Mum comes in first. She surveys the flat the way she surveys any room. Eyes doing the circuit: bookshelves, records, the cleankitchen, the framed print above the sofa. She registers it, a grown man’s home. A life, maintained, with ironed tea towels and perfect shelves.
‘Lovely,’ she says—the single word carries three stones of subtext.
Dad follows. Sean Carrick is in the doorway of Laurence Haldrey’s flat, arms crossed, before his feet have stopped moving. He doesn’t know how to enter a room without announcing he’d rather leave.
Ron is behind them, hands in pockets. The face is doing its thing. He catches my eye and gives me the look, the one that saysI’m here, I’ll be useful, don’t make me do the talking.
‘Please, come in.’ Laurence. The voice is pitched at a formal-warm tone. He extends himself to my mother first. She greets him.
Dad shakes too. Briefer. The grip of a man completing a contractual obligation. His eyes already—no, on the records. I see them land.
We sit, the lasagna, the serving. The choreography of passing plates in a kitchen too small for five people and too full of the silence that happens when everyone present understands, and nobody’s decided who breaks it.
Mum asks Laurence about the flat. How long has he been here? Whether the tram’s reliable. Safe questions. The kind you can answer without detonating. Laurence answers with the meticulous politeness of someone undergoing a pleasant interrogation, every response slightly too detailed.
Ron eats and compliments the lasagna. ‘The edges are class,’ he says, and I nearly choke on my water.
Dad doesn’t speak. His fork moves. He eats and says nothing. He’s sat at the end of the table with the posture of a man counting the minutes until he can stand without it being rude. Six inches to the left. Always six inches?—
‘Is that a first pressing?’
His voice, out of nowhere. Directed not at the table, not at me, not at the six-inch void. At the shelf behind Laurence’s head.
Laurence turns. ‘Sorry?’
‘The Floyd.’ Dad nods at the records. His arms have uncrossed. The first time I’ve seen Sean Carrick’s arms uncrossed in a social setting. ‘Dark Side of the Moon. That sleeve.’
Laurence looks at the record. Looks at my father. Something recalibrates behind his glasses.
‘It is. I found it in a charity shop in Lancaster. Five pounds.’
‘Five pounds.’ Dad’s voice. The flatness cracking, a first pressing. Five pounds. He’s outraged on behalf of the universe. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘The inner sleeve’s a bit?—’
‘Doesn’t matter. The vinyl’s the thing. The posters, they include the posters?’
‘Both of them.’
Dad stands, a movement towards instead of away. He crosses to the shelf.
His hands—calloused, builder’s hands, the hands that have avoided touching anything in this flat until now—reach for the sleeve with a gentleness I’ve only ever seen when he held my mother’s hand.
He turns it over and reads the back. Runs his thumb along the edge.
Laurence stands too. They’re side by side. Two men looking at the same object.
‘I’ve gotWish You Were Here,’ Dad says. ‘Original pressing. My father’s.’
‘That’s the better album.’
Dad looks at him. Direct. His eyes are where his attention is. The six-inch displacement is gone.
‘You think so?’
‘The sequencing.’ Laurence nods towards the sleeve. ‘“Welcome to the Machine” into “Have a Cigar”. That transition’s architecture.’
Dad turns the record over again, considering that. Like Laurence has answered correctly in a language he respects.
