The Sister(125)

He was aware of a shadow moving into the periphery of his vision. Instinctively, he turned to look.

A stranger stood there smiling at him. ‘I tried to get here earlier. You don’t remember me, do you?’

Miller scanned his face, trying to imagine what he might have looked like when he was younger. The residual colour of his hair was mid-brown, even reddish, but now mostly grey. His eyes were dark brown, sharp and intelligent looking. He was thinking how much he resembled Brookes as he imagined he might have looked were he alive today, except Brookes had much paler skin and his hair was bright copper coloured, but the bluff face, square jaw and grin were uncannily similar.

‘No, I don’t, I’m sorry if I should. What’s the name?’

‘It’s John Kennedy. I was a year younger than you.’

Miller scratched his head. A slight crease pinched his forehead between the eyebrows. ‘No, I still haven’t got you. Did you have a brother in my year or something like that?’

Kennedy offered his hand to shake, and Miller took it. He winced at Miller’s grip. ‘What have you done to your hand?’ Miller asked.

‘Oh, it’s nothing. I slipped tightening a bolt on my motorbike, scraped it on the garage floor. It’s fine, just squeezed it wrong that’s all.’ Kennedy poured a drop of wine into someone’s discarded glass and moved his chair closer to Miller. ‘Do you remember that time it rained three days solid? It was so bad they let us into the school hall during lunch break.’ Kennedy saw the dawning of recollection in Miller’s eyes. ‘By the third day of lunch time confinement we were bored out of our minds with listening to Lionel’s piano rehearsals. You older guys used to agitate him – get in his light or whatever. I can’t recall exactly now, but it didn’t matter whether you did or didn’t with Lionel. If he dropped a note, and you were anywhere nearby, you got the blame and he’d get incandescent with rage, banging around and scowling. The duty master always sent you to the other side of the hall – well away from him. Do you remember?’

Miller was shaking his head at the returning memory. It lit his face with amusement.

‘Then you casually walked up to the base of the steps, we all thought you were going to get on the stage.’

Miller joined in the recollection. ‘Let me tell you something. That’s exactly what I was planning to do, but then I noticed the access door on the other side of the steps. Unless you walked right up to them, you never would have known it was there. Out of curiosity I tried the handle, and it opened!’

‘And because I was the youngest,’ Kennedy recalled, ‘you had me looking out for the rest of you while you all went in.’

‘When we eventually did go in,’ Miller twirled the pale remnants of liquid left at the bottom of his glass, examining the patterns it made on the side of it as he reflected on the past. ‘It was far larger under there than it looked and so much warmer than you'd expect. In the gloom, down a few steps to another level, there was a light and another door. We heard voices coming from behind it and crept further in. I noticed you had followed us. I was suddenly afraid whoever had left the door unlocked – would return to lock it – and we'd be trapped!’

‘Yep, you weren’t too happy with me!’ The two of them slowly shook their heads in disbelief at the follies of youth, both of them quietly remembering.

Kennedy drained his glass. Miller put his down. They were the last of the guests remaining. One or two waitresses were busying themselves clearing the last few tables.

After years of not seeing his long forgotten school friend, he wanted to make the most of it. Shrugging off his earlier tiredness, Miller found a second wind and began speaking more enthusiastically. ‘It was so full of old school drama stuff, props and things, theatre swords and shields.’

Kennedy grinned.

‘It was an Aladdin’s cave to us back then,’ Miller said. The years rolled back. He was a child again, yet thinking as an adult about how strange it was you could live in the same town – the same few square miles as some of your old school friends, yet never see them again. Miller had hit his stride. ‘And when we crept closer to that door, we could see through the crack, where it had warped in the heat. Down below, I couldn’t believe there was this place we never knew about before, but we could see the caretaker and that assistant of his skiving off down there, with their dirty magazines and ashtrays full of cigarettes. You could smell the smoke coming through the gap.’

‘You tried to inhale it, as I recall,’ Kennedy said.

Miller frowned. ‘I don’t remember that! But I do remember you couldn’t hear what they were saying, because the noise of the boiler drowned it out. We'd always imagine they were plotting things, up to no good.’

Then he had a further recollection, one he was not absolutely sure about. ‘You went down that ladder once, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, I remember that. It was for a dare, and I didn’t hear them coming back.’

‘That was terrifying, you had about five seconds to hide or they'd have caught you. I still don’t know how you so quickly managed to find such a good place to hide under all those smelly boiler suits.’ They both laughed. ‘So that was how you managed to get in with us.’

Kennedy poured from the last of the bottle, sipped it, pulled a sour face and looked squarely at Miller. ‘Do you ever think about that accident?’