CHRISSY
She took a sip of wine, glancing at Lexie, before adding, “And we haven’t finished explaining that to him”

That was a side of Blondie I had met before, but nowhere near as hard, when she had nicked my lovely uncle, and I wondered what Forbes had seen. I was guessing it wouldn’t have been heavy on the blondeness.

My phone bounced in my pocket as a text came in. Right.

“Anth?”

“Aye, pet? That’s your food. Just coming over”

“Not that, but ta. We’re going to need another four chairs. Sorry!”

I looked round at some very curious faces, and simply gave them a wide-armed, palms-up shrug.

“So I know people! Is it a crime?”

Neil looked worried.

“Who is it, Chrissy?”

“Nobody to worry about, Neil. Just some who offered, and I thought, we thought, they’d be good for the mix. Debbie?”

“Yes?”

“Could you let us know who, why, the girls? Just curious; not a prob if they want a bit of privacy”

DEBBIE
I had been expecting something like that, mainly because it was a question I had been asking myself from the moment I had decided to bring them along.

“Not going to be a short answer, Chrissy”

“I’m not going to starve, obviously, and I have a---oh, it’s gone. Would someone mind grabbing me another of those IPAs? They seem to have a very short half-life”

I slipped Clara a tenner, and nodded to the bar, and she took the hint, as I composed my words. Odd; I realised I wouldn’t just be explaining to the musician, but to myself.

“This place, girl, it’s a special part of my life. The actual site we’re going to visit, as well as another I asked Neil to take some photos at”

Neil jerked again.

“I have a package, colour and monochrome, plus digital back-ups I can show you when I upload them to my laptop, but I’ve been here and eating, and then Chrissy rang me, so I haven’t had time yet”

Clara was back with the pint for Chrissy, and as she set it down, she simply looked directly at the man and spoke his name, before blushing.

“Sorry… Just Neil, yeah? He said that’s what Maddy would do when he was looping. Sorry. Not my place”

Neil just reached across to squeeze her hand, and she sat down, still pink in the face. Right, Petrie.

“I lost my parents here when I was young, and that was sort of how Neil and I met. There was another woman, though, who pulled me out of a very deep hole. She gave me all sorts of reasons to keep going, and then she did the same for my girls. Kim, Cathy and Nell here, they are, well, Pat should have been with me when my sister and I set Mam and Dad free, but she’s gone, so these three are representing her”

I looked across at Clara, her blush subsiding.

“Neil?”

“Yes?”

“Mike Rhodes and his family. They see you as a part of it, don’t they? No crap, please. We all know that. Lexie and Candice there, they know it. Clara here, she is worming her way into that same family, so, well, see her as a sort of Rhodes-representative. She can tell them how it went, better than I can---ah!”

I rose to greet the four new arrivals, and by god were they welcome ones. Chrissy was smiling now.

“I think you all know each other?”

Alys was wrapped around Neil, her wife hugging Lexie, so of course I had to do the same to the tall redhead and her husband.

“Have you come to play for us, Steph?”

“I think that’s the general idea for later, but right now we’ve actually come for a pint and some munchies, in that particular order. Um… Yes, I think I know everyone, at least by sight. What are you eating, Ms Morgan?”

“Venison and wild mushrooms on defleshed panhagglety”

I couldn’t hold a laugh back just then, so of course I had to explain.

“Mam and Dad had a friend, Northumberland farmer, from Druridge Bay. We’d stay there for part of the Summer, and he always had something local for us, and pernackity, panhagglety, whatever, that was one of them, Yes, Nell, that Graham. Anyway, one of the things he showed me was stotty, and we used to do a rally up this way, bike rally, called the Hairy Stotty. It was Mam who explained it, in the end”

It was actually enlightening to see the reactions, from confusion to amusement via acute embarrassment. I added the words, “As in Hairy Pie”, and a couple of faces slipped from ‘confused’ to ‘pink’, including Neil’s.

Enfys coughed, trying to move her own expression from the pink zone.

“Alys and me, we’ve been up here as well. Her Dad does photography as well—yes, Neil?”

“He doesn’t do it the way I do. He does views, things for postcards and coffee table books. I do details. Maddy did art, and components”

Cathy called out, “Like that Poucher man? Not the components, whatever, but the views?”

Neil just nodded, clearly trying to hold his words back, but then slipped the leash a little.

“Yes. Poucher did good landscapes, but with too many false colours. When Maddy did components, they were for catalogues, all lit the same, hundreds and hundreds, and she said it was very boring, but…”

I was watching him carefully just then, for I had seen a hand start to tremble.

