Lies of Tenderness

By Stephen Volk

A woman parks her car outside a fateful, familiar motel. The last giant of Albion finds connection with a soul not long for this world. A lightning-struck man seeks meaning for his longing and loss. 

In this new, startlingly wide-ranging collection, Stephen Volk explores hidden truths and secret wishes, deceit and delusion, the paths not taken, and the pang of dreams unrealised. Proof once again he is "once of the most provocative and unsettling of contemporary writers" – with seventeen tales that break boundaries, and will break your heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781786369864

Book preview

For Nathan Ballingrud

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother:

Marion Mary Volk (1928-2020)

Men think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love. But there are no such circumstances . . . If you feel no love, sit still.

Tolstoy

Resurrection

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What did he learn when he learned of his own black heart? That scared and sacred are but a beat apart.

Christian Wiman

Ten Distillations

A Letter of Introduction

PRIYA SHARMA

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Dear Steve,

I hope this finds you well. I realise I’m taking liberties by addressing you and not your readers. I’m honoured to be asked to write this but also daunted by the task of introducing someone who needs no introduction. So, here’s a letter instead.

It’s been such a difficult period for everyone, hasn’t it? We all have been, and will continue to be, marked by the Covid Years; each with our own losses, anxieties, and isolation.

A few things have helped. A sense of community has never been more important. You once wrote to me of the solitary solidarity of writers. We’d met at cons, but it was only through letters and emails during lockdown that we’ve got to know one another. Your correspondence has been a big part of feeling connected to the writing fellowship. Thank you.

The other thing that’s buoyed me up are stories. If we ever needed proof of how essential they are, we have it now. Your work has been a big part of the long months of lockdown. First came Under a Raven’s Wing. I travelled with it to the Parisian Opera House, to backstreets and catacombs, and diplomats’ salons. It was gothic and thrilling. Fizzing with ideas. Dupin and Holmes made the best of companions and I was sad to turn the final page.

Lies of Tenderness is a different experience again. Each story is meaty and satisfying in its strangeness. My favourite reads aren’t just about escapism. We had a discussion recently about dark fiction being a way to interrogate painful and horrific truths for those of us who find it too distressing to look at them directly. Which is exactly what this book does.

Sicko is a loving tribute to Psycho that keeps Marion firmly centre stage in her flight from the worst kind of men. The Black Cat returns to the Poe territory of Under a Raven’s Wing to confront the racial prejudices of the era. Unchain the Beast is a tale of the artist versus the regime. Tragically, all are themes that are more relevant today than ever.

When violence breaks into our lives it’s unexpected and shocking. We make much of its perpetrators without considering the far-reaching effects of their actions. The Little Gift, a modern Brief Encounter, takes a different and laudable approach to this.

The book varies deliciously in tone and subject. The Flickering Light charts a different sort of loss by bringing genre into the domestic sphere with vivid social observation. I found Agog surprising and charming. He is ancient Briton made large, striding through our history, but it has all the delicacy of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.

I suspect Bad Language will touch many readers. The horror here is more mundane but no less terrible for it. The condition it depicts charts a double bereavement for those with loved ones affected by it. Factoring in Covid has magnified the heartache of it. By 2025 the number of people diagnosed with it will rise to over a million. I’ll say no more here, except that to write our own truths and insight, albeit veiled in fiction, is one of the truest acts of creation.

Each time I think of Lies of Tenderness my personal favourite changes. Right now, it’s The House That Moved Next Door. To make one strange, quiet incident so potent and powerful that it casts such a long shadow through a life speaks to your skill. It’s a story drenched in sunlight and a particular kind of sadness.

I’ve only mentioned some of the stories within and different ones will chime with different readers. I won’t bore or delay them any longer. If they have any sense, they’re flicking ahead, keen to begin.

Keep safe and well, Steve. Keep writing your wonderful work.

Love and best wishes,

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Priya

Wirral, 2021

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Priya Sharma’s short fiction has appeared venues such as Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Tor. She has won three British Fantasy awards and two Shirley Jackson Awards including Best Collection for All the Fabulous Beasts and Best Novella for Ormeshadow.

The Holocaust Crasher

I am a mere mortal, and sometimes less than that.

David Milch

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When you’re my age keeping the pen from shaking is a task and a half, I can tell you. Other than that, writing a line of numbers on your skin in blue Uni-ball felt-tip isn’t all that hard. It doesn’t have to be that meticulous, I remind myself. From what I’ve seen in photographs they weren’t that meticulous at all. Quite slapdash, considering their reputation for meticulous order.

