Something Like Happy

About the Book

In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment; all kinds of women, all kinds of men – lonely, unfaithful, dying – driving empty roads at night. These are people for whom the idea of ‘home’ has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children’s picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.’ But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending.

John Burnside is unique in contemporary British letters: he is one of our best living poets, but he is also a thrillingly talented writer of fiction. These exquisitely written pieces, each weighted so perfectly, open up the whole wound of a life in one moment – and each of these twelve short stories carries the freight and density of a great novel.

About the Author

John Burnside’s last two books were the novel, A Summer of Drowning, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Prize, and his poetry collection, Black Cat Bone, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Something Like Happy’, ‘The Bell-ringer’ and ‘The Cold Outside’ were first published in the New Yorker.

‘Slut’s Hair’ was first published in the Sunday Times.

‘Peach Melba’ was commissioned for the anthology À Table, published by Metailié, of Paris; first English publication was in the Guardian.

‘Perfect and Private Things’ was first published in the New Statesman.

‘The Deer Larder’ was commissioned by Scottish Book Trust, for their second Jura anthology.

‘A Winter’s Tale’ was commissioned by the Sunday Herald.

‘Lost Someone’ and ‘The Future of Snow’ were commissioned and broadcast by the BBC.

‘The Smiles of the Bathers’ by Weldon Kees is reprinted from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1962, 1975, by the University of Nebraska Press. © renewed 2003 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Il n’y a pas de nautonier de bonheur.

Gaston Bachelard,

L’eau et les rêves

SOMETHING LIKE HAPPY

THE FIRST TIME I saw Arthur McKechnie, he came into the bank with some cheques. I had just started working there, fresh out of school and a bit nervous, I suppose, and I liked the way he behaved, all polite and nicely spoken, which was more than I could have said for some of the other customers. By the end of that first, almost wordless transaction, I had already decided he was someone I could have liked, but I had also noticed that he was a bit too different, one of those men who thinks too much about stuff that nobody else bothers with, or he doesn’t pay enough attention to other people to understand what they might do, when push comes to shove. As he stood there with the pen in his hand, very obviously reading the badge pinned to my lapel, I found myself wanting to shake him out of the little dream he was in.

Of course, I noticed the name the moment he handed over the paying-in slip. Arthur McKechnie. Everybody knew the McKechnies, and most people knew they were a bad lot, but I knew them mainly because my sister Marie was going out with the worst of them. People would tell Marie that Stan McKechnie wasn’t right for her, which was a mistake, because all that opposition only made her more determined to stick with him. Besides, Stan was good-looking, if you didn’t study him too closely. Not like this Arthur, who seemed put together from a kit, all angles and mess, with an odd cast to the eyes and a mouth that didn’t look altogether finished, like the mouth in a kid’s drawing. I didn’t know then that he was Stan’s little brother. Marie had never mentioned an Arthur, though she talked about the McKechnie sisters all the time. We all did. Some people thought the McKechnie girls were even worse than their brother, if only because they were nice-looking and dressed smart and, if you didn’t know them from old, you didn’t see what they were capable of until it was too late. With Stan, you knew what he was at first sight; it didn’t matter how well he scrubbed up. There was a meanness in his face that you couldn’t miss, unless you were Marie and wanted to miss it.

Arthur didn’t say much. He handed over the money and the paying-in slip; then, when I had processed the transaction, he took the confirmation chit and, carefully, making no attempt to hide what he was doing, wrote down on the back what it said on my lapel badge. He was a slow writer. He held his pen in an odd way, between the first two fingers of his left hand, and he angled his arm round to make the letters, writing them out large: ‘FIONA, TRAINEE’. He didn’t seem to care that I could see what he was doing. When he was done, he looked up and nodded.

‘Is there anything else I can help you with today?’ I asked, not sure whether I was amused or annoyed.

He shook his head. His voice, when he talked, was soft. ‘Not today, thanks,’ he said, with an odd, even suggestive emphasis on ‘today’. He smiled then; it was a tight, secretive kind of smile, but it wasn’t mean, and I could see that he didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary in what he had just done. He wasn’t being smart, or impolite. He’d just written my name on the back of his confirmation slip, the way a child would do, for reasons of his own that had nothing to do with anybody else.

