The Old Haunts

  Allan Radcliffe

  Fairlight Books

  First published by Fairlight Books 2023

  Fairlight Books

  Summertown Pavilion, 18–24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG

  Copyright © Allan Radcliffe 2023

  The right of Allan Radcliffe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Allan Radcliffe in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  ISBN 978-1-914148-39-2

  www.fairlightbooks.com

  Designed by Sara Wood

  Illustrated by Sam Kalda

  www.folioart.co.uk

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  About the Author

  Allan Radcliffe was born in Perth, Scotland, and now lives near Edinburgh. His writing has won the Allen Wright Award and the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. With an MA from the University of Glasgow, he works as an arts journalist and editor, and is currently a freelance theatre critic and feature writer. His short stories have been published in anthologies including Out There, The Best Gay Short Stories and New Writing Scotland, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The Old Haunts is his debut novel.

  For my family

  and in memory of my mother,

  Mary Radcliffe

  Contents

  We Don’t Drink Beer

  One Day All This Will Be Yours

  A Book of Fairy Tales

  Make Light

  Keanu’s Eyes

  What Have You Done with Jamie?

  The Warmest Welcome in Central Scotland

  Careful

  Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self

  Art

  Snow’s Best Enjoyed in Hindsight

  College

  Stay

  Work

  Rumpelstiltskin

  Meet for Fun

  Callum and Daisy

  The Only Thing to Do

  History

  Let Be

  Once Upon a Time

  Acknowledgements

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep

  —‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, Robert Frost (1923)

  We Don’t Drink Beer

  After the house was sold, we drove north to Aumrie, a cinematic place at the western end of Loch Tay. My head had been full of grey – a sky with no sunshine – and Alex thought the change of scene might help turn me back into myself.

  It was March suddenly; the year was pulling at its reins. Alex had surprised me with a crumpled printout, brandished like a long-stemmed rose. He knew our destination well, having grown up nearby, and he knew that I had taken that holiday there with my family. So, it was a meaningful place for both of us.

  We kept pausing on the drive up so he could get out of the car with his camera and marvel at all his old haunts.

  It was getting dark, the landscape receding, when Alex spotted the sign for the village and the White Waters. The apartment – one portion of a steading conversion – was waiting at the end of a mile-long track, the forest deepening on either side. Alex had to slow all the way down to avoid snagging the underside of the car.

  He negotiated a sloping turn, his eyes turning to seeds as the Panda bumped down through a wrought-iron gate towards a paved yard. Pristine windows gleamed from old stone. Razor-edged slate shone from the sloped roof. Only the barns and outbuildings looked decrepit enough to be original feature.

  Alex unfurled his legs from the car. A woman was making her way towards us: eager and waving with both hands.

  ‘Mister and Missus Karim? Kit Ross. We met over the Internet!’

  She was sixtyish, soft-faced with giant grips in her piled hair. She glanced over as I made my way around from the passenger side.

  ‘This is Jamie, by the way,’ Alex said, reaching behind him.

  ‘It is so nice to meet you, Jamie.’

  If she was taken aback by my not being a Missus, she didn’t show it. I kept my hand welded to Alex’s back as she led us to the furthest corner of the courtyard.

  ‘You two look like you need to get inside and get your beers in the fridge.’

  I heard flecks of something not of here in the way her voice went up at the end of each sentence.

  ‘Oh, we don’t drink… beer,’ Alex said, flashing his fangs.

  ‘You’re the first of the season.’ She moved into the vestibule, shouldering the interior door, snapping on the light. ‘Folk don’t usually start coming until Easter. You’ve pretty much got this whole neck of the woods to yourselves. There, now. I’ve got the place all cosy and warm for you.’

  The apartment was compact, all on one floor with the kitchen and bathroom on one side of the hallway and the bedroom and living room on the other. Alex had to duck as we peeked through the bedroom door. I felt my limbs turn heavy at the sight of the king-sized bed, the bedspread pulled taut. Cotton-white walls, a lingering smell of paint: everything bland like a show house save for the mini-zoo of stuffed animals plonked along the window ledge. There were dogs, cats, a gorilla and a giraffe. Three bears, the baby nuzzled between its parents.

  ‘It all looks very smart,’ I said, following her into the kitchen. ‘I don’t know if I dare sit down, everything looks so new and clean.’

  ‘What’s that now?’ Kit Ross was gazing up at Alex, her head tilted like a connoisseur. There are so few like him, with that hair, black like you’ve never seen black before, and his newsreader’s voice. He had marched around the kitchen counter and was peering into cupboards, checking where everything was. The clothes he wore accentuated his height: drainpipes, vertical stripes, and boots with pointed toes. One hand, the pink of his fingernails peeking through chipped black, brushed mine as he came past.

  We paused in the hallway while Alex dived into the bathroom to take a leak. Kit Ross took a breath and launched into an interrogation, her voice rising to cover the torrent. How was our journey? Had my friend and I visited before? Did we have plans? How was the weather in London?

