It was true his old man hadn’t died in the bombings; he’d died a couple of years before, diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.
At least it’s not my lungs, he’d said as they’d walked out of the London Hospital together.
Two weeks later he was called back in.
It’s your lungs, they’d said.
His dad Wilbur believed he was going to beat ‘the cancer’， as he called it, with the same misguided surety that had lost him thousands of pounds, and a few trusted friends, over a lifetime. I feel lucky, son, was what he said. A precursor to disaster if ever there was one.
It was September, and they walked over to Tubby Folgate’s together to make a final bet, one that said his dad would be alive till the new year. Tubby laughed and said he’d have given him better odds on a white Christmas.
That night, they sat out in the small bricked yard. Neither knew what to say to the other. Mrs Ashley’s soprano voice rose from the neighbouring lav and she played her part and added an exquisite sweetness to this scene of father and son on the precipice of farewell. So tender.
Wilbur got out his notebook and quietly said, I’ve done my calculations, son, and the numbers add up, and his frail finger moved across the page tracing the illegible mystery of chance. See? he said. And then his arm shot up to a midnight sky, revealing the shocking translucency of his skin.
Look, he said.
And there, a sudden clearing in the fog, as if heaven’s chenille had been pulled back just for him. Same frail finger moving across the celestial architecture. Across the constellations, and the containment and hopes of all they were. And from gambler to philosopher, he said, I’ve lived under the fickle movement of planetary adventure. I’ve encountered long dark nights when the sirens sound. But the moment stars align, and the shift of sweet wind greets you of a morning, this is when mystery becomes knowing and fortune becomes love— Nora popped her head out the front door.
What’s he going on about, love?
Don’t know, Mum. I think it’s the morphine.
—and the arc of flight settles a small bird a thousand miles from home with heat on its wings and a calm delight at the mastery of navigation.
Wilbur withered within the month; his lungs rattled like an overworked boiler, and he became teeth and bone and essence. Everything on the black, was the last thing he said. He died in the middle of the night on the downstairs sofa.
Ulysses kept vigil in the armchair next to him and when he looked over, his dad was glowing on top of the bed. Glare from a streetlamp had snuck in through the curtain and lit up the old boy like some medieval saint.
The wake was at Col’s. Stout and whisky and tea. Peg buttered the sandwiches and forgot to put the filling in, and Ginny cried because she was always a kid and always would be. It was a good send-off. Tubby Folgate sent a wreath, paid for by his dad’s last bet, and a card that said, You were one in a million to one.
End of an era, said Cressy to Ulysses. Up to you now, boy.
Ulysses was seventeen. Big words for slight shoulders.
Ulysses turned the corner and Col’s pub came into sight. The Stoat and Parot was a tatty Georgian tavern that had never seen better days. Ragged bunting left over from VE Day hung down from the guttering and there was enough pigeon shit on the bricks to give Nelson’s Column a run for its money. For years it was known as The Stoat, till the eponymous bird flew down the chimney and refused to leave, thus instigating a hasty and careless addition to the pub’s name.
The sign swung to and fro in the breeze, a weary creak of indolence. Come in or fuck off, come in or fuck off.
Ulysses pushed open the door, and the fire to his right gave off a ripe old smell, all sour and smarting bodies. The old ones were huddled around the hearth exactly as he’d left them: same faces less teeth. And above the fire on a narrow shelf, the stuffed stoat, looking exactly as it did the day it died: angry and incredulous.
Over by the bar, the large blue-fronted Amazonian parrot guarded the till with a glum weariness. Ulysses dropped his kitbag by the footrest and rubbed the parrot’s chest. Hello Claudie, he said, Remember me, fella? But Claude stared at him mute, eyes glazed by post-traumatic stress. Suddenly Claude ducked low and hit his head repeatedly against a bell. Col came through from the snug.
Well look who’s here! Good to see you, Tempy. We thought you’d forgotten us.
They shook hands.
Peg here? asked Ulysses, as he took off his hat and smoothed his hair in the mirror behind the bar.
Nah. She don’t work here any more, son.
Peg don’t?