‘Where’s Gary?’ Jackson asked, scanning the banks of seats.
‘Gary?’
‘The Gary you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on.’
Without looking up from his phone, Nathan nodded in the direction of the dragon boats where Gary and Kirsty were queuing for tickets.
And the battle is over and the Union Jack is being hoisted. Let’s have a cheer for the good old Union flag!
Jackson cheered along with the rest of the audience. He gave Nathan a friendly nudge and said, ‘Come on, cheer the good old Union flag.’
‘Hurrah,’ Nathan said laconically. Oh, irony, thy name is Nathan Land, Jackson thought. His son had his mother’s surname, it was a source of some contention between Julia and Jackson. To put it mildly. ‘Nathan Land’ to Jackson’s ears sounded like the name of an eighteenth-century financier, the progenitor of a European banking dynasty. ‘Nat Brodie’, on the other hand, sounded like a robust adventurer, someone striking west, following the frontier in search of gold or cattle, loose-moraled women following in his wake. (‘When did you get so fanciful?’ Julia asked. Probably when I met you, Jackson thought.)
‘Can we go now?’ Nathan said, yawning excessively and unselfconsciously.
‘In a minute, when I’ve finished this,’ Jackson said, indicating his ice-cream. Nothing, in Jackson’s opinion, made a grown man look more of a twit than walking around licking an ice-cream cone.
The combatants of the Battle of the River Plate began their lap of honour. The men inside had removed the top part of the boats – like conning towers – and were waving at the crowd.
‘See?’ Jackson said to Nathan. ‘Told you so.’
Nathan rolled his eyes. ‘So you did. Now can we go?’
‘Yeah, well, let’s just check on our Gary.’
Nathan moaned as if he was about to be waterboarded.
‘Suck it up,’ Jackson said cheerfully.
Now that the smallest manned navy in the world was sailing off to its moorings, the park’s dragon boats were coming back out – pedalos in bright primary colours with long necks and big dragon heads, like cartoon versions of Viking longboats. Gary and Kirsty had already mounted their own fiery steed, Gary pedalling heroically out into the middle of the boating lake. Jackson took a couple of photos. When he checked his phone he was pleasantly surprised to find that Nathan had taken a burst – the modern equivalent of the flicker-books of his own childhood – while Jackson was off buying the ice-creams. Gary and Kirsty kissing, puckered up like a pair of puffer fish. ‘Good lad,’ Jackson said to Nathan.
‘Now can we go?’
‘Yes, we can.’
Jackson had been following Gary and Kirsty for several weeks. He had sent enough photographs of them in flagrante to Gary’s wife, Penny, for her to have divorced her husband for adultery several times over, but every time Jackson said to her, ‘I think you’ve got enough evidence now, Mrs Trotter,’ she always said, ‘Just stay on them a bit longer, Mr Brodie.’ Penny Trotter – it was an unfortunate name, Jackson thought. Pig’s trotters. A cheap meal from a butcher. His mother had cooked pig’s feet, the head too. Snout to tail and everything in between, nothing wasted. She was Irish, the memory of famine engraved on her bones, like the scrimshaw he had seen in the museum in Whitby. And, being an Irish mother, of course the men of the family were fed first – in order of age. Next it was his sister’s turn, and then, finally, their mother would sit down with her plate, dining on whatever was left – often nothing more than a couple of potatoes and a drop of gravy. Only Niamh ever noticed this maternal sacrifice. (‘Come on, Ma, have a bit of my meat.’)
There were occasions when Jackson’s sister appeared more vivid to him in death than she had been in life. He did his best to keep the memory of her alive as there was no one else left to tend the flame. Soon she would be snuffed out for eternity. As would he, as would his son, as— (‘For Christ’s sake, Jackson, give it a break,’ Julia said crossly.)
Jackson had begun to wonder if Penny Trotter took some kind of masochistic pleasure in what amounted (almost) to voyeurism. Or did she have an endgame that she wasn’t sharing with Jackson? Perhaps she was simply waiting it out, Penelope hoping Odysseus would find his way home. Nathan had a school project for the holidays about the Odyssey. He didn’t seem to have learned anything, whereas Jackson had learned quite a lot.
Nathan attended a private school (mostly thanks to Julia’s fee for Collier), which was something that Jackson objected to on principle but was secretly relieved by as Nathan’s local comp was a sink school. (‘I can’t decide which you are,’ Julia said, ‘a hypocrite or just a failed ideologue.’ Had she always been so judgemental? That used to be the job of his ex-wife, Josie. When had it become Julia’s?)
Jackson had grown bored with Gary and Kirsty. They were creatures of habit, going out together every Monday and Wednesday evening, in Leeds, where they both worked at the same insurance company. The same pattern: a drink, a meal and then a couple of hours closeted in Kirsty’s tiny modern flat, where Jackson could guess what they were up to without, thank goodness, having to actually witness it. Afterwards Gary drove home to Penny and the brick-built, character-free, semi-detached house they owned in Acomb, a flat suburb of York. Jackson like to think that if he was a married man conducting an illicit affair – something he had never done, hand to God – then it would have been a little more spontaneous, a little less predictable. A little more fun. Hopefully.
Leeds was a long drive over the moors and so Jackson had contracted a helpful youth called Sam Tilling who lived in Harrogate and had been kicking his heels between university and joining the police when Jackson recruited him to do some legwork for him. Sam cheerfully carried out the more tedious assignments – the wine bars, the cocktail lounges and the curry houses where Gary and Kirsty indulged in bridled passion. They occasionally tottered off on a day-trip somewhere. It was Thursday today so they must have bunked off work on account of the good weather. Jackson, with no real evidence, imagined that Gary and Kirsty were the kind of people who would deceive their employers without any qualms.
As Peasholm Park was practically on Jackson’s doorstep, he had chosen to follow them himself today. Plus, it gave him something to do with Nathan, even if Nathan’s preferred default position was to be inside playing Grand Theft Auto on his Xbox or chatting online with his friends. (What on earth did they find to say to each other? They never did anything.) Jackson had tried dragging Nathan (almost literally) up the hundred and ninety-nine steps to the gaunt ruins of Whitby Abbey in a vain attempt to make him understand history. Similarly the museum, a place that Jackson liked for its quirky medley of exhibits, from fossilized crocodiles to whaling memorabilia to the mummified hand of a hanged man. None of that interactive, keep-the-ADHD-kids-amused-no-matter-what stuff. Just a gallimaufry of the past, still in its original Victorian cases – butterflies pinned, birds stuffed, war medals displayed, dolls’ houses open to view. The odds and ends of people’s lives, which, when all was said and done, were the things that mattered, weren’t they?
Jackson was surprised that Nathan wasn’t attracted by the gruesomeness of the mummified hand. ‘The Hand of Glory’ it was called and it carried an elaborate, confusing folktale of gibbets and opportunistic housebreakers. The museum was full, too, of Whitby’s maritime heritage, also of no interest whatsoever to Nathan, and obviously the Captain Cook Museum was a non-starter. Jackson admired Cook. ‘First man to sail round the world,’ he said, trying to engage Nathan’s interest. ‘So?’ he said. (So! How Jackson hated that contemptuous So?) Perhaps his son was right. Perhaps the past was no longer the context for the present. Perhaps none of it mattered any more. Was this how the world would end – not with a bang but a So?