Husband Material (London Calling #2)(103)

“Yes,” agreed Oliver moodily.

“Still,” continued Uncle Jim. “You were right. He had it coming.”

That wasn’t what I’d expected, and Oliver seemed to be languishing in a similar state of flummoxosity.

Ascending into the gazebo, Uncle Jim pulled up an iron garden chair and sat down opposite us. “Be honest with you,” he said, “I wish I’d had the balls to tell him to go fuck himself too. And your granddad, for that matter.”

“I wouldn’t call it balls,” Oliver replied. Given the audience, he didn’t add that he thought it was inappropriately cis-and-gender-normative to associate one particular set of gonads with emotional strength, but he was clearly thinking it quite loudly. “I’d got to the point where I felt it was… Well, I suppose I explained my reasoning fairly extensively already.”

Uncle Jim nodded. “You did. You did. There comes a point, doesn’t there? One where you’ve got to make a choice. Stand up for yourself, or spend your whole life getting walked over.” Out of nowhere he heaved a sigh so heavy I thought it was going to shake the roof off our little shelter and leave us all to run back inside or get drizzled on. “Suppose looking back, I think I made the wrong one.”

“I always thought you two got on?” The tone in Oliver’s voice was careful, like he was sneaking up on a butterfly and didn’t want to spook it.

“Oh, we did. Best friends our whole lives. I mean, he was my big brother. How could I not think he was the business?”

“You could have met him?” I suggested before I could stop myself.

Uncle Jim laughed. “I like you, Luc. In fact, thinking about it, I suppose all this telling people to go fuck themselves was you from the start, wasn’t it?”

There really didn’t seem to be a good way to answer that. “I’m not sure I’d put it quite—”

“Told me to go fuck myself as I recall. As part of the group, I mean.”

“I think you might have been collateral damage,” I suggested.

With an only-half-listening shrug, Uncle Jim moved on. “But yes, we were close. Thick as thieves. But that’s the thing about thieves.

They’re not especially famous for being nice to each other.”

He lapsed into a melancholy silence, and I let myself think back on what I knew about David and James Blackwood. They’d always struck me as of a type, the kind of bluff, untouchable older man who’d been raised to see no difference between humour and cruelty.

They’d had something of a ringleader-sidekick vibe about them, certainly. And perhaps that was all you needed to know. After all, who was more scared of the school bully than the school bully’s best friend?

“He was a good man, our dad,” Uncle Jim was saying, as much to himself, it seemed, as to anybody else. “Honest, hardworking, wouldn’t stand for nonsense. Made sure David and me got good careers that set us up for life, and I’m grateful for that. So was David.”

Leaning forward, Oliver did his best to engage. “I suppose I didn’t know him that well.”

“No. He wasn’t the affectionate sort. Approved of grandchildren, but didn’t care for them.”

“I remember,” said Oliver, his own voice growing a little distant now. “He stopped giving us birthday presents the moment we turned sixteen.”

“Old enough to earn a living,” agreed Uncle Jim. “And David was just like him. Not quite as…as of that generation, of course. But a lot of the same values. Neither of them had any time for layabouts. Or weaklings. Or sissies.”

I wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but the shape of somewhere it could be going was beginning to schloomp together out of the haze of rain and reminiscence in front of me.

“Did Father often make you feel like a sissy?” asked Oliver, who seemed to be seeing the same schloomping possibility that I was. A possibility that made a depressing kind of sense for an unmarried man in his sixties who’d spent his whole life in the shadow of an older brother with no time for anyone he didn’t approve of.

“I looked up to him.” The fact that Uncle Jim hadn’t entirely answered Oliver’s question wasn’t lost on either of us. “Tried to be like him. Wasn’t.”

“That might have been for the best,” Oliver pointed out. “I’m not sure he was the sort of man it’s a good idea to emulate.”

Now Uncle Jim was staring fixedly into the middle distance. “You know, they say you can’t put old heads on young shoulders, but I’ll tell you this. You worked that out far sooner than I did.”

“Shoulders of giants, Uncle Jim,” offered Oliver with what I thought might have been unnecessary kindness.

Another longish silence followed. The fine rain on the roof sounded like an endless bag of rice being emptied into a pan that somehow never filled.

At last, Uncle Jim turned back to us. “Caught me once, you know. At school. I remember…I remember he didn’t say anything.

But the look on his face was… I mean, in the man’s defence, it had only been legal a few years at that point… I don’t think I ever quite got over it. Then when you… Well, he didn’t say anything then either.

Not to me.”

“To me”—Oliver’s voice was almost impossibly gentle, certainly gentler than I’d have managed with a man who had been happily joining in with jokes at Oliver’s expense the last time we’d met—“he said, ‘As long as you don’t start wearing dresses.’ Mother said, ‘But what about AIDS?’”