I blow on my forearm. I’ve done a good job, if I do say so myself. Becoming a bit of an expert. My knees creak as I stand up, making me groan. Creaking bones are to be expected at ninety. I’m not going to be covering them up, either. Creaky is good. Poor old chap. What he’s been through. I always think to not be a bit wobbly and a bit fragile would be, well . . . I think, disrespectful.

I have to put on a good effort or there’s no point. I fetch my bowtie—red and spotted, but not garish—and the hall mirror shows me unwelcome jowls overlapping my collar. I take the Star of David badge from the little drawer where my cufflinks reside and pin it to my lapel. I did think of getting one of those little black skull caps, but thought that might smack of overkill. I slap my cheeks with a little cologne. Old and frail is one thing, but I want to be presentable, always. Clean. Dapper. Smart. It’s a special day out. It is for me, anyway.

I look down at my shoes, polished last night after I switched off the TV. That’s when you notice the silence, last thing. Nobody to say goodnight to. Nobody to say goodnight to me.

The doorbell rings. Taxi driver I haven’t seen before. Indian. Sikh. One of those turbaned ones. Nice enough. All smiles. I ask him where did he come from? He says not far. No, I say—where? He says, oh. He says, up the road. Then he says, ah. He says, Huddersfield. I say, I like Huddersfield. He says, It’s all right, aye.

He puts on music as he drives. He says it’s a Bangra mix. Asks if I like Bangra. I say, It’s not Tony Bennett. He laughs like a drain.

I take out a packet of Trebor mints and crunch on a couple, to freshen my mouth and thoughts. Give myself a little pep talk. Run through my lines. Tell myself I’ve done it before and there’s no need to have butterflies. Still, you’re never quite sure how it will go down. Every audience is different.

Presently the school appears, up ahead. Outside it a tall young man—when I say young, forty, forty-five—abbreviated inside his grey suit, hair flapping like a windsock.

Mr Podolski? Derek Hatfull. Pleased to meet you. He releases my hand to pay the driver—twelve pounds from Withinroyd is a bit steep. Waits for a receipt while I take out my handkerchief and blow my nose. The wind is bitter and I thank my lucky stars I don’t have hair to be blown around the way his is.

I take the teacher’s arm and we cross the empty playground to a pair of automatic doors that slide open to reveal a welcoming committee.

He introduces me. Mr Podolski.

Tomasz, please.

Took a while to come up with, but it had a ring to it and rolled off the tongue. Tomasz Podolski. Lot of names in the indexes of the books I went through, of course, so it was a case of doing a bit of a pick and mix.

Tomasz, repeats a woman with a doughy face so overendowed with moles one can’t help envisaging a lengthy game of join the dots. Mrs Oswestry, I’m informed, no first name, though the black woman behind her divulges hers: Star. Like in the heavens.

Would you like a cup of tea in the staff room? There’s plenty of time before . . .

A cup of tea would be wonderful, I say.

• • •

I can’t tell you how pleased we were to receive your generous offer to come in and talk to the students. Mrs Oswestry sits in the low armchair opposite me, leaning forward with her hands clasped. "The Holocaust is part of the syllabus, but there’s nothing, nothing quite like the children hearing . . . well, first-hand testimony."

Absolutely, says Star.

I dedicated a lesson to it yesterday, in preparation, says Derek Hatfull, the one who led me in. "They had lots of questions, naturally. Year seven, I mean. They’re so excited to . . . not excited, I mean . . . He corrects himself. Curious. They’re a very curious bunch. On a good day. Mostly. I think you’ll like them."

Star proffers a kettledrum-sized tin of assorted biscuits. My hand hovers before I pluck out a tentative custard cream.

In any case, thank you so much for your unexpected letter, Mrs Oswestry oozes. What made you think of us, if you don’t mind me asking?

I’ve done a similar thing for other schools in the area, I say, adding a bit of sibilance to the consonants to give the mere hint of a Polish accent not quite ironed out by a Northern one.

It must take so much courage. Having all these terrible memories locked inside . . . Unimaginable, really.

I shrug and stare pensively at the carpet. My suffering is in the past. What’s important is what I have to give the new generation in the future. To light their way, so to speak.

You dear, dear man, says Star, very quietly, a glistening coming to her eyes. I’m going to go in a minute. Sorry. She turns away, fanning her face with her hand.

