CHAPTER 1
“You down the club on Wednesday, Keith?”

He looked up from his feet, losing enough concentration in the darkness to stumble on the verge.

“Bugger! Why do I always forget to bring a head torch? Who’s on?”

“Jez again. Got a new album out, I hear. I’ll be there; lot simpler now I’m off shifts”

He shrugged, just visible in the darkness.

“I think I’m off. Pen?”

She called from behind us.

“Yes you are. Early turn on the Wednesday, then late on the Thursday”

“Thank you, Secretary Hiatt!”

“Less of that, or it’ll be you driving”

“Sod that you are!”

“But you love me!”

I left them to their teasing, concentrating on my own feet. Three of us, all supposed to be Great Outdoors Explorers, or something like that, and not one of us had thought to bring a light for the walk back from the Village pubs, probably on a mutual assumption about ‘one of the others’. It wasn’t that much further to Sundon Park and their house, so I settled into the last bit of navigation down an unlit country lane while Keith and Penny bounced off each other, their teasing comfortably spiced with long and almost symbiotic familiarity.

My sleeping bag was already laid out on the sofa, part of our familiar ritual. They lived in a redbrick estate on the northern edge of Luton, while my own place was over to its East. While the pubs nearby were pretty dire, each of us had some more rural ones a reasonable walk away, mine being in Cockernhoe and theirs in Sundon Village. When our work patterns allowed, and the two of them weren’t zooming off climbing somewhere, we would use one house as a base and crashpad for the chance of a decent pint and its friends away from the feral nastiness of Luton’s town centre. I will be honest and admit that I never actually slept that well on their sofa, but the company was worth the slightly stiff neck I invariably woke to.

Penny opened the door, grinning as she beat both of us up the stairs to the loo, and Keith just shrugged once more. Dark country lanes and hedgerows had given us ample opportunity to ease that problem, so neither of us was in any hurry. He led the way into the kitchen, and I filled the kettle as he sorted the pot and mugs, and it was a minute before I realised he was still facing away from me. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

“Mike? Can I ask a question? About work?”

He did not sound at all happy.

“Go ahead”

“Farrell. What can I do about them? Both of them are getting worse”

“Ah. Why do you think I put in for that move?”

He turned to face me again, arms wrapped around himself.

“Yes, but you’ve got skills, letters after your name. Me… I mean, Penny’s got the qualifications, I know, but I would feel I was sponging off her if, you know”

He turned back to fill the pot as the kettle clicked off, talking quietly as he worked.

“It’s, well, had a few beers, so probably saying too much. Just that he is such an arsehole, and I don’t know if he’s infectious or what, but the whole mood in that place, I dread going in. And I find myself getting angry, short with people, when there’s no need. That’s not me, mate”

I put a hand out to squeeze his shoulder, and ha laid one of his over mine for a second before finishing with the kettle and pot. Voice still low, he continued.

“Penny’s not happy. For once, I really don’t know what to do”

Sodding hell. I could understand his pain, for Farrell was a particularly unpleasant manager, both of him. It wasn’t the fact that he was bipolar, manic-depressive, whatever the official term then was, but that the personality underpinning both modes was that of a hyena with a bad case of haemorrhoids. Derek Simon Farrell was colloquially known as Doctor Derek and Mister Simes, but there the resemblance to Jekyll and Hyde ended. While Doctor Jekyll was written as a genuinely nice man, both Derek and Simes were simply two cheeks of the previously-described pile-riddled arse.

I really felt for Keith, but there was literally nothing I could do. I had had enough trouble with him myself, and it was only a change of specialism that had moved me away from his management chain. That said, I still had to share the same office complex with him, and sharing the same planet was already bad enough.

My friend dropped the subject as Penny made her appearance along with some cheeky remarks about the tea not being ready in her mug, and the subject of Farrell was dropped. We settled into the chairs in the living room, drank our tea, said our goodnights, and I lay awake half the night in my sleeping bag as my memory brought up wonderful moment after glowing incident of Farrell’s benevolent humanity. The last to play across my closed eyelids was the one where Farrell had bullied one new starter so badly that they had gone to the rest room to write a complaint to their trade union rep, and Farrell had followed them there, taking away the paper they were about to write on as it was ‘property of the business’.

Thank god my own time there was coming to an end in less than a year.

That morning, I left them both sleeping, slipping off after tidying the sofa and closing the front door as quietly as could manage. My Suzi 400 was quiet enough not to disturb them, I hoped, so I made my way through the slowly increasing traffic to my own place, by way of the greasy spoon in the middle of Stopsley village for a traditional fry-up. That triggered a little of my own angst, as I was on my own, and had been for far too long. Penny and Keith would be sorting their breakfast together, and there was I reduced to a cheap café.

I could have cooked my own, of course, keeping a supply of the necessaries in my own fridge, but doing so would simply have reopened my own old wounds. It had always been a joint thing for me and Carolyn, made our own by her insistence that tinned ‘pisgetti’ was preferable to baked beans, and that set of memories would always interfere with my own attempts at a Full English.

Enough, Rhodes. Think nicer thoughts. Think of the move coming up. Now, could I find a house with a cellar, and set up a bouldering cave of my own?

I stopped in the florist’s after I had finished in the café, picking up some flowers to leave with Carolyn before I went to work. When I stopped by her plot, I saw that the grass had been cut recently, and the old blooms cleared away. That left space for my new offering, and I took a few moments to stand in silence by her grave, somehow finding a smile as I thought once more of tinned ‘pisgetti’ and black pudding, and the time she had tried to make laver bread one morning after a day spent picking what she hoped was the right sort of seaweed off a Pembrokeshire beach.

I couldn’t make up my mind when I arrived at work as to who was actually in luck due to both Doctor Derek and Mister Simes being off sick. We were all in luck, of course, those of us on shift or otherwise there, but the mood my visit to Carolyn had stirred up was turning a little dark, and I suspected I might have been rather direct with him, whichever face he were to show. Not. In. The. Mood.

I got through the day, accordingly, rather more easily than I had expected, and then the day’s friends and followers, with the planned evening at the folk club going exactly as I had expected. Jez was as entertaining and as charming as ever, several of the regular female members, plus extra visiting ladies, swooning over him, and none of us bought his new album until after the raffle had been drawn, for the very simple reason that it was one of the prizes.

It was three weeks later that Keith dropped his bombshell, as I parked my bike in the garage for once, noting the absence of their little van.

“Where’s the doss machine, mate?”

“Er, Penny’s got it”

“Oh, right. When’s she due back?”

“Um. She isn’t”

“Sorry?”

“She’s walked out, mate. Gone”