Tinted Glasses

“As a kid, it looked …bigger, you know?”

“Most things do, I guess. How old were you when you left anyway, thirteen, fourteen?”

Billy thought a minute. “Just turned fifteen and, when I did, man, I thought my world was going to end. All my friends were here. Ian Bennett, Bogey Williams. We called him that because … well, I’m sure you can figure it out. Jesus, my Air Training Cadet unit … the ATC Flint Squadron. I’ve not thought about that in years.”

“You were an air cadet?” Sally asked, smiling. "D’you have a uniform and everything? Little hat like a MacDonalds server guy? I bet you were just too cute!”

“It was blue and grey. Dark blue shirt and brassard, blue-grey trousers, a V-neck blue-grey jumper and an RAF blue beret with the Air Training Corps cap badge squared off front and centre. Saved my life in a lot ways, being in that thing. Taught me a lot too: discipline, loyalty. Teamwork. Made a lot of friends. Lifelong friends, so I thought at the time.”

“We all think like that,” Sally was looking through the windshield of their ghost-silver Porsche Cayenne, and up at the dilapidated building that had once been her husband’s home. “My best friend at school was Mary-Mae Hopkins. She had this lisp on account of her bucked teeth. No matter how thick the braces, those Bugsy’s were never going to get aligned. Terrible acne, too. When she was thirteen, she had more pips on her face than a jar of Strawberry Jam.”

Billy’s chuckled. “Nice image. What happened to her?”

“We went through elementary school together – St Mary’s Saviour over in Jersey – then on to High School. That’s where the zits predominated. Obviously. Puberty and whatnot.”

“Obviously.”

“Then, after years of being teased about her teeth and her spots and her striking inability to grow anything remotely resembling a chest, she just … blossomed. Overnight. Turned into this drop dead gorgeous model type.”

“Yeah?” Billy was interested despite himself.

“Yeah. Couple of years ago, I read she renewed her vows. Heard of Leonardo Azzizi?”

“The clothes designer guy?”

Sally nodded. “Renewed her vows after thirty years married to him … in Milan … where they live now. Seriously rich. Seriously happy. Three kids. One of the daughter’s is engaged to the son of Sheik.”

Billy whistled gently. “Wow. Life. You just don’t know do you. You just never know where it’ll lead.”

“Good thing too, I say,” Sally answered. “I mean, if we knew what was in store d’you think we’d do half of what we end up doing, or would we be too scared? I think, maybe, it’d be more of the latter.”

Billy half-turned towards his wife. “Wow that’s pretty deep Sal, I have to say. And a little depressing too, don’t you think? Given that this is supposed to be the season to be jolly and all that guff.”

Sally shrugged, half-smiled then turned her head to look through the tinted glass of the passenger window. Outside, across an orange-red gravelled car park that was badly infested with weed, stood an old church. Yellow-cream towers, tipped with black slate, soared into the deep grey sky; the building’s graveyard, littered with too many crumbling headstones to count, was badly in need of some TLC. A faded wooden sign read St. Mary’s Church clearly enough. The Service Times, however, had long since been scrubbed clean by God’s weathered hand. “D’you go there?” she asked.

Billy snorted. “Church? Us? You never met my mother, did you? Anyway they’re kind of like these places when you think about it,” he flicked a hand towards the crumbling façade of his former home. “The customers confess, look for redemption … even pray sometimes – that their wives or husbands don’t walk in when they’re doing something with someone they shouldn’t be. That their team gets a last minute winner. Whatever. They keep different hours though. And at God’s altar you’re rationed to only one sip of wine and you get snacks thrown in to soak it up. My mum’s church? The Church of the Wholly and Completely Wasted? That bar was always open and she was always more than willing to sample the wares … right alongside her customers.”

A silence fell between the two: a hush that felt comfortable in their understanding of each other’s histories, yet uneasy in the presence of the spectres from the past – both their pasts, it seemed – that loomed large: a quiet which, suddenly from nowhere, provided chills for the pair of them.

“So,” Sally sighed, trying to shake the feeling, but not quite succeeding. “We travel all this way just to sit in the car?”

Billy nodded resignedly. “No. Guess not. Let’s go.”

They stepped out into the stiff breeze, the salty estuary air thick with brine and damp. Rain threatened, but that was all. So far it had kept to itself, despite the clouds above being pregnant with it.

Billy buttoned his black Burberry overcoat to the neck, turning slowly around in a circle as he did so. The wall that ran the width of the double car park, its black-lettering-on-white board ‘Coaches Welcome’ sign, chipped and flaking now, stood at the halfway point. The red bricks topped with grey corner stones, two layers high, had been mountainous when he was a toddler. They were all chipped and cracked now, from the frost getting behind the faciers. Moss and mildew freckled the cement. Cowslips and brambles licked the masonry.

“Looks old,” Billy said. “Tired out.”

“It is old,” Sally answered. “Like us.”

“Yeah? Speak for yourself. I’m still seventeen.”

“In your dreams, big guy.”

“In my head, I’m seventeen at least.”

“Still, a Toy Boy … now that’d be something.”