Well, this is an incredibly valuable thing to do for your community. And it’s an incredibly valuable thing to do for our school, says Mrs Oswestry, clearing her throat, and I catch from the word school for the first time that she’s Liverpudlian. "We are preparing them for the outside world, Mr Podolski. Not just for the world of work, not just passing exams to get jobs, but how to be citizens. How to be good. That is what education is for, at the end of the day."

I nod sagely. Try to do everything sagely, if at all possible.

I quite agree, Derek Hatfull says. Last week, this Muslim lad was out in the playground, and one of these other boys put a football up his jumper and shouted, ‘Look at me! I’m a suicide bomber!’ I said right. Inside. Now. I had to cancel lessons and talk to the class and tell them what was wrong about what they’d done. And Hasan, lovely lad, really upset he was, came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Thank you, sir, for standing up for me.’

I watch Star close the lid of the biscuit tin. I’d been courting hopes for a triangle of shortbread. They don’t understand. Where do they get these ideas? At home? From the telly?

Who knows? But we have to deal with them, says Mrs Oswestry, glancing at her watch, then at me, rising to her feet and straightening her skirt. Right. You’re on, sir. If you’re ready.

I say I am, and lay aside my cup of tea, half-drunk, and half the custard cream.

• • •

I wonder what it looks like to the children. This tiny, pot-bellied man in bottle-bottom glasses towered over by their teachers, who then arrange themselves around the perimeter of the classroom. This grandfather, to them. Great-grandfather, more like, let’s face it.

I gaze out at a sea of faces. Boys. Girls. Aged around eleven, twelve. Mixture of races and creeds. A whole biscuit tin. Are they expectant? Interested? Already bored? Impossible to tell.

This is the very special guest speaker I talked to you about yesterday.

Somebody pours a glass of water. I wet my lips.

We are very honoured indeed that he has come here to talk about his experiences during World War Two—that’s the 1930s and 1940s, long before any of you were born. Now, please remember, your parents have all been notified about this event, but if at any time you get upset by anything Mr Podolski says, just put your hand up and make yourself known to Mrs Oswestry or Miss Beeston or myself, and—

Please. I smile benignly, interrupting Derek Hatfull’s formal introduction. Your teachers think you should be all wrapped up. I make a gesture in the air, encircling them. Protected from hurt. But hurt is life. I hold my tightened fist gently against my heart. "I know that. You know that. I point at them, drawing them into my story with a soft, clear voice. What I am going to be talking about today, boys and girls, is history. Not boring history from books. Not Romans. Not Vikings. Not Henry VIII and his seven wives."

Six! A voice.

Six? I correct myself. Six. I turn to the teachers. I can see this lot are good listeners!

The teachers laugh. Mrs Oswestry clicks her fingers in the direction of a girl distractedly playing with the zip of her pencil case.

For some of us, what you call history has been a part of our lives. We cannot escape it. It is a part of us, and will live with us forever.

I look over at Derek Hatfull and give a miniscule nod of the head. He attends to the controls of the projection system linked to the carousel in which my slides are sitting. The first image comes up on the white board behind me. A grainy black and white photograph from the Warsaw ghetto.

Children. Like you are. You and your sister or brother. Don’t look at their clothes or their terrible haircuts. Look into their eyes. The one with the sticky-out ears. No, it isn’t me. But these are children like I was. Jewish children. Does anybody know what Jewish means?

The children nod.

I indicate to the school teacher to change the slide.

I step to the left so that they can get the full drama of the next image.

Do you know what this picture shows? Does anyone want to guess?

A hand shoots up. A camp.

Does anyone want to guess what sort of camp?

No answer.

"Those words above the gates—Arbeit macht frei—does anyone know what they mean?"

No one does, of course. In my experience, they never do.

"Work sets you free. Do you know who was free in this camp?"

Silence again.

This was a special camp where people were sent if they were undesirable. Do you know what kinds of people might be called undesirable?

A different hand. Homeless people.

Correct.

Disabled people?

Correct. I walk down the aisle between the children’s desks. You see, the people who ran these camps, they decided the country would be better off if certain people could be got rid of. They were a drain on resources. They were scroungers. Taking jobs from good, hard-working people who weren’t foreign or different or funny-looking. What do you think of that? I retrace my footsteps. Wrong, yes. Very wrong. But it happened. I was there. You see, I was one of the people they didn’t want in society. I turn to face them. I was a Jew.

• • •

I tell them how I first spoke to my wife through the wire next to the crematorium at Auschwitz. Always grab them with an image, I feel, and girls in particular respond to a bit of a love story. The boys on the other hand tend to prick up their ears when I say I was delegated the Corpse Unit, having to deal with inmates who flung themselves at the electrified fence.

