Chapter Twenty Eight

28


Bring out your dead

Friday, October 7

The following Friday night Gabriel arranged an evening out at the Tickle Toby Inn, Hustwickgate in an attempt to cheer me up. She invited a friend along no doubt surmising this would force me to be civil. Clever thinking. However, her choice of friend could not have been more misguided. Civility was indeed beyond me – what, with the plague and weeks dealing with alleged demons and a bona fide one masquerading as an art director.

Fergus Blaine was now gone, his stay at Hartley Castle House cut abruptly short by a short person with a sharp temper and a keen eye for the disgusting. The ‘disgusting’ came in the form of a white towel, a towel Gabriel had draped neatly over the radiator in the guest bathroom for Fergus Blaine’s personal use. A towel Fergus Blaine duly used post-shower the next morning. A towel he then placed just as neatly back over the radiator. With a dark brown stain on it.

Asking Fergus Blaine to leave was left to me as Gabriel had left me in no doubt there would be nothing left of Fergus Blaine if left to her. I left it until after she left, then left Fergus Blaine in no doubt that Gabriel’s sudden family bereavement would not have required him to leave had it been left to me. He understood. Left. We saw out the week where we should have begun it – in the windowless bowels of Creative Solutions occasionally venturing outside to exercise two large, furry work experience creatures.

I was relieved Blaine’s stay had been cut short, seriously concerned as the reason I had invited him there in the first place. To show off. To parade him past everything that wasn’t me yet somehow, sadly, pathetically, completed me. Yet again wrapping the real Bailey Harland in silver paper and tinsel in a feeble attempt to impress. Just like I’d done with Gabriel in my ongoing charade of wealth. It was as though I didn’t love myself enough to be real. To realise that, when revealing the real me totally and wholeheartedly, the material was immaterial.

This was, of course, rubbish. I could be the nicest, most charmingly transparent bloke in the world, loving myself and living within my means. But where would that have got me? Certainly not into the arms of a top shelf girl like Gabriel. I did love myself. I just loved Gabriel more. From the moment I set eyes on her. First impressions count. All I did was embellish mine slightly. Dug myself a bit of a hole in the process, but still…What was done was done. Now it wasn’t so much about the hole, but what I did with the dirt.

With Kurt and Courtney happily ensconced watching Top Gear on the living room television, we caught a cab which duly deposited us onto the street outside Lloyds TSB at about the tailbone of the Hustwickgate High Street spine. There, with a polar wind whistling me through an impromptu jig, I withdrew a hundred pounds from an ATM, thirty pounds of which immediately disappeared in the hands of our cab driver.

‘Sixty pounds, Gabriel,’ I said having done the return fare math. ‘Sixty fucking pounds and not a pint’s been pulled!’

Bent into the wind like a couple of rugby props hitting a ruck, we battled our way up the high street to the Tickle Toby Inn and threw ourselves at the door. The door responded well, opening inwards in a well-oiled, hinged sort of way and we were suddenly inside, which was good because it was extremely warm. Two roaring fires at opposite ends of the long wood panelled room were quietly toasting thirty or so patrons in-between who were liberally basting themselves in beer from a central bar currently well stocked with elbows and proffered notes. While Gabriel went looking for her friend, I squeezed in with a coat-covered elbow of my own and realised I was sweating. Not badly – just a few underdone beads on my forehead but sweat nonetheless. Either the head down battle up the hill into an icy headwind had been more strenuous than I thought, or the hothouse Tickle Toby had caught me wearing a few too many layers of clothing. And/or I was running a stress-induced temperature at the prospect of meeting one of Gabriel’s closest mates. A girl I needed to like for Gabriel’s sake: So far everyone she’d introduced me to had abandoned her.

‘Penny? This is my fiancé, Bailey. Bailey? Penny.’

Penny James stood and shook my hand. Her palm was surprisingly coarse attached as it was to a not unattractive, fresh faced girl about Gabriel’s age. That said, Penny James bore just a hint of pug. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, there was just the merest suggestion of cute, flat-faced puppy about her orange visage – dark, prominent, globular eyes – soft and solicitous – and a short, blunt muzzle, square, but not up faced. Her chest was small and pert; her hindquarters taut and muscular; coat newly shaven and fake tanned. Her only distinguishable markings were a mole above her top lip and a tattooed sun around her navel. Penny, it would transpire, had an even temperament, although she was of a playful and outgoing disposition. She was twenty four in human years, sandy haired and scantily dressed. To this casual observer she was as I’d imagined a girlfriend of Gabriel’s to be – cute, carefree and taller than she was. I was relieved to find her both sweet and amiable. The signs for the evening were good.

