She paused to catch her thoughts. She smiled. ‘They were ghosts,’ she said, ‘those Annan kids.’
‘But you understood the pictures — the light.’
She turned and waved a playful finger. ‘So did you, Sonny Jim. That’s the darkroom for you. That’s why you’re number one.’
Luke had gathered from his mother and from the warden that they were going to move Anne out. They said she couldn’t manage any more and even the Memory Club wasn’t helping, though she still had bursts of clarity. It was time to place her in better care, they said, and Anne wasn’t really absorbing this information so they would be better just cracking on. There were a lot of things to box up. It was hard, too sad. The books and the photographic stuff would need a van to themselves. Luke was talking to the people in Canada about her photographs and various papers and they put him on to a person at McMaster University, a nice woman with an Irish name, who was going to be in charge of whatever they did.
‘I’m happy, Luke,’ Anne said. She just said it. He lowered his head and thought of Scullion and the boy in Bad Kichan, and he found himself exhaling slowly as he took Anne’s hand. When she said she was happy it gave him the final push he needed to announce the excursion and defend her against whatever doubts. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘You and me. I’ve got a new car. We’re going to pack some things and go to Blackpool.
You always used to talk to me about it, remember, the lights and the trams and all that?’
‘Blackpool,’ she said.
‘We’re going to go and see the Illuminations.’
‘Nice, that. Will we take the train?’
Glasgow Central to Preston. And Harry would be waiting for me, if he could get away. Or it didn’t matter if you had to manage by yourself. Work is work. You wouldn’t believe the concentration. Masking is a technique whereby you hold back some of the light from one or two areas by placing a mask on the printing paper itself. It will affect the image you see and the reality you observe.
She asked again: ‘The train?’
‘I have a car,’ Luke said. ‘Now, listen. I’m going to work it all out and we’re going together. You and me.’
‘We’ll pack some things.’
‘We will so, Gran.’
‘We’ll pack some things and there’s always lots to do in Blackpool.’
Luke had phoned his mother. ‘There’s a flat,’ she said. ‘Part of a flat or a room, anyway, and you’ll find the number in her address book. She never wanted me to know about it. It’s hers, the flat. And it doesn’t matter any more. Just go. It’s a lovely idea.’
‘It’s tomorrow they’re coming, right?’ Luke asked.
‘Tomorrow, yes. Monday,’ said Alice.
‘We’ll go tomorrow, then.’
‘You want me to come along?’
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but just drive over here and help the cleaners once we’ve gone. I’ll spirit her away.’
‘All right,’ Alice said. ‘God bless.’
THE DIFFERENCE
Luke was sitting out by the exotic plants that everybody called the jungle. His gran was having a nap and he wanted to arrange things. He hadn’t spoken to Flannigan in a while and was out of touch with the boys and hadn’t said anything about his visit to Scullion in Birmingham. ‘So what about it, Flange?’ he said on the phone. ‘Do you think your fucken heap-of-shit car will make it out of Liverpool?’
‘What you doing?’
‘I’ll be in Blackpool.’
‘Don’t sweat it, lad. I’ll be zooming past all the horror-pigs on the road to get to the land of Kiss Me Quick. Just hit me up with the time and the place.’
They hadn’t talked about the tour or the tribunal or any of the stuff that was in the papers. It just wasn’t part of their training to pore over things. ‘Shit happens’ was the other motto, but, at the end of the call, the young private altered his tone and there was a pause.
‘What is it?’ Luke asked.
‘I dunno, man. Flashbacks. She said I woke up shouting in the night and like fucken crying and shit.’
‘And did you?’
‘I did, yeah. It was like I was losing my nut. My head just full of Scullion, man, the boss lying there ripped to fuck. Remember his eyes?’
‘Go on.’
‘Blood, sir. His eyes were full of blood. Fucken leg blown off and blood pouring down the fucker’s cheeks.’
‘Aye,’ Luke said. ‘It was messy.’
‘That’s the difference,’ Flannigan said. ‘You’re out. I’m nineteen. What the fuck am I going to do if I don’t have the army?’
Luke didn’t know what to say. He didn’t yet know how to talk about the visit to Selly Oak or how to share the details of his own flashbacks. When he came into Lochranza Court that afternoon he had been spooked right away by a Remembrance Day appeal box sitting in reception. And when he was telling Anne about the night he went out on the town, the night he drank too much, her voice rallied and she said what he’d heard older people say to boys with hangovers, ‘Hell mend you.’
‘What, Gran?’ He shivered. He’d thought she had said ‘
Helmand
you.’
‘I better go, Flange.’
‘You stayed so long, sir. Why did you stay so long in the army if you hated it that much?’
He wondered, as he often did, whether he should tell the truth or reach for something he half-believed. He had never really lived in a world where things could be said, but he said it now, in a lowered voice, as if posting an old letter he’d never got round to sending. ‘I kept thinking I’d meet my dad and we’d change the world.’ Luke wondered if Flannigan was just far too young to believe it, but it didn’t matter, he’d said what he’d said and the kid went on to something else.
‘It didn’t feel real, being in Afghan,’ he said. ‘It was so fucken hot all the time.’
‘I know it’s a loser thing to say,’ Luke said, ‘but I stopped believing in it, Flange. I was never like that in Iraq.’
‘Other people believe in it, sir. We just do our job.’
Luke paused to take that in. ‘I hope I haven’t embarrassed you, mate.’
‘Don’t be daft, sir.’
‘Okay. I’ll buzz you from Blackpool.’
‘Roger that,’ Flannigan said.
Luke was sitting on the wall looking at the plants when the two boys came up. ‘Is that the new iPhone?’ Scott asked. Luke’s phone was sitting beside him.
‘Yep. Top of the range.’
‘Aw, man. I want that, like,
so
badly.’ Luke knew they must be the grandsons of Anne’s nice friend Maureen. It was weird for him to think that they weren’t much younger than most of the guys in his section. The two boys spoke very easily: one of them said he wanted to be a DJ and the other said he’d study medicine if he could get in.
‘I’d never join the army,’ Jack said. ‘No offence.’
They spoke about phones and laptops and sounded very keen on cool things. ‘Wait here,’ Luke said, after a second’s hesitation. ‘Just wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.’ He went out to the car park, opened the boot and lifted out a black bag of stuff and brought it back to the boys. They opened it and gasped: two Xboxes, all the wires, handsets, mouthpieces, manuals, and a jumble of Nintendos and games.
‘Aw, man. Awesome!’ Jack said. The boys looked at each other with big smiles and Luke felt sure it was right to return it all to the realm of fun. They put their long arms into the bag and pulled things out and from the bottom Scott produced a paperback book, Kipling’s
Kim
.
‘This stuff is so cool.’
‘Don’t stay up all night,’ Luke said.
SHEILA
Anne woke and didn’t know where she was. All the houses had become one house and one time. She could have been downstairs as a child in Canada or was she inside the doll’s house, lighted with the bulb Daddy put there at Christmas? She felt for a moment she might be in the parlour in Hamilton waiting for the doctor, her mother bad with the shakes, and red leaves spinning in the yard. She blinked and heard a rumble under the boards.