"I had to drag bodies to a barracks and put them on trucks, until word got round I was a singer, so I was ordered to entertain the Nazi officers in a building called the Cabaret. It wasn’t a case of saying, no, I don’t feel like it. I’d rather watch EastEnders. No. If I refused— kaput, I draw a finger across my throat. You didn’t get a choice."

They listen, spellbound.

My future bride, Anežka Škorvánková, I say, had been amongst the Jewish women to arrive at Auschwitz in March 1942. She was twenty. She came from Slovakia, where she’d studied art. She’d arrived with two thousand unmarried women, first at the sister camp, Birkenau. She could speak German so got a job in the office, and was allowed to move around the camp but not enter the male compound.

I was fifteen, I tell them. I was her toy boy!

The boys and girls like that. They laugh. I have them in the palm of my hand.

Anežka was quiet, refined. No make-up of course. Wore a man’s jacket, but still looked beautiful, I say, smiling fondly at the memory. Not that it was one. We were introduced. Her brother was in the bunk beside me. We fell in love. I fell in love with her. She was slower on the uptake. You know girls.

The children laugh again. I’m winning them over. I have it down to a fine art.

Whenever she had the chance, she’d throw apples and bread over the fence. We promised to meet the same time every week in a secret corner where the machine gun posts couldn’t see us, between crematoriums four and five. Each time we had a conversation we talked our heads off. We didn’t know if it would be our last.

A girl in the front row looks up at me, enraptured. Mesmerised. I find sometimes it’s useful to focus on one person rather than the whole throng, so I focus on her.

Anežka could type. She was brainy. I was a silly boy. We existed under constant stress and danger, but we lived for those short, sweet meetings together. I felt she had chosen me, like an angel from heaven. But don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t all that nice all the time. She told me to brush myself up. Get rid of the stink all over me. I had to explain it was the smell of the crematorium.

I hear Mrs Oswestry take in a sharp breath. And I know I have them too, the teachers. I always do. It’s always that moment when I mention the smell of the crematorium. It never fails. I’m rather proud of myself. All the hours of research paying off. Selecting each meaningful scene, each resonant phrase.

"During those chats we shared our family history. My father was a concert pianist who perished with the rest of my family in the Warsaw ghetto. Anežka loved music, and would hum songs, not too loudly in case the guards heard. Sometimes she’d play an imaginary keyboard on her arm and I’d hear the notes in my head. Around the corner, other prisoners stood watch. They liked the idea of lovebirds in their midst. They’d make a noise like a bird if an SS officer was coming. We knew it wouldn’t last. Death was everywhere—illness, coughing, sickness in the belly, wasting away

. . . It makes you have horrible thoughts, I tell the eleven-year-olds hanging on my every word. One man was dying and I remember thinking, if he dies, I really want his hat. I really would kill to have that thick woollen hat. The nights, you see, were cold as ice. But everyone that died you carried with you. Up here." I tap the side of my head.

My story nears its climax. I’ve timed it to a concise fifty minutes. By 1944, I say, the Nazis were transporting the last of the prisoners on death marches and destroying evidence in their wake. The paperwork was burning, the crematoriums demolished. We guessed that the Soviets must be closing in and the war nearing an end. But what kind of end?

We’d survived more than two years while many didn’t last more than a few months. Anežka and I vowed that if we were separated we would meet again. Nothing but death would stop us.

Romeo and Juliet, you see?

I tell them I was transferred to Dachau in the December, and soon after that sent on a death march. Miraculously, I managed to grab a spade, hit a guard, and ran, hiding overnight in a barn, waking up to the sound of soldiers.

I was terrified they were Russians but it turned out they were British. They adopted me, gave me a machine gun to hold. I said no, I didn’t want it. I’ve seen enough guns and death, thank you very much. I wanted to get out of there. Leave that country.

I was put with all the other orphans, I say. There was a thing called the Central British Fund which meant children could be taken to England. A British officer faked my birth date. Made me out to be twelve instead of fifteen, so that I could be sent with the rest.

We arrived in the Lake District. It was so beautiful after the greyness of the camp. It was like heaven. They called it Windermere. I will never forget it. A psychiatrist looked after us. His name was Frank Doleman. We called him Uncle Frank.

(I have to admit, for this part I relied heavily on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?)

I found out from another survivor that Anežka was still alive. She’d been sent to Ravensbrück and a sub camp in Malchow before being evacuated. She returned to her home town of Bratislava to find her entire family all gone. I immediately went to find her and proposed to her. She looked beautiful in a dress now, not a man’s jacket. I loved her just the same.

