skoosh of mouth-freshener and took up a pose on the doorstep as if she were on the catwalk, and when Tommy had exited the taxi she said, ‘Hello, babe. Did you have a good day?’
‘Yeah, great day,’ Tommy Holroyd said. ‘I hit an albatross.’
Crystal frowned. She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which that could lead to a great day, particularly not for the albatross, but she said, ‘Oh, well done you. I didn’t even know we had them in Britain.’
Thisldo. ‘The marital home’, as it was now known in Steve Mellors’ legalese. The pigeon part of his brain guided Vince’s feet there automatically. Perhaps he could have a word with Wendy, ask her to dial down the divorce so he didn’t lose everything, especially his dignity.
The lights were on, a fact which irritated him as he was still paying the electricity bill. Wendy could show a little mercy, even if only by turning a light off. She had a job, after all, only part-time, but she could easily go full-time and make some more money instead of taking all of his. (And half his pension! How could that be fair?) Wendy worked in the office of a local college, although you would think she spent her day hewing coal with her bare hands from the dramatic way she used to fling herself on the sofa when she came in from work. (‘I’m knackered, Vince, fetch me a glass of prosecco, will you?’)
Vince peered through the front window but couldn’t see anything between the finger-thin gap in the curtains. It seemed unlikely that Wendy was in there with a new man, she would surely have been canoodling by the soft light of a lamp or a forgiving candle rather than in the full glare of their five-armed BHS ceiling chandelier. British Home Stores may have gone bust now but their light fittings blazed bravely on. It was a Saturday night, he supposed Wendy was out painting the town.
He rested his head against the cold glass of the window for a moment. The house seemed deathly quiet. No chatter from the television, no crazed barking from Sparky.
‘Vince!’
Vince jumped away from the window but it was only a neighbour – Benny. Ex-neighbour.
‘You all right, mate?’
‘Just checking in on the old homestead, you know.’
‘We miss you round here.’
‘Yeah, I miss me too,’ Vince said.
‘How are you doing anyway?’ Benny asked, an expression of concern on his face, a doctor with a terminal patient.
‘Oh, you know,’ Vince said, mustering an attempt at bonhomie, ‘can’t complain.’ He had lost the appetite for confrontation with Wendy and said, ‘Better get going anyway. See you around, Benny.’
‘Yeah, Vince, see you around.’
Vince crawled between his stale-smelling sheets. Yes, there was something more pathetic than an about-to-be-divorced middle-aged man ordering a single fish supper – it was an about-to-be-divorced middle-aged man lugging a bag of dirty washing through the streets to a launderette. The company car had disappeared with the job, the dog with the marriage and the washing-machine with the house. What would be taken from him next? he wondered.
He lay awake, staring at the ceiling. The pubs had just emptied and it was far too noisy to sleep. He could hear the nerve-jangling noise of Carmody’s amusement arcade across the way. The Carmody family still ran it. Every time he passed it Vince could see Carmody’s stringy daughter sitting in the change booth, looking bored to death. They used to call it Carmody’s ‘empire’, just because he had more than one arcade in more than one town. Four amusement arcades do not an empire make, Vince thought. And now where was Carmody? Sitting in a jail cell somewhere, an emperor deposed. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Vince thought. He had learned that poem at school. He had an excellent memory, more curse than gift. Was Carmody really going to name names? Depose more emperors? Or just their minions?
He was dog-tired, but he expected that as with most nights since he had moved here he would have a tortured, restless sleep. The usual pattern was that just as he managed to forget his troubles and drop off, he would be rudely woken by the seagulls performing their morning tap-dancing routine on the pantiled roof above his head.
Vince sighed. He was reluctantly coming to the realization that nobody would care if he didn’t wake up in the morning. Vince wasn’t sure that he cared himself. If he fell off a cliff, like Lesley Holroyd, he doubted that