Dave was nodding. ‘Yeah, there she was. All tangled up in the weeds and the willow roots, or the current would have taken her further downstream. Staring right up at me, she was. Drowned, poor old Phil. Dead as toast.’

‘Christ. I’m sorry,’ said Josh.

‘Tragic, yeah? She must have got too near the edge and just lost her balance. I couldn’t get over it for a long while. Shook me right up.’

‘That’s awful.’ Josh was remembering how much Shauna had hated Phil. And now she was dead. ‘When was this?’ he asked, although he really, really didn’t want to know.

‘Late autumn I guess – 1978.’

Now Josh thought of Shauna coming back from lunch with the ‘girls’ and saying, That cow Philippa, Dave Houghton’s wife? She told the others I was a gyppo, the mouthy cow. Christ, I hate her guts.

Then Dave turned a little, elbow on the bar, and his face lit up. ‘Ah, here she is,’ he said, stretching out a welcoming arm.

For a moment, feeling he was in a nightmare, Josh expected to see Phil, white as a bloated maggot and covered in fronds of stinking grey weed, come stumbling on dead legs across the bar toward them.

But the woman who joined them wasn’t Philippa, dead or alive. It was a tiny, pretty young Malaysian woman who looked at Dave with adoration as he slipped his arm around her shoulders.

‘Josh,’ said Dave proudly. ‘This is Wi Lin.’

So not that broken-hearted about poor old Philippa then. Josh wondered if Dave still had male lovers, too. He supposed he did. But what the hell. Who cared?

Josh stayed there for another few minutes, then left Dave and his new love to it.

109

109

Not wanting to go home yet, Josh went over to his mum’s grave, feeling reluctant to do it but thinking that for once he should pay his respects. He half-hoped he would see Claire’s sister Trace there and have a word. On the night of her mother Eva’s gypsy funeral, she had vanished too quickly for him to talk to her, but maybe today she might stick around.

She wasn’t there.

So he drove back to the camp, near to where Pally had taken him to see off his old lady into the next world. The dogs came out straight away and started barking. Then Pally appeared at the door of his trailer, still looking like death warmed up. He saw Josh and came over. Josh got out of the car. The dogs sniffed around him, then went away.

‘You back? Thought we’d seen the last of you,’ said Pally.

‘I wanted a word with Trace,’ said Josh. ‘She in?’

Trace came out into the trailer doorway. ‘She’s in,’ she called down. ‘What you want, Josh?’

‘Can we talk?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘What’s to say?’

‘Please. Five minutes.’