I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t find the right words. I just shook my head ever so slightly and looked out to the line for the next customer – and Arthur McKechnie turned to go, that odd little smile on his face, a smile that I could see even then was the sign not only of a secret happiness but also of his inevitable fall. I’m not saying I knew what that fall would be, or claiming it was some kind of premonition; God knows human beings are made for falling, and most human beings in that town were going to fall sooner rather than later. But I did see something out of the ordinary, and I’m sorry now that I didn’t take more notice.

I asked Marie about Arthur when I got home that night. She was preoccupied, getting ready to go out with Stan, so I thought she’d just shrug it off, but she stopped putting on her make-up and sat looking at me through the mirror, her eyeliner suspended in midair.

‘Arthur?’ she said. ‘Where did you come across him, for God’s sake?’

‘He came into the bank today,’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah?’ Her hand dropped and she grimaced. ‘Well, don’t be getting interested in him. Stan says he’s a nutter.’

‘So who is he, then?’ I said, picking up some clothes that were scattered around the place. I was always clearing up after Marie, even now, when we didn’t share a room any more.

‘He’s Stan’s brother, of course,’ she said. ‘He’s really pissed Stan off, though.’

‘Oh.’ I folded her powder-blue sweater and put it away in the chest of drawers. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Something to do with money,’ she said. She watched as I gathered up a pile of obvious laundry. ‘Why? You’re not really interested are you?’

I snorted. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I just don’t remember you ever mentioning that Stan had a brother.’

‘Yeah, well.’ A worried look crossed her face. ‘There’s not much to talk about. I hardly noticed him at first. He’s hardly ever there when I go round. When he is, he just sits in a corner, reading.’ The thought of it made her shiver. ‘Stan’s old man says Arthur’s not a real McKechnie. He says Margaret must have got him from some tinker woman she met outside the off-licence.’ She started working on her make-up again. ‘It might even be true, for all I know. I mean, he’s nothing like Stan.’

‘So why is Stan annoyed with him?’

Marie shook her head. ‘Search me,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to hurry. I’m going to be late.’

I studied her as she applied the finishing touches to her face. She wasn’t pretty, but she tried hard. She had been working for three years at the biscuit factory and, though she would never have admitted it, she was jealous of me, having a good job at the bank. For her, that meant I had a future. Of course, I couldn’t tell her that a future didn’t mean as much to me as she thought it did. It was a good job and everybody said I should be grateful; most girls from my background ended up with no prospects, just eight hours a day on the packing line. People were always saying how lucky I was, as if I had won the lottery or something. ‘Where are you going, anyway?’ I asked.

She stood up and gave a little twirl. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Stan’s got any money.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Maybe he should ask Arthur for a loan.’ I smiled sweetly.

‘Ha-ha,’ she said. ‘Very funny.’

Marie had never thought much of me, or my taste, when it came to matters of the heart. It was probably fair to say that I was better-looking, and the teachers at school had always referred to me as the smart one, but it’s no big secret that, with boys, giving out the right signals matters more than looks or brains. Just before then, I’d been going out with a boy called Jack, but when it didn’t work out I felt an odd relief, like someone who had been rescued from the need to maintain some minor but time-consuming pretence. I wasn’t like Marie. She had always liked the idea of love; even at nine, she’d had a boyfriend, a kid called Tony Ross who gave her cards at Christmas and on her birthday. All through her early teens, she had very obviously liked boys, and they had liked her, mostly because boys like to be liked. For Marie, intelligence in a boyfriend was the worst kind of liability, and the few boys I did bring home knew how to write their own names and do basic arithmetic, at the very least. Which was more than anybody could say for Stan, and this was one of the reasons that my father got so angry with Marie a few days later, before he left for his shift at the works.

‘Stan McKechnie will never amount to anything,’ he said, in his customary, quiet but final style. ‘He can’t keep a job, he doesn’t know how to handle money, he wants something for nothing. Someday he’ll find out that the world doesn’t owe him a living. You steer clear of him, you hear?’

Marie always seemed genuinely surprised that people thought so ill of Stan; after all, she would say, the McKechnies weren’t the worst people on the estate, not by a long way. Stan had been unlucky: his mum had died when he was at a vulnerable age, and his sisters had spoiled him rotten. His dad was a bit of a rogue, everybody knew that, a rogue with a liking for the bottle, but Stan was doing the best he could, and he had big plans. He just needed a break, that was all. Of course, it was sad listening to her talk like that, and I’m not sure she even convinced herself much of the time. The fact was that after she chose Stan she couldn’t have let go, even if she wanted to. She didn’t want to have to admit she had made a mistake; she couldn’t be seen to give in to pressure. Even when the rumour about Bobby Curran started going around, she refused to believe that Stan was involved.

