Free Another Kind of Country by Kevin Brophy

father at all.’
    They said goodbye. Miller waited for his mother to put the phone down first.
    He remembered her on one of his rare visits home from university. He’d let himself in, found her drunk on the sofa, the wine bottle still upright amid the fallen-over plastic pill containers. His mother had looked at him as if trying to remember who he was. He remembered the red gash of her mouth, the crimson lipstick smeared below her dribbling nose. The multicoloured pills were splashed like smarties across the polished surface of the coffee table. He’d taken her to the downstairs loo, waited while she vomited. ‘I didn’t take any, Patrick, honest.’ He’d lifted her from her knees beside the lavatory, washed her face, settled her against the mound of pillows on the double bed. ‘You mustn’t tell your father, Patrick, please, promise me, he has enough on his mind.’
Like his round of golf this Saturday afternoon
.
    And you neverdid say anything, did you, Patrick Miller? You couldn’t bear to see her hurt but you didn’t want to stick around and face the music, did you? You wanted to escape, to flee the Compton mausoleum.
    And now Sophie has fled.
    Who is this?
    The voice on the phone was that of a stranger but Miller knew only too well – and for too long – who and what his father was.

Ten

    January 1964
    Wolverhampton
    England
    ‘Sod it!’
    The Compton bus wasjust pulling away as Patrick Miller came running around the corner. After seven o’clock the buses came only hourly. Sodding dentist, keeping him waiting in the unheated waiting room warmed only by ancient
Titbits
and
Reveille
s and
Woman’s Weekly
. Hadn’t even apologized, just another schoolboy customer with an overweight bag of books and his school cap folded in his pocket.
    ‘Least you had plenty of time to get your homework done!’ Dentist’s idea of an apology, concluded with a guffaw and, ‘How’s your dad, haven’t seen him in ages. Tell him I was asking for him.’ Fat twit. At least the nurse had smiled her toothy smile at him from behind the dentist’s back.
    He shook his shoulders, felt the schoolbag settle more comfortably on his back.
    ‘Miss your bus, young fella?’ The owner of the newsagent beside the bus stop was fixing the folding metal gate across the doorway of his shop.
    Patrick nodded. Mr Mapother was OK, he kept the
Hotspur
for you even if you were a day late.
    ‘You’d better get a move on.’ The newsagent pushed the neck of the lock home, tugged at it once, then straightened. ‘It looks like rain and it’s a good walk to Compton.’ He nodded, said goodnight.
    Patrick watched him until he turned the corner. He’d never said more than ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ to the newsagent and yet the man knew he lived in Compton. Wolverhampton was that kind of place. It seemed large, stretching out in all directions, but really it was no more than a big village where everybody knew if you burped or broke wind. And when your father was a doctor who drove a Jag, well, there was no hiding at all. Not even if you did your burping or wind-breaking in the dark.
    Queen Square was dark now, shopsand banks and offices closed or closing, the last shopkeepers exchanging goodnights at the end of another day. It wasn’t such a bad place, Miller thought, but he’d be leaving it as soon as his time at the Royal Grammar School for Boys was done.
    He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the darkened window of the newsagent’s. He thought he looked ghostly under the dim street lamp. He peered at himself in the window. The half-light hid the spots at the corners of his mouth. He’d hated that, the blonde nurse bent over him, handing the silver instruments to the dentist, no place for the pimples to hide. Pity you couldn’t fill the bloody things with something, the way the dentist filled his cavity.
    He started to walk, had only reached the corner of the square when the rain started to fall. The clock above the red-brick bank