Only Killers and Thieves(106)

A lantern is burning on the porch. He quickens his pace down the final slope, toward a house little different from his own. They had built both places together, same materials, same design, lived in an improvised humpy to begin with, then the first house while the second was built. They had nothing but the land and the land was enough. He can still remember the feeling. His giddiness at putting down roots.

Tess announces their arrival. He comes up the steps, balances the pie in one hand, and is about to knock when a woman’s voice calls through the door, “Bobby? That you?”

“Aye, Rosie. It’s me.”

She opens up and smiles at him, notices the pie. “What’s this?”

“Brought you some supper.”

She touches his arm. “Thanks, love, but we’ve et.”

“I thought so. Bloody good, though. You don’t want it, I will.”

She laughs. Her cheeks are plump, her eyes shine. She has short braided hair and dark skin whose lines show her age. Not that he knows it. You never like to ask. In fact, he knows very little about her, doesn’t even know how she came to be here: one day she wasn’t, then the next day she was. Which was fine. He liked her instantly. There’s a fondness between them like nephew and aunt.

“He awake still?”

A voice from inside calls: “Course I’m bloody awake!”

Rosie smiles indulgently, steps aside to let him pass. She takes the pie, then crouches to ruffle Tess on her neck and under her chin. The dog sniffs the pie and Rosie singsongs to her, “You want a piece, do you? You want a piece of this?”

He walks through, into the living room. Arthur is sitting in his chair. The old man smiles at him. “Hello, Tommy,” he says.

The sound of his name stalls him. Comes like the glimpse of a ghost. He looks over his shoulder, toward the front door, where Rosie is still playing with Tess, doesn’t seem to have heard.

Arthur waves a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry, her hearing’s going. She’ll think I said Bobby, they sound about the same.”

Tommy sits in the other armchair, angled toward Arthur, the fire between them, though it’s not much of one. A spindle of a flame from a clutch of dead logs, but Arthur likes a fire every night. Could be the middle of summer and he’d want one lit; keep away bad spirits, signal the end of the day. Old habits: Arthur hasn’t changed much in all this time. Small things. Age leaving its mark. His knotted gray hair still hangs about his face, but the face is thin and haggard and the beard is all gray now. His body too is thin and shrunken: the best of his strength has left him, but he’s not decrepit yet. He moves just as easily as he always did, no sign of aches and pains, and he gets out in the fields with Tommy, feeding, droving, mustering the stock. It’s perhaps in the eyes that Tommy notices it most, his age, his decline: they are often laced with redness, damp and hesitant, quick to tear. Arthur is still just as full of himself but the eyes give him away. He is frightened, Tommy has concluded. He can see the end.

“Brought you a pie,” Tommy tells him. “From the baker’s in town.”

“I’ll bet you did. That pretty wife of his serve you?”

He slaps Arthur on the knee. “How d’you know she’s pretty?”

“You’ve talked about her,” Arthur says, shrugging. “And you’re a bloke.”

Arthur doesn’t go into town anymore. There’s nothing for him there, he says. In the beginning they’d visited together and people assumed he was Tommy’s boy; Tommy corrected them but nothing improved. Arthur saw where it was headed. He’d seen it all his life. If they were going to make it out here, he’d need to be invisible, to disappear. So one night over supper Arthur said to act in town like he didn’t exist: “I’ve not lost nothing by it. Your world’s not my world.”

Tommy protested but that’s what they did, and soon Tommy found himself tolerated, then accepted in town, while up here he and Arthur carved out a life for themselves, at first just the two of them and now with Rosie, all on their own terms.

“Aye, well, she’s married, so that’s the end of it.”

“It’s never been the end of it,” Arthur says. “Everything changes sometime.”

“Not everything.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Took some shit on your account in the pub again. And from bloody Alf.”

“How does he know about us?”

Tommy shrugs. “Someone’ll have told him.”

“Ah, fuck ’em,” Arthur says, laughing. “You know I don’t care.”

Rosie comes through with the pie. She has left Tess outside on the porch.

“Don’t care about what now?”

“Them buggers in town,” Arthur says, and Rosie blows out incredulously as she passes through the room and into the kitchen.

“You want anything?” she calls.

“Tea maybe.”

“Bobby, I meant!”

“I’ll take a tea.”

Rosie clatters the pot on the stove and they both settle back in their chairs.

“Alf bring them papers, did he?” Arthur asks. “That why you’ve come?”

“Can’t I pay a visit now?”

“Only saw you this morning. Sick of looking at your bloody face.”