The Steep Approach to Garbadale, Page 2

  ‘Sorry,’ Al says to Fielding, looking round us all. ‘You been introduced? ’

  ‘Sunny and Di, this is Fielding,’ says I. ‘I’m Tango,’ I tell him, as I think we might have missed on that nicety. I nod at the good chair. ‘Take a seat, pal, make yourself at home.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Fielding says, glancing out the window. He makes a stretching motion. ‘Been driving all morning. Good to stand up for a while.’

  ‘Aye, sure,’ I say, taking the good seat myself.

  ‘So, what brings you to the Fair City, Fielding?’ Al asks. He sounds tired. We’ve both, over the last fortnight or so, been skelping the arse off the drink and a wide selection of herbal and pharma logical merchandise, all provided by the generosity of Al’s last pay packet.

  ‘Well, cuz, I need to talk to you,’ the man in the sharp creased jeans says.

  Al just smiles, stretches and says, ‘Talk away.’

  ‘Well, you know, it’s family business.’ Your man Fielding looks round at the rest of us, granting us what you might call a sympathetic smile. ‘I wouldn’t want to bore, ah, your friends with it, you know?’

  ‘I bet they wouldn’t be bored,’ Al says.

  ‘All the same.’ The smiling of the Fielding is a tight affair indeed at this point. ‘Plus, I brought some mail,’ he says, looking down at the briefcase.

  ‘Fucken wicked case, man, by the way,’ Sunny says, seeing the offending article for the first time. He’s got one of those high, nasally weejie voices. Di widens her eyes at him and elbows him in the ribs for some reason and they get into a elbowing competition.

  ‘Well, let’s have a look at it,’ Al says. He starts clearing a space on the coffee table in front of him, redistributing empty cans, ditto bottles, full ashtrays and various remotes onto the mantelpiece and the arms of other seats and the like.

  Fielding appears unhappy, looking round us all again. ‘Look, ah, man, I’m not sure this is the right place . . .’

  ‘Na, come on,’ Al says. ‘Here’s fine.’

  Fielding does not look happy at this idea, but sighs and comes over with the case. Meanwhile I’m helping with the table-clearing, getting a beamer (that means going red in the face, by the by, not anything else) because I hadn’t got out of bed in time to do the clearing up in here. Canny get the staff these days, know what I mean? The briefcase is placed on the - being honest - fairly sticky table. The case looks like it’s been worn down from a solid ingot of silver at the bottom of a stream for a few hundred years, all sort of worn-polished and curvy-edged and round-cornered. Al is presented with his mail - a big slidey pile of your usual assorted nonsense - and the briefcase is snapped shut again. Fielding looks like he wishes he could handcuff himself to it. Obviously hasn’t spotted the stickiness yet. ‘Anyway,’ he says to Al, ‘we still need to talk.’

  Al just grunts and starts sorting through the envelope’s, throwing most of them unopened onto the tiles of the fireplace, skidding into the base of the electric fire. Fielding stands looking over Al’s shoulder for a bit until Al actually opens one of the smaller envelopes and looks up and round at his cousin, who takes his briefcase and goes to stand back at the opened window, checking outside on his wheels again.

  ‘Hey, Tango,’ Sunny says, staring at one thumb. ‘Where’d you think’d be the worst place to get a paper cut?’ Him and Di have desisted from the elbowing of each other and are sitting rubbing their ribs.

  ‘No idea,’ I tell him. ‘Your eye, maybe?’

  ‘Naw, man,’ Sunny says. ‘I reckon your cock. Right on the top, along the slit, man; that’s goanae hurt like fuck, so it is. Ow! Ya -!’

  It’s back to the mutual elbowing session again for the young happy couple on the couch. Tea is spilled. Your man Fielding stares out the window with patented disgust.

  Al ignores all this and continues through the rest of his mail, discarding most of it, then finally opens one letter, looks at it for a moment and stuffs it into a back pocket in his jeans.

  Meanwhile Sunny has jumped away from Di - fare enough, it does look like she has the sharper elbows - and squatted down at the fireplace, looking at Al’s mail discard pile. ‘“Alban”,’ he says, picking up one junk-mail shrink-wrapped envelope, covered with official-looking stamps and personalised just for Alban like only a big company on the make can. ‘Is that really your real first name, big man? Fucken weird yin that.’ He grins an already gappy grin at big Al and holds up a bunch of the junk mail. ‘Ye finished wi all this, aye, Al?’

  ‘Yeah, take it,’ Al says, standing. He looks at his cousin.

  There’s an alarm going off in the street but it’s obviously not coming from Fielding’s car because he looks relaxed about it. He puts his mug down on the window ledge. ‘Can we talk now?’ he asks.

  Al sighs. ‘Aye, come in to my office.’

  Finally he gets the guy out of that scuzzy, smoke-filled living room, down a dim, narrow hallway made even narrower by what looks like a roll of carpet underlay lying on the floor and piles of cardboard boxes. The carpet feels sticky, like something from a cheap nightclub. Opposite the kitchen, where a couple of thin, nervous mongrels cower, there’s a fist-sized hole in the plasterboard at shoulder height. They enter a small, bare room with a piece of thin material nailed over the window. Al hooks the makeshift curtain up over another nail to let in more light.

  No carpets in here and no proper flooring either, not even laminate - just bare floorboards, unpolished and unfinished. Each wall is a different colour. One has what looks like Power Rangers wallpaper, half ripped off, exposing plasterboard. Another has been partially repainted, from green to black. Another looks like it’s covered with silver foil, while the last wall is sort of off-white, heavily scuffed. There’s a sleeping bag by the wall, a big camouflaged backpack leaning nearby spilling clothes and stuff on to the floor, and a small chrome and fabric seat that looks like it was designed in the Seventies. Al takes some clothes off the seat, dropping them on the floor.

  The soft bits of the fragile-looking little chair are covered in brown corduroy. Stained brown corduroy. Stained brown corduroy with little bits of grey stuffing showing round the edges where the stitching has given way.

  Al says, ‘Take a seat, cuz.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Fielding sits down gingerly. The room smells of drink and stale sweat with a hint of what might be air freshener or maybe male grooming product from the more budget end of the range. There’s an open screwtop bottle of red wine in one corner. No shade or bulb attached to the ceiling fixture. A dark stain covers a quarter of the ceiling. One shadeless lamp near the wine bottle. Al bunches up the sleeping bag to make a seat, then sits leaning back against the wall and waves one hand.

  ‘So, Fielding, how are you?’

  Al looks ruddy, fit - better quads and abs than me, the fuck, Fielding thinks - but his hair is a mess, the beard looks like you could hide a flock of starlings in it and there’s a sort of crumpled set to his face and a beaten look around his eyes Fielding doesn’t remember from before. At least, not as bad. ‘I’m fine,’ Fielding says, then shakes his head. ‘No, I’m not fine. I’m not happy in this situation.’

  ‘What situation?’

  ‘This situation. Look, d’you mind if I close the door?’

  Alban shrugs. Fielding closes the door then goes to sit down, then doesn’t. He looks about the place, waving. ‘I’m not happy here. In this place.’ He looks around the room again, wanting to shiver, then shakes his head. ‘Alban, tell me this isn’t where you live. This isn’t your home.’

  Alban shrugs again. ‘I’m just staying here for now,’ he says casually. ‘It’s a roof over my head.’

  Fielding looks up at the stained ceiling. On closer inspection, the stained bit looks slightly bulged. ‘Yeah, right.’

  Another shrug. ‘I guess technically I’m of no fixed abode.’

  ‘Wow. What age are you again?’

  Alban grins. ‘Over twenty-one. You?’

  Fielding looks round the pla
ce again. ‘I don’t know, Al, I mean, just look at this. What have you done with—?’

  Al gestures at the corduroy seat. ‘Fielding, will you sit down? You’re making the place look untidy.’

  This is one of Gran’s phrases. Fielding guesses Alban means it ironically, an attempt at humour.

  Fielding says, ‘Let me take you for lunch. Please.’

  There’s some nonsense about taking the dogs for a walk but there’s no way Fielding’s letting these mangy mutts in the Merc so he pleads an allergy. Then the chav couple with the tobacco habit ask if they’ll be going anywhere near the ‘middle o’ toon’.

  ‘Why?’ Fielding asks, in case they’re going to ask him to score them some drugs or - worse - bring them back a McDonalds.

  ‘Wur goin’ that wiy, boss, ye know?’ the male one says. ‘Save us the bus fare.’