‘People shouldn’t spread stories,’ she said. ‘Not unless they know all the facts.’

The facts, it turned out, were fairly straightforward. Bobby Curran had been drinking in the White Swan when Vincent Cronin and his brothers had come by. There had been bad blood between Vincent and Bobby since the previous winter, when they’d got into a drunken argument about a motorcycle at a Christmas party. Everybody knew the affair wasn’t over, but nothing happened until that night in the Swan, six months later, when they found Bobby alone and half-cut in a place where he hardly ever drank. The Cronins were too scared of Bobby to have a square go with him; even that night, when it was three against one, they didn’t do anything right away, because none of them was carrying. They couldn’t have fought it out with fists and boots, like in the old days – they had to be armed. Since Vincent lived right across the road, all that was needed was someone to keep an eye on Bobby so he didn’t leave, and the Cronins would run back to Vincent’s flat for some blades. Stan was the one who kept Bobby talking while the boys got themselves ready. Then, when Bobby went out back to the toilets, he gave the Cronins the signal and they went in.

It was over in seconds: Bobby probably didn’t even know what hit him. The Cronins ran out, their clothes covered in blood, but nobody tried to stop them. Jim the landlord came around the bar and went out the back to see what had happened, and he did first aid on Bobby while somebody called the police and most of his custom melted away, not wanting to be there when the law arrived. The only one who stayed put was Stan McKechnie. He watched the police come in, and he watched the body being taken out, and he never batted an eyelid. Nobody knows who spread it about that he’d been involved, and nobody could say for sure that the story was true, but everybody believed it – which meant that it didn’t matter whether it was true or not.

It was a summer of hard, yellowish heat. The air was never quite clear anyway, because of the works, but this year it was thick and dry, like a fine material wrapped around my face and arms. The bank was supposed to be air-conditioned, but the system didn’t really work; by the end of the day, I was desperate to get out to somewhere cool and wash away the thick gauze of heat on my skin. Sometimes I just went home and showered, then sat by a half-open window waiting for the night, Marie out on the town with Stan, my parents on back shift at the works or sitting downstairs watching game shows. But now and again I would go out to the old swimming hole, the place everybody called the Twenty-Two, and spend half an hour or so in the water, not really swimming so much as hanging there, suspended in the rumour of coolness that rose from the depths below.

Usually, I was alone, even though everybody knew about the place; in school, we had spent weekend afternoons out there, five or six of us going together to swim and talk and smoke cigarettes, trying out love and friendship and loneliness like teenagers in a pop song or a movie, but we always got home in time for supper, and we spent the evenings elsewhere, at clubs and discos and pubs, dressed in the clothes we thought suited us, waiting to be seen by boys we thought we liked. Nobody had ever gone swimming at the Twenty-Two in the evening, but that was the best time when the weather was hot. There was a current that flowed through the hole – a current that nobody could quite explain, some underground run or spring deep in the earth – and it was cold and quick, a near-animal force moving and turning in the water. I had always felt that, how something alive seemed to brush against my skin, coming up out of the depths to pull at my legs or encircle my feet. It wasn’t just a surface motion; it was bone deep, a force with a shape of its own. Maybe it was a great hank of river weed turning below in the cold current, maybe it was just the way gravity works in water, but it felt like something that matched me exactly, the same shape and weight and volume, and it always seemed as if that something came to life the moment I stepped into the water.

On the few occasions when I met other people at the Twenty-Two, I felt cheated, as if I had looked out of the window at home and found someone having a picnic or passing a bottle back and forth on our lawn. Mostly, though, I got to be alone. I liked to get there about six-thirty or seven, when people were still having supper or watching television, and I would just slip into the water and swim around in circles, to get cool. It wasn’t exercise, like swimming in a pool. I just liked being in the water and feeling that echo of myself deep down in the current, matching my every stroke, or falling still when I stopped moving. Sometimes I swam out to the middle and stayed there, treading water, listening to the quiet that surrounded me, a hiatus in the air, like a held breath. If other people came along while I was swimming, I would hear them long before they got to me, and I would just doggy-paddle over to the bank and get my stuff together so the moment wouldn’t be spoiled.

