The Silver Skeleton
Chapter 14
‘You know what mate, drop me over there before the island, just by the chippy.’
John Garland had not said so much as a word to the driver of a taxi ferrying him to Hall Green since slumping into the black leather seat of a shiny new Mercedes black cab at Birmingham International Station. His voice no longer pounded in his head as it had two hours earlier when he rather abruptly informed a chatty woman on the train that due to his severe hangover and less than jovial mood, he would not be exchanging pleasantries all the way from London Euston to the station servicing the National Exhibition Centre and Solihull, or even as far as the first stop. Instead, he placed the lightweight jacket he was carrying unsociably up over his head and hoped he would snore loudly enough to serve as a reminder that he did not wish to be disturbed throughout the journey north. He imagined the woman would consider him a typically unfriendly southerner, who rarely ventured north of the Watford Gap, which he was, but with sociable origins in the Midlands at least.
John met the taxi driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror for the first time since depositing himself in the cab fifteen minutes earlier and they looked as bloodshot as his felt. He fumbled for enough notes in his wallet and declined both the few pounds change and a receipt as he stepped out onto the pavement and shut the heavy black door.
‘You know the Bull’s Head is further down there, right mate?’
John had walked from the pub of his misspent youth along Highfield Road to soak up several pints with a generous portion of greasy chips and sometimes a saveloy sausage at Jack’s Fish & Chips Shop more times than he could even begin to remember. He smiled at the driver’s directions, which while well intended, were completely unnecessary.
‘Yeah, I’m good thanks. I fancy some chips before I hit the beer.’
John slung the strap supporting an expensive black leather Tumi garment bag over his shoulder and walked towards Jack’s which was now called the Highfield Fish Bar. Jack had been a hardworking Greek or Cypriot immigrant; John couldn’t remember which. Along with his cheery wife and two young sons, Jack had served fish n chips at all hours to the locals of Hall Green for generations. John liked to think that Jack was now comfortably retired somewhere warm, perhaps on a Greek island, though probably still trying to rid himself of the unmistakable stale smell of fried food that greeted John as he pushed open the shop’s heavy glass door.
Cod and chips set him back six pounds twenty, a far cry from the days when a handful of small coins could buy enough chips to fill a teenage craving and Jack would scrape the corners of the fish cabinet to add a sprinkling of loose bits of batter for those kids who asked politely. Salt and vinegar were still applied as liberally as ever. John’s eye caught a large vat of pickled eggs sat on the counter top and he winced as he remembered the time his friend Sully had accepted a dare to eat as many of the foul acidic ovals as he could stomach after a bout of drinking. Sully had burst suddenly out of Jack’s, projectile vomiting several eggs and just as many pints of beer onto the pavement at the feet of a mix of disgusted onlookers and cheering drunken blokes saluting his bravado. Two hours ago, when boarding the Virgin mainline train, John might have suffered a similar reaction at just the memory of those pickled eggs, but after a solid hour napping beneath his jacket on the journey from London, his hangover had subsided. He was now ravenously hungry and even felt the inkling for a few more pints.
The previous night he had pounded a stream of bottles of Leffe Blonde Belgian beer to the point where Rachel Turner had forced him to phone for a taxi to take him home to his wife and his bed. Unconcerned by whether Ellie Garland suspected he had ventured beyond his alibi of Fulham’s Bricklayer’s Arms, he had eventually collapsed on the living room sofa, though not before polishing off the remainder of his wife’s second bottle of red of the evening. Ellie was unsympathetic the following morning and made no effort whatsoever to temper the noise generated by her cooking a breakfast omelette, which was amplified by John’s horrific hangover, until he explained the catalyst for his drinking. Her immediate compassion filled John with guilt, especially when she rushed to iron three clean but creased dress shirts to pack for his impromptu excursion to Birmingham.
John sat on a weathered old bench outside Jack’s former chippy and wondered if these were the same wooden slats he had graced some three decades earlier. As he tore at lumps of fish and batter with a small wooden fork and poked thick chips that were almost too hot to eat, he remembered the times spent on that bench. He had kissed two girls there and been chased away once by a pair of rockers who took exception to the line of Two-Tone record label badges he wore down either side of the zip on his fashionable Harrington jacket celebrating bands like The Specials, The Selecter and Madness. He had convinced Siobhan Murphy to dump her boyfriend Craig Jones while they sat on that bench one night on a perfect summer evening. Another time he had fought Craig outside Jack’s, long after the closing shutters had been drawn.
John felt happy to be home, if he could still call this home, having not set foot on still familiar streets since he was a teenager. As he screwed up the chip paper, empty apart from the wooden fork, John thought about Stephen Taylor. He too was a fabric of this bench’s memory. They had sat there together watching boy racers in finely tuned Mini Coopers approach the adjacent traffic island at speed and on occasion navigate its curve on two wheels, while perversely hoping the posers would lose control and crash into a parked car or perhaps flip onto their roof to provide genuine entertainment. He watched a bus breeze by, remembering how he and Stephen would often share their deepest secrets and fears on the back seat of the top deck over bags of chips bought by pooling the cash they had scraped together by various means.
Disposing of his rubbish in a squat council-supplied bin that was concreted to the pavement, John again banished the picture he had in his head of Stephen connected to tubes and machines that blinked and beeped. His reunion with Sully and Andy and whoever else planned to join them in the pub would likely be emotional enough without him arriving sniffing and teary-eyed. He ambled the five-minute or so walk along Highfield Road to the busy intersection with the main Stratford Road. He passed houses of people he had known at school, remembering the names of some, but searching his memory banks unsuccessfully for others and wondered what might have become of them, not that he honestly cared.
A number ninety-two bus breezed by, exceeding the thirty miles per hour speed limit, and John watched as it sped towards Shirley, the next adjoining suburb. The sporadic traffic ceased, but John did not cross the dual carriageway, the Bull’s Head awaiting his arrival on the opposite side. He watched the bus hurtle along the main road, transfixed, paralysed almost, for perhaps a minute or more as it gradually disappeared beyond the horizon. A few stops further on, the bus would pass the leafy cut through where John, along with the friends he was poised to meet and his comrade who lay dying in a coma, had once committed murder. Or at least they believed they had.
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Michael Preston 