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  These were some of the things that made you a gentleman. If you weren’t a gentleman, you were a yob.

  I cut my nails like he told me, but he didn’t like my hair. It was too long and girlish. What I needed was a man’s haircut. So he took me on the bus to see his barber. It felt like a long way. It was near the supermarket in Corstorphine, where Derek worked. He liked his staff to call him Mr Cross. Being respected was another part of being a gentleman.

  The barber shop was around the corner from the supermarket. The barber was an old man in a white coat. And he was bald, which I thought was a funny thing for a barber to be.

  He greeted Derek fondly–‘Well, hello there, Mr Cross’–and I was proud that Derek was a man who was known.

  The barber said, ‘And who’s this?’

  ‘This is Neil,’ said Derek.

  ‘Well, hello to you, Neil. And has your dad brought you in before?’

  I should have been embarrassed by the mistake. I waited for Derek to correct it, but he didn’t.

  So I said, ‘No, he hasn’t.’

  It wasn’t really a lie; not technically.

  ‘You see?’ said the barber. ‘I thought we’d not met before. I’m sure I’d have remembered such a handsome lad.’

  I blushed and he smiled. Then, from the far corner of the shop, he retrieved a board and lay it across the arm-rests of the cracked leather chair. He said, ‘All aboard,’ and helped me up.

  I could see Derek in the mirror, sitting in the row of chairs next to the empty coat-rack in the corner. On the floor were curls of brown and black and grey hair.

  The barber tied a gown around my neck and tucked tissues into the gap. He snipped the scissors close to my ear. They hovered impatient and hungry, like hummingbirds.

  He said, ‘And what are we doing for you today, young man?’

  Derek spoke for me. He stood up. He put his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet.

  He said, ‘Short back and sides, please.’

  The barber hesitated. He lifted the side of my hair with the comb. Then he half-turned, facing Derek. The scissors kept snipping the air at waist height.

  He said, ‘Oh, man, surely not?’

  ‘Short back and sides,’ said Derek. His smile widened. His eyes went narrow, wrinkled at the corners. He rocked on his feet.

  The barber ruffled my head.

  He said, ‘Och, it’s such a shame.’

  I looked at Derek, reversed in the mirror.

  ‘Don’t be in a hurry to grow him up,’ said the barber.

  There was a long moment. Derek kept smiling, rocking.

  Then the barber said, ‘It’s no good. I can’t do it.’

  He took the gown from round my neck and helped me climb down to the floor.

  Derek’s smile was the same shape: beaming and broad. And his eyes were crinkled in exactly the same way. But something had gone from it; something you couldn’t see. When I looked at him, I felt strange.

  He said, ‘Very well, then.’

  We said a hurried goodbye to the barber. Outside the shop, Derek zipped me into my anorak. Then we caught the bus home. All the way, Derek didn’t speak. I looked out the window: Edinburgh, going past.

  We got off the bus at Dalry Road. Derek took me to a barber called Koolcutz. Mr Koolcutz was younger and skinny and he too was almost completely bald, with hairy arms and blue-grey lenses in his spectacles.

  He passed the electric clippers over my head. Blonde curls fell on to my lap and on to my shoulders. I closed my eyes when he cut my fringe. The scissors were cold and they tickled my forehead.

  When he was finished, I looked at myself. I had short hair. It looked darker. My neck was long and my ears were big and red.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Derek, ‘that’s much more like it.’

  We walked home together.

  Derek said, ‘And how does it feel, to have a proper haircut?’

  He rubbed the back of my neck, where the hair was bristly.

  I said, ‘Ace.’

  When Mum saw it, she ran all ten fingers through my shorter, darker hair. I could tell she was about to cry. Her hand went to her throat.

  But then Derek told her about the first barber. He said, ‘Can you believe the bloody cheek of the man?’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well,’ said Derek. ‘I told him what was what.’

  I looked up at that bit. I hadn’t heard Derek letting the barber know what was what. I’d seen him grinning and nodding with all the humour gone out of it, like a red apple that only looks good on the outside. Then I remembered him hurrying us from the shop, helping me into my anorak only when we were back on the street, in the drizzle.

  ‘I told him,’ said Derek. ‘I said, “Don’t be expecting my continued custom. Because I’m telling you right now: you’re not getting it.”’

  ‘Oh, Derek,’ said Mum. ‘Did you have to be so hard on him?’

  You could tell by the way she said it that Derek was forever letting people know what was what.

  Then she looked at me, happy sad, and ruffled my hair. She told me it was lovely. She was lying. She wanted me to look like a baby.

  I said, ‘It’s a proper man’s haircut.’

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘It’s very grown up.’

