Free The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett Page A

term, he was briefly taken with an extremely pretty first-year history student named Angela Smith, but she’d broken it off, citing some old boyfriend from school – but no one about whom he has felt remotely serious.
    ‘It’s not such a bad place, really, is it?’ Jim says aloud. ‘Even old Croggan seems to be warming to me a bit.’
    Peter nods. ‘I find it’s best to avoid him until early afternoon – he’s usually just back from lunch then, and half-cut on port.’
    They exchange weak smiles, sip their pints. Jim, facing the bridge, admires its great struts and curves, the way it seems to thrust out organically from the thick green foliage on either bank. Peter, like most of Bristol’s natives, seems not even to notice it, but Jim is continually struck by the way Brunel’s great construction hangs above the Avon like a huge, still bird, its grey wings outstretched.
    The first time they came to the White Lion, Peter had told him a story: a factory girl, jilted by her lover, had thrown herself from the parapet and floated gently down to safety, her wide Victorian skirts billowing into a parachute. ‘She lived to eighty-five,’ Peter said. ‘A legend in her own lifetime.’
    Jim had shivered, thinking of the nights – how many had there been since he’d moved back to Bristol: three? four? – when he had run out onto the Clifton streets after his mother. Vivian was usually barefoot, her raincoat loosely belted over her nightdress. Once, she had already stepped out onto the parapet before he reached her. He had caught her by the collar like a cat, tried not to look down at the deep, silted darkness below.
    Now, to dispel the memory, Jim asks Peter what plans he has for the weekend. ‘Not much. Working tomorrow, of course. I might take Sheila out on Sunday. Clevedon, maybe, if it’s still nice. Ice cream, stroll on the pier. All that jazz.’
    Jim has met Sheila once, at Peter’s birthday party: she is wide-hipped, tall (taller than Peter, in fact, though neither of them seems to mind), with a tumble of blonde curls and a low, infectious cackle. They are newly married, with a little house in Bedminster, a few streets away from where they both grew up. ‘That’s right,’ Peter had said proudly when he introduced her to Jim, ‘I really did fall for the girl next door. How lucky was I that she fell for me too?’
    ‘What about you?’ Peter says now, eyeing Jim carefully over his pint glass. ‘Up to anything? How are … well, things?’
    Jim has sketched out the bare framework of his situation for Peter: his mother’s illness; his decision – if Jim could call it that, for it had certainly not felt like one – to forget art school, forget London, and stay here with her.
    ‘All right,’ he says.
    It’s true, in relative terms: Vivian is back on an upswing. Last night, she woke him at three a.m., playing Sinatra at full volume in the living-room. ‘
Dance
with me, Lewis,’ she said, her eyes unnaturally bright. And so Jim had danced with her, for a song or two, because he hadn’t the heart to tell her for the millionth time that he was not his father, that his father was long gone.
    ‘Find time to do some painting this weekend, will you?’
    ‘Maybe.’ Jim has set up his easel in a corner of his bedroom; the light isn’t good, and he often wakes with a headache from the turps, but at least he can turn the key when he goes out. A month or so ago, when he forgot to lock the room, he came back to find great sweeps of paint smeared across the blank canvas he had left there, and the half-empty tubes bleeding stickily onto the carpet. ‘Hope so.’
    They are quiet then, enjoying the silence of men happy to leave the finer details of their feelings between parentheses. Soon their glasses are empty; another of the clerks, passing on his way to the bar, asks if they’d like another drink. Both say yes: Peter because he feels Jim could use the company, and Jim because it is a warm Friday evening,