing . . .
something
… she’d buy her own custard creams and not have to search every time for where Mummy had hidden theirs. She’d live in a warm house in a sunny field, miles from trees, where mould didn’t blacken the walls and where the wind never squealed through the windows.

Daddy must be wrong about growing up.

She couldn’t
wait
to get there.

LEGEND HAS IT
that in
AD
878, Vikings under the leadership of Hubba the Dane landed thirty-three ships right here, at the broad mouth of the River Torridge, and headed up the steep hill to launch an assault on Kenwith Castle. They barely got a mile before they met the English defenders coming the other way. The king’s men had the high ground and the raiders were repelled, but not before the battle claimed the lives of thousands of winners and losers alike.

The dead victors were carried back to Kenwith under the first Eagle standard ever captured, while the Danes were buried where they fell – in mass graves dug easily in earth so softened by carnage that it is known to this day as Bloody Corner.

Since then, not much had happened in Appledore.

For nearly twelve hundred years, the little village serried its way up that same hill like a much slower, more respectful invasion. The first row of cottages rose straight from the muddy estuary, and the tide lapped against painted walls and seeped into basements on a twice-daily basis.

Appledore had a post office, three churches and six pubs: the usual ratio. In summer, little galleries and gift shops opened in people’s front rooms, selling handmade and home-made gifts, although the hands and homes were mostly Chinese. Not like the Hocking’s ice cream, which was made right here in the village from great golden mountains of real butter, and sold from a fleet of vanilla vans.

And not like the ships.

Appledore folk had been building boats for generations, and at its peak Appledore Shipbuilders had employed over two thousand men: so many that one village alone could not satisfy the demand, and men had come from miles around, working shifts around the clock, and riding to the yard on cheap old step-through scooters that cut through sleep like 4am buzz-saws. For half a century the huge iron shed had dominated the river and made bonsais of the trees. Great warships slid from it and into the river, causing passing yachts to bob and pitch like toys. The dry dock had once been the biggest in Europe, and it had seemed that the good times would never end.

But everything ends – especially good times.

And when they ended in Appledore, fifteen hundred men lost their jobs.

Overnight.

Fifteen hundred breadwinners. Fifteen hundred skilled welders and fitters and carpenters and machinists, suddenly unemployed in a place where the job centre only regularly offered bar work, labouring and babysitting.

Many of the men never worked again. Not legally, anyway. They missed the work and the money, of course, but more than that, they missed their mates and the way men could be when they were with other men – which was not the same way they had to be when they were with women.

So they found other places to meet. Some of them met in the bookmaker’s, some in the pubs, some in the snooker halls.

And some of them joined the Gunslingers.

The Gunslingers were a loose group of maybe twenty men who, once a week, dressed up as cowboys and met at the George in Appledore – just as the Shootists did at the Bell in Parkham and the Outlaws did at the Coach and Horses in Barnstaple.

North Devon had its fair share of cowboys, that was for sure. All week they worked in banks or did odd jobs, but Cowboy Nights transported them for just a few hours to the Wild West, where men were men, women were buxom, and jails were made of wood.

When the Gunslingers had first appeared, the residents of Appledore had been a little nervous of the men in boots and black hats who swaggered down the narrow canyon of Irsha Street every Friday night. But after a while the net curtains stopped twitching every time a cowpoke passed through the little fishing village on his way to the pub, and it was left only to small gangs of teenaged boys to laugh and shout insults.

From a safe distance.

Once at the George, the Gunslingers got drunk and showed off and flirted with the barmaids, and talked in a cowboy way about cowboy things.

Like fashion.

They fell on any new item of cowboy clothing or equipment like Beverly Hills housewives – poring over it for style and authenticity. Funds and geography dictated that items usually failed on both counts. Nellie Wilson’s holster was from army surplus, Scratch Mumford’s poncho had been crocheted by his mother, and Blacky Blackmore’s cowboy hat had a Pixar logo under the brim.

The Gunslingers’ most authentic asset came when Frank ‘Whippy’ Hocking would ride his hairy skewbald, Tonto, through the village and tie him up outside the George. There, tourists took pictures, and small children fed him sugar and ketchup and any other pub condiments that were free. ‘No mustard,’ Whippy always told them. When he left, the worse for wear, the other Gunslingers would come outside and help to push Whippy up into the tooled leather saddle. It always took at least three of them to heave him upright, because Whippy was one of the ice-cream clan, and quality control was his life.

When they weren’t peacocking, the Gunslingers played a casual game of poker for pennies and bickered back and forth about old TV Westerns – wavering between
Bonanza
and
The High Chaparral
and
The Virginian.
Between them they had pirated all the box sets. In the films they were split between Clint Eastwood or Gary Cooper; John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. Their jury was always out on Kevin Costner, who promised so much and so often – then somehow always managed to ruin things with gills or a bad haircut.

If a man joined the Gunslingers – and if he were not thoroughly unpopular – he’d be given a cowboy name. Whether he liked it or not. Mostly these names were bestowed for low reasons that barely troubled the imagination. Blacky Blackmore delivered coal, Hick Trick lived in the sticks, while Daisy Yeo mooed loudly and randomly, in a sort of agricultural Tourette’s; in the supermarket you could hear him aisles away.

Some men tried to join up with their cowboy name all ready to go, but the Gunslingers had no truck with that. Indeed, they were apt to punish such presumption, which was why Len ‘Pussy’ Willows’ membership had been short and fractious, ending in a brawl that had memorably spilled out of the George and all the way down Irsha Street.

Just like real cowboys.

It had happened six months ago, and they still worked it into at least one conversation a week.

As the night and the beer ran down, the Gunslingers would get reflective on how much better life would be if only North Devon were open of range and filled with cattle – preferably ones which needed driving from one end of the county to the other on a regular basis. They’d put Willie and Johnny on the jukebox in a mournful loop, and sigh into their empty glasses and empty holsters, and long for the good old days before varmints started shooting small children and everyone got so damned jumpy – even about replicas.

THE NAKED GIRL
sat on the empty beach.

The tide was so far out that its edge had disappeared in the low grey cloud, and the sand was hard and wet in the persistent drizzle.

She sat cross-legged and hunched over. Cold and snivelling, with her back to the invisible sea, and her hands trapped under her icy buttocks.

‘Call your mother,’ the man said.

Fresh sobs burst from the girl and the man looked at his watch. He prodded her again with the phone. It was an iPhone. Better than any phone he’d ever had. And the girl was what? Sixteen? Seventeen? Ridiculous.

‘Call your mother,’ he repeated slowly.

The girl was crying so hard now that when she tried to say something, he couldn’t understand it.

‘What?’ he said. He frowned in concentration, but her words couldn’t get past her weeping.

‘Oh, for fuck’s
sake!
Stop crying and speak clearly!’

‘You’re going to kill me!’

‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed. ‘Call your mother.’

She only wailed loudly.

‘Don’t you want to say goodbye?’ he asked, almost kindly.

The girl raised her snot-stained face defiantly.

‘Shut up!’ she shrieked, and lunged at his legs. She didn’t get her hands from under her bottom fast enough, and toppled forward on to her shoulder and her face.

He righted her roughly with the toe of his boot. The left side of her face was coated in a gritty tan mask, and she blinked and gasped as though she’d risen from the sea, not the sand.

He held up the phone so he could take a picture.

‘Eight megapixels,’ he observed. ‘On a bloody phone.’ He showed her the photo. ‘Maybe I’ll send that to your mates. What do you think? I’ve got all their numbers in here.’

Her face slackened in misery.

‘Please don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t send that to anyone.’