This is the Life. Alex Shearer

we’d keep in touch, though I doubted that we would and I believe she doubted that too.

      The last I saw of her was in the rear-view mirror, her and her little dog watching me drive away.

      I hadn’t said a word to her about Louis’ version of events; I’d felt it would have been impolite to mention this contradictory story. But I did wonder which version was true. And I also wondered why she had even mentioned the incident. Did she know that I knew something and she wanted to put me right? Or had she really slept with Louis, but was embarrassed about it, because of his paint-splattered clothes and his torn shorts and his creased T-shirt and his untrimmed beard and his not having been under a hot shower in ten years?

      And if her version was the true version, then why had Louis told me a different one? Had it been a tale of wish fulfilment? But he hadn’t needed to tell me a single thing about it. If she’d turned him down, he could have kept quiet about that. Only the two of them need ever have known.

      So where does the truth lie, and does it really matter?

      But I liked Terri. She seemed like a good person to me. Good and kind and generous – someone who’d had a hard life but had come through without cynicism and with her values intact. And she said some nice things at the funeral service, and she didn’t have to.

      So what the hell. What you are supposed to do anyway, with all the fathomless stories that you’ll never get to the bottom of, and all the contradictions? People’s lives seem like entangled balls of string, with a thousand knots in them. You’ll never unpick them all. The best you can do is just carry on and forget about it. You could drive yourself nuts if you brooded over it. And what good would that do anyone? Least of all yourself.

       5

       BABIES

      Back in my juvenile delinquent days I had been apprehended for tearing the leaves off a rhododendron bush, but had given a false name and address, so the cops had come looking for me and stopped the school bus on the way home into town. I guess I must have been the only person on board who looked guilty, so they said it was me, which it was, but I denied it, and they escorted me off the bus to the police station across the road.

      I used to try to sit on the long back seat of the bus with the trouble-makers and no-hopers and those who had aspirations to play the electric guitar but who would probably end up working behind a counter.

      Seeing me being taken away, Louis – who was a respectable pillar of society back then, with a prefect’s badge and high status as deputy head boy – got off the bus too and accompanied me to the station.

      When news got to the school the next day, they said they would expel me for what I had done to the bush, as it was plain I was a bad lot and a corrupting influence and heading for the pan.

      Louis went to the headmaster’s door and knocked on it and requested an interview, during the course of which he relayed the fact that if I got kicked out, he would leave too, and they didn’t want to lose him, so we both stayed.

      I should have been grateful, I suppose, but I wasn’t particularly, as I hated the place and left anyway after a couple of months. But I appreciated his loyalty, as we hadn’t been getting on back then and fought constantly. Once he tried to break a beer glass over my head and told me I treated home like a hotel. I told him it was a pretty poor hotel and not what I was used to – which was a lie, as I’d known nothing else. After that I tried to hit him over his head with a cricket bat, but he was too quick for me. But apart from small skirmishes like that, we got on fairly well.

      At one time though, Louis had a religious period and our mother started panicking when he let it be known that he felt he maybe had a vocation and would one day become a priest. Our mother went straight to church and prayed that such a thing should never happen, and God, being bountiful, let that particular cup of woe pass to someone else.

      All the same, Louis took possession of the high moral ground and defended it staunchly for several months. When he came across the James Bond paperback I was reading he tore it up and binned it and said reading it was a sin.

      I had to tell him that it wasn’t even my book, I’d been loaned it, and it was none of his damned business what I read as I would read whatever I liked and he could go and screw himself and he’d better get me another copy soon as I was due to return the book to the boy I’d borrowed it from.

      Give him his due, he bought a replacement, but he said I wasn’t to look inside it, I was to hand it back and no peeking.

      When he was out of the way I read the rest and finished the novel. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, unless it was the heavy smoking.

      But that was Louis for you back in those days, always ready with the judgements and the moral tone, but then he mellowed a little in later life and said the school was a nest of hypocrites after it came to light that half of the Reverend Fathers were now standing accused in their retirement of fiddling with little boys.

      All the same we had a big row once that set the tone for the remainder of our relationship when Louis told me that as soon as he got the chance he was going to move abroad and head for another country so as to get away from me. And that was just what he did – though whether I was the prime mover in this or just another incidental annoyance he wanted to get away from I’m unsure. I suspect the latter and bear no hard feelings because if he was pleased to go, I was also relieved he was gone, as it meant I could read my books in peace without the censor looking over my shoulder.

      The first place Louis went to was Canada. He got his chemistry degree and then went to Alberta to study for an MSc and teach undergraduates. He met a girl there called Chancelle who had a brain the size of his or maybe even bigger and they both studied chemistry and had a lot of sex, according to Louis, and no doubt some intellectual conversations afterwards. They soon moved in together.

      Chancelle was French Canadian and her family supported a free and separate Quebec. They wouldn’t speak English to you and made out that they didn’t know any, though they did and spoke it like natives when people weren’t looking. Louis had to learn some French or they’d have left him out of all the conversations. He got quite fluent as far as I know, though he spoke it with a Canadian accent.

      But things went to pot after a few years. Louis got his degree and went to work for a mining company out in the sticks. Chancelle got more deeply involved in French Canadian politics and she and Louis only saw each other at weekends. She began an affair with another French Canadian who was also active on the political front (and, no doubt, the sexual one) and spoke better French than Louis did.

      Louis got disillusioned and disgusted and came back home. Like most academically-inclined people who don’t know what to do with themselves, he decided to return to university. So he studied for an engineering diploma this time, and when he got it, he moved up north and worked in a straight and proper job for a while, but he got disillusioned and disgusted, as they didn’t know how to run a business and there was too much politics and the senior management were wankers.

      So he took his savings and bought a narrow boat and sailed it down the canal and moored it in the harbour half a mile from the flat I lived in with a woman I had fallen in love with, on account – amongst other things – of her Scottish accent. The trouble was she was an artist, and her friends were artists, and Louis lived on a boat now, and he got into craft and furniture making and rented a small workshop by the docks. So everyone was a bohemian apart from me, and I had to get up on Monday mornings and go to work, as I was the one paying the rent.

      This narrow boat was the first of Louis’ wrecks. It needed so much work done to it, it would have been easier to start from scratch and build a new one. It had once been a fire boat on the Birmingham canal. Its engine was situated in the middle of the boat, instead of one of the ends, which is more usual, and it had two drive shafts, so that the boat could go in either direction without the need to turn it around – which