I’d never seen Arthur out there. I’d never seen him anywhere other than the bank, and it was a surprise when I caught sight of him one evening coming out of the water, white and strangely angular, in a pair of pale-blue shorts, his hair plastered down over his forehead, his arms and chest glistening. I was about twenty yards away when I saw him, and before I could think it through I had ducked in among some bushes. I was hoping he hadn’t noticed me, I suppose, because it was embarrassing, meeting him like that, but he’d seen me, all right. I’m pretty sure he saw me before I saw him, and he’d been watching me coming along the track, watching in complete silence, standing still in the cool water, waiting to see what would happen. I thought he wanted to embarrass me, just to see what I would do. That couldn’t have been true, though, or not altogether true anyway, because he turned quickly and swam away as soon as he saw that I’d seen him, gliding out to the middle. He was a good swimmer, easy and lithe, like some animal that belonged to the water, some creature of trust and grace; it was only a matter of seconds before he reached the centre and dived, vanishing into the dark water, as if there were a way out down there, some exit that only he knew. One minute he was there, the next he was gone, leaving barely a ripple behind.

I didn’t know what to do. I stared at the point where he had disappeared, thinking he would come up for air, curious to see if he would call out to me, or wave, or whether he would just dive again, and keep on diving, till I left. It struck me then that I would have done exactly what he was doing if the roles had been reversed. I imagine I could have stayed down there for a minute or so, maybe more. Not long enough, though.

I don’t know how long Arthur stayed down, but it was more than a minute. More than five minutes, probably. I kept thinking he would have to come up soon, but he didn’t. He stayed under. The thought crossed my mind that the current had caught him and dragged him away; I even imagined having to go and get help, or having to dive in and save him when he came up half-drowned and struggling for his life, but I didn’t do anything. I just stood there. Maybe he had some trick, like that thing you see in old films, where the spy or whoever sits for hours underwater, breathing through a hollowed stick or a reed. Maybe he was ready to drown rather than admit defeat and come up again, feeling awkward and cheated. I didn’t know, but I couldn’t quite manage to believe he was in any danger, and after a while I didn’t want to see his face, because I knew I had stolen a private moment from him. I wished I could have said something, maybe called out that I was leaving and he could come out now, but I didn’t say a word. I just turned around and walked back the way I came, following the track up to the road, with the cool of the water hole at my back, and a sound I almost heard, like a bird taking flight off the surface of the water, or a fish breaking the calm in the first grey of the evening, leaping out into the dizzy, unfamiliar world, to snatch its prize.

The summer passed, the hot days fading into a wet, sticky autumn. I saw Arthur at the bank from time to time: sometimes he spoke, mostly he just handed over his little bundle of cheques and the paying-in slip, with the amounts made out in his neat, slightly childish handwriting, but he didn’t seem as distant, or as shy, as he had when he first came in. After our encounter at the Twenty-Two, it was as if we had a secret between us, something we both knew about but had promised not to mention, and though nothing ever happened between us, I realised, come September, that I liked him a little, even if it wasn’t a liking that Marie would have understood.

Somewhere between the last warmth of the summer and the damp cool of Halloween, I noticed a change in Marie, and I knew it had something to do with Stan. I didn’t know at first, though, that it also had something to do with Arthur. Stan had never treated Arthur as a brother, from all accounts, but before that summer he had mostly just ignored him. As far as Stan was concerned, Arthur really was the boy in his father’s joke: a scrawny kid the tinkers didn’t want, sitting in a corner of the kitchen, dreaming his life away, never saying a word. Then, beginning that summer, everything changed. The first trouble had been about the money: Stan never had any, but that was no great shame till his brother started coming home with pockets full of cheques and cash from his odd jobs. What was worse was that Arthur just kept squirrelling it all away in the bank: after he’d paid for his digs – which Stan almost never did – he saved whatever was left, going out every day with a packed lunch of peanut-butter sandwiches and not coming home till late, still not saying anything, but happy in a way that Stan didn’t understand, happy, or something like it, as if he had lain awake one night and hatched some foolproof scheme, some plan for a future that Stan couldn’t even have imagined. That went on for several weeks, and it drove Stan crazy, but he didn’t say anything to Arthur. He just took it out on Marie, sulking when they went out on dates to the Hearth or the Nags. Sometimes he’d take her out, then he’d leave her at a table with a couple of the other girls while he went wandering around the lounge, talking to his mates and doing deals, the way the old married men did with their wives. He’d buy her half a lager top, then he’d be off, playing pool with somebody Marie didn’t know or chatting to Jenny, behind the bar. He’d been out with Jenny once, he said. Now they were just good friends.