We sat – me beside Penny, Gabriel opposite – and even the chairs were to my satisfaction, wide, round and well cushioned. I sipped my beer. It was cold. It was quenching. I took in the boisterous pub patrons – a lot of young sour-faced boys with Paul Gascoigne haircuts and Tourette’s, a lot of trainee soccer players’ wives, but they didn’t bother me either. Nor did the music – a suitably English mix of Robbie Williams, Oasis and Robbie Williams.

I was in good shape. I was in even better shape after two pints, five cigarettes and an hour of largely smiling about and listening to my fiancé and her friend chat in the sure, bright and breezy anecdote-laced manner of true mates, never leaving me out, but never quite letting me in either. I didn’t mind – I had friends like that myself, friends I abandoned for a lonely, persecuted life on the other side of the globe. I was also pleased and relieved to surreptiously derive from this hour of amusing chit chat that Penny was none the wiser as to our/my plight. In a conversation spanning the four corners of their worlds, not the merest nod to our current status with Chicken Colditz, not the vaguest hint Penny was abreast of my inner torment for Duncan and Archie.

If it was possible, I loved Gabriel even more for this show of considerate restraint. She must have been bursting to tell Penny the whole story. It was a good one after all; no offence to the tales that had shot back and forth across the table thus far, they were good too. But the ‘girl from battery hen farming family meets animal-loving boy, brings him to England, family suddenly under attack, lives in tatters’ was a far funnier one if you omitted the doomed handout bit. Yet she’d resisted. Remember, Gabriel was only twenty three. I couldn’t even resist a fat girl at that age.

Then came the conversational pause that began it all. Quite a long pause. Long enough for my drinking buddies to giggle and dab at their eyes with tissues spirited from handbags in that ‘look away’ manner girls were able to spirit anything from the mobile jumble sales that are woman’s handbags. I had no idea how they did this. Equally I had no idea what they were giggling about, busy as I was basking in the glow of my feisty but faithful fiancé.

‘Sorry monkey,’ Gabriel said, sniffing and dabbing her eyes. ‘We kind of forgot you were there for a minute.’

I smiled and raised placating palms. ‘I’m perfectly fine.’ I gripped my pint. ‘I’ve got a beer. I’ve got…Robbie Williams. You go right ahead.’

The girls exchanged a glance – Gabriel’s had looked better on her. ‘I think we’re pretty much finished for now,’ said Penny, whose decidedly Upstairs diction made Gabriel sound emphatically Downstairs.

‘I think we are too,’ said Gabriel grinning my way. ‘Do you think we should, you know, involve him a bit more?’

Penny considered me a moment. ‘Weeeell,’ she said. ‘He seems nice enough.’ She looked at her glass, twirled it. ‘What do you actually do, Bailey? For a living. Gabriel hasn’t told me much.’

A brief job descriptor would have sat comfortably within the limits of a proud if cautious overview between friends. ‘I’m a writer.’

‘Really?’ she said, clearly impressed. ‘Wow. I’ve never met a writer before. What’s your forte – fiction or non-fiction?’

‘Ads.’

There may as well have been an ‘i’ in it such was her nodding, politely pursed response. ‘Oh,’ she said.

I wasn’t fazed. Every adman encountered them once in a while: the blinkered soul not fascinated by what we did. Not wheeling out a list of their favourite television ads. Or asking if I’d done any ads they’d know. Most considered themselves experts. Fair enough: whether subconsciously or consciously, the average person was exposed to about two thousand advertising messages a day. They couldn’t help but have an opinion.

Gabriel ill-advisedly grabbed the baton. ‘Bailey works for an agency in York—’

‘No, I don’t!’ I interjected before she could utter the damning words “Creative Solutions.” ‘I freelance for them, Gabriel.’ I turned to Penny. ‘Bit of a stop gap. I’m in the process of getting established with quite a big multi-national in Leeds.’

‘No, you’re not! They fired you before you even started!’

So much for considerate restraint.

Mood around the table now suddenly edgy, I opted to turn the spotlight back on Penny. I chose the same inane, socially redundant question she’d asked me, confident ‘Ads’ would stack up rather well against whatever a girl residing in a small town at the edge of the North York Moors could offer in rebuttal.

‘Enough about me,’ I said, tone artificially bright. ‘What do you do, Penny?’