Extract taken from The Old Haunts
By Allan Radcliffe
Published by Fairlight Books

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 almost 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. 

The Old Haunts by Allan Radcliffe is published by Fairlight Books, priced £7.99.