The Walk Home (2 page)

The queue behind Graham was grumbling by that stage, but Lindsey just told them all to watch their manners. He looked up at her then, and saw how her eyes were sharp and smiling, her back straight, like she could take on all comers. She got Graham to go through the order again, roll by roll, burger by burger. And she wasn’t teasing him either; she knew he was shy, but that was all right.

Graham watched her fingers on the calculator buttons, and her narrow lips, repeating what he told her; the pink tip of her tongue, and all her freckles. His eyes found them on her face and hands first, then down her neck as well, and up her arms. They were all wearing the same T-shirts on the van: oversized, with what looked like a lodge number and today’s date printed across the top of the chest. They all had aprons, so the rest of the shirt was covered, but Lindsey was wearing hers back to front, and knotted at the side, so when she turned round to get Graham’s change, he could see the Red Hand of Ulster printed on the cloth. And how long her hair was too: a long, loose plait. It stopped at Lindsey’s hips, where Graham found more freckles to stare at, on a bare inch of lovely skin showing just above the waistband of her skirt.

After all that, she didn’t have enough coins left in the float.

“I’ll bring the change over later.”

Lindsey told Graham she’d come and find him, before the lodges set off up the road again. She looked right at him too, making her promise:

“Won’t forget you, honest.”

Graham watched her while he was eating, from the safer distance of the damp grass, sitting with the rest of the band. She was the same with everyone she served—joking, familiar—and he was gutted, thinking he’d just imagined it. He’d been so sure of it, up at the van: that she fancied him. He tried to work out how old she was: could be fourteen, could be eighteen, no telling. Graham hoped she wasn’t older than him.

Lindsey did come over when they were making ready to go, and she gave Graham the coins she owed. He had his drum back on already, and his gloves, so he pulled those off to take the money. He felt her fingers touch his palm, just for a second, and then she stayed next to him while the bands and lodges assembled. Graham couldn’t look at her then. But he was certain again.

He waited for her after the Walk, in the back room of the only pub. Graham sat there a good couple of hours, sure that she’d come, certain he’d never have the nerve to go and look for her if she didn’t; and then he saw her. Walking through the bar, and looking for him, he knew she was, because when she saw him she made a bee-line through the crush. She had the same T-shirt on, still knotted, but no apron, so now Graham could see the skin on her belly, and it was all he could do to stop himself putting his hands there when she got up close.

One drink later they were out the back and walking, past where the barrels were stacked and on, with the sun going down behind their shoulders. It was quiet out there after the pub doors fell shut; just the two of them on the empty track, and neither of them talking. Only the sound of the wind in the wheat, and the weeds growing tall beside the farm gate. They walked the
length of a tumbledown wall until it got low enough to climb, and behind that was a hidden spot with just enough grass for Lindsey to lie down.

Graham shouted out when he pushed himself inside her. He didn’t mean to, but it didn’t matter; she didn’t laugh or anything. But then after, when it was over, when she stood up and pulled down her skirt, Lindsey looked at him, and then he saw it hadn’t been that way, not for her.

Graham was still on his knees, and he busied himself with his trousers. Tucking in his shirt, to cover his shame: gutted again. Too much drunk, he regretted the pints he’d already sunk.

Lindsey stood a moment, watching, and then she crouched down next to him reaching for her knickers. They’d slipped off her ankles, over her trainers, and she picked them up from where they’d landed.

“Where you from then?”

She was looking at him, face level with his, and close; knickers bunched in her fist. Graham told her:

“Scotland.”

And she rolled her eyes. But friendly, he thought: like she’d been on the burger van that afternoon. Graham said:

“Fae Glasgow. I’m fae Drumchapel.”

He named the housing scheme, though she’d never have heard of it, and then Lindsey narrowed her eyes a bit:

“You in a juvenile lodge, Graham? Or a man’s?”

She was smiling. She’d found out his name from someone, and now she was guessing how old he was. But she was teasing as well, and that nerve was still too raw for Graham to take courage. So he shook his head:

“I’m no.”

Bad enough he was in a band, that’s what his Mum said.
There’d be no end of nagging if he joined a lodge: she’d told him their family had had troubles enough. But Graham wasn’t about to go into all that, because Lindsey had her cool eyes on him, like she was weighing him up. She leaned in a bit closer:

“Me either. My Da’s Orange enough for the two of us.”

Lindsey pulled at her T-shirt, tugging the lodge number up onto her shoulder to show him, then shoving it back again, out of sight.

The knot at her waist had gone slack. So she undid it, and then re-tied it, tighter; higher up, under her ribs, and she told him:

“I’ve never been to Glasgow. Is it good there?”

Graham shrugged, trying not to look at her skin. That strip of it on show again above her skirt.

“Aye.”

He’d never thought if Glasgow was good or not, he couldn’t say. Lindsey looked at him a second or two:

“Better than here.”

She wasn’t asking, but Graham shrugged again, by way of reply; not wanting to put this place down, because he’d had a fine time. Except that made Lindsey smile, so he had to look away, and then his eyes landed on the small scrunch of cloth between her fingers. Lindsey laughed:

“Bet it is.”

And then:

“I’ve never been anywhere.”

She stood up and pocketed her knickers.