I heard Star blow her nose and sniff back tears.

I brought her back to England. Wrote to Uncle Frank, who lived in London now. Invited him to come to the wedding. Said I was sure he would see some old faces. All the orphans would be there. He said he would perhaps come for the reception. He did. He cried. So did I. We had three sons, Anežka and me. Peter, Marek—and Frank.

I might be mistaken, but I think I see a little glint in Mrs Oswestry’s eyes too.

And here I am. Over the years I worked hard to lose my Polish accent, with, as you can hear, not too much success. But what the hell—Polish accent, Leeds accent, Pakistani accent. It is part of who you are. Correct?

Correct, Mrs Oswestry says.

Liverpool accent. Liverpool accent too, there we are.

Birkenhead.

Birkenhead. My apologies. To Birkenhead. I say, taking a last dramatic pause before bringing the curtain down on my talk. "You know why I do this? Tell my story to students in school or to children or at libraries? I’ll tell you why. It’s because there are only a few people left now who remember these things. Fewer of us every year. My Anežka is gone, my friends are gone, but those of us who survive, we have a job to do, and that is the most important thing . . . to remind people, to tell them to our dying breath . . . please, please—never again. Never again."

And that is when I see him.

One of the boys. A sullen-looking article with a myriad of suppurating pimples and the sides of his cylindrical-shaped head shaved to create a tufted parrot effect on top. Staring out of the window, yawning. I’ve noticed him all the way through. Generously, I’d put it down to lack of sleep, the raging hormones of pubescence, or the draining biological consequences of a growth spurt, but now it’s abundantly clear to me by the way he’s displaying a Mersey tunnel full of molars, it’s due to nothing but plain old boredom. The lad has a smirk on his face that tells me he really, really doesn’t give a damn about a word I’ve said. If he’s been listening at all. And when he fidgets in his chair like he can’t wait to leave the room, then leans back at forty-five degrees and addresses a loud sigh to the ceiling, it’s like he’s showing me, and the class, that he begrudges every moment he’s been sitting there with ants in his pants. And I see red, though I don’t show it.

Excuse me. Sir . . . Sir? What’s your name?

The kid straightens his back, not meeting my eyes, annoyed by the inconvenience. Jordan.

Jordan, can I just ask you this, please? How many Jews were exterminated in the concentration camps?

The eyes of his peers swing towards him. Some turn in their chairs.

Jordan shrugs. Five hundred? The embarrassed laughter only serves to embolden the tyke. I dunno. Seven hundred and . . . Sudden precision. . . . Eighty-three?

Jordan, said Derek Hatfull.

I hold up my hand. Don’t worry, I can deal with this.

Six million. I say, then repeat the words, for Jordan and the class, with a raised index finger for emphasis tapping out the four syllables in the air. "Six. Mil-li-on."

Jordan’s eyes roam lazily, anywhere but me, as he slides back, almost horizontal.

Fake news.

I’m shocked. I’m stunned. I can’t believe he’s shrugging off the most devastating episode of human history by parroting those two inane words. I don’t move, but Derek Hatfull makes a bee-line, furious. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast.

No, leave him. Please. Let him speak, I say. I’d like to know what he thinks is ‘fake’ exactly. Does he think eating stale bread, fighting rats for a crust is fake? Hearing your parents weeping at night is fake? Your friends, your school friends, rounded up and taken away, is that fake?

I’m not bothered, am I? Because I wouldn’t be there, would I?

Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?

No, I wouldn’t. The boy doesn’t even have the good manners to look me in the eyes. I’d join the army. I’d be there giving you orders, don’t worry.

Yes, I daresay you would. I feel a redness spreading round the inside of my collar. My brain is throbbing inside my head but I try to keep calm. You’re exactly the type, aren’t you?

Yeah, I am, says Jordan matter-of-factly. And I know your type too. He ignores the sharp bark from his teacher to shut up. "You’re the enemy. You’re a bullshitter. Everybody knows it never happened. It’s all a load of bollocks."

How can such lies have seeped into his young mind? I’m enraged. I walk forward. How can he be like this, after what I’ve said I’ve been through? It’s outrageous.

I lean my knuckles on his desk. My head glides towards his but he doesn’t cower, though he tucks his chin in slightly as if I’m doing something insane and inappropriate by intruding into his space.

Is it? Is it, I say, when Dr Mengele selects you? When he points at you and you are the one strapped to the chair and have your eyeball scooped out with a spoon to see if your twin brother feels the pain? You’d like that, would you?

