Free Fan by Danny Rhodes Page B

into spaces and money into fat wallets. And it was just a hundred yards from there, the length of a fucking football pitch. He could see the black gates, the driveway leading up to the arch, the chapel beyond, and if he’d been pressed for time perhaps he’d have headed straight up there, found himself a seat at the back somewhere, made himself part of something he really was no longer part of. But he wasn’t late. He was too fucking early by any measure. He had time to think and to revisit his doubts.
    They strangled the life out of him.
    He continued down to the river instead, stopping at the bridge, wrestling with guilt, telling himself it was better this way, to take a moment, to gather his thoughts, to arrive at the last minute and avoid the inevitable onslaught of bitter glances and barbed questions.
    Bitter and barbed for what? For fucking off down south and leaving them to it?
    Too right, serri. Too fucking right.
    The river was deathly quiet, no sign of life on the water, some old guy in the allotment burning off the dead and the dying, the rotten and the wasted, black smoke rising in a thin plume, drifting up and away. An old gal came down the path. He felt her eyes on him, him in his suit, his shined shoes, his dew-glazed hair looking like fucking Brylcreem. But he wasn’t a ghost. She could see him better than that, he realised. She knew what he was and what he fucking wasn’t.
    He looked down at the water, at the sluice gates holding everything back. Black thoughts started spilling in, trapping him between moments.
    Dark water rising.
    The river become a river of people moving inexorably towards a tunnel, trailing into a dark space where there was no space, filling an area that was already full, compressing and solidifying there.
    The dead and the living, the living and the dead. The dead standing up. Blue lips. Vacant expressions. Lifeless eyes. The lights going out.
    And Stimmo shouting over his head, shouting the same fucking thing over and over.
    ‘That one’s dead, mate. I’m telling you he’s fucking dead.’
    A look on Stimmo’s face then, a look that etched itself on to him, became part of the person Stimmo was after that day, if he remembered it right, if he could be trusted to comprehend anything about the life he’d lived.
    Stimmo. There and gone.
    He didn’t go to the service. Did he fuck as like. He wandered the streets of the old town instead, feeling the separation of fifteen years, registering the changes.
    For better.
    For worse.
    The corner garage transformed into a drive-through takeaway. Half the factory site already given over to housing association dwellings, clean bricked, neatly shrubbed, soulless.
    The fleapit nightclub, his old stomping ground, gone. No trace of its shell or its footing in the earth but the topography the same, the stretch up to the town hall littered with the old and the new, with names he recognised on shop fronts and pub signs and vans, and names he didn’t know at all. A supermarket where the old town football ground used to stand. Nothing to remind him except the chip shop they used to visit at half-time. All other traces swept away.
    Time moved relentlessly onward, the hour of the service passing into oblivion like everything else, leaving him untethered, without anchor in a place that had been his anchor for over half a lifetime.
    And he should have gone home then, got himself on the train and made his way back, tried to get the wedge back in. But he didn’t. He couldn’t get past that bedroom door, couldn’t see beyond it. He was a daft bastard, really, a let-down to himself, a disappointment to others. So he really did have to stay. He had to explain himself, see the people he’d not seen, find out what the fuck it was all about, Stimmo doing himself in like that, discover if he was barking up the right tree or poking about in dark places he had no business with.
    He returned to the hotel and booked himself in for the weekend, closed the