  I went to the bathroom and for a long time I stared into the mirror. I looked at my long neck and my big, red ears. And I thought about Derek, smiling at the barber and leaving the shop, zipping up my anorak outside in the rain. Then sitting silent and angry on the bus, all the way back to Dalry Road.

  Derek wasn’t his real name; not his real first name anyway. He’d been baptized Winston Derek Cross. But he didn’t like to be called Winston. He never told me why, but Winston was a funny name: the children at school had probably laughed at him for it. They probably chanted ‘Winston Churchill’ and danced round him in a circle. I’d have laughed, too, at a boy called Winston.

  Back in Bristol, he’d been regional manager for Parker’s, the chain of bakeries that employed my mum. That’s how they met. Their eyes locked over the jam doughnuts and the hot Cornish pasties and the French sticks. They flirted with one another. Then they fell in love and ran away together.

  But he wasn’t from Bristol. He was a white man from South Africa who’d lived in Britain for many years: ‘Many years,’ he said, ‘many, many years.’

  He never told me why he had chosen Bristol as a place to live.

  He’d already been married four or five times. He told me this with a certain resigned sadness, as if being married to all those women had been necessary but regrettable. He talked about his wives as he might a childhood friend who had died young, of a rare and incurable disease.

  But I asked him to tell me more about them, these other wives–where had they lived, what had been their names? He counted them off on his fingers, the way he might have checked Roman emperors or the greatest films of Yul Brynner. Their names were just information, like a timetable. Because of that, I couldn’t imagine their faces: and because I couldn’t imagine their faces, I couldn’t remember their names. Each of them flashed once in my imagination, like sheet lightning, and then was gone. They left the vaguest after-image: a shifting, composite, woman.

  He also had a son. His name was Richard. Richard lived in another city with his mother. Derek told me her name once and didn’t use it again. She was just ‘Richard’s mother’.

  When Mum talked about Caroline or Lin or Clive, her children, she had a certain look on her face. It was a mixture of cheerfulness and sorrow. But when Derek told me about Richard, his voice and his face remained perfectly neutral. Richard Cross was just more information, another entry on the timetable.

  We only talked about him once, and soon I forgot that he existed. He was a failure of my imagination. I never wondered if Derek had read to him The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, doing all the voices, even Becky Thatcher, or if they had gone camping along Hadrian’s Wall. It didn’t matter to Derek,
so it didn’t matter to me, either.

  Derek liked ballroom dancing. A real man could dance, he said. Every Wednesday, he and Mum went for lessons. I went with them. Derek told me I’d thank him one day, and gave me a peculiar smile.

  He and Mum were in the advanced class. They danced very well together; they could do the rhumba. I was in the juniors, the only boy in the class and in some demand as a partner. The girls wore their best dresses and shiny black shoes with buckles. I wore a collar and tie and a brown blazer. I learned to waltz and to cha-cha-cha. The teacher told me I had wonderful rhythm. I couldn’t wait to tell Derek.

  He liked Laurel and Hardy. He had most of their silent movies on reels of Super 8 film. Sometimes, he set up the white screen and projector he kept in the pantry. It was a delicate operation, spooling on a Laurel and Hardy movie. When it was done, we turned off all the lights. The only sound came from the unspooling tape. The room smelled of dust, burning on the hot bulb of the projector.

  On screen, Laurel and Hardy slipped and slid. Derek laughed until he wept, and I did too. The way we laughed made Mum laugh, even though she wasn’t watching. You could hear her, laughing in the bedroom as she folded clothes or ran the carpet sweeper over the floor.

  He also had a Super-8 cine camera which he took on trips to the zoo and the botanical gardens. He was always behind the lens, recording. He and Mum liked to watch the films he’d taken.

  Once, long before I arrived, my nan had been to visit them. Derek had filmed their coach holiday to the Isle of Skye. Mum always cried when the camera closed up on my nan’s embarrassed, grinning face and her silly, nervous wave.

  My sister Caroline and her boyfriend Tony had also been to visit. There was film of them, too: Caroline and Tony in their denim flares and platform shoes, walking arm-in-arm and laughing, trying to pretend the camera wasn’t there. During that visit, Caroline became pregnant with her first child.

  And Derek liked music. There was a record-player in the living room, under the TV. He squatted down there and showed me his records. He liked Johnny Cash and Jim Reeves and Hank Williams. And he liked Bill Haley and the Comets, and Eddie Cochran, whose final concert, he said, had been at the Bristol Hippodrome: Eddie Cochran had played “Summertime Blues’ and ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. Then on his way to the airport–he was flying home for Easter–his car blew a tyre and hit a lamppost. Eddie Cochran sailed through the windscreen and smashed up his head. He died the next day, in hospital.

  Derek also liked Fats Domino and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. He told me that Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Fats Domino had helped to invent the music known as rock ’n’ roll, but that it had taken white men like Elvis and Bill Haley to make it famous.