The smirk, far from undiminished, is triumphant as he jerks his face towards mine. "I don’t have a twin brother, do I?"

That’s enough, Jordan! I’m sorry.

The boy brushes the teacher’s hand briskly off his shoulder before getting up, his chair legs rasping noisily against the floor.

Jordan, you’re a disgrace. You come with me, says Mrs Oswestry, throwing the door of the classroom open so wide it hit a radiator. "Now! Please!"

Her voice cuts through the air but the little beggar stands up to his full runtish height—small for his age—unbowed and unrepentant. He slings his Adidas bag over one shoulder and shuffles out of the room, staring at me now the whole time without breaking eye contact. Even as the beads of sweat break on my forehead I think he is gone but at the door he turns back to give a Nazi salute and click of the heels as a parting shot before the headmistress hauls him off down the corridor, the ripple of titters it engenders hushed by the teachers in no uncertain terms.

• • •

I’m so, so sorry.

The custard creams are out again, but I’m still in a right state, worried I lost my rag and that the other children would have been horrified by what I’d said to the boy. I’m also deeply annoyed with myself. It’s not like me to go off piste like that, but I couldn’t help it. No, it was . . . inexcusable. I . . . I don’t know what—

Don’t apologise, insists Derek Hatfull, bristling and blue chinned. That little shit needed taking down a peg or two. He’s been flying close to the wind for weeks. It’s high time Wendy pulled him in and read him the riot act.

There’s always one, and he’s it, says Star, pointing to my tea cup and non-verbally asking if I wanted a refill. I non-verbally decline.

The male teacher, sitting in the chair earlier occupied by Mrs Oswestry, and leaning forward the same way she did, wears shoes the colour of Cornish pasties with socks that have snowmen on them. Well. Congratulations on a job well done, anyway. I found it fascinating.

And apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, I’m thinking, how did you enjoy the play? But I take the compliment in the spirit in which it is given.

In some . . . some small way, if I’ve . . . I let the thought drift away on the air, trying to forget the final image of the lad in the classroom doorway.

You shouldn’t have to put up with that rubbish, says Star, suddenly striking a pose that is both buxom and sassy.

We’ll talk to him, says Derek Hatfull. "If we thought it would do any good. Talk to the class anyhow. En masse. Explain. In the wider sense. Tolerance-wise. Context-wise. It was good. It was all good, ultimately. I hope you don’t feel disappointed, or that we’ve let you down, at all?"

Me? I say. No!

Good. Because honestly, it made them think. Even the Mengele part.

Even the Mengele part, echoes Star.

"Makes them think. How would they like it?"

How would they like it? Precisely. She places her hand on my knee and wrinkles her nose, just as you might if petting an old and smelly dog that was nearing the end of its time on earth. Empathy.

Empathy, Derek Hatfull chimes back. As if he’s been searching for the word for hours, in a muddy field with a metal detector.

If we don’t have empathy, what do we have? elaborates Star, as in the heavens.

Not much, says Derek Hatfull, of the flighty fringe.

• • •

It has to be said, Asda is reasonably convenient. Two stops and I’m there. Supermarket shopping’s a bit of a chore these days. Can’t pretend it isn’t when you’re my age. What am I saying? Everything’s a chore at my age. When she was alive it was all right. Something to do, to get out of the house. I didn’t mind it then. Pushing the trolley. Didn’t need to have a list. She had it all in her head. Marvel like that, Noreen was. Seemed to always know her way around the place. Up and down, this way to vegetables, over here to fresh meat. Bread. Dairy products—yoghurt, et cetera. Had a food compass in her head, somehow. Never had to backtrack. I’d follow her, Ben-Hur with his chariot, struggling to keep up. She was like a whippet.

I peruse the cans at eye level, using the lower part of my bifocals to assess the labelling. Heinz baked beans with pork sausages. Hello. Haven’t had that in donkey’s years. Into the trolley it goes. Noreen would police such indulgences. Nobody to police me now.

I move to the ice cream and hover over the raspberry ripple, another blast from the past I’ve suddenly got a penchant for. My hand rests on the edge of the freezer. For some peculiar reason I think of the day she died and wonder if she’d felt cold. I hadn’t touched her, see. I was afraid. I know that’s daft. What’s to be fraid of?

