Shane rubs at his eyes and exhales loudly and finally regards me with a look of resignation. ‘Okay then, if you’re sure.’
‘I am sure. I’m sorry.’
His mouth twists and I see that his eyes are wet. ‘Fine,’ he murmurs. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter about Huddersfield, does it? It’s not as if Ravi will ever know.’
32
SHANE
The stupidest man in Britain is driving south at a steady 60 mph. The biggest twat in the known universe is telling himself that it’s okay, it was her choice – and Josie knows her own mind.
It was bound to be a one-off, he’d decided, when he’d woken up with her snuggled close, her arm flopped across his chest. They’d had a ton of booze, and she’d literally just broken up with her boyfriend. She was upset, her emotions running high. That’s why – thrillingly – she’d grabbed him and kissed him like he’d never been kissed in his life.
Last night had been incredible. For a short while this morning Shane had lain there in the Love Heart bed, replaying it all in his mind like a wonderful dream you don’t want to fade from your consciousness just yet. But then had come the wake-up call: his son phoning him on the actual telephone. What terrible thing had happened? Who was injured or dead? Ryan despises making phone calls, and avoids them at all costs. Shane would be no less shocked to see him writing a cheque, or expressing enthusiasm over broccoli. So it had to be something major.
In fact, it turned out that all he’d wanted was a moan about Rich Tony establishing a ‘Rota of Responsibilities’ in their home, with stickers awarded for goals achieved. Shane gets it that, at sixteen, Ryan no more wants a sticker than a Thomas the Tank Engine pencil case. But he couldn’t understand what he expected him to do about it at 8.15 a.m. from a hotel in Pontefract.
So all of that had rattled Shane. Then he’d had to switch from dad stuff back to the scenario with Josie. He didn’t want her to feel awkward, or feel she had to explain anything to him (‘Look, Shane, that was lovely but…’). Pre-empt it, his stupid brain had urged him. Tell her you understand it was just a drunken thing in the heat of the moment, and that you’re fine with that.
Obviously, that went brilliantly.
As Doris’s engine acquires a new, higher pitch, as if mocking him, Shane tries to shake off the terrible feeling that he’s screwed everything up. As a distraction, he makes a concerted effort to focus on shop matters instead. What’s been happening there, he wonders? He’s barely been in touch with Fletch, as his mind has been very much elsewhere. However, these days, Back Alley Music is where he tends to feel at his most content. It had seemed like an impossible goal, at one time – to build a music-related business. He’d done years of session playing and teaching drumming, supplemented by a ton of bar work, but he’d known he couldn’t keep doing that forever. Aside from the financial peril that engulfs him sporadically, things have turned out pretty well.
Only they haven’t really, have they? Never mind the shop. Never mind sourcing an elusive brand of strings for a banjo orchestra in Bristol. What about his personal life? His relationships and his family – the things that really matter?
He stops at a service station for a coffee and sandwich and wonders if he should message Josie. But what would he say? If she couldn’t even bear to travel back to London with him, will she really want to be pestered by him now?
Maybe it’s him, Shane reflects as he climbs back into the ambulance. When he and Fletch set up the shop, working all hours in order to refit the place and set up the website, he’d still been with Paula. Back then, he hadn’t even realised anything was wrong. The kids were great – still at that age when they were generally happy and relatively uncomplicated and thrilled about the shop. In school holidays they’d loved to hang about there and ‘help.’ Liv played drums and Ryan played guitar. Music was a thing he had with his kids, something that bonded the three of them.
Had Paula felt excluded? He had no idea. So when it all came out – that she had a keen interest of her own – he was blindsided.
‘I’ve met someone,’ she announced one bleak, wet afternoon just after Christmas.
He stared at her. ‘What d’you mean?’ Of course, he realised she didn’t mean, ‘I met Mrs Lamar in the street, she wonders if you could help her drag her old mattress out for the council collection?’ Nor did she mean she’d ‘met’ someone who might invest in the home storage business she’d set up with a friend. In fact, she didn’t mean ‘met’ at all but was sleeping with.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tears spilling from her big brown eyes. ‘I’ve dreaded telling you. I don’t know what else to say.’
They were standing face to face in the living room. The kids were out, thank God. ‘So… you mean this person, this person you’ve met…’ Shane broke off. He knew what he wanted to ask – what he needed to know – but he was finding it hard to place the words in the right order. ‘Does this mean you’re… with him?’ he choked out. ‘You mean, you want to be with him and not me?’
Paula nodded. Tears continued to stream down her cheeks without dislodging her make-up. ‘Yes, I do. I’m sorry, Shane. I really am.’
‘But… why?’ He stared at her.
She wiped her face briskly, and seemed to click into a business-like manner, as if faced with a particular challenge in the home storage arena. A request for a foldable hanging system for a child’s room that could be reconfigured as they grew older, perhaps? Jolly butterfly motifs, attachable by Velcro, that could be switched for more sophisticated adornments as their tastes changed? In his reeling shock, Shane found himself picturing that storage system – and Paula demonstrating how to assemble it – and had to haul himself back to the matter in hand.
Following her announcement, Paula explained, curiously dry-eyed now, that their life together had taken so much out of her, she had ‘nothing left to give’. All those years of trying for a baby and then finally going through IVF, resulting in their much-wanted baby girl. Then – miraculously – Ryan being conceived naturally and born when Paula was forty-one. Did Shane have any idea what that had been like for her? Being an older mother?
Not that old! he’d wanted to protest, but a rare flash of common sense had told him to keep his mouth shut.
Further details were spilled. The ‘someone-she’d-met’ wasn’t Rich Tony (he came along later) but a man she’d got to know through her business. A man called Marcus who’d wanted a bespoke system for his headquarters. ‘Honestly, Shane, it was a professional relationship until—’ Until they’d taken their clothes off, presumably.
He’d grilled Paula some more about how long it had been going on, aware of the life they’d built falling away from him. All that history they shared – together since they were twenty, after the band had imploded and Josie had run off (that’s how he’d viewed it. Shortly after the terrible end to their tour, he’d heard that she and Dale Watson were an item, and next thing they’d moved to London).
All he could do was leave the room, and their family home, and climb into his car and drive, drive, drive, finally ending up at the shop which was still closed for the festive season. He’d let himself in and then gone to the pub – a grimy old boozer down the road – and got royally pissed. Early next morning, he’d woken up in the shop, lying on the scratchy carpet behind the counter. Well, he thought as he hobbled outside to put the A-frame shop sign in the street, I handled that maturely.
He was fifty-one years old, and a father of two, and nothing would ever be the same for his children again. It wouldn’t be the way he’d dreamed of and had wanted with every cell of his being from the moment Liv, and then Ryan were born.
Shane hadn’t expected perfection. He realised that raising a family would be hard. But he’d known, more strongly than he’d ever known anything, that he’d wanted the very opposite from the family life he’d experienced with his mum and Pete. Warmth and kindness where what really mattered, he’d decided. From out of nowhere, a scene had popped into his mind: when Pete overheard Shane asking his mum if she’d buy him a hot-water bottle. What does he think this is? The fucking Ritz? Shane hadn’t even known what the Ritz was, but he deduced that it was posh – like the salty crackers.