“Yeah. It’d be something alright. A miracle springs to mind. And anaesthetic.”

Sally punched him lightly on the arm, smiling. “Cheek!”

“Didn’t you used to be slimmer?”

“Don’t push it sunshine. Now, Mister Charm, if you’re ready ...” Sally walked around the back of the Cayenne, slipped her arm through that of her husband, turned back to face the main building. “Which one was yours? Which room?”

“That one, Billy said, pointing to the first floor window, surrounded now with a rotting wood frame, painted white. “Me and Georgie, we shared that room. Bunk beds. Me, being older, on top. See that balcony beneath?” Over the front door to leading to the lounge bar – a door closed now, barricaded with a metal sheet to prevent being broken in to. “One night, when Georgie annoyed me … nicked my LeGo or something probably … I hung him out by his ankles. Threatened to drop him on his head.”

“You what?” Sally squealed. “That’s crazy. How old were you?”

“I’m eight years on Georgie so, dunno? He’d have been about five or so. And you see here? This parking lot?”

“Don’t you Brits call it a car park?”

“Yeah. Car park. This? This was our Wembley, our Lords … our Gillette Stadium or Fenway Park back home. It was our Okay Corral, Iwo Jima … Normandy and D-Day. Colditz. All rolled into one. On summer nights … and believe me, we had proper summers here when I was a kid … we used to pray for coaches on day trips to pull up for a refreshment stop. Meant we could stay up late, play until all hours. Put dad in a good mood, too. More money in the tills.”

“Sounds like you had fun times here,” Sally said, as they walked in front of the pub.

“Yeah, I guess. That room to the right, that was mum and dad’s bedroom. Under no circumstances were we allowed in there, other than to open birthday presents. That kind of made the day even more special. Say what you like about my parents, they made a deal about birthdays.”

“Mine too,” Sally said, snuggling in close, out of the wind but also to try to get an even better sense of the man she’d been married to these past thirty-seven years. “They’d always throw me and Megan parties to end all parties. One year, dad dressed as a clown and did the worst magic tricks in the world.”

“We couldn’t have parties,” Billy explained, his voice sad. “It’s a pub. No kids allowed back then. Plus mum and dad were too busy. Dad worked during the day. He kept the stores for the council works around here. Mum would look after the pub during the day, while we were at school, and then dad would take over at night. Run the bar.”

“That’s a long day for him, right?”

“For sure. Eighteen, nineteen hours probably. Two boys as well on top. Must’ve been tough. Plus my mother, of course. The drinking. The tablets …”

Billy allowed the sentence to go unfinished, stopped outside the locked outer door that had lead in to the smaller, public bar. Unlinking his arm from Sally’s, Billy moved slowly across to the one murky window which remained uncovered, cupped his hand around his eyes and peered in.

He couldn’t see clearly, but the lay out – stripped now of tables and chairs and, well, customers and atmosphere – he closed his eyes and imagined it filled with revellers. The smell of good times and cigarettes and beer and wine. The songs. The piano playing. The clickety-click-click of dominoes being shuffled. The dull whumph of darts hitting the board. Skittles falling with a wooden clatter.

Billy smiled.

Then, unbidden, came other sounds. Glasses breaking against walls. Tables and chairs and stools being knocked over. Raised voices – mum and dad; knuckle on skin; palm flesh on cheekbone. The warmth of liquid on his thighs, the remembered sensation of being so very afraid some nights.

Billy felt the smile freeze as it cracked away.

I’m taking the baby. See how she copes with the other one and …!

He jerked away from the glass as though hit by a bolt of electricity.

She.

He's hurt.

“You okay?” Sally asked.

He's hurt ... again.

“Yeah. Memories, is all.”

“Want to go on?”

Billy shrugged. “We’re here aren’t we?”

They walked on, headed towards the hill in the road that ran around the back of the property. Billy told Sally about how he made a diving save, down to his left, that’d have made Gordon Banks himself applaud. That after Stevie Lloyd drove the ball from twenty feet away, towards the jumpers-for-goal-posts targets they had built near the entranceway to the car park. How his favourite bike – his only bike, a red Chopper – got crushed beneath the wheels of a beer delivery truck. How he cried for days after. How Prince, their Alsatian, was the gentlest dog in the world yet turned into a vicious sheep killer at nights when it escaped. How dad had cried having had to have him put to sleep.

“We used to call this Top Hill,” Billy said, crowning a bend in the road. “I used to think it was huge. Everest nearly. We’d build carts out of boxes and pram wheels and used string to steer by. No brakes, of course. Bits of scrap wood holding it all together. Death traps.” He smiled, recalling the thrill of it.

“It’s a wonder you weren’t all killed,” Sally said.

“Yeah,” Billy agreed. “It was. Taking this bend though, at any speed, if a car was coming the other way – up the hill – we’d be done for. That’s why we put look outs here. Like, I don’t know … like track marshalls. If a car did come up, somebody would shout out. Not that it’d have mattered mind. No brakes. Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

They continued walking, arms linked and heads bowed against the stiffening wind. Fields to their right spread out like green canvasses as yet untouched by seed or design. Fresh, green pasture lying in wait for a new lease of harvest ready crops. To their left, the rear of the property that had first attracted them. A yard, narrow and deserted, was met by a wrought iron staircase leading down from the living accommodation. In the roof, a cracked skylight. Black now, like a blinded eye.