Marie could have sat out the sulks, if that had been all there was to it – but suddenly, with winter approaching, Arthur changed again. First, he bought a guitar. ‘A bloody guitar,’ she said. ‘I mean, he doesn’t even know how to play.’

‘What kind of guitar?’ I said.

She looked at me as if I were part of this great conspiracy against her happiness. ‘How do I know?’ she said. ‘What difference does it make?’

I shook my head. I’d noticed a change in Arthur a week before, when he had come into the bank and, for the first time, made a withdrawal. I wouldn’t have thought much about it, except that he didn’t seem to know how to get money out of his account. He had to ask.

‘Is it an electric guitar or an acoustic is what I mean,’ I said.

Marie thought a moment. ‘Acoustic,’ she said. ‘He just sits there, in the front room, strumming. Stan can’t stand it. None of them can.’

‘Maybe he’s going to start a band,’ I said.

Marie snorted. ‘That’ll be the day,’ she said.

It turned out Arthur had no intention of starting a band. Stan asked him once, when Marie was there; it was an ugly little scene, with Stan and his dad poking fun at the younger brother while Arthur just sat at the kitchen table, stroking the guitar strings, with his head turned away toward the window. Marie said he didn’t say anything – he just sat there with a sad little smile on his face as if he felt sorry for them all, though you could see he was trying not to cry. She almost felt sorry for him herself, she said, but then he’d asked for it, really, what with his stupid guitar and his weird new clothes.

I’d seen Arthur at the bank the day before, and he’d been dressed as usual, in black jeans and a navy-blue shirt. ‘What clothes?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, God,’ Marie said. ‘You should see him. He’s completely changed. Bright stripy shirt, this weird-looking suede jacket. At least I think it’s suede.’

‘When did that start?’

‘Not long ago,’ she said. ‘He’s completely different. He plays his guitar all day, then he goes out, nobody knows where. Stan’s dad says he’s got himself a fancy woman.’

I shook my head. I felt strangely disappointed in Arthur, maybe for doing all this stuff in front of his dad and Stan, and maybe because I could just see him with some woman, making a fool of himself. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Not Arthur.’

Marie laughed. It was a cruel laugh. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He’s fairly come out of his shell now he’s got a bit of money.’ She gave me a hard look. ‘You missed your chance there,’ she said.

I was annoyed then. Not with her but with myself, for getting involved in the conversation in the first place. It didn’t matter to me what Arthur McKechnie did. Good luck to him, if he wanted to blow his hard-earned money on the latest fashions and a guitar he couldn’t play. I looked at Marie, and I saw the little glint of nasty pleasure in her eyes. ‘You going out tonight?’ I asked her.

‘Of course,’ she said. I could see her thinking: What a stupid question.

‘With Stan?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

I nodded. ‘I’m not the only one who missed my chance,’ I said. I regretted saying it as soon as it was out.

Marie’s face went very bare, then she laughed. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she said, but it wasn’t that convincing, and I felt even worse, not just for her, but also for myself, that I could be so petty.

We found out later that Arthur McKechnie mostly just got dressed up in his odd clothes and sat alone in a Chinese restaurant with a half-bottle of white wine and a plate of crispy fried duck. Or he would go to a church social and hide in a corner, watching the people dance. That was probably where he met Helen Walsh, and that was when the real trouble started.

It wasn’t much of a story, really. It seems that when Arthur was still in primary school Stan McKechnie and Helen Walsh were in middle school together. The Walshes had lived on Devon Way, two doors along from the McKechnies, and though they were never friendly – Joe Walsh always saw himself as a cut above – Stan had decided that he and Helen were an item, trailing along to school beside her, trying to make conversation, doing stuff to impress her, acting as if they had something more in common than a street address. I don’t think Helen ever took any of this seriously, but by the time he reached third year Stan was going around talking about her as his girlfriend, and he’d been upset when Joe Walsh did well and moved his family off the estate to one of those so-called executive houses with a separate dining room and French windows at the back leading on to a patio with raised beds and a walled yard. All the McKechnies had been upset, in their own way, to see the Walshes get on: Stan’s dad resented Joe’s success, saying he was just a brown-nose anyhow, and the sisters put it about that May Walsh had a fondness for vodka. Stan hated the Walshes more than any of them.