  We had spent the previous week in Edinburgh, I told her, though I stopped short of telling her why. For once, I hadn’t noticed the weather.

  ‘Look at those lashes!’ She leaned forward, as though seeing me for the first time. ‘Are those real?’

  ‘They’re my mother’s,’ I said, remembering my last-minute decision to put in my contacts. ‘My dad said her eyelashes could have fanned Cleopatra.’

  ‘Well, I can quite see that.’

  Alex came back into the hallway and her attention once again floated upwards. ‘It was the smaller apartment you booked?’ she said. ‘The double room?’

  Alex lifted his chin. ‘That’s us.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, as though we were used to making do.

  ‘Well, think of this as your home from home.’

  She stole a final delighted look up at Alex. What did we look like to her, I wondered? Alex, with the stack of bracelets that hissed up and down his forearms. Me, peeping like Kilroy over the top of my rollneck. I thought of the estate agent who had visited the house before Christmas: a boy of twelve in an outsized suit. He held himself at arm’s length throughout the appointment. One sudden flick of my limp wrist, I thought, and he would defend himself with his golf umbrella.

  Alex frilled his fingers at Kit as she passed by the kitchen window at the back of the apartment. We heard a door unlocking and then the creak of her footsteps.

  ‘My god, she really is right next door,’ Alex said. ‘We are going to have to make out so quietly.’

  His roving eye alighted on the kitchen counter. ‘Wow, is that shortbread?’

  I unpacked and cooked while Alex got the fire going in the living room then walked his mobile around the apartment until it chirruped into life.

  He cast an eye over the leaflets Kit had left.

  ‘We could take a walk along the old railway line tomorrow. Have a go at finding this house of yours. I mean: if you think you’re up to it?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  We took our bottle through to the fire and chose a DVD from the stack by the telly. The film was a romantic comedy about a woman who works selling train tickets. She’s in love with one of her regulars but he doesn’t notice her. Then, when he falls onto the platform and ends up in a coma and she’s the first one on the scene, his family mistakes her for his girlfriend.

  My mother would have called it an old cod. The ending would have given my father the excuse he needed to cry until all that came out was damp breath.

  I pouted silently into my rollneck. Alex pulled my head onto his lap. ‘I’m fine. I’m fine,’ I said. He stroked my hair. It was al most a motherly embrace.

  That night, as I was sitting up in bed and staring off, I felt him looking at me.

  ‘I was thinking about my dad,’ I said. ‘I was trying to picture him. Just when I think I’ve got him clear in my head, it’s like he shrinks and loses all his… dimensions, you know, like one of those wee men cut out of paper.’

  Alex put aside his phone.

  ‘I’m sorry I never got to meet them.’

  ‘They were… good people.’

  ‘I was twelve when my dad died,’ he said. ‘Someone – a teacher, maybe, or a neighbour or the priest, I can’t remember now – said the only advantage of losing a parent at an early age is that you have less to forget. Or maybe that was something I read in one of the books. Anyway. Every time I see a picture of my dad, I notice something that surprises me. Like his freckles – the man had so many bastard freckles, across his nose. I must have seen them loads of times, but for some reason I don’t think of my dad as a freckled person.’

  He continued to watch me, wondering if his words had helped, as though a reminder of his loss could somehow draw me outside of my own.

  I wanted to talk more, to tell Alex about my mum and my dad, he had such clear views on people and things. But which version to choose?

  So, I changed the subject, complimenting him on his new haircut, which was shorter at the back and sides than usual, and he shrugged, kneading the thatch while glancing across at me a couple of times. I kissed him and told him goodnight before turning onto my side, and when I heard his breathing change I raised myself to my elbows. His sleeping face: it almost made me want to dig out my sketchpad just so I could draw him.

  Outside the rain picked up. It rustled against the window.

  The three bears watched from the window ledge.

  Somebody has been sleeping in my bed!

  I felt smaller than ever.

  One Day All This Will Be Yours

  For a long time, we lived in the flat above my parents’ newsagent’s. The building was unique: a two-storey rectangular block, with no architectural kin close by. It was sandwiched between a tenement row and the forecourt of a Honda showroom. The outside had once approximated white but, one summer, when all the patches of grime had started joining up, my father cracked and painted the façade the only colour he had to hand. It changed shade more than once over the years, but it would be known forever after as The Purple Shop.

  The front door opened onto the pavement. An aged swing sign blew back and forth on the street: Come on in – it’s all here. Next to the main building was our garage; for years we had no car, so my dad stuffed the space with excess stock. Out the back there was a strip of green that could barely fit a whirligig, with a grid of slabs at the far end, which my mother optimistically referred to as The Patio.

  The view from my bedroom window was of an advertising billboard, stuck to the side of the tenement block that ran perpendicular to our street. I opened my curtains onto faces with Aquafresh smiles or giant vodka bottles or dead-eyed cars.

  Still, we were never far from history or damp greenery. If you turned right out of our front door and crossed the road, a cobbled close led through to Holyrood Park and the wall that ran along the back of the palace. If you walked to the top of the road that curved behind the car showroom you could see Arthur’s Seat, the lounging giant, its head visible above the tenements and surveying the shoppers on London Road.

  The Purple Shop creaked and groaned, needing repair. My mother killed her back oiling hinges and sticking down floorboards. ‘One day, all this will be yours,’ she muttered, while guddling around in the building’s guts.

  Lying in bed, I strained to listen to them moving around, chuckling at some mysterious joke, or sharing problems of a work–domestic nature that were beyond me. They seemed more than two people who shared a marriage and a shop. They were best friends, a double act, so close that the boundaries between them were almost irrelevant. I lay in the dark, open-eyed and indignant. When I couldn’t sleep, they came through and sang ‘Morningtown Ride’, my father growling beneath her clear tones.

  I was seven, and curious. I asked my mother how it was they had come to open the shop. It seemed such a bold thing to do, and so unlike them.

  The usual pause while she considered the right way to tell the story.

  ‘My dad, your granddad, moved out when I was your age, and your gran had to work more than one job. She said I never gave a thought to how hard her life had become.’ She broke off, her face tightening. ‘She was probably right.’

  She had longed to get away, she told me. The afternoon she finished her Highers she caught the bus into the centre of town and walked up and down Princes Street and George Street, looking for signs in windows and asking at counters until she found a shoe shop that was looking for full-time staff.

  ‘Your grandmother was… not happy,’ my mother said. ‘She had expected me to go to college, but I knew that would mean three or four or five years of listening to her telling me how untidy I made the place look, how much I cost her. When I told her I was planning to move out as soon as I had saved enough money to put down a deposit on a room, she went very quiet. I don’t know why I was surprised. It was exactly what I had wanted to do: wind her up.’

  She was talking almost to herself now.

  ‘Anyway. She left me some money, her savings’ – she made a noise somewhere between a cough and a sigh – ‘and I, well, I think I wanted to prove something to myself or maybe even to honour her memory, who knows. So, I used it as the deposit for the shop. There.’

  She straightened up, all business.

  ‘You would have liked her. Your gran. She was a snappy dresser. She was always just so, no scuffs. Sharp tongue. Not like other people’s grandmothers. She wasn’t a sweetie. She didn’t knit.’

  I have a hazy half-recollection of the plaque with my father’s name on it being drilled to the front of the shop. Matthew James Haley. As I get older, this memory, like so many things, begins to seem more like something I’ve been told.

  I clung to the brightly lit shop. It meant warmth; it was home. The counter area was separated from the back room by a beaded curtain that brattled as the strings lifted and dropped into place. Dad would shout ‘Jamie!’ as soon as he heard the click of the beads, and he would pull me into the armpit of the tweedy jacket he always wore, the one Mum kept holding up and saying had seen better days.

  I breathed in his woody smell until he began to hold me away from him, loosening his grip: ‘Ah’m gonnae drop ye.’ Blue eyes cut in half by sleepy lids – also my eyes, which were framed by my mother’s famed lashes. I was theirs, no question.

  At cashing up time, as the till churned out the day’s receipts, I would sit through the back, scarfing crisps and doing homework or reading my way through the tied stacks of magazines. Woman’s Own, Woman’s Weekly and The People’s Friend: I liked the fireside stories, the sleek photography and the cottagey illustrations. It was there, aged eight or nine, searching through a pile on the desk where my parents kept their paperwork, that I found a new title, For Women, and opened it. There was Todd, that month’s full-frontal centrefold.

  With his rigid hair and ludicrously square jaw, Todd looked like a cartoon hero – Fred from Scooby-Doo or a Disney prince – only with glossy pubes, a sponge-like scrotum and a belly that seemed to go on forever. The soft focus lent the image a dreamlike quality. Everything about Todd – his skin, his eyes – shone. I shut the magazine, breathed, then peeped again. Without thinking I tore him from the magazine, folded him at the waist and tucked him away; my heart thrilled. I knew this was something my parents wouldn’t like; that it was something I should not be doing. Until then I had kept almost nothing from them. That leaf of flimsy paper was the first thing that came between us, the first in a career of secrets.

  After dark I wore the page ragged, folding and unfolding until Todd ghosted away to nothing.

  Before Todd, I read The Beezer, The Broons, books about children who solved crimes or went on journeys and ended up with their forever families. Mum read murder mysteries and the Sunday supplements. My father loved crossword puzzles, word searches and quizzes. When he was concentrating, he used to let his mouth hang open while he stroked his jawline. Friends were always telling him he should apply for Mastermind or Fifteen to One.

 

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