The road from langholm avenue - A Novel by M Graeme

The Road From Langholm Avenue

Michael Graeme

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Preview

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- 1 -

I don't know what drew me back to that house and even now I'm surprised it should have possessed sufficient gravity after all those years to lure me from my course. I recall little of the journey that delivered me there, only a slow surfacing to the realisation that I'd pulled the car over, switched off the engine and had been staring at the place for what already seemed like an age.

It had changed. I'd been expecting the same painted window frames and the same mahogany door with the little rose window at the top, but it had all been replaced by a uniform white PVC. There had been a willow tree in a corner of the front garden but that had gone too, along with the neatly clipped privet hedge in order to make way for a rather vulgar block-paved driveway.

The passing of twenty years had left its mark. Or was it longer? Just when was the last time I'd swung my course by Langholm Avenue? I thought I'd finished with all that nonsense by now, but if that were true, then why was I sitting there, forty two years old, going on seventeen once more?

I was there for an hour, perhaps longer, I can't say for certain but it was long enough to alert the Neighbourhood Watch, who alerted the police, who sent their dowdy little patrol car to investigate my mysterious sojourn. It pulled up quietly behind me and for a moment nothing happened, though I suppose my registration number was being passed through a computer somewhere.

Endorsements none, I imagined it saying; convictions none; parking ticket in the summer of 1982 or thereabouts - altogether a rather dull biography of my motoring years. Eventually, a lone policewoman emerged. She looked no more than twenty, and she might have been pretty except she seemed at pains to hide this gift beneath a mask of dour severity. I wound the window down at her request, and in her driest tone she said: "Been having a nap have we, sir?"

Without waiting for an answer, she began to circle the car, inspecting it with a patient and practised eye for the easy hit: road tax, bald tyres, anything broken or hanging off. But even though the old Midget had definitely seen better days, I was confident it had scored well.

"Live round here, do you?" she asked.

"Parbold," I replied. But her computer had already told her that. Was she trying to catch me out? And what else had it told her? Did it also know I'd been married for fifteen years? Wife's name: Annie. Supplementary information: Separated at five thirty yesterday afternoon. Reason: Annie preferred wide-arsed gent by the name of Alistair,...

"I'm going to visit my dad," I told her. "He lives in Arkwright Street."

"Well, this is Langholm Avenue" she replied. "Forgotten our way have we perhaps?"

Her tone was irritating, as if she was trying to tempt out my anger, make me swear and shake my fist so she'd have reason to beat me senseless with her stick. She was wasting her time. There was no anger, nothing left inside of me now.

"Has there been a complaint?" I asked.

She ignored the question and instead demanded to see my documents - insurance certificate, MOT, driver's licence, the usual. I reached behind the passenger seat and pulled out an envelope which I handed to her. She was disappointed perhaps that I should have had the papers on me, but right then most of my life seemed to be in the car, or at least as much of it as I'd thought to rescue from the house that morning.

Everything was in order. She scanned through the papers slowly and handed them back without a murmur. Then she looked at the car again, her gaze passing lazily from one end to the other as if she couldn't believe there wasn't something she could book me for.

"A bit untidy isn't it sir?"

"I've not had it long. I've changed the tyres, done the electrics and brakes and such. It's perfectly road worthy."

She regarded me closely, her eyes narrowing for the kill. "Waiting for someone are we, perhaps?"

"No, I was just thinking," I said.

"Thinking?"

"Sort of."

She sighed. "Mind opening the boot, sir?"

I flipped open the boot, and stood back while she ran her hands over the surface of my possessions. It was filled to the brim and she didn't know where to start. Eventually, she registered the main items: my antique laptop computer, an old sketch book, my camera gear and a boxed chess set my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday. Then there was the case of clothes, the shaving kit,...

"Can't get much else in here can you?" she said. "I take it you can prove all this stuff is yours?"

"I don't suppose I can. It's mostly very old. I've no receipts or anything if that's what you mean."

"Then how do you explain it?"

I was puzzled. What was there to explain? Did she think I'd stolen it? "I can't, " I said. "It's just my personal gear."

She took out the sketch book. It was one I'd kept since my last year at school, a quarter of a century ago. The drawings were careful studies of flowers and figures - better than anything I'd done in more recent times. She flicked through these pictures carelessly, or so I thought, but she was a sharp eyed girl and it didn't take her long to notice the address written in faded pencil at the top of the very first page: Langholm Avenue,...

"What about this then?"

Of all the things she could have homed in on, it had to be that! Why not the missing pawn from my chess set, the one I'd replaced by making a near perfect copy at work? Care to explain the difference, sir? Or how about the fact that most of my shirts had buttons that didn't match? Bit untidy, don't you think, sir? No, it had to be the sketch book and suddenly I found myself sweating at the prospect of explaining the inexplicable to a woman who looked like she neither cared nor could ever be made to understand.

"It was someone I used to know," I began. "It was their house."

"Does this someone have a name?"

A name? Of course She had a name but to my astonishment I realised that even after all these years to have spoken it under those circumstances would have been a sacrilege, and I would rather have damned myself by the most transparent lie and gone to prison for it than speak it now.

"She doesn't live there any more. It was all such a long time ago."

The policewoman weighed me up while the curtains of Langholm Avenue fidgeted around us on that grey Saturday afternoon. I was clean, as they say; no guns, no explosives, no suitcase stuffed with counterfeit money, no seedy stash of drugs - just a middle aged chap sitting in an old car, apparently thinking.