Graham thought she was making to go, and so this was it now: it was all over. But when he looked up, she was waiting for him:

“You coming?”

Lindsey put two fingers through his belt loops when they got to the road. She was walking next to him, but it felt like she was pulling, like she was more than willing, and Graham got hard again, and hopeful; so hard that it was painful. And even when she led him up the front path to a house and got her keys out, even though he felt sure this must be her Mum and Dad’s place, and they might be home and demand to know who he was, Graham couldn’t think of anything but pushing himself inside her again.

Lindsey shut the door and there was no one there. Just the last bit of late sun falling through the window onto the carpet, same colour as her hair. The red gold girl, she stood in front of him, and he put his fingers there first, where he wanted to be, and she was wet; not just from what he’d done before, he was sure, because it was different; she was full and swollen, just like he was. She kissed him, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and she kept her eyes open, unzipping his trousers.

The girl came as a shock. It took Brenda a while to adjust: a girl was the last thing she’d expected from Graham.

He was Brenda’s youngest, by a few years, a big baby with a big head;
oh ho, a troop cometh
, Malky said. Graham was a happy accident, who never stopped eating, never stopped growing. He was the quietest of their four sons, but also the tallest, and the widest. Overnight he couldn’t do up the buttons on his school shirts, his socks forever showing where his trousers were too short. Graham was a gentle lad, and a comfort, but a bit too backwards in coming forwards, so Brenda fretted about him some school mornings, after she’d dropped him at the gates: hard to see him sidelined at the railings till the bell went.

She and Malky used to talk about him last thing at night, in bed, lights out. Brenda said she watched all the other boys tearing about, and Graham standing there like he didn’t know how. Malky said he’d learn, give him time. So she’d held her tongue when Graham joined his first band.

It wasn’t that Brenda liked it, but it was just about the first thing he’d joined in with. And she knew plenty boys who’d done the same: her older sons’ school pals, and even Malky, before they were married and he’d settled to driving his cab. Malky reckoned it was just a scheme hazard, part of life if your life was lived in Drumchapel. He said boys will be boys, they’ll always want to belong, and he teased Brenda too: he said it was her blood coming through. Her Dad had been an Orangeman, true blue, forever nursing the wounds of his Free State youth;
aw the faimly woes, they all lead back tae Ireland
. But Malky was a sweet man, mostly, and he could tease without being hurtful, so Brenda trusted him when he told her flute bands were forever springing up and then folding, and Graham would grow out of it, same as he had.

Graham was thirteen when he started. He got himself a paper round to pay for his uniform, and Brenda didn’t know that it was worth it: all he did was bash the cymbals. But the months went by with him saving, and then the Glasgow Walk rolled round, as it always did, just ahead of Ulster; first Saturday in July she sent him off with a good breakfast, if not her blessing, and then Graham came home again towards tea time with his face all shining. Wide-shouldered and even taller in his new uniform trousers. He said how folk on the scheme had cheered them, and followed them all the way into town, and how the lodge they’d played for had paid them too, like no one had told him that’s how it worked. Graham saved his cut, in any case, and then he took on a second round, because he could manage two paper bags, one across each shoulder. He did that for months. Earned himself enough for a drum. Just second-hand, but he chose a good one, Malky said so: he remembered that much from his own band days.

The drum got Malky worried too, Brenda could see that,
because he went out and made enquiries. He even went along to practice, to see where this was headed, and have a quiet word to Geordie. He was the bandmaster, and an Orangeman too, but one of the decent kind. Malky told Brenda his band had been going decades, no headcases allowed: Geordie only kept folk that could hold a melody down. He didn’t like a drum to be battered, the way they did in the blood-and-thunder bands, he said it should be played, and he taught Graham the difference. So for a while there, they breathed a bit easier.

Only it turned out Graham was quick to learn, and quick to get poached by other bands. It was a new lot he went to Tyrone with: none of them much over twenty, not one of them with an ounce of sense. The idiot bandmaster reckoned the Glasgow Walk was just a warm-up to get the marching season started. The real deal was over in Ireland on the Twelfth, so he’d talked some country lodge into hiring them, and it was a worry from the outset, the whole enterprise.

Brenda looked the town up in the atlas that used to be her father’s. It was just a thumbprint’s distance from Portadown, where they didn’t just remember the Battle of the Boyne each July, they fought it against their neighbours all year round. She told Malky it was too much like the place her Dad was born in; she’d grown up hearing all Papa Robert’s stories, of the Irish Civil War and what came after, when the Free State turned out to be anything but, and the family fled across the water. Plus she’d had two sons in the army, and endured their Ulster tours of duty, so there were just some place names that set Brenda on edge. The folk around those parts were unyielding. Not just the Catholics, with their residents’ groups, stirring the bloody soup, but her own kind too: staunch. No thought of surrender allowed there. They all had their reasons, turned rigid over centuries of
grievance, but Brenda said if no one bent, then someone was bound to break, and she didn’t want it to be their boy.

She’d gone to meet Graham off the coach, when it drew up outside the snooker club, hours late, and it was bucketing too. He was a sight: looked like he’d spent the three days drinking himself red-eyed. Relief made Brenda run off at the mouth, and she gave the older boys in the band a piece of her mind, until they put her straight: