The Liverpool Trilogy (31 page)

They stopped on Darwen Road. ‘So you want me to wait here, then?’ Trish asked, her voice high and unsteady. She was afraid that he might never come back. She was just the taxi driver, and he was going to make up with his wife and disappear for ever. Panic closed in on her, and her rate of breathing increased. She had never lived alone, couldn’t cope alone, and her terror might frighten Alan off if she let him see the true extent of it.

‘Trish?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll be back. There’s no way I’ll be stopping here. My business has gone, she’s sold the plant right down to the last cement mixer, and the project I’d planned is down the pan to pay all the debts she never cleared. As for the house, well, it’s mortgaged from footings to chimney pots.’ The mortgage company would be looking for him. They couldn’t get their money back from Lucy, because she’d never borrowed it in the first place. ‘Oh, and if you do buy me a partnership, it’ll be in your name,’ he said. It would have to be. Any assets he obtained would be taken to repay the money he had borrowed by forging Lucy’s signature. He could very well go to jail for fraud . . .

‘It doesn’t seem right to be just in my name, love. You’ll be doing all the hard work.’

‘I’m bankrupt,’ he said. ‘Anything I earn will have to be cash in hand, or in an account with your name on it.’

‘How much do you owe, Alan? If that wife of yours won’t pay the debts, let me make a clean start for you.’

He swallowed hard. ‘It’s a lot. She cleaned me out by over two mill, but that was company money. The mortgage on the house is for just under half a million. If that was paid, I’d be in the clear. They couldn’t take any more from me, and I wouldn’t go to prison. The two million’s gone for good, but I need the mortgage money to put me right.’

Trish lifted her chin. ‘Prison? No man of mine goes inside. Look, I’ll pay the building society and wipe your name off the bad books. You’ll no longer be bankrupt, and you can start again in our joint names. You’ll be able to hold your head up high again, and all I want is to be Mrs Henshaw. How about that?’

She was buying him. In return, he would have to pay via bingo, tea dances, whist and line-dancing. But she could make everything OK. If she did pay off the loan on Tallows, he’d become visible and viable again, but he’d still be trapped in Trish’s simple, childish idea of life. He couldn’t run and wouldn’t run, because whatever else Trish might be, she was loyal. And he was tired.

He took her hand. ‘Trish Styles, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’

She blushed and giggled like a girl. ‘That sounded so old-fashioned.’

‘Then give us an old-fashioned answer, girl.’

‘Yes. Yes, I will marry you.’

Every man had his price, he mused as he sealed the deal with a kiss. And now, with his heart filled with gratitude, he needed to get into the house for a new reason. If he could find enough cash, he would take this good woman to Preston’s of Bolton and buy her the best ring he could afford. Like him, she had known poverty; like him, she had dug her way out of it with the help of her marriage partner. He would take the bingo, the dancing, and even the bloody donkeys, because he was sick of running around, tired of being a wanted man, and fed up with women. This one would be enough. He’d make damned sure she was enough.

She was asking him a question. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Say that again.’

‘Your mortgage company. I’ll start sorting out the payment tomorrow. Find out how much, and I’ll put an end to all your misery.’

It was as if heavy chains had been removed from his limbs. He was still tied – tied to her – but with silk or velvet rather than with base metal. It would be all right. He would make blinking sure of that.

‘Can you just park here for a minute, please?’

David applied the anchors, and the van stopped. ‘What now, missus?’ he asked. ‘I’m doing my best to stop a drama becoming a crisis worthy of discussion at the next G8 conference. Also, poor Moira can’t see back there, and she can scarcely breathe. If any one of those bloody things bursts, we’ll all be talking like Donald Duck – that’s helium, you know.’

Lucy turned and caught a glimpse of Moira, who was giggling like a child. She was holding on to the strings attached to thirty heart-shaped balloons. ‘Good job this wheelchair’s pinned down, or I’d be flying back to the shed. And I’m starving. I’d just about kill for a ham sarnie.’

David tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Look here. If they find out we’re there, and we’re not there, that’ll make them worry, and they’re already worried. But if they find out we’re there and we are there, they’ll cope better.’

Lucy turned to look at her festooned friend. ‘Didn’t Shakespeare have a wonderful way with words?’ Then she awarded full attention to the man she loved. ‘Listen, buster. We’ve stopped because here, on our right, we have a cake shop. I know I can’t get a proper wedding cake at this point, but Sally in there specializes, so she’ll have a little bride and a little groom, and we can stick ’em in any cake.’ She left the van and crossed the road.

Moira cleared her throat. ‘She’s lovely, David.’

‘She’s beyond that,’ he answered. ‘For me, she’s a life-saver. I was buried in work, and she dug me out. She’s beautiful, and she has a heart the size of Brazil. But I can tell you this, Moira. If and when she ever loses her temper, we’d do better if we all moved to a different planet. There are years of anger bottled up, and whoever takes the lid off gets splashed.’

‘It won’t be you. She thinks the sun shines out of your stethoscope. It’ll be my Richard. He’s like a dog after a bitch on heat, and she’s already clobbered him once. Nothing physical. She just stopped him in his tracks when I did my stupid bit of matchmaking.’

‘Good. She’s spoken for.’

Moira was only too happy to hear that. She had realized of late that her other half was not really fit for marriage. He needed too much of his own way, and she had been lenient with him. Lucy believed that her children had been allowed leeway, but that was nothing compared to the way Richard had developed. Was it all the result of MS? She looked through the window. ‘Blood and guts, David – what the hell has she got? Just look at the state of her.’

He looked. His beloved Louisa was staggering across the opposite pavement with a three-tier wedding cake. Was there no end to the woman’s powers of persuasion? He leapt out of the vehicle and ran to offer help. After relieving her of the burden, he chased her back to the van.

‘It’s cardboard,’ he told Moira. ‘Madam was pretending it was heavy.’

Lucy climbed into the passenger seat. ‘I just wanted the sympathy vote,’ she said sweetly. ‘The cake is some kind of plastic, but the icing’s real. And the bottom tier holds a dozen small fancies, so job done.’

There followed a discussion on the subject of concealment. The cake might be covered by a car rug, but Moira’s balloons were a different matter.

‘We’ll just have to ruin the lawn again,’ was Lucy’s decision. ‘Drive round to the back of the shed, and take everything in through the kitchen door. I have no other ideas except, perhaps, we might plead insanity.’

‘I am quite sane, thanks,’ David said, a laugh breaking his words.

‘And I’ve no desire to be so,’ added Moira.

Lucy looked at her other half. He had put his foot down again. The hastily arranged party was his idea, since he believed that Simon and Lizzie needed support rather than criticism. ‘If you seem to be against the marriage, you both seem to be against your children,’ he had advised. ‘Don’t push them away. No fuss, just a few fairy lights and a couple of bottles of champagne.’

It had grown from that. They now carried with them half of Marks & Spencer’s food hall, six bottles of Sainsbury’s on-special-offer pink champagne, the crazy cake with bride and groom on top, and thirty uncontrollable balloons. Short of hiring the Dagenham Girl Pipers and the Luton Boys’ Choir, they had done a thorough job.

Once back in the little wooden bungalow, Moira ate her longed-for sandwich while the other two idiots ran round with plates, fairy lights, silver horseshoes, ice buckets, a false wedding cake and a ghetto blaster. They couldn’t find a wedding march in the small collection of CDs, and Lucy expressed the opinion that neither Floyd Cramer’s ‘On the Rebound’, which was hers, nor her sons’ collection of rappers would be suitable. So she settled for Robbie Williams singing ‘Angels’, because it was beautiful.

Once more, she found herself overruled. ‘Play that one second,’ David told Moira, who was to be in charge of music. ‘But first, I think Ronan Keating’s “When You Say Nothing At All” is more suitable. Here it is. There’s a beautiful sadness in ‘Angels’, and the message in the other one is spot on. It’s about love that needs no words.’

‘You’re special,’ announced Moira. He’d left her with Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ and ‘How Do I Live’ by LeAnn Rimes. ‘My Richard would have chosen differently, I’m sure.’

‘David’s perfect.’ Lucy took his hand in hers. ‘Not ashamed of his feminine side, are you, darling? He likes Westlife. Few men would admit to that. I never met a more thoughtful and loony human being. And you’re staying, David. You’re in loco parentis on the male side. I can be stubborn, too.’

‘OK. Now. Where are they?’