“George had a balloon,” he said, his voice sombre. “A black one. Filled with helium, it was. Yellow slashes here and there all over it. Bought at Southport flower show. He let it go and I remember him squalling like a trapped fox when he couldn’t get it down from that skylight. Bawled his eyes out so much, dad got a ladder – over a staircase mind – and grabbed it by the string. Brought it down, went to give it back then mum burst it with her cigarette. Laughing.”

There was nothing she could say to that, so they kept walking. At last, they saw the hill tail down back towards the village. All around them, fields and farmhouses that seemed untouched by the decades and Billy guessed they never would be.

He brought them both to a stop here, looking out across the back of the pub and out across the river sea-bay beyond: The Myrtyl. They fall into that comfortable silence again. Content in the sadness of their being here at all.

“Can I ask you something?” she said then.

“Course.”

“D’you think that if, you know, the start hadn’t been the way it had been, you’d have been doing what you do now? Writing?”

Billy considered a moment, nodded his head. “Yes. Not because of how it was here though. Not because of Georgie dying when he did – how he did – or mum or dad. Sure, it wasn’t great my upbringing, but it wasn’t all terrible either. It wasn’t … it wasn’t Peter and Mandy that’s for sure.”

“Who?”

“Peter and Mandy Roberts. Lived in the house opposite. A police house. Even had a cell my dad had me locked up in after I stole apples from somewhere around here.” He pointed his thumb back behind him, over his own right shoulder. “They were twins. Mandy was beautiful, blonde haired. Full of life. Peter though. He was deaf without speech – what we used to call dumb – and very partially sighted. Always ill. Went to special school somewhere. We were best of friends.”

“What happened to him?” Sally asked.

“No idea, but the outlook wasn’t good in terms of his having a long life.”

“Right.”

“Thing is, even after Georgie, even as we were leaving this place afterwards. After Georgie passed. Even though I was leaving behind my friends, the ATC – everything, even Georgie in that graveyard down there,” Billy pointed to the overgrown yard of St. Mary’s, “even then, at fifteen years of age, I knew my life was still a million times better than Peter’s would ever be.”

“Counting blessings even then, huh?”

Billy leaned down, took his wife’s cheeks in the cups of his hands, pulled her face up towards his own, kissed her long and strong and, he hoped, sweetly on the lips. “Always,” he said afterwards.

Sally smiled, sadly. “They all come from within. These stories of yours.”

Billy shrugged then. “Write what you know, they reckon. This is what I knew and this is what I’m forged from I guess.”

“I guess.”

“And if I hadn’t had that … if Georgie hadn’t, you know … we’d never have met. I’d be working in Players Meat Factory or some such. Definitely not living in Boston. Definitely not married to someone as gorgeous as you. Two sons, one daughter. I’ll take that as a consolation. And he’s always here. In my head.”

“I know, he is. Always,” she said. “I know.”

Billy nodded, turned away. “So, are you going to say it or am I?”

“You should.”

“Right.”

Billy unbuttoned his Burberry, slipped his hand inside and withdrew a can of Dandelion and Burdock soda pop. “He loved this stuff, you know. Like … like some kind of drug to him it was.”

Sally smiled, nodded.

Billy popped the ring on the can, raised it. “Cheers, Georgie. Happy fiftieth birthday, brother. Sorry I couldn’t be there the way you’ve been … you’ve been there for me all these years.”

“Cheers,” Sally echoed, dipping her head, watched Billy take a draft of the pop then stifle a belch. They stood again in silence a moment then she said: “I’ll give you a minute. Head back to the car. D’you have the keys?”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

He fished the keys from his outer Burberry pocket, feeling the first specks of rain fall on his balding head. He passed them over to Sally, felt the warmth of her soft kiss on his ever fattening cheek. Watched as she walked back down the hill, those skinny jeans of hers doing wonders for her, despite the heavy, red anorak and fluffy green hat she was wearing against the cold.

I’m taking the baby.

He heard his mother say as he watched his wife walk down the hill.

I’m taking the baby.

He heard his mother say, seeing the cart they’d built together career out of control.

I’m taking the baby.

Remembering the scream and the crunch of the wheels of the oncoming car around the corner.

I’m taking the baby.

Recalling the smell of rubber and how his own sense of relief.

I’m taking the baby.

At not having called a warning to his baby brother, despite having seen the car turning onto Top Hill.

I’m taking the baby. See how she copes with the other one and …

“And what, mummy dear,” Billy asks as Sally disappears from view, around the same bend Georgie Boy had been killed on. “And what?”

I’m taking the baby. See how YOU can cope with Billy's jelousy!

Billy smiled. Nodded. Made to follow his wife down the hill. It was then he heard the screech of rubber, the whumph of flesh on metal, the sound of breaking glass.

Of a body hitting the floor, like skittles.

"Sally!"