It happened in the middle of the night. She’d rolled off into the gap between our two beds and I couldn’t hear her breathing and didn’t want to touch her. In case, like. I rang the neighbour, nice lass with a stutter, trainee dog groomer. I said I thought Noreen was dead, could she come and take a look? She called the doctor and the doctor went up and came down and said I was right. Did I want to go up and see her? I said no. A nice feller came from the undertaker’s in a van. Small white van. A Renault, I think it was. He had a neatly clipped beard and wore a shirt and tie. I thought it was nice he didn’t turn up in a T-shirt and jeans. He’d made an effort. I appreciated that. By the time the sun came up she was gone.

The rest of the day was peculiar. It was the day of 9/11. The World Trade Centre and all that. September 11th, 2001. I put on the TV just to fill the house with some sound and all day it was just that, watching those two buildings collapsing over and over, backwards and forwards in time, folding down into a white dust cloud, then up, intact again, falling down, destroyed, obliterated, then up again, intact. That was what it felt like after she died. I was standing, I was alive, but in reality there was nothing there holding me up. Something had hit me and had crashed me to the ground and it couldn’t be built up again.

All over the news, it was. Endless. People weeping and reporters sticking cameras in their faces, asking how they felt. Nobody was asking how I felt. Nobody was sticking a camera in my face.

Now then, Ernie, I tell myself at the bacon counter. Buck up, lad. Come on. You ray of flaming sunshine. Think about something more cheerful. More school visits, for example.

I tell myself to write a few more letters. Cast my net further afield. Wetherby. Keighley. Pontefract. Wakefield. Dewsbury, perhaps . . . Shouldn’t feel a dent in my confidence after one troublesome little ignoramus. I have to put that well and truly behind me. Think positive. That off the cuff remark about Dr Mengele and his experiments, for instance. Is there something in that? They say the horrible side of history is a real hook for youngsters. Torturing one twin in order to see in the other experience pain could be a really powerful addition to my narrative. I feel quite excited now. Perhaps I can have a twin brother myself? That has interesting potential. Yes. A visit to the library is in order. My old stomping ground. All new faces now, of course. The idea puts a little pep in my step.

Which is eradicated when I see Derek Hatfull stood at the end of the aisle, giving the ready meals the once over. Oh, hell.

I toss the packet of streaky bacon back on the shelf and swing my trolley round, making a sharp turn down the next aisle. This is the last thing I need. Too late.

He raises his eyebrows in recognition.

I raise mine.

I swerve straight to the checkout without a queue and pile my shopping onto the conveyor belt. Shepherd’s pie. Carrots. The can of sausages and beans. Sliced loaf. Clover. The girl gives me a smile like she’s half-cracked or a robot. Asks me if I wanted a bag as she starts putting them through the beeper. I say, no, I have one of my own, thank you. Five pence, she says as if she hasn’t heard me. I say, no, you’re all right, unravelling one from my coat pocket.

Saving the planet, she says.

I say, Pardon?

No, it’s good, she says.

What is? I say.

The school teacher is walking towards me smiling and approaching the tills. Primed to say hello.

Ernie? Ernie Yapp?

My name. Behind me. I go cold.

I don’t know if it feels like a flashback so much as a bullet in my chest. A right rave from the grave it is, certainly.

Standing at the next checkout, the man who said it is staring at me like a lunatic with a George Formby grin. Glasses like triple glazing. Same age as me, wearing a puce V-neck under a shortie jacket and mustard-coloured shirt with a maroon tie. Hands clutching a Zimmer frame, or one of those ones with wheels on, whatever they’re called. And a flat cap—white, of all things. Bugger belongs on a golf course, as far as I can see.

You remember me! Ron Gravel, he says. Lass of about forty beside him, hair piled up, blue smock like a nurse. We were in primary school together!

Ron Gravel. I struggle to see him. I don’t want to see him, but

I do see him. The ten-year-old layered over by the wattle and daub of decades. Ron Gravel! By heck! It’s him without a doubt. Without question.

You remember! Applegarth. Northallerton Grammar. Ernie Yapp! You lived up by the old Pack Horse Bridge.

I look back at the end of the conveyor belt, where Derek Hatfull is arranging his purchases, his cat food, his multigrain cereal, his basmati rice, his Comfort.

I turn back to my own purchases. I’m sorry. I—

’Course you do! Ron Gravel says. You remember! All those evacuees came down from Tyneside and we couldn’t understand a bloody word they said!

No, no. Sorry, I concentrate on filling my plastic bag. I’m not from—

"You do! Those Wellingtons and Halifaxes coming overhead every night, taking off from RAF Leeming. Remember the day that bomber flew low over the school with a trail of black smoke coming out of the back and crash landed into a bungalow up by Castle Hill?"