‘In bed, if I know anything about my son.’ Moira swallowed the last of her sandwich while the other two pretended not to worry. Her choking fits were dramatic and life-threatening, yet she soldiered on. Only days ago, she had been on a diet that was almost liquid, but she was loth to give up her real grub.

When the swallowing was over, Lucy told her that her son would need to educate Lizzie.

‘No!’ Moira’s eyes were wide. ‘In this day and age? Oh well, never mind. He researched the subject when he was about seventeen. Other boys had mucky mags, but he chose the medical route. I bet he could write his own book about female orgasm. They’ll be all right. They’d better be all right, else I’ll kill him myself.’

‘They’re coming. They look great together.’ David backed away from the window. ‘Get your finger on the button, Moira.’

‘Are we still on about female parts?’ she asked innocently.

Lucy heard their footfalls on the ramp. ‘Cue music,’ she whispered. Then the door opened, she saw her daughter and her son-in-law, and she burst into tears. They were beautiful people.

There was hardly any furniture. Apart from a couple of rugs and a few chairs, the lower storey of Tallows had been stripped of its identity. Lucy wasn’t coming back, then. But someone was living here, and that someone was his daughter, because bits of her were scattered through kitchen and living rooms and even on the staircase. Alan experienced a couple of pangs, as Lizzie was just about the best thing to have happened in this barn of a place. His sons were good lads, but his daughter was special.

For ten or more minutes, he waited and listened. When no one appeared, he returned to the laundry, took a crowbar from behind the dryer, and began to work on the stone-flagged floor. This was where he had kept his stash, emergency money for drinking, gambling, and all other just-in-case occasions that cropped up in the normal run of life. Nowhere near as fit as he had thought, he had difficulty in lifting the slab, but he managed, just about. He dialled the number, opened the floor safe, grabbed what was left, and replaced the flagstone in the nick of time.

‘Who the hell are you?’

Alan clapped a hand to his chest, turned, and saw a tall, blond man in the doorway. ‘I could ask you the same question, because I’ve lived here for over twenty years.’ He shouldn’t have said that. This bloke could be a detective, and Alan needed to stay hidden until Trish had cleared his debts.

‘So you’re Mr Henshaw?’

Alan offered no reply.

‘Simon Turner,’ the young man said. ‘Your daughter’s husband.’

‘What?’

‘Liz and I were married last Wednesday. We told no one, so you’re not the only person left out of the loop.’

Alan staggered and righted himself by leaning against the washing machine. ‘My Lizzie? My little girl?’ The true nature of paternity hit him in that moment. Someone was touching his daughter. Someone had inveigled his way into her heart and into her bed. Had it been one of his lads married, that would have been different. But not his beautiful Lizzie. Her whole life flashed before Alan’s eyes – the child on a beach, running in these gardens, looking at animals in the zoo and at the safari park, spilling ice cream down her clothes, playing Mary in the school nativity at Christmas. ‘You do right by her, or I’ll find you and bloody well kill you.’

Simon nodded thoughtfully. ‘I shan’t steal from her, won’t forge her signature or abuse her in any way. As for you, take care. I’m training in cardio-thoracic surgery, and I can tell you here and now that you need to look after yourself. Open heart procedures are costly and time-consuming, so start respecting your body. For now, just try to calm down. Watch your blood pressure and eat very little saturated fat. Stress is to be avoided, too, so don’t make a rod for your own back by committing any further crimes of fraud.’

Alan gulped audibly. ‘Does my Lizzie know all my sins?’

‘Most of them. But don’t worry, because she’s her mother all over again. They both seem capable of endless forgiveness, though I dare say either or both could be pushed to the edge by lunacy such as yours if it continues. What the bollocks were you thinking of, man?’

It had to be said. ‘I’m an alky. Some days, I didn’t know whether I was coming, going, alive or dead. It’s no excuse, but booze is my master. I still live from one drink to the next, but the difference is that I’m not taking any alcohol. Inside, I’m screaming. But I’m living with somebody who holds me back. And that’s the God’s honest truth.’

They walked into the kitchen and sat one each side of the table.

‘Well, I believe you.’ Simon stared at the vision before him. Alan looked older than his years. Too-rapid weight loss had left him looking rather like a balloon from which half the air had escaped. A man in his forties should have retained some elasticity in his skin, but this one had lived too hard, and he was wrinkled. ‘How’s your liver?’ he asked.