14
T he new arrival is not particularly tall, walks with a swagger as though he owns the place, and looks slightly annoyed, as if he hadn’t expected so many people to be in his living room.
Essie looks up at him. There is something familiar about him, but then she always sees something familiar in this town: faces repeating, generation after generation.
He is the most ridiculously dressed person she’s ever seen, and she wants to laugh.
Simon Cowell-style cowboy boots under incredibly tight Levis, and, of all things, a cowboy hat.
At first she thinks he’s a stripper sent as a joke; but Al is already moving forward.
‘Dwight, man, how’s it going?’
The man nods. ‘Al. Alright, aye. Shelby, can I get a beer?’
‘No!’ says Shelby. ‘This isn’t your bar. You can wait in a queue like everybody else.’
Dwight frowns crossly, and Essie realises who he is: Shelby’s brother.
Of course. Both their names are completely mad.
But he can’t . . . he can’t still be dressing like this.
Oh, my God. It’s the most embarrassing thing she’s ever seen.
He’s not big, but he’s wiry, and his clothes absolutely cling to him.
She looks away, only to be confronted with Owen scratching a pimple that’s peeping out through his moustache. Oh, lord.
‘How you doing?’ says Al to Dwight.
‘Well, beerless, mostly,’ says Dwight, still frowning. His eyes rest momentarily on Essie and he nods quickly, and she nods back just as quickly. Then he actually tips his hat to her. She stifles a giggle, which her mum notices, crossly.
Janey comes over to the boys. She’s always had a soft spot for wee Dwight, with his silly name and cowboy boots and enforced line-dancing.
He’d always taken it all in reasonably good part, and even when he was small he used to tip his cowboy hat at ladies he passed, which made her laugh.
He doesn’t have freckles any more, but you can still see the cheeky little boy within the man.
And now she is far too old to have useful opinions about it, she thinks he fills his jeans out rather nicely, if anyone would ever think to ask her, which they wouldn’t, in her sensible hospital lanyard.
‘Hello, Dwight,’ she says warmly.
‘Howdy, ma’am,’ he says, because he knows she likes it, even though it makes her feel about a hundred also.
‘You off the rigs, I hear?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, brightening.
‘Excuse me?’ says Owen, bright pink and shouting over from the table. ‘But we have three minutes to work out which of these names are Grand National winners and which are Crufts winners.’
‘Yeah, I’d had enough,’ says Dwight, ignoring Owen completely. ‘And I’ve got a plan.’
‘He thinks he’s going to be Billy Big Bollocks of Carso,’ remarks Shelby loudly.
‘Shut it, you,’ says Dwight crossly.
‘Mr Property Developer,’says Shelby, rolling her eyes.
‘Ooh,’ says Janey, impressed. And, it’s property. Always interesting. ‘Whereabouts?’
Dwight shrugged. ‘I’ve bought Seagate. Going to do it up for holiday cottages.’
Janey blinks. ‘You’ve bought the houses next door to me?’
‘Is that where you are, aye?’
‘Yes! I thought they’d just gone up – the For Sale sign arrived yesterday!’
‘Aye,’ smiles Dwight. ‘But there’s a . . . ’ He obviously can’t remember the word. ‘There’s a condition on them – they can only get sold locally. So I just swooped in and . . . swoosh!’
Janey raises her eyebrows, which is a bit harder to do since she’d gone to Caithness for Botox.
Hector the dentist does it in town, but the idea of entrusting her face to Hector, and going in and out of his office in front of everyone, is a bit much for Janey.
It isn’t that she lies toher mates about it specifically.
Everyone politely doesn’t ask the questions, that’s all.
Well, she’d once tried to bring it up with Lish, but predictably Lish has never had anything done and has completely wrinkle-free skin and couldn’t understand what Janey was on about or why she should mess with her perfectly serviceable face, so Janey had retreated timidly.
It’s a nice thing, Janey sometimes thinks, to have a friend who is so confident and secure in everything.
But it is also, quite often, incredibly annoying.
Janey tries to watch what she eats, so she can still get into her jeans.
Lish thinks this is ridiculous behaviour, eats cake whenever she feels like it, and just wears a larger size.