Sorry, no, I say, even though the picture in my mind is as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. You’ve—you’ve mistaken me for someone else.

No, I haven’t!

Come on, Ronnie, says the nurse, carer, whatever she is.

Ernie Yapp! he says again. As if I didn’t know my own name. Your dad worked at Clapham’s, the furniture shop. Kept thirtyodd rabbits in hutches in the back garden. Used to sell them to the butcher. Your mam used to cure the skin and make them into gloves. Vera, her name was. Made the best Spam sandwiches in—

"No. No! Really! I raise my voice, seeing the teacher earwigging now, head in the air like one of those meerkat things off the telly, so I’m slathering on the Polish accent again, just in case. I—I don’t know you. Please! I have never seen you before in my life."

You what? It’s your old pal Ron! What’s the matter with you? Why are you speaking in that—?

Twenty-eight pounds fifty-six, please. The checkout girl swings the credit card thing towards me.

Siamese twins, we were. He’s coming round to my checkout now, the four legs of his Zimmer contraption blocking my exit. Playing on those tank traps, those big concrete things either end of the High Street, till Gordon Bannister fell off and it got declared off-limits. Hey, d’you remember playing up the becks and ditches? I remember once, your mam boxed your ears once for getting your wellies wet!—wellies!—wet! He chortles.

Look, look. I’m really not—

How long have you been living in Leeds? he’s going. What a coincidence, eh? Bumping into you, here of all places! Well, well. Where d’you live now?

Mr Podolski! (You-know-who trying to get my attention.)

"There! There! You see! My name is Podolski. Thomasz Podolski!" I snatch my credit card and slide it back in my wallet before anyone can see the name on it. The long white tongue of the receipt curls out. I ignore it.

Laurence! Ron’s crooked, monkey-like finger lunges at me, trying to pin me like a butterfly. That was your dad’s name. Thinning on top. Ginger.

Why don’t you leave Mr Podolski alone, goes the school teacher. It’s obvious he doesn’t know you from Adam. Why are you bothering him?

And who are you when you’re at home?asks Ron, not unreasonably, a tremor of Parkinson’s in the hand gripping his Zimmer frame.

Ronnie, that’s enough, says the nurse, carer, whatever.

By now I’ve rammed his Zimmer with my trolley twice, three times, forcing him back, almost upending him, startled, fragile, golfing V-necked busybody that he is, and I circumnavigate the security guard.

I shove my trolley into the snake of other ones, making a grating sound like a shudder down the spine. My fingers fiddle to get my one pound coin back. I look back at my old school chum through the glass covered in posters for special offers, thinking for a passing instant I’d really like to talk to him about old times, old adventures, old games. The scabs we got falling off our bikes. The dams we made that we pelted with rocks. He’s looking forlorn and uncertain of his footing but I can’t be responsible for that. I have to be responsible for me. The school teacher looks like he wants to get past him and looks like he wants to talk to me but I don’t want to hear what he has to say. I don’t want his flaming curiosity. I don’t want his flaming questions.

Ernie! Ernie!

I turn my back and head for the bus stop on the far side of the car park, a hundred yards away. A bus stands waiting. I need to catch it. I need to put those special offers and that rumbling snake of trolleys in my rear view mirror, so to speak. But my knees aren’t up to it. The spirit is willing, but the bones are not. I’m already out of puff and my head is bursting. The plastic bag starts to feel heavy and cuts into my fingers. I see the bus up ahead move away into the traffic. I slow down. It’s no good killing myself. I’ll have to wait for the next one. My shoulders drop.

Mr Podolski! Oh no . . . It’s Derek Hatfull.

Oi!

The bark from a smoker’s windpipe comes from the figure I see striding towards me between parked vehicles. He’s wearing a black Fred Perry T-shirt two sizes too small that he thinks shows off his hours in the gym but doesn’t. His head travels like a cannonball towards me, pink and hairless. I’m backing away already because he has a look on him that reminds me of someone when I was young who came at us with a broom handle because we put a football through his window. He was a nut case and this feller looks like a nut case too.

He stops dead in front of me and I know he’s not going to deliver a polite ticking off. He looks like an unexploded bomb.

He looks over his shoulder and that’s when I see the slovenly Jordan skulking beside a dented Audi, eyes shaded by one hand, school uniform replaced by some shiny, spectacularly graceless sportswear covered in the ugly hieroglyphics of various team logos.

Oi, you! I want to talk to you!

I don’t get far before the two-legged rodent has got me by