“It was sort of how we got together. Not the components, the art. Silhouettes. Maddy. Naked… Sorry. This is hard to say, for me. Maddy taught me many things, and, oh. Is this what they call a wake? Where we speak of the dead?”

I felt a hand on my arm, and it was Rosie’s.

“It can be, Neil. Debbie and me, we both know about losing people. If you want to talk, we can listen. Frank? Here’s my card; get a round in. Red, get your food ordered. Let’s do this properly, and it’s for all three people, okay?”

I began, once all plates and glasses were adequately replenished or delivered.

“I was a runaway, from an abusive care home. I was twelve. I know what Shrewsbury means to Steph there, and I suppose Clara as well now, but it was where I met my Mam and Dad…”

I left a few things out, especially any reference to our dear, lost Carl, but I made sure they got as much of the good stuff about Mam and Dad, as well as Pat, as I could fit in without speaking all night. Steph looked up from the plate she was clearing one-handed, the other being held by her man.

“I sort of come into some of this, with Pat, that is. Short form: I was in a bad place. I got very drunk, all the time. I was going to walk a long way, uphill, on a snowy Winter night, but someone cared, cared for a stranger, and gave me a lift. Pat and Debbie, it was. That was a moment I could very well have died, so if we are speaking of good people we have lost, I think she counts as one of mine”

I squeezed her forearm.

“We met you properly later, love. You were there for her when, you know”

Enfys made a funny noise, that I realised was a stifled sob.

“Popular woman, she was. I was there… Ah, the doctor, he asked us all to stay aboard the chopper till he had a chance, a bit of sensitivity, ah?”

Really?

“I hadn’t realised you were there that day. Enfys”

“You were a bit distracted, obviously. We could see you had more than enough family around you, and we had the time. Neil?”

“Yes?”

“This was supposed to be a day for Maddy. Do you mind us talking about other people?”

He stared at his hands for half a minute, and I began to worry about him locking up, one of those loops he spoke of, but he looked up, and it was with a smile.

“What can be wrong in giving her such good company? Carry on, please. And they don’t have to be dead. But, well, Maddy…”

NEIL
I remembered Pat, of course, but I had never met, could never meet, Debbie’s parents.

“Her silhouettes. That was what I first saw, in an exhibition. Silhouettes, ones I later realised were her, just monochrome, but nude, naked. I bought some online. Then I found Maddy in the rain. She had a scooter and a flat tyre. I fixed the wheel. I use a reverse mushroom patch I invented that I can insert from outside and…”

“Neil”

Clara’s voice again. Right…

“She cooked me dinner, but I ran away afterwards”

Cathy asked the next question, which was, I suppose, an obvious one.

“Why, Neil?”

“I was scared”

I started talking again so that they couldn’t ask more about fear.

“I was working in Upper Weardale a little while later. She was working in Durham City, and she e-mailed me about my photos, so I sent her one back. Of bikers. I was at Hartside, one of two high passes into Alston, but lower than Wearheads, at… Sorry. I sent her some pictures of the bikers who gather there”

I needed something to break the flow. Random but relevant, those were Maddy’s words.

“On the way up. Stopped at some services on the M6 and… I had a moment. Painful. There was a couple, strangers, and she asked if I was ok, Terry. That was her name. And George, her husband. They said they’d, I’d told them where, what I was going to do. Her mother, they’d just done the same for, at her favourite pub, Hartside”

How many words? Nobody was saying anything, though.

“Maddy had a commission, two portraits. With permission to spend a day in the cathedral, so I rode over, and… We bought a spare helmet, or not a spare one, but one for her, because hers was at her house, and I took her along the Wall, and my landlady, I was staying at a Bed and Breakfast in Garrigill, which is over Wearhead and actually on the South Tyne”

“Neil”

It was Alys this time.

“Sorry. Stress… So my landlady had spoken about the temple, and Maddy, she said the woman had a real soul, so when we got up, and the hotel had taken my key back, we went up there by bike, and that was when I met Anth. We met Anth. He made a joke when she tried to pay”

The man himself was looking at me very intently, and even with my limitations I could see the dampness in his eyes.

“Ah remember that day well, Neil. What you said about her, aye?”

I nodded.

“You offered to take her off my hands”

“Aye, and you said ‘sorry, this woman’s mine’, and a minute later, she’s, well, not seen a kiss that passionate since, and that’s the thing, me and wor lass, aye? We got the chance to know Maddy, as well as Neil, so here’s a toast, like: Maddy, and all the other decent folk we’re missing”