  Often, we listened to Live at San Quentin, because Johnny Cash was my favourite. Soon I knew all the words to all the songs. Derek put the stylus to the vinyl and we listened to the rumbling hiss then, at just the right time, we made deep voices and looked at each other and said: ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’.

  It was because of back pain that he sat in the stripy deckchair. He’d once passed a kidney stone. Passing a kidney stone was the most painful experience a human being could endure, he told me. It made him scream with pain.

  And he hated niggers.

  He lay a hand on my shoulder, a soft hand with a gold band on the third finger, not a wedding ring. He looked me in the eye. A dark, glossy lock of fringe fell across his pale brow.

  He said, ‘I don’t have many rules in my house. But one of those rules is, you never, ever bring a nigger through my door. If you bring a nigger into my house, then you’re out on the street. And you will never be welcome under my roof ever again. Do you understand that?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘good boy.’

  He gave me a hug. He kissed me on the forehead.

  I hugged him back.

  He took me to the cinema. All the way, he wore an expression of rueful endurance and he laughed at himself when he bought the tickets.

  I was excited; I loved going to the pictures. When the lights went down and the adverts began, I was happy.

  Halfway through the film, I turned to whisper something and saw that Derek was asleep. His head was thrown back on the port-red velvet chair and his mouth was open.

  There was a slow, fond sunburst inside me.

  I thought about how Mum began to sing when Derek came home–and how the anticipation of his arrival even made her move more energetically, as if he was battery that recharged her. I thought about Derek waiting for me in Bobby’s Book Shop, how he was amused and pleased by the frankness of my awe. And later, he had passed me those books, one by one from the bulging carrier bag: Kidnapped, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island. And I thought what an immense burden it was that he carried: not to love, but to be loved.

  In that cinema, watching him sleep, I came to understand that adoration requires a kind of pity. I looked at him, and I wanted nothing bad ever to happen to him. I wanted to protect him. I wanted him always to be happy, because when he was happy I was happy too.

  I had not by then been in Edinburgh for many months. But time has a different quality in the solemn heart of a seven-year-old boy.

  By now, when we went walking in the hills, Mum used to hang behind Derek and me–not because she was tired, but because I’d begun to walk just like him. She liked to watch us, walking together: Stan and Ollie. Eric and Ernie.

  Tom and Huck.

  6

  On my final weekend before starting at my new school, we’d gone walking again in the Pentland Hills. Once more, I’d looked down upon the city. I knew the school was there. It was a very old school. It sat still and empty, like an old lady in an empty room. The passing of a single weekend meant nothing to it.

  During the ascent, I found a sheep skull. It was lying in the grass by a grey-brown fencepost that was weighed down by sagging barbed wire. The skull was bare. The blunt teeth were loose, and they clattered when I shook the skull in my hand. It was difficult to believe it had once been a sheep’s face, packed out with wary eyes. I asked if I could keep it. Derek said yes. Mum said no. She didn’t want dead animals in the house.

  I looked at Derek and he looked at me. He made a face, but he said nothing, and we walked along, laughing. For dinner we were having roast leg of lamb.

  In the evening, I had my bath and changed into my pyjamas. I watched some TV. Then I was sent to clean my teeth.

  The hallway frightened me. It had no windows and it was dark and straight. When I stood at the sink, it seemed to telescope into the darkness, like a hallway in dreams and I sensed something rushing towards me from the far end of it. The thought of it loosened my bowels. I cleaned my teeth, two or three scrubs, then hurried to the living room. I watched TV until my heart had slowed. Then Mum came with me to bed, to tuck me up.

  She sat on the edge of the bed.

  She said, ‘Big day tomorrow.’

  I nodded.

  We said goodnight. Then Derek came to read to me. It was a short chapter–the one where Tom Sawyer cons his friends into whitewashing the fence. It was my favourite. I’d already heard it two or three times. I liked that one of Tom’s friends swapped him a dead rat and a string to swing it with.

  It was Derek’s favourite bit, too. He thought it was hilarious, the way Tom fooled his friends: If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he’d have bankrupted every boy in the village.

  When he’d finished the chapter, I asked him to leave the light on and the door a tiny bit ajar. Only a tiny bit. And he said what he always said: ‘There are no spooks here.’ But he did as I asked.

  I tried to stay awake, to keep tomorrow away. I read comics until I felt myself drifting and knew I couldn’t stop it. I hoped I’d have the Hansel dream, of the cottage in the woods. That would keep tomorrow away for many months.

  But I slept and didn’t have the Hansel dream. I was woken by Mum, calling me out of bed. Derek was ready to leave for work. He had to get there ear
ly, because he opened up. He was in charge of the money. He was all clean and dressed, carrying his briefcase. He ruffled