  Fielding’s about to piss all over this idea too but then somehow just looking at their pathetic, pasty, thin, proto-junky faces makes him think, Oh fuck, I’m bigger than this. The car’ll smell of cigarettes for a day or so just from their clothes even if he doesn’t let them smoke in it, but what the hell.

  Al throws on a grubby-looking green hiking jacket that probably cost a lot when it was new. The Tango guy announces he’s got cleaning and stuff to do and waves them off down the echoing, disinfected stairwell. The car is unmolested, the briefcase goes in the boot and Al navigates them out of the scheme towards the centre of the little city. Di and Sunny amuse themselves playing with the buttons that control the rear sun-blinds. Fielding drops them near the Job Centre.

  Al suggests he and Fielding take a walk as it’s too early for lunch and so they drive on a little further and park by the river in the shadow of some grand Victorian buildings, then walk along the bank, heading downstream with the swirling brown flow of the waters. It’s a mild, half-sunlit day beneath a sky of small white clouds that makes Fielding think of the title sequence of The Simpsons. The air smells good here by the water, though there’s traffic buzzing on both sides of the river.

  ‘Kind of you to pick up the mail, Fielding,’ Al says.

  ‘Well, I was in the area.’

  Alban looks at the other man, grinning. ‘What, in Llangurig?’ He sounds amused.

  Llangurig is a small town in mid-Wales, near the Hafren Forest, where Al was working for the first half of the year. ‘Well, not so much passing through or anything,’ Fielding admits, ‘as scouring the length and the breadth of the land for your absconded arse.’

  Alban makes a noise that might be a cough or a laugh or something in between. ‘You were looking for me?’

  ‘Yes. And now I’ve found you.’

  ‘Kind of guessing you weren’t doing all this just to facilitate my re-subscription to Foresters’ Anonymous and What Chainsaw?’ Al says.

  Fielding looks at him and Alban catches the glance, holds up his left hand, the one with only half a little finger. ‘Kidding. Made them up.’

  Another attempt at humour, then. Fielding had taken a look at the envelopes his cousin’s mail had arrived in and there had been nothing obviously from any such publications, but you never know.

  ‘Well, exactly,’ Fielding says. ‘As I said, I was looking for you. And you are not an easy man to find.’

  ‘Amn’t I? Sorry.’

  He doesn’t sound it. Fielding turns to him, takes one sleeve of his jacket, making him turn towards him, so they stop walking. ‘Al, why are you like this?’

  Fielding wasn’t losing his temper or anything at this point - he’d decided from the start to be calm and reasonable with the guy - but he really would just like to know why Al’s gone like this, become like this, even though he realises Alban probably wouldn’t tell him even if he could, even if he knew himself. Maybe they’re just too far apart, too different these days, family or not.

  ‘Like what?’ Alban looks genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Like a man who’s trying to lose himself, like a man who’s trying to abandon his family or get them to abandon him; I don’t know. Why? I mean, your own parents don’t know whether you’re alive or dead.’

  ‘I sent them a Christmas card,’ Alban says. Plaintively, Fielding thought.

  ‘That was - what? Eight? Nine months ago? And they only knew you were still in the country because it had a UK stamp on it. Nobody seems to know where you are. Jesus, Alban, I was on the brink of hiring a fucking private detective to find you when I heard you’d been working in Wales. Even then it was sheer luck I bumped into one of your forester chums who knew you’d started a job round here and eventually remembered the firm’s name after a curry and about eighteen pints of Stella.’

  ‘Sounds like Hughey,’ Al says, and starts walking again. To Fielding, it looks more like wandering off. He falls into step with his cousin, frustrated. ‘How was Hughey?’ Alban asks.

  ‘Al, I’m sorry, I don’t care about Hughey. Why don’t you ask how any of the family are?’

  ‘Hughey’s a pal. Seriously, how was he?’

  ‘Drunk and well fed when I last saw him. Why do you care more about people like him than about your family?’

  ‘You choose your friends, Fielding,’ Alban says, sounding tired.

