Free Landed by Tim Pears Page B

around. Mess about in there like kids we did.
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    He’d been an altar boy for a while, Owen had. Said how much he liked it, said it were somewhere to go. Mass on Sundays, helping out at weddings and funerals. An empty church. He loved being in there on his own. Priest were a nervous man, Owen says, needed a smoke before taking a service: people going in the front of the church, Father were out having a gasper round the back. Owen told me you don’t think you’re listening, you don’t think you’re taking it in, but then you catch the smell of incense or a snatch of a hymn and it all come back. It’s all in there.
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    We had our wedding in a barn on this hill in Wales. Owen organised it, drove over, asked the farmer what owned the land
if we could borrow it for the day. Hired two coaches to take the gang over. We and a few mates went the day before and got this old barn decked out with balloons and streamers like Christmas. His mother come, my brother too. Owen’s grandad come up from his bungalow down below. I were expecting a giant, there were this miserable old widower hobbling about on two sticks, moaning about being dragged up on to the tops. He give Owen a bag of old tools, though – pliers, a kindling axe, a knife – and Owen were well chuffed.
    A great party. We had music – generator and decks, big speakers – and dancing. Plenty of pills and drink. The little barn were full of our mates, townies every one apart from Owen, there in the middle of nowhere, it were what you’d call odd. But it worked. I’ll tell the kids about that.
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    Sara were born in 1990. Can’t imagine there were ever a prouder father. Nor better husband, let me say. Turn his hand to anything. Never claimed there’s a job a man shouldn’t do: he’d stay up late, ironing all of our clothes, ready for the morning. Polished shoes, laid them out in their pairs, in a row in the hallway of the flat. Then he’d sit in the corner of the living room, smoke his last fake of the day, wonder how his life were turning out so good.
    When she were a toddler, Sara wouldn’t let me help her walk. She’d stumble, little mite, she’d bash herself, but push me away. If Owen were there, though, she’d hold on to one of his rough tattooed fingers, grasp it tight in her tiny hand. He’d walk behind her, bent right over, guide her along. The look on Sara’s face: happy, proud.
    Sara seemed to have inherited self-confidence from each of us, Owen’s with the natural world and mine with people. We couldn’t see our weaknesses in her, like it were a miracle. Maybe
they would have emerged in time. Or maybe not. You just don’t know.
    After Sara we had Josh, who were just like his father. Born shy, my little prince. Hardly look his own mum in the eye, never mind other people. Deliberate like his dad. Hated to be rushed into anything. We moved from the flat to the house, with its own garden, a tip what Owen transformed into a jungle playground.
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    Soon as Sara were born I says to Owen we have to visit his mother. Owen cleaned out his car the night before, put his tools in the lock-up garage; I made sandwiches and put them in the fridge. We got up early in the morning and drove east. Liz lived in a block of flats on the outskirts of King’s Lynn. We took her out for the day, a picnic up around the coast.
    Liz were all made up and waiting. She give us a big hug that smelled of sandalwood and Polo mints. She were in her mid-fifties, worked in a shop. She wore hippyish clothes, though when you looked closer often there were just one paisley-pattern blouse or orange Indian trousers. The rest were normal highstreet stuff had somehow adapted itself to her. She looked like a funky grandma, a little glamorous, a little doolally. After that we did it regular, three, four times a year. It’s spectacular over there, them great flat beaches and marshes and dunes,