This is the Life. Alex Shearer

hang out and show the passers-by your tattoos.

      ‘Louis,’ I said. ‘I just got a phone call. It’s Chancelle and she’s landed at Heathrow and she’s coming down here to have your babies.’

      Louis looked panic-stricken.

      ‘She’s coming here?’

      ‘Right now. Even as we speak she’s on the bus and throwing her birth-control devices out of the window.’

      ‘Jesus,’ Louis said.

      ‘What do you want me to say?’

      ‘I’m going to have to go,’ Louis said. And he went on board his boat and started packing a bag. He had bought an old rusty car by now. He got it cheap as it had three hundred thousand miles on the clock.

      ‘Louis,’ I said, following him. ‘You can’t just disappear and leave me to deal with her. What am I going to say? She wants to have your babies.’

      ‘Well, I don’t want to have her babies.’

      ‘You what?’

      He threw a grey towel into a bag.

      ‘That is I don’t want her to have mine. I haven’t heard from her in years. She’s crazy.’

      ‘I guess the separatist politics must have gone wrong.’

      ‘I’m not seeing her.’

      ‘Louis, where are you going?’

      ‘Walking,’ he said. ‘In Wales.’

      ‘Louis,’ I said. ‘You can’t just run off and disappear and leave me to deal with a woman who’s travelled six thousand miles or however far it is to have your babies.’

      ‘Watch me.’

      ‘Louis, it isn’t fair.’

      He paused in packing his bag.

      ‘Remember the school bus? When you got arrested?’

      ‘Maybe, Louis. But who’s the delinquent now?’

      ‘Blood’s thicker,’ he said.

      ‘Louis—’

      ‘It’s your turn to do me a favour,’ he said.

      ‘Louis, I’ve done you favours. You’ve spent the whole winter in front of my portable gas fire and my girlfriend sewed your trousers up.’

      He zipped the holdall and squared up to me. He was no taller than I was, but he was a stone or two heavier, and it wasn’t fat, it was muscle. Though when it came to a fight we were fairly equal, for though he was the stronger, I was the more desperate man. I think I had discovered that when we were children. And the reason I was more desperate and fought more ferociously was because I knew I was the weaker.

      ‘It’s little to ask from your only brother. It’s little to ask. I’d do it for you.’

      ‘You wouldn’t, Louis. You’d tell me to face up to my responsibilities.’

      ‘I’m going walking in the Black Mountains,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back Thursday or when she’s gone, whichever is the sooner. I’ll call.’ He hustled me out of the boat and locked it. Then he had a thought.

      ‘You want to come with me?’ he said. ‘You like walking, don’t you?’

      ‘Louis, I have to go to work. And how come you can take time off?’

      ‘They owe me holidays.’

      ‘Louis, what am I going to say to Chancelle about your babies?’

      ‘Tell her I had a vasectomy.’

      And off he went. He had a little trouble getting the car started and almost suffocated the both of us with all the black smoke. But that was Louis for you – Louis and his vehicles. If they didn’t burn oil and belch out fumes and break down regularly, he wouldn’t buy them.

      Chancelle turned up that evening and was nigh inconsolable. She had put on a lot of weight and looked as though she were expecting babies already, quite a few of them, or at the very least twins.

      She sat and sobbed and sobbed, but I had to be hard and I told her it was over and there was nothing anyone could do, as Louis had gone off to the Black Mountains and he didn’t want to have babies with her at any price.

      Iona held her hand and I made some tea and then we sent out for a pizza. She stayed the night on the sofa, and when I explained that Louis had spent the winter there, she seemed comforted slightly.

      The next morning she got a bus to London and that was the last we saw or heard of her.

      Louis rang the following evening and asked if it was safe to come home.

      ‘Louis,’ I said, ‘when you say “home”, where do you mean exactly?’

      ‘Where the heart is,’ he said.

      He could throw me like that sometimes by coming out with the completely unexpected.

      ‘I’ve met someone,’ he said. ‘With blonde hair.’

      ‘What? In the Black Mountains?’

      ‘She’s a backpacker from New Zealand. I’ve invited her to stay on my boat for a while.’

      ‘I hope she doesn’t feel the cold then, Louis.’

      ‘No way,’ he said. ‘We’re tough.’

       6

       OLD BLACK DOG

      It’s easy to think that you know where and when the rot started. With the so-called benefit of hindsight. Always presuming it is a benefit and not the opposite, some kind of handicap or millstone thing around your neck.

      I was eleven years old and Louis was twelve and our father was dying upstairs in a room we were no longer allowed to enter on the grounds that he wanted us to remember him as he was. The flaw in this prohibition was that he hadn’t looked so great the last time we had seen him, and if I had to remember him in that condition, then I could equally have remembered him in his last few days and been no more the traumatised.

      He’d been suffering from lung cancer due to twenty to thirty a day hand-rolled for years and years.

      Whenever I see these tobacco company executives in their nice suits and white shirts and sober ties, as they make their justifications and announce their profits and explain how they are opening up fresh markets in the new world, I think the sons-of-bitches should be boiled in oil for all the suffering they have caused. And I wonder if they smoke, or if they would want their own children to smoke, and I firmly believe it’s the last thing they would want, to find their own offspring hanging out of the bathroom window with cigarettes in their mouths.

      Anyway, he spent his last few weeks getting increasingly yellow and burning holes in the sheets to our mother’s fear and dismay, for he carried on smoking right to the bitter end – and it was bitter. She was afraid he’d set fire to the bed and the whole place would go up, and then we’d all die of smoke inhalation together.

      So it wasn’t a question of if, just when. And I came home from school one afternoon to find Louis waiting at the back of the house. For the front door was a thing we never used except for visitors, or when the police came round to talk about the rhododendron bush.

      Louis had been waiting for me to return, for though we were at the same school, we were in different classes, and he always took the high road home, whereas I took the low road, with its many distractions, and so I rarely got back before him.

      ‘He’s dead,’ Louis told me.

      I