‘Stan’s not happy,’ Marie told me one day after work. ‘Arthur keeps taking his stuff.’ She shook her head. ‘Big mistake.’

‘What do you mean, taking his stuff?’ I couldn’t imagine Arthur as a thief, and if he were I couldn’t imagine Stan having anything he might want.

‘Just stupid stuff,’ she said. ‘Clothes and stuff. He says he’s borrowing it, but Stan doesn’t let anybody borrow his things. Can you imagine?’ I shook my head to confirm that I couldn’t. ‘And then he wears Stan’s best shirt to go out on a date with that stuck-up Walsh bitch.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t have been a date, would it? Can you imagine Helen with one of the McKechnies?’

Marie shot me an ugly look. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said.

‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘I’m not talking about you and Stan—’

‘Yes you are,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what you’re talking about.’ She lit a cigarette. She didn’t usually smoke in the house, in case Dad caught her. ‘But me and Stan are happy. I don’t care what Dad says. I love him and I’m going to marry him.’ She sounded like a little girl in the school playground. ‘And you can take a look at yourself before you start judging other people.’ She turned away slightly and stood looking out of the window, with her cigarette hand pressed to her cheek.

I didn’t see any point in replying to that. I wasn’t angry with her – I wasn’t even upset. For a moment, I even wanted to go over and give her a hug or something, but we didn’t do that kind of thing in our family. ‘I’m not judging anybody,’ I said, after a while. ‘I just want you to be happy.’

She looked at me then, and I could see she was close to tears. ‘Happy,’ she said quietly, as if it were some foreign word whose meaning she couldn’t quite remember. She laughed. ‘Happy,’ she said again. She took a draw on the cigarette, and, in the smoke and the early evening light, she looked almost pretty, like a girl in a television show on the night before she runs away from everything, written out of the script to begin a new life somewhere else.

It snowed early that year: a freak blizzard, a beautiful anomaly. It was the kind of snow you see in films, white and perfect and deep, the cars moving slowly along white roads, the people coming out of their houses in the morning or stopping on the high street to notice the light. For a while, it was as if the works didn’t exist; the snow just kept falling, white upon white upon white, and nothing was grey or smoky or tainted enough to leave a lasting stain. It really was beautiful. People came into the bank in coats and gloves, brushing the snowflakes off their shoulders and hair at the door, smiling to themselves, gladdened by the brightness of the day. You could see the child in every face, a buried life rising to the surface, a lightness about the mouth and eyes, a childish sweetness returning to a dried-out voice. Everyone seemed happier, or almost everyone. Stan McKechnie wasn’t happy. I would hear about it from Marie from time to time – the petty details, the black moods, the muttered threats – but I had stopped paying attention. It just seemed too ridiculous, in all that snow and light.

The snow didn’t last, though. It was replaced by a grey lull, all smoke and pig iron. So what I remember now about the day Stan McKechnie almost killed his brother is how the light changed after the snow melted. It was a day that could have happened only in a town like ours: the sun was bright, warm even, but there was a chemical haze in the air, a blurred, dusty quality to the light that we knew from having lived so long in the shadow of the works. That was what I knew about that morning, that pale haze, and the thin ferrous smell that became a taste in the mouth, part rust, part churchyard – but there was something else that day, something I hadn’t felt before. If I had to describe it, I’d say it was a sense of how things must have been before any of us came to be in that place, a stubborn beauty in the light that filled the trees, a sense of the land around us, with its buried dead and winter trees, its livestock and clouds and fence posts, there before we were and treating us as an exception to the norm, an ugly but fairly minor crease in the fabric of things, irrelevant to the larger picture.

The attack happened because of Stan’s black sweater. That was what people said, at least, when it was all over: ‘That Stan McKechnie, he almost murdered his brother, all because of a sweater.’ Marie told me about it while we were both getting ready to go out, on the night Stan and Arthur finally came to blows. That afternoon, Arthur had borrowed Stan’s aftershave, then put on the new black sweater that Stan had bought the weekend before, even though Stan had told him a thousand times that he didn’t want anybody touching his things. Nobody knew where Arthur had gone, but Stan had rung Marie up and told her he was going to do something about it once and for all. Marie had tried to calm him down, but she knew there was no point; Stan had been heading for a big blowout for weeks now, she said, and she knew trouble was coming. Nobody could have predicted how far it would go, and nobody would ever understand what had led up to the final moments. It would be just another story people told each other, another cautionary tale about the McKechnies, how in that family one brother could kick the other senseless over a borrowed sweater. Marie told me about it that night, all the while so wrapped up in her own worries that she didn’t even notice I was getting ready to go out. Then, when she had finished talking, and I’d told her not to worry, that it would all blow over, she realised.

