Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

long forgotten when he’d first twigged that Merrick might be staying away on purpose on these afternoons. Or when the idea of Jimmy’s coming back and catching them at it had become just an idea, a game, that added a little spice to proceedings. Nor did he need to have Luke sitting outside, to sound the alert if necessary. He just took Luke for the company. And Luke knew that too.
    And then there was no Luke anyway.
    But they’d kept up their pattern: first the bedroom, quickish, then the kitchen. Which naturally began to wane in excitement, even sometimes in satisfaction. There was a period during the cattle disease when it acquired a new adventurousness by the banning of even human movement between farms—something that generally shouldn’t have troubled the Merricks and Luxtons. Jack had let it pass for a week or two, and then thought, Hang it, and made the traditional journey (would there be government helicopters spying on him?), and found that he was greeted with some of the old fervour from the days when they could at least kid themselves they were doing something forbidden. One good effect of the cow disease.
    But mostly Jack had begun to feel that these visits, though he couldn’t do without them (what else did he have?), had become just a little humiliating. Maybe Ellie felt the same. Though she’d never said, ‘Don’t bother, Jack.’ (What else did
she
have?) Jack even felt that his inexorable traipsings over to Westcott Farm represented the final triumph, so far as it went and after so many years of its being the other way round, of the Merricks over the Luxtons. It might be his dad who was going down the harder now, but didn’t his son’s situation only clinch it?
    When old Merrick contrived to bump into him, in that supposedly unplanned way, on his returns to Jebb, there’d be an extra gleam, Jack thought, in the old bugger’s eye. Or it was an extra nip, perhaps, of whatever it was he took. And the gleam seemed to be saying: Well, boy, your dad might be suffering, and so am I, and those cows might have been up against it too, but who’s got the shortest straw, boysyboy, of all?
    They wouldn’t linger now when they met each other like that. Jimmy would just stop, stick his head through the window of the Land Rover, pucker up his face and say a few words, or just twinkle under the brambly eyebrows, and lurch off.
    For some reason, if only because Jimmy was Ellie’s father, Jack couldn’t help liking the little pixy-faced bastard. And, once upon a time, those interludes when he’d trundle back after seeing Ellie—whether old Merrick appeared over the horizon or not—had simply been some of the better moments of his life.
    He still thinks it now. Still sees himself rolling a cigarette, with just one finger crooked round the wheel of the jolting pick-up, as if it would know anyway how tosteer him home. Sometimes, even if old Merrick didn’t appear, he’d stop, all the same, on the Luxton side of the boundary, just to take in the view. Something he never did otherwise. To breathe the air. He’d get out and stand with his back against the pick-up, one Wellington boot crossed over the other, one elbow cupped in one hand, ciggy on the go. The breeze riffling through the grass. And Luke, still alive then, lolloped by his feet, ears riffled too. And Tom just a nipper. Just a baby really.
    A sense, for a moment, of simply commanding everything he saw, of not needing to be anywhere else.
    ‘I wouldn’t bother, Jack.’ She’d never actually said it. Though she’d sometimes said, at dullish moments, as if to make him feel he had rivals or he was just some stopgap (had been all those years?) that what she was doing was waiting for her ‘mystery man’ to turn up, her mystery man who’d also in some way be her real man, like the mystery man who’d been real enough once for her mum to be persuaded to run off with him. That wasn’t ‘Uncle Tony’, that was someone before. Even his name seemed a