"This is a quiet neighbourhood, sir," she said. "I suggest you move on. I'll be back shortly and if you're still here, our next conversation will be at the station. Is that understood?"

When she'd gone, I sank inside the Midget and turned the key. The engine spluttered uncertainly, then caught and purred. The dials twitched - old dials, silver on black-crackle, telling me an antiquated tale of volts and oil-pressure. Finally, pulling away from Langholm Avenue, pulling out of the past, I felt the name welling up inside of me.

"Rachel," I said. "Her name was Rachel."

- 2 -

When I was younger, I had a way of dealing with emotional pain. I would take every piece of physical evidence I could lay my hands on, anything that reminded me of the source, and I would throw it away.

It's not a bad technique if all you're trying to do is get over being jilted by your girlfriend because then the evidence might only amount to a sweater, some CD's and a birthday card you've sworn you'll keep for ever. But when it's your wife, things are not so simple.

With a wife, the evidence is usually more substantial. For a start, there's the house, a tangle of mortgages, endowments and direct debits,... and sometimes there are children; two children in fact, Stephen and Gemima.

Already I had not seen them for three days, so deftly were they spirited from the house, the stage being prepared by Annie for that astonishing finale to the fifteen year act that had been our marriage. Afterwards, walking through the house, I'd picked out what few items I could think of as belonging solely to me - the antiquated laptop, the camera, the sketchbook. The rest I'd consigned to an imaginary dustbin until I could get my mind around what had happened.

The sketchbook was a mystery. I had not looked at it for years, but pulling open the drawer that morning I had fastened my eyes upon it as if remembering something crucial. Then I'd seen the address pencilled on the front sheet. I had written it with care, as if it were a verse from a love poem but I no longer recognised the hand. Indeed, it might have been written by a stranger,... not just the because of the style, but also the sentiment.

Art had been my thing at school, and even without looking I knew every sketch book I'd owned around that time had carried the same mantra: 11 Langholm Avenue, her house, Rachel's house, a house I'd never been inside,... the house of a girl I'd loved with all my heart, but never really known.

Unlike Rachel's house, my father's on Arkwright Street hadn't changed at all since I'd grown up, at least on the outside. It was to the north of Middleton, one in a long row of Edwardian terraces, just a couple of miles but a world away from the lower middle-class, semi-detached suburb of Langholm Avenue.

Arkwright street had an altogether darker look about it. This had been the mill district and it was still easy to imagine the scrape of clogs on cobbles, the clatter of looms, the gasp of steam. Langholm Avenue had borne the lighter vision, the optimism of the sixties - the new, dynamic industries - Leyland Motors, Britannia Electric, but like the mills, they too were mostly gone now, leaving both streets looking weary and frayed in their disappointment.

In that terraced cottage, my father had begun to sink into his old age, becoming threadbare and worn since his breakdown, since the last pit closed and since his only son had buggered off with some posh cow from Parbold. But then, to the astonishment of us all, only a few years ago, things had changed.

When I pulled up outside, he opened the front door wearing a pair of neatly pressed Chinos and a GAP shirt. His white hair was brushed back, thin but slick, over his pink scalp and he wore a pair of designer rimless specs. Money had never been a problem, not since the generous Coal Board payout, but with my father, like me, his sense of well-being had always been vulnerable to a fickle motivation. It drifted in and out with the seasons, sometimes standing bare and black against a winter's sky and sometimes to swell with ecstatic blossom, as if at the promise of summer,... or of a woman.

"Come in you daft bugger," he said and then he looked down at my overnight bag in dismay. "Is that all you've brought with you?"

"There's some other stuff in the car."

He eyed the rust pocked outline of the MG in astonishment. "That's yours? What happened to the bloody Rover?"

"I sold it."

He pulled a face, pretending he couldn't understand. "What for?"

"I liked the look of it, that's all."

"But it's a bloody wreck."

Eleanor appeared behind him then, as always a slightly eerie vision in her long black dress and with her black hair worn long and loose, all the way down to her waist. There was black lipstick, black nail varnish and black eyeliner. Always she was the same, since the first time I'd met her, and according to my father long before then. At thirty five, she was seven years younger than me, but she appeared timeless and might have passed for any age between twenty five and forty.

"How's my favourite stepson, then?" she asked.

My father shook his head and took my bag. "He's a bloody dick-head, that's what he is. He should have kicked her out. It's as much his house as hers. Hard faced cow!"

Eleanor smiled at my father's tone while appearing almost to float towards me. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me, putting back some warmth into a soul all but frozen by a sudden and terrible rejection. I took a breath, breathing her in, and gave myself over to her scent and to her softness.

"We'll sort that out later, Jack," she told him and then to me: "I'll ask our Phil to take you over tomorrow and fetch the rest of your stuff in his van. Has she got a solicitor yet?"

Had she? I'd no idea. It seemed too soon to be thinking of such things. Only yesterday, I'd been a married man. We'd been out last weekend and bought a new sofa, for pity's sake! Then last night I'd come home to find her sitting hand in hand on it with a well groomed, wide-arsed gent! I'd stared at them, imagining perhaps he'd come to sell us some insurance - except why was he holding her hand?

Annie had looked at me, quite calmly and with the hint of a smile. "Tom,... this is Alistair," she'd said. "There's something you should know,...."

Know? What did I know? I was forty two years old and realising, perhaps not for the first time in my life, I knew nothing at all.

