her tray of drinks, a potentially precarious move for a woman in four-inch heels, but it did allow Mellors to eye up her cleavage as she put his Manhattan down on their low table. She delivered Jackson’s Perrier in the same manner, pouring the water slowly into his glass as if it was an act of seduction. ‘Thanks,’ he said, trying to behave like a gentleman (a lifelong project) and not look at the cleavage. Instead he looked her in the eye and found that she was smiling at him in a feral way that was startlingly familiar and saying, ‘Hello, Jackson Brodie, we meet again,’ as if she were auditioning for a part as a Bond villainess. By the time Jackson had recovered the power of speech she had stalked off on those killer heels (they weren’t called stilettos for nothing) and disappeared into the shadows.
‘Wow,’ Stephen Mellors said approvingly. ‘You’re a lucky man, Brodie. Thighs like a nutcracker. I bet she does a lot of squats.’
‘Trapeze, actually,’ Jackson said. He noticed a fallen sequin, glinting on the table in front of him like a calling-card.
They made their way out of the park, Nathan loping along like a puppy, Dido gamely hirpling as if she could do with a hip replacement (she could, apparently). At the gates of the park there was a noticeboard on to which several posters had been affixed advertising the various delights of the summer season – Lifeboat Flag Day, Tom Jones at the open-air theatre, Showaddywaddy at the Spa. There was some kind of Eighties revival show, a variety thing, at the Palace, with Barclay Jack topping the bill. Jackson recognized his gurning face. ‘The North’s very own side-splitting laughter-maker. Parental guidance required.’
Jackson knew something dodgy about Barclay Jack, but he couldn’t get the knowledge to rise up from the seabed of his memory – a dismal place that was littered with the rusting wreckage and detritus of his brain cells. Some scandal to do with kids or drugs, an accident in a swimming pool. There’d been a putative raid on his house that had come to nothing and then a lot of apologizing and backtracking from the police and the media, but that was his career pretty much ruined. There was something else too, but Jackson had exhausted his powers of retrieval.
‘That guy’s a wanker,’ Nathan said.
‘Don’t use that word,’ Jackson said. Was there an age limit, he wondered, when you let your child swear with impunity?
On the way to the car park they passed a bungalow with its name proudly on the gate – Thisldo. Nathan took some time decoding it and then snorted with laughter. ‘That’s crap,’ he said.
‘It is,’ Jackson agreed. (‘Crap’ was allowed, he judged – too useful a word to ban completely.) ‘But, you know, perhaps it’s quite, I dunno … Zen’ (Zen – was he really saying that?) ‘to know when you’ve got somewhere and realize that it’s enough. Not striving, just accepting.’ A concept Jackson struggled with every day.
‘It’s still crap.’
‘Yeah, well.’
In the car park there were what Jackson always thought of as ‘bad boys’ – three of them, only a couple of years older than Nathan. They were smoking and drinking cans of something that would definitely be on Julia’s taboo list. And loitering far too near Jackson’s car for his liking. Although in his head he drove something more virile, his actual vehicle of choice was currently a tragically uninspiring mid-range Toyota that endorsed his parental, Labrador-sitting status.
‘Lads?’ he said, suddenly becoming a policeman again. They sniggered at the authority in his voice. Jackson could sense Nathan shrinking towards him – for all his bravado, he was still a child. Jackson’s heart filled at this sign of vulnerability. If anyone laid a finger on his son or upset him in any way Jackson had to suppress the urge to rip their head off and stick it where the sun never shone. Middlesbrough, perhaps.
Dido growled instinctively at the boys. ‘Really?’ Jackson said to her. ‘You and whose wolf?’
‘That’s my car,’ he said to the boys, ‘so hop it, lads, okay?’ It would take more than a posturing teenage prat to scare Jackson. One of them crushed his empty can underfoot and bumped the car with his arse so that the alarm went off and they all exploded into laughter like hyenas. Jackson sighed. He could hardly beat them up, they were still – technically – children and he preferred to restrict his acts of violence