‘You got a date?’ she asked, blurting it out, not hiding her surprise.

I laughed. ‘Don’t sound so shocked,’ I said.

‘Who with?’

‘None of your business,’ I said.

‘Oh, God!’ She put her hands to her face. ‘It’s not Arthur, is it?’

I looked at her. She was serious, but I could see in her face that she wasn’t concerned about me – she just didn’t want this mess to get any bigger than it already was. I shook my head.

‘It’s not, is it?’ she asked again. ‘Please tell me it’s not.’

I was tempted then to tell her it was, just to see the look on her face, but I didn’t. I just shook my head again. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said.

It wasn’t a real date, anyway. Somebody from the bank had asked me out, a tall, thin man called Peter who worked in business and foreign. He was a bit older than me, but I’d been bored and surprised when he asked, and I’d accepted his invitation to go for a drink at the Falcon before I registered what was happening. That’s how it goes in the workplace. All these office romances start out of boredom and wanting something to happen to break the monotony. As things turned out, it was a pretty monotonous evening too, and I was regretting my mistake long before Arthur came into the lounge bar and stood waiting for someone to serve him. He was alone, all dressed up in Stan’s black sweater and a pair of greenish trousers; maybe he was meeting somebody, maybe he was just out to see what was happening. One thing I knew for sure was that he wasn’t on a date with Helen Walsh. As I sat listening to Peter going on about his plans for the future, I watched Arthur order his drink, a lager top, and it occurred to me that I didn’t really know him. I told myself that it would be a mistake to get mixed up in his feud with Stan, that I really ought to mind my own business, but I was bored with Peter’s supposed prospects, and I was grateful for any excuse to get away from him, if only for a few minutes. Peter didn’t seem to mind when I told him there was someone I had to talk to. ‘Family business,’ I said, by way of explanation. He just nodded and took a sip of his beer. Maybe he was bored with me, too.

Arthur didn’t see me coming. He hadn’t even noticed me when he came in, or maybe he had and didn’t want me to know. Maybe he was embarrassed about the Twenty-Two after all. For the first time, it occurred to me that he might have been, and when he finally turned his head and saw me I knew I was making a mistake. Only it was too late to go back. I gave him a serious look. ‘Nice sweater,’ I said.

He put his glass down on the bar and looked at me. He knew who I was, but he was surprised that I’d spoken. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s not mine. I just borrowed it.’

‘It suits you,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’

‘You know Stan’s looking for you,’ I said. The sooner I said what I had to say, I thought, the sooner we could get away from one another.

He looked puzzled. ‘Sorry?’ he said; the moment he spoke, though, he worked out what I meant. He shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘He’s been building up to something for a long time.’ I felt stupid: I sounded like somebody out of a soap, or a bad movie. What was I doing? None of this was any of my business. I glanced back at Peter. He had gone over to play the fruit machine. I turned back to Arthur. ‘It’s none of my business,’ I said. ‘I just thought you ought to know.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said. ‘Stan is my brother.’ He studied my face. ‘We’re brothers,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything.

For a moment, I thought Arthur was going to laugh; then, as if noticing me for the first time, as if I were some puzzle he’d been gathering clues about for weeks and had only just solved, he gave me a serious, almost concerned look. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I know you only mean well, but Stan’s my brother. He knows I wouldn’t do him any harm.’

I should have given up then. That would have been the sensible thing. I don’t know now why I carried on. ‘I don’t think he does,’ I said. ‘He’s looking for you right now.’

He smiled softly. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked.

‘My sister told me.’ I really was embarrassed to hear myself saying that, like a kid telling tales. I knew it was hopeless, and I wanted to stop talking and just take hold of him and lead him somewhere, into the shadows for safety, out to the Twenty-Two, to where he could hide under the water until the danger had passed.

‘Ah.’ He leaned toward me, and the light from the optics shifted on his face a little, so he looked softer, less defined. ‘Marie is your sister.’

I nodded. For a moment, I thought I had got through to him – that my relationship to Marie had convinced him that I knew what I was talking about. For a moment, he put his head down and stared at the ground, and I