‘Hang on,’ Janey says, frowning, which she can still do. ‘Does this mean I’m going to be living next to a building site for the next year?’
‘We will be quiet as mice, ma’am,’ says Dwight, cocking his ridiculous cowboy hat at her again. ‘And by the time we’re done, your road will be the smartest in Carso.’
‘Hmm.’ Mind you, she can’t help thinking, it will be nice to have the street tidied up, and everything fresh and nice.
‘Well, well done,’ she says finally in genuine admiration. ‘There must have been loads of vultures circling.’
‘Aye,’ says Dwight. ‘There was a bunch of consortiums wanting them. Codicil . That’s what it’s called. Something written in the will.’ He smiles, looking cocky. ‘I did pretty well on the rigs.’
‘You must have done,’ says Janey admiringly.
Essie looks up. She couldn’t help hearing her mother’s admiring tone, something she hasn’t heard applied to herself for quite a while.
So Shelby is running the bar and Dwight is clearly doing well.
Essie remembers, with some bitterness, being smug about the fact that she’d got her qualifications and was moving away, and these guys were stuck here.
It doesn’t seem quite like that now. Her student loan is still enormous. Whereas these guys won’t have any.
‘Grand National,’ she says automatically to Owen, who is pushing a piece of paper in her face.
‘Lord Floss-Floss of Cardingdale?’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have thought so. What do you think to Prince Nero Verashan dell’Antico?’
‘Foreign is horses, local is dogs,’ says Lowell unexpectedly.
He has proven to be a quiet yet valuable member of the quiz team, killed it on architectural terms, and is the only person Owen can currently look at with respect, even though they are all getting thrashed by a team of out-of-town ringers, all men,who are sitting in the corner not talking to anyone and pretending to be local even though they clearly aren’t.
Hector had taken many complaints about ringers in the quiz night (admittedly many of them from Owen) and had attempted to establish a ten-mile village perimeter from where people were allowed to enter, but it didn’t work well for visiting relatives and friends and people having to dig out utility bills, and frankly absolutely nobody could get on board with it, so the ￡50 fish shop voucher was still at risk from the shark ringers.
The only good thing anyone could see was that all four were drinking, which meant they’d be catching the bus back to wherever they’d plotted the evil scheme from, and that bus was always late, incredibly draughty and meandered round the houses for hours, and that was without factoring in the upturned tractor on the B47, so they had to hope it was worth it for their stupid fish voucher.
‘Huh,’ says Owen, as Hector reads out the answers and Lowell is proved to be right.
Janey, meanwhile, on a few glasses of the white Lowell had bought, is doing that thing where you try not to be an idiot in front of your children, but somehow you just can’t help yourself.
She can hear her own voice in her head, sounding ridiculous.
‘Dwight, you remember my daughter, Essie, don’t you?’
Essie is shooting her a look she knows only too well, and doesn’t even stand up as Dwight ambles over, sticking out his hand.
‘I sure do – hi there. Aren’t you in the big city now?’ he says, still with that politeness Janey remembers from his days of talent shows and town fêtes. He never got tall, she notices; he’s wiry, not big like Shelby. He’s a little taller than Essie, but then his boots probably have heels.
‘I’m back. For a bit,’ says Essie, giving an ‘and now we’re done’ thin-lipped smile in a way that makes Janey want to shake her. Shelby is watching all of this, her face like fizz.
‘Oh, good,’ says Dwight, amiably enough, then, to Al, ‘Let’s catch up, eh?’ just as Hector says, ‘And now, the round is Eighties song lyrics’ and the entire table of quizzers says ‘Ooooh!’ and (finally, thinks Owen, darkly) starts paying attention.
*
Owen sits with his arms folded as the final tally comes in.
Everyone else was more or less completely uninterested, and a couple of people who’d hit the wine quite hard had appeared to have forgotten they were in any kind of a quiz altogether.
The Ancillary Justices have come in third, to Janey’s evident surprise; they never normally win anything.
There is even a prize, a bottle of prosecco, which Shelby hands over rather reluctantly, but they open it right away in delight.
‘You got all the questions!’ Janey says, grinning at Lowell, who had obviously made the difference.