Eleanor looked me in the eyes unblinking, unselfconsciously searching. It was a disturbing mannerism, one few people could endure without distress, unless they knew her,... knew she meant no harm, that her heart was not black like the clothes she wore.

"Are you all right, Tom?"

"I'm okay."

"Kids?"

"At her mother's."

"You're still their dad."

"Am I?"

But I couldn't think about the children; I had to shut them out or I would go mad. They'd be all right of course; they had the house, their mother, a large contingent of doting in-laws. What was an estranged father in the greater scheme of things?

"Dad looks great," I said, switching the subject.

"He's fine," she replied.

"I won't stay long. I won't get in the way."

"Tom, for goodness sake! Anyway, we were expecting you hours ago."

"I know. I did something,... something a little crazy,... something I don't understand,..."

I felt her hand on my shoulder, guiding me towards the door.

"We'll talk about it later. Bring your stuff in." Then she looked around to check my father was out of earshot. "How bad is it?"

It was her openness - the open stare, the eyes wide but soft with sympathy that finally brought the tears, so slow in coming I'd thought I didn't really care.

"It's finished," was all I could say.

Once more she folded me quietly into her embrace and held me there suspended in her stillness until the moment had passed. I was dazed and I was numb with it all, for I'm a steady sort of chap and I'd imagined nothing more until the end of my days but Annie and the children.

- 3 -

There was no television in my father's house. He'd thrown it out the day we'd buried my mum and that was twenty years ago. He said it reminded him of her, a rotund little figure for ever camped in front of it. Then he told me, years later, it was because he couldn't stand the bloody thing and resented paying the license fee for the superficial crap they served up in the name of entertainment. But I think the truth was he'd just lost interest in everything,... until the day he'd met Eleanor.

Gone as well these days was the floral patterned paper in the lounge and the yellowing paint work. In its place there were pastel shades and scatter cushions to co-ordinate the old sofa. This was Eleanor's influence but she had reached my father in other ways, more profound: he was seventy five, but I swear at times he seemed ten years younger than me.

After bringing in the last of my gear, I found him in the spare room. I'd helped him to convert it into a study, a place he could sit down and finally write the book he'd always been going on about - the decline of the trade unions in the nineteen eighties - a sort of therapy, he'd told me, getting it off his chest, forcing all his ghosts into the open. I'd set him up with a computer and everything, but that had been three years ago and no sooner had he started than he'd decided no one cared anyway. Instead he'd discovered the Internet. And Eleanor.

"So, go on then," he said, without looking up from the keyboard. "Why did you dump the Rover? You've not had it six months."

"I know."

"It had a good ride."

"I know. Maybe that was it. Lately I've been feeling remote all the time, cushioned from everything. I wanted to feel the world up close, like when I was a kid - struggling with broken down old motor bikes and clapped out cars."

"Well, you'll feel the world in that thing all right," he said. "Get a Midget up to seventy and it's like being dragged along the floor on a bloody shovel. You had one before, didn't you? That was a wreck as well from what I remember."

"Long time ago, Dad."

"You nearly killed yourself in it."

"Don't remind me,... but this one won't do seventy, it needs a re-bore. Anyway, how's Eleanor these days?"

He seemed surprised I should ask. "She's okay. Looks okay, doesn't she?"

"Sure."

"Then why mention it?"

I'd meant only to divert him, to fend off his needling over the car, which had begun to irritate me. "It's just,..."
He paused and looked up from the computer, which I read as a bad sign. "What?" he said.

"I was just wondering about her clothes - she always wears the same sort of stuff. You know,... all that black. It's more than just a fashion thing, isn't it?"

He gave me a warning look "That's her business". he said.

"I just wondered. "

"Well don't."

"Sorry, I didn't mean anything. You know how I feel about Eleanor."

"I know. "

I cast about desperately for another change of subject. "She said she'd do us a stroganoff later."

"Oh,.. right."

The moment had passed and I think we were both relieved. We'd never made a habit of talking and tended to leave the deep and meaningful stuff well alone. No cosy man to man chats,... you see, Tom, this is the way it is, lad,...

He returned his attention to the computer and shook his head again in mock despair. "You daft bugger - I bet you didn't get was it was worth either."

"What's that then?"

"The bloody Rover!"

After supper, I washed the pots and wiped down the work surfaces in the kitchen while Eleanor took time out in the lounge. If nothing else, marriage had made a relatively modern man out of me, but not so my father who returned to his study almost as soon as we'd eaten.

I joined her, drawn in by the sound of Bruch's violin concerto. She did not acknowledge my presence but remained for a long time a picture of dark serenity, a frozen black lotus flower, cross legged upon the floor, the black petals of her long dress spread evenly about her.

I had been alarmed by her sudden appearance in my father's life,... this strange woman with the Mortitia looks. So far as I could work out from what little he'd told me, they had met in the waiting room of Middleton General's clinical psychology unit.

"She's been poorly," was as much as he'd ever told me, but how poorly and what particular demons were her tormentors, I did not know. Nor could I imagine what her motives were in latching on to a man so many years her senior. He'd been all right for money since the Coal-Board payout, but he was a long way from being wealthy and certainly not much of a sugar daddy. Most puzzling to me was the fact that my father had once begrudgingly admitted, there was precious little fire down below these days, as he put it, the result of a life propped up on pills since around nineteen eighty five. And Eleanor was still young,...

The marriage had provided the inspiration for a great deal of ridicule among my aunts and uncles,... even a sensationalist picture in the increasingly seedy local rag. Annie had loved every morsel of the scandal, though not enough to come with me to the registry office the day they'd tied the knot.

"Hollywood actors do it all the bloody time," my father had said. "I don't see what the fuss is about."

He'd known of course. Like always, he'd simply been fending things off by acting numb, by assuming the easy role of a cantankerous, ornery old git.

There'd been just me and Eleanor's brother, Phil, that day - Eleanor dressed completely in black as usual and looking very beautiful in spite of it - and my father, the years falling from him and a new determination appearing in the set of his jaw. That was three summers ago.

"Go on then," she said, snatching me back to the present as the Bruch faded away.

"Hmnn?"

"This thing you did,... You can't just say something like that and expect to get away without telling me everything, you know?"

"Oh, it was nothing. It was stupid. A stupid thing to do. I was in a state, what with Annie and everything. I don't know why I did it."

"So, tell your stepmother all about it."

She was looking at me, smiling, her hair almost brushing the carpet as she sat there. In the beginning, there had been an awkwardness between us as we had each struggled by our looks and our words to define the level of our relationship - her being my stepmother, yet so many years younger. Eventually, we had learned to make a joke of it, and I had learned to trust her openness.

I lay down on the sofa and turned my face to the ceiling so I might be spared her gaze. I was afraid of what I'd done. Was I losing my grip? Was I starting down the path that had dogged my father for most of his life? Was it some sort of genetic disorder that resulted in depression and an eventual nervous breakdown? Had this thing with Annie pushed me so close to the edge?

"Did you ever love someone?" I asked. " I mean someone who didn't know you loved them?"

Eleanor was quiet for a long while, so that in the end I thought she'd considered the question too personal but eventually she said: "Yes."

I waited for her to go on but she didn't and I found myself jumping in to fill the silence. "It normally doesn't last long does it? I mean, a summer,... a season. You blink and it's gone."

"I suppose it can happen like that."

"It was a bit different for me. It began the day I first saw her, at school. I remember the date as clearly as the birthdays of my children. It was September, 1974, a Wednesday morning, a watery sun coming in through the windows of the classroom. The headmaster had brought her in half way through the lesson - a new pupil, her first day. ''This is Rachel Standish,' he said.

"I looked at her. Our eyes met for a moment as she took everybody in, but I don't think she was really aware of me. All the same, I felt something in my heart tear wide open and that was it,... until the day I walked out of my last examination in the summer of '77, three and a half years later."

"That's so romantic, Tom - and so sad. "

"In fact, I was still thinking of her years afterwards - until I started dating for real I suppose. Then the memories got buried under a load of other stuff. But I'm beginning to wonder if she's always been there - that she's never really gone away."

"Didn't you speak to her? Did you never tell her how you felt?"

"I'd just freeze whenever she was near "

"Is that what this is about then? This thing you did? Did you see her?"

"No. When we were at school, her picture was in the Clarion. She'd won a trophy for net ball and they'd given her address - 11 Langholm Avenue, so every chance I got, I'd ride my bike past her house after school, even though it was miles out my way.

"I was still doing it years later, on my motorbike, then my car,... just cruising by. I couldn't let her go, even though after all that time you'd think I would've realised how hopeless it was.

"I imagined that if I'd seen her, I could have pulled over and said 'hi' and that would have been all we'd needed to get things moving,... except of course I didn't see her. Anyway, from the moment I learned her address, it became a precious thing and I'd write it down on the first page of all my sketch books and my diaries - anything personal. It felt like a lucky charm, having the mark of Her on everything I did.

"Then, this morning when I was gathering some stuff together to bring with me, I found an old sketchbook. I don't know, Eleanor,... everything was such a mess with Annie and yet I felt nothing, just sort of numb inside. Then, seeing that address, it took me back to a time when I used to really feel things, feel them so deeply I'd go writing down a girl's address, because in the absence of anything more tangible, it brought me closer to her."

I heard Eleanor shifting, moving nearer. Then I felt her hand on my arm and I turned to find myself pitched into the disturbing well of her gaze. "So you went round?" she asked.

"It wasn't as if I expected her to be there or anything. I just wanted to see if I could remember the feeling."

"And did you?"

"Yes."

" What was it like? "

"It was,... intense,... incredible really after all that time - the sadness, the melancholy and yet, in a way it was good, because lately I hardly seem to feel anything at all. In fact, I don't think I've felt anything in years, until this afternoon."

"It's just shock, Tom. You only found out about Annie yesterday. Do you remember the line of that Joni Mitchel song? 'there's comfort in melancholy'."

The plaintive music of Joni Mitchel was one of the things we shared. In fact I'd given Eleanor all my old vinyl when Annie had refused to give it house-room. "No," I said. "It's something else, something fundamental inside of me that's gone wrong."

"What was her name, Tom?"

"Her name?"

"The girl at school."

I hesitated, even with Eleanor.

"It was Rachel," I said.

"And the way you felt about Rachel. Have you ever felt as intensely about anyone else?"

It seemed odd to be suddenly talking about Rachel,... about the way I'd felt,... for I'd never spoken of her to anyone before. So far as the rest of the world was concerned my love for her was of no account. My misery throughout all those years was entirely self inflicted and of no consequence in the greater scheme of things. I thought about it for a long time, wrenching my eyes back to the swirling patterns on the ceiling. How many women had there been after Rachel? Five? Six? And of those only two I had known intimately, before Annie.

There had been excitement and warmth and with some a sense of recklessness, of danger, but had any of them been able to reach down inside and tear me apart? Had they sent me home too sick to eat and dreading tomorrow for its emptiness? Had they filled my life with melancholy, comforting or otherwise?

"No," I said. "It's like I've been searching for it ever since Rachel, and never found it."

"Not even with Annie?"

"No."

I sat up then, burying my head in my hands. I could hear my words and they sounded stupid. "But it was just a crush,... a difficult age. You bruise so easily then."

"Tom, you were in love."

"It was still crazy, going back."

"You don't know what crazy is."

"It means nothing,..."

"I'm not so sure. It's just a pity you never asked her out."

"She would have said no."

"How can you be certain? She might have been flattered. Or perhaps you're right - she would have said no, but at least if you'd asked you would have had your answer and stopped thinking about her long before now."

"I didn't have the guts. My feelings were so strong, and a part of me desperately wanted to believe she felt the same way about me, that secretly she yearned for me in the same way and that we were both too shy to do anything about it."

"Ah,... now we're getting to it."
"So you see, it was better to go on not knowing, to go on living the fantasy that she loved me, rather than risk her rejection and have to face the reality,... that she did not even think of me, that she barely knew I existed."

"And it's the not knowing that's kept it alive."

"But I haven't thought of her in years."

"Are you sure?"

"Okay, there have been times when I've thought about her, wondered where she is, what she's doing,... times when I've asked myself what if? But life goes on. You meet someone else, you get married, you have children and these things go away, don't they?"

She sank back into the lotus position and rested her head against the wall. "Not always," she said. "The subconscious is a strange place, Tom. The psychologist I used to see at the hospital said it was like a lake of the blackest water you can imagine. It's where we bury all our demons, but we have no way of knowing how deep. They might lie hundreds of fathoms down, so deep they're as good as dead, but some demons we might carry our whole lives barely inches below the surface and we would never know. Sometimes those demons can break through and haunt us when we least expect it."

I spent the night in my old room. It was one of the few places in the house not to have changed. The bed was in the same place, the worn out sixties furniture, the lamp shade, everything was as it had been, right down to the little rings on the carpet where as a boy I'd spilled my tiny pots of Airfix paint, and the pin pricks in the ceiling from where I'd strung up my model aeroplanes.

It had been a long road from that room to a detached executive brick-box on Parbold's Lindley Crescent, and only now, laying my Rolex back on that old bedside cabinet, the cabinet where I had once laid my first Timex, did I realise how far I'd travelled. I'm not saying my life was a big deal. I was still a small town boy, worked at the same engineering firm in Middleton since leaving school. I'd never chased promotion, not travelled much, never made love on a sun-kissed beach with the waves crashing all around me,... but I had found contentment with Annie and my children. It had seemed a worthy goal and I had never wanted to be anywhere other than where I was. I'd been so sure, so set. Where the hell had it all gone wrong?

- 4 -

It was Monday before I could face going back. Phil picked me up at nine in his old Sherpa, honking his horn in the street to bring me running. He gave Eleanor a half hearted wave and a nod while she stood to see us off, but little else passed between them by way of greeting.

I climbed aboard. "Thanks, Phil."

He shrugged as if to say it was no problem.

He was dark haired, like his sister, but his skin had more colour. He was almost swarthy in fact and from the size of his gut, I guessed he liked his beer. The last time I'd seen him had been at my father's wedding and he hadn't said much then either. I remembered him telling me he'd worked for the Standard Machine company in Leyland, but he'd been given notice of redundancy. I'd asked him about his plans and he'd shrugged, as if he hadn't known, nor really cared much about what he would do.

I'd already telephoned Annie that morning to tell her we were coming. She'd been abrupt. It was a bad time and didn't I know she had the kids to get ready for school? It was as if it was my fault for running off and leaving her in the lurch. I think I even said I was sorry but then decided to be firm and told her I'd be there in an hour, that I didn't want any trouble, that I was sure we could sort this out amicably. That was the word they used at times like these wasn't it? The holy grail of all unholy break ups, the amicable settlement?

She wasn't in. Her father was there instead, his silver Mercedes blocking the driveway and standing out like a battle-tank. He opened the door at our approach and stood obstructing the entrance, arms folded, making me feel like I was trespassing on my own property.

"Hello, Tom."

"Hi, Alan. Just came to get some things - personal stuff, you know. Clothes and that."

He was fumbling with a piece of paper which, eventually, he handed to me. "Sorry, Tom. Annie's quite a headstrong girl, as you know."

She'd written down all the stuff it was okay for me to touch - it wasn't much: clothes, shoes, toiletries. It was written in her best, and most methodical hand, due care and consideration given to each item. I turned it over, thinking of other things, trivial things like the Biggles books my mum had bought me and I'd kept all these years. They weren't on the list. Was she saying I couldn't have them? My bottle of ten year old Kuros was fine but keep away from the Biggles books or I'll sue your ass, as they would say in America. Phil came up and took the list.

"Bollocks," he said, then pushed his way in.

Phil was a big lad with lots of muscle and the fact that he didn't say much lent him an air of menace which, according to Eleanor, was complete nonsense but people tended not to mess with him just in case. Alan took the same circumspect view and stepped aside.

"We'll be as quick as we can," I said.

What hit me first when I walked in were my children's shoes lying at the bottom of the stairs, such tiny shoes, I thought. And there, yesterday, in the living room, had been Annie and her be-suited, wide-arsed Alistair, twisting their fingers together on the sofa as they'd faced me.

"Just one of those things," she'd said. "I mean we've not been right for years, have we," and: "Let's be adults about this, Tom. It's for the best," and: "We can be amicable about this." And other set phrases gleaned from countless soap opera bust-ups which all roughly translated as: why make it hard for me, Tom! This is simply the way it's going to be!

She'd always been like that. When we'd first met it was what had drawn me to her. I'd always been so easy going and I'd found her forthright manner quite stunning. I'd met her at the Squash club,... hated every minute of the game itself right from the start, but I'd persevered for six months because the sight of her prancing about in her whites had driven me crazy.

"Could I take you out for a meal?" I'd asked her eventually.

"No," she'd replied, almost cutting my throat with a flick of her lovely blonde hair. "But I'll take you for one, okay?"

From the first, I'd thought her magnificent and beautiful. Then, fifteen years later I'd come home to find Alistair sitting beside her, cringing silently while I'd gazed open mouthed and felt,... nothing at all,... not I think because I didn't care, more because I couldn't believe any of it was really happening.

The shoes brought it home to me though,... the enormity it. Whatever had happened between Annie and I, the love I felt for the children was the same - it was instinctive and unconditional. Eleanor was right, I'd always be their father, but I was terrified if I was not around, they would forget me. I wanted to take the shoes with me as a sort of anchor. I mean they had to be a part of me didn't they, if I had their shoes? But Alan who'd looked on calmly throughout, became suddenly nervous.

"It's only a pair of shoes," I said but he stood up to me, his voice reverberating with all his boardroom bossiness. No way was I taking those bloody shoes and then as I emerged from my momentary madness, I saw it all: they weren't simply my children. There was a greater picture to be considered. They were his grandchildren, an integral part of the lives of Annie's family. I could squabble all I wanted over the Biggles books and my Joni Mitchel CD's but the children were a different matter. They were to be kept out of this, out of harm's way, out of my way if necessary; protected; best interests and all that. We could be amicable all we liked but mention the children and things would get very nasty, very quickly indeed.

I looked at the shoes as if I were looking at their faces. Why didn't I have a more recent photograph of my children?

"For fuck's sake," said Phil. "Leave em."

I came away with my Biggles books and my Joni Mitchel CD's and my bicycle and my printer and my CD ROMs and a half dozen bin bags containing my clothes and books and other bits and bobs, most of which I could probably have thrown away. In parting Alan offered me his hand which I took a moment to shake.

"Truly, I am sorry," he said, and I think on reflection, he was.

"Tell Annie there'll be an estate agent round tomorrow to value the house," I said. "I'm staying at my dad's for a bit until she sorts herself out. I suppose she'll be moving in with this Alistair chap. Only she didn't say,..."

He looked down at his feet. He was suddenly uncomfortable, as if only now remembering it was Annie, his daughter, who'd taken a lover and not me. If it had been me, it might have been easier for him to deal with. "Is there anything I can do? " he asked. "Anything for the children? Any message perhaps?"

"No," I said. "I can't think of anything that would make sense to them. I won't argue about custody or anything - I mean the mother always gets them anyway doesn't she? And I never wanted the little bastards in the first place. They were her idea."

I felt Phil's hand gripping my arm. "He didn't mean that," he said.

It was true. I hadn't meant it. Even from the outset, the children had always wielded an astonishing emotional power over me. Why had I said it then? To hurt him? To shock him? To shock me into waking up to the fact that it was all very, very real?

"Sorry Alan,... The kids couldn't hope for a better grandfather. You'll see they're okay?..."

I'd always liked Parbold. In spite of the inevitable sprawl of boxy housing throughout the sixties and the seventies, it had retained a sense of character with its remaining old stone buildings, it's converted windmill and its permanent regatta of colourful barges on the canal. From the centre you could walk in any direction, and within five minutes find yourself in deepest countryside, among the meadows, wild commons and wooded glades marking the inland boundary of the Lancashire plain.

If your destination took you deeper inland, it meant climbing the long, unforgiving snake of a road up Parbold hill. It was no problem for a modern car, but in a Midget on a cold morning, or a clapped out van like Phil's it was more of an ordeal. We laboured up, eventually hitting bottom gear while trailing a noxious cloud of diesel, and we just about made it to the Wiggin Tree pub, on the summit. Here the road levelled out and Phil pulled in.

"Problem?" I asked

"Nothing a pint won't fix," he said.

It was quiet inside the Wiggin Tree, a calm relaxed air pervading the modern decor, quite unlike the last time I'd been in on a busy Saturday evening. We took a table overlooking a cornfield. It was swishing about in great lazy waves. The crop seemed ripe, its long ears of grain drooping sleepily. Already it was late August. Summer was coming to an end. Another month, I thought and there'd be Christmas cards in all the shops.

This time last year, we'd just returned from holiday in Ibiza, two weeks with the children, sun and sand and warm seas, and Annie in a yellow bikini, looking as trim as she had when I'd first met her. A year! Suddenly I found myself thinking I would never take life for granted again. Nothing stayed the same. Even the firmest foundations crumbled in time and it was folly to attach ourselves to anything,... or to anyone.

"You must think I'm stupid," I said.

He shrugged, quaffed down half his pint, but said nothing.

"My dad said I should have kicked her out. I suppose I should. I've always been too easy going."

He shook his head. "Your dad didn't mean it - he knows the score."

"Score?"

"It's all about children, isn't it? What's best for them. You don't want to kick them out. And like you said, the mother always gets the kids, so even if it's her who's been shagging around, she stays and you go. Simple. No offence."

"None taken," I said. "I mean, that's exactly what I thought."

Phil sat back and contemplated the rest of his pint.

"So how long were you at Standard's then?" I asked him.

"Twenty years," he replied. "I was a turner."

"A turner? You can name your price then these days."

He shrugged "A turner's a rare species all right, but there's no call for it any more."

"Isn't there?"

"Who'd want to hire a British turner when you can get it done for next to nothing in China? No, Tom. We're done making things in this country. I bet if you asked, not one of the buggers in this place could even tell you what a turner was."

"Maybe," I said. "Sad though."

"Just fact," he said and then he stabbed the table with his podgy finger as if to drive the point home. "No sense harping on about it though. Gotta face it. Gotta move on."

"True."

"You still at Derby's then? I heard they'd all but shut that place as well."

"They closed the machine shop years ago but there's still plenty of design work. It keeps me busy anyway. I heard you had a workshop or something."

"Just a side line. I salvaged a couple of machines when they were emptying Standard's - a Hardinge lathe and an old Cincinatti miller. I still do the odd freelance job - motorbike spares mainly."
"Ever done a re-bore on an engine?"

He laughed. "That bloody old Midget?"

I nodded.

He thought for a while. "Buy yourself a kit, then give me a bell."

"Thanks I owe you one."

"No, Tom. I owe you one."

"Me?"

"Our Ellie and your Dad." He shrugged and gulped down the rest of his pint. "Ellie was in a mess," he said. "I did what I could, but she was impossible to deal with. Now, your dad and her,...." he tapped the side of his head and lowered his voice. "They've been to the same places, in here, you know? It makes a difference. All I'm saying is you could have made it difficult - an old chap like that, and you his only son,..."

I'd missed my mother every day of the past twenty years but Eleanor was still the best thing that had happened to my father. "Come on, Phil. Eleanor's all right."

"She's better these days," he said. "But she'll never be all right."

While I was pondering on what he might mean, a waitress came up to our table. She smiled, took our glasses and wanted to know if we fancied anything to eat. She was young and blonde, the same shade of purest platinum as Annie, but her name-tag read: Rachel.

"Rachel," I said.

"Yes?" she asked.

I looked up, startled. "Sorry. Nothing. It was just the name. Such a pretty name. Rachel."
She gave me another smile, though not as wide and went on her way.

"Who's Rachel, then?" he asked.

I shook my head. "It was just some girl I used to know at school."

He smirked. "She must have been quite a girl."

"I wouldn't know," I said. "I hardly knew her."

Sure, I'd hardly known her, not really known her, but once more I was feeling the white heat of her presence and feeling again the ominous stirrings of everything she had ever meant to me. My life was falling apart before my eyes and I was thinking of Rachel. It was insane! I had no time for this.

- 5 -

She came back to me as I lay in bed that night. She was a head shorter than me, slight of frame and with short black hair combed in sweeping waves. She was wearing a navy blue skirt, cut to just above the knee as was the fashion then. Also she had on a regulation school blouse, sky blue with seventies style flared lapels, and a blue and gold striped tie done up into a fat knot. But it was her expressiveness more than anything that so captivated me - the tilt of her head, the slightly exaggerated movement of her hands as she spoke, and the nervous way she used to balance on the sides of her feet,...

It was a dream I'd had before, the first time when I was fifteen years old. In the dream I was conscious of her, of all these mannerisms, as I followed her along a corridor at school. We were making our way between classes, a weekly ritual,... that particular corridor, that particular class, the same time every week. The clamour of voices, the damp, dusty smell, the anxious feel of it,... all came back, bubbling up from the dark lake of my subconscious.

The dream was a reflection of reality, but in that reality I always lost sight of her in the crowd and my chance of glory, of recognition, of hope borne afloat on the chance of a smile, had always evaporated. But in my dream, the sweaty crush of school blazers parted suddenly to reveal her leaning against the wall. As I drew level I realised her eyes were tracking me. She was waiting,... for me. And when I came to her, she fixed me with a steady gaze, bringing me to a standstill.

"I want to be with you," she said.

They were just words, but they might have been the most precious words, had she ever really spoken them. Of course it was just a dream and I remember the first time it's cruel authenticity had me waking delirious with a fragile joy, which imploded into a terrible despair. Even now, waking that morning, twenty five years later, it's taste was fresh and it frightened me that a fantasy from so long ago could still wield such power.

I was still aware of her presence as I coaxed the Midget into work that morning. Why was she haunting me now. Was it simply my mind retreating away from the shock of Annie? Was it something about the car? Something about the smell of it, a mixture of hot oil and musty carpets,.... stirring old memories?

Like my father had said, I'd driven a Midget before. At eighteen, it was about the only sport's car I'd been able to afford. I'd seen one advertised in the Clarion - a '67 registration, a classic or so the greasy little man had said, after he'd taken my three hundred quid.

"Needs a bit of work, like," he'd added. I'd noticed that. But it had sounded like a dream and its racing green paint had sparkled seductively beneath the feeble strip-light in his garage. I hadn't even thought to check the insurance premiums before I'd bought the bloody thing - only to find out on later enquiry that even third-party cover was more than I'd paid for the car and quite beyond my means as an apprenticed technician at Derby's Diesels.

The only time I'd ever driven it was on a brief, un-insured cruise down Langholm Avenue. The plan had been quite simple, though criminal in its recklessness. I'd see Rachel. She would be coming out of the house as I drove by. The top would be down and I'd cut a heroic figure in my flying jacket. I'd slow down, gunning the engine provocatively. She'd turn at the throaty sound of it and give me that look, that quizzical look. Then she'd recognise me and her expression would change - eyes dancing, a little flirtatious. "I want to be with you," she'd say.

I didn't see her of course. Then, at the roaring junction with the A6 on the edge of town, the throttle jammed wide open and the car nearly rammed me into the side of a wagon. I'd had the sense to slip the clutch and cut the engine, but it had been a near thing and my father had gone berserk when I'd finally got it home.

It had sat upon the drive for months after that, gathering grime and dripping oil, a constant reminder of the hopelessness of everything, and rather than save up to pay the insurance premium, I just sold it, then got on with my life. It came as a shock remembering all of this now.

Today's Midget was a later marque, and in better condition. It's original black wrap-around bumpers had been stripped off at some stage and replaced with more traditional chrome. It had a neat grille from off some original sixties scrapper and I had a feeling the car had been loved, but had fallen recently on hard times. It was green, like the other and I'd bought it on impulse after seeing it on the forecourt of a second hand dealer's in Preston. Perhaps it had been a hunger for nostalgia that had attracted me - but I wasn't aware I'd been thinking of Rachel.

Pulling into my slot outside the office, some wag shouted across an insult about the car having shrunk in the wash. "Bloody classic, this mate," I retorted while carefully smoothing down the broad band of tape that was holding the rag-top together. I'd have to get a new one before winter set in, I thought.

Once inside the air conditioned sterility of the open plan office, I logged onto my computer, checked my e-mails, then loaded up the latest version of the design I was working on - a simple valve for a marine engine, but Rachel was still with me and I found it impossible to concentrate. I made coffee and sipped at it while gazing without seeing at my computer screen. Then I tried quite deliberately to remember what I could of her, before realising most of it was irrelevant.

In the seventies, when I'd known, or rather not known her, the technology for a quartz watch had been beyond us, and indeed most of what I took for granted now was science fiction back then: E-mail, Pentium processors and personal telephones so small you could loose them in your pocket. For all the vividness of my memories, they were of events that had taken place a long time ago. A generation had passed. She would be in her forties now, maybe fat, wrinkled and grey. I was being haunted by a fantasy that was a quarter of a century out of date. It was meaningless. And it was maddening.

In the seventies, I'd been like the other lads,... shoulder length hair and flared trousers. Nowadays, the hair is disappearing over the top of my head, and the eyes are dim without my specs - yet inside I feel the same as I imagine I did then. How would I feel though, I wondered, if I actually saw Rachel today? I didn't suppose for a moment she'd recognise me, but would I recognise her? And if I did see her, or more importantly saw the change in her, would I be able at last to rid myself of this strange feeling?

"Got that document ready, Tom?"

"Document?"

It was Stavros, the section head.

"We talked about it last week? The departmental reshuffle? We need your thoughts on the way ahead."

"Sure, only I'm a bit tied up on this valve right now. We got the prototype back and the flow's not right. I'll need to reshape the inlet."

As I spoke, I was aware of Stavros' eyes glazing over. He wasn't technically minded and even though without the valve, a two million pound contract was as good as dead, he didn't seem interested. "Can't Joss do that?" he asked a little wearily.

"By the time I've explained it to Joss, I could have done it myself."

"Well, I really need your input for this afternoon's session, Tom."

I couldn't do both at the same time and he wouldn't actually say he thought the technical work on the valve was less important. It was one of those lose-lose situations with which all office drones,... even technical ones are familiar. Dutifully, I zapped the valve model and opened M.S. Word, loading a document I'd begun only last week,... already a lifetime ago.

"The Way Ahead," I read. But what about my own way ahead? Bugger Derby's: Where did Tom Norton go from here? While I pondered on it, Charlie Wheeler returned from the purchasing office. He was a sour faced engineer of some thirty years experience. "That's it," he said, addressing no one in particular. "The design office is moving to Paris. Administration's going to Dartford. They're shutting us down - three month's for the lot of us."

He was a gossip, a man for a good rumour and we didn't take much notice because we'd heard this sort of thing from him before.

I gave a cynical sneer. "Who says?"

"It's all round Purchasing. They're having a session this afternoon. Haven't you seen the bloody Jag outside? Old Whacker 'imself's come to make the announcement."

Whacker was the Chief Executive, not his real name of course but it's what everyone called him on account of his stern headmaster's demeanour. He dropped in from time to time, but mostly he plied his mysterious trade from a poky little office with a posh address in London. "That can't be right," I said "Stavros' just asked me to finish this thing on the way ahead. Why would he be wasting his time with that if they were shutting us down?"

Charlie gave me a grin and shook his head at my innocence - with only twenty five years service, I was still a bit green. "That's local, Tom. That's trivial. What I'm talking about comes from headquarters. Stavros probably knows as much about this as we do."

Stavros returned an hour later, somewhat pale faced. With an effort he heaved his well padded frame onto a desk at the head of the office. It was a peculiar sight, one without precedent, him stood up there like a reluctant schoolmaster and waving his arms for silence and I felt at once it's import, felt at once the shock wave of doom even before he opened his mouth.

Charlie winked at me, then nudged my elbow. "What did I tell you, lad? It's tickets to a dance."

"A dance? "

"A redun-dance. "

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The Road From Langholm Avenue

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Copyright

M Graeme 2007

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