  ‘Al, Jesus, man, what is this?’ Fielding asks, controlling his voice. ‘What the hell has the family ever done to you to make you like this? I know you’ve had some tough breaks, but we gave you—’

  Alban stops and spins round, and just for a second Fielding thinks he’s going to shout or at least poke a finger in his chest or maybe just point at him or, if nothing else, express himself with a bit of passion. But the look on his face fades almost before Fielding can be sure it’s really there and he shrugs and turns and starts walking again, along the broad sand-coloured pavement, between the twin streams of water and cars. ‘It’s all a long story. A long, boring story. Mostly I just got fed up with . . .’ His voice trails off. One more shrug.

  After a dozen or so steps, he asks, ‘How’s Lydcombe? You been there recently? They keeping the gardens tidy?’

  ‘I was there last month. It all looked fine to me.’ Fielding leaves a gap. ‘Aunt Clara, everybody else, they’re all well. Same with my parents. Thanks for asking.’

  Alban just grunts.

  Forget the draughty castle and thousands of windswept barren acres the family owns - for now, anyway - in the Highlands. Lydcombe, in Somerset, was the first serious out-of-town property purchase Great-Grandfather Henry made when he started to rake in his millions. Quite a beautiful setting, on the north edge of Exmoor National Park. Bit quiet, and a long way from London, but a good place for family holidays unless you want guaranteed sun. Only forty acres or so, but it’s lush and green and sunny and the grounds go rolling down to the coast of the Bristol Channel.

  Fielding was brought up in a few different places round the world, but as a kid he probably spent more holiday time there than anywhere else, in the big, rambling house overlooking the terraced lawns, close by the walled garden and the ruins of the old abbey. The main building is listed and, of course, it’s all part of the National Park so there are various planning restrictions if you wanted to do anything radical with the place.

  Alban knows Lydcombe better than Fielding. It was his home for most of his childhood, then he spent a couple of summers there as a teenager, discovering what green fingers he had. And thereby, of course, hangs the tale.

  Fielding’s moby chooses to go at this point, inside his jacket pocket. He’s left it on vibrate since he made the turn into Skye Crescent and probably missed a couple of calls - otherwise it’s been amazingly quiet. Fielding gets a weird, tight, unpleasant feeling in his guts when he’s out of touch for this long, like there’s vitally important stuff happening that he really needs to know about and there are people on the other end desperate for him to answer . . . Though of course he knows it’ll probably be nothing, or more likely just somebody asking a question they wouldn’t need to ask if they were seriously intent on actually doing their job rather than
always passing the most trivial problem upstairs to cover their miserable asses. Even so - though his hand is itching to grab the fucker - he’s not going to answer. He ignores the vibrations, keeps up with Alban.

  This is all so annoying! He’s a good manager, a good person-manager and he has certificates to prove it, not to mention the respect of his peers and subordinates. He’s good at selling, good at persuading. Why is he finding it so hard to get through to this one guy he should feel closer to than most?

  ‘Look, Alban, okay, I can understand . . . Actually, no, I can’t understand’ (about tearing his hair out here!) ‘but I guess I just have to accept you feel the way you do about the family and the firm, but that’s part of what I need to talk to you about.’

  Alban turns to him. ‘Maybe we should get a drink.’

  ‘Whatever. Yeah, okay.’

  They find a bar nearby, the lounge of a small hotel in the compressed-feeling town centre. Alban insists on paying and has a pint of IPA while Fielding takes a mineral water. It’s still before noon and the place is quiet and dim and smells of last night’s cigarettes and spilled beer.

  Alban swallows about a quarter of the pint in one series of gulps, then smacks his lips. ‘So why are you looking for me, Fielding?’ he asks. ‘Specifically.’

  ‘Well, frankly, I was asked to.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Gran.’

  ‘Good God, is the old harridan alive and compos mentis?’ Al shakes his head and takes another drink.

  ‘Al, please.’

  Gran - Grandmother Winifred - is the Wopuld materfamilias, the head of the family and one of its eldest surviving members. She’s also, in terms of voting rights, the most powerful person on the board of the family firm. She’s not perfect - at nearly eighty, who is? - and she can be prickly and fussy and sometimes even wrong, but she’s seen the firm and the family through tough times and good times and a lot of people still have a real soft spot for her, Fielding included. And she is very old and of course everybody feels protective of her, no matter how spirited and feisty she might seem, so it’s not good to hear somebody in the family dissing her. Fielding tries to let the hurt he feels show on his face.