‘That’s not true,’ says Lowell, cheerfully allowing her to slosh the cheap fizz into his empty glass and smiling despite himself. ‘You were very, very good on Eighties song lyrics.’
‘I was rather,’ agreed Janey, a little carried away. ‘I used to memorise them all from Smash Hits .’
Lowell grins again. ‘I couldn’t even read that text these days,’ he says. ‘Didn’t they used to print in white on top of photographs?’
‘I didn’t have you down as a Smash Hits fan,’ Janey says, looking at his slightly shabby waxed jacket.
‘I wasn’t,’ says Lowell. ‘I was definitely an NME kid. Although I had never heard of any of the bands.’
‘I was scared of the NME ,’ Janey finds herself confessing. ‘They were so mean to everyone. And the bands were all called things like “Scraping Babies Out of the Abyss”.’
‘I think I saw Scraping Babies Out of the Abyss at Caithness Pleasure Gardens,’ he says. ‘They weren’t as good as Super Big Nuclear War or the I Hate Thatchers.’
She laughs immediately.
‘I did love music then, though.’ Lowell is warming to his subject. ‘God. Once I went to Glasgow and I bought an album from Fopp and I kept that plastic bag – I took it everywhere with me, until it was falling apart. So people would think that I was in Fopp every weekend when I lived in Thurso.’
Janey shakes her head. ‘Don’t start me!’ she says. ‘I am furious about the vinyl revival. You know Fopp is back?’
‘Is it?’ says Lowell. ‘I think I still have the bag.’
‘I genuinely can’t believe I got rid of all my vinyl. I can’t believe it. My daughter wanted a record player last Christmas. There’s even an HMV in Edinburgh.’
Lowell shakes his head. ‘Wow. I am behind the times. Or so far ahead of them I have no idea what’s going on.’
‘And,’ says Janey, ‘having basically given away all my albums to a jumble sale, I thought, oh maybe I’ll just buy Hounds of Love again.’
He smiles. ‘All the girls I used to fancy at school had that album.’
‘That is not true, because all of us girls who had that album never got asked out one single time. The boys were busy asking out the girls who had Def Leppard albums.’
‘I’m not saying I had the courage to ask any of them out.’
She grins.‘Anyway, I took it up to the cash desk . . . you won’t believe this.’
‘Go on,’ says Lowell, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘Everything is so expensive .’
‘It cost thirty pounds.’
‘No way!’
‘I thought six pounds was expensive the first time.’
‘It was.’
‘Not for that album,’ says Janey fiercely. ‘But paying it again really hurt.’
‘But worth it, though?’
‘No!’ says Janey. ‘Because I put it on Essie’s record player and guess what? They’ve remastered them and cleaned them all up. So you don’t get the breaths and the crackles and little noises. It didn’t sound the same at all! It sounded exactly like Spotify!’
‘Almost as if,’ says Lowell, ‘getting older is an endless series of disappointments.’ He looks at her suddenly, then drains his drink. ‘It’s been really nice to meet you.’
‘Janey,’ she supplies.
‘No, I knew that,’ he says. ‘I remember you. You were . . . very kind to us.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help . . . ’
Again he looks awkward and she doesn’t want to intrude, and anyway Owen is getting up and putting on his anorak that he zips right up to his neck, still complaining about Hector’s mispronunciation of Eastern European capitals, and Essie is looking at her mother in an accusatory way that Janey is sure has something to do with her re-introducing her to Dwight, and she really ought to call it a night.
‘How are you getting home?’ she finds herself saying, again feeling stupid. She is sure she used to be charming. When did she forget how; when did it all become so difficult?
‘Oh, I have my bicycle,’ he said.
‘I didn’t have you down for a MAMIL,’ she says. He looks confused, and then she doesn’t want to say ‘Middle-Aged Man in Lycra’ because it will sound so weird. ‘I meant, what kind of bike do you have?’ she gabbles.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think it belongs to the gardener. I just borrowed it.’
‘That’s my favourite type of bike,’ she gushes, going red – is it very hot in this bar? – and Lowell looks confused.
‘Okay, Janey,’ says Al, coming up behind her. ‘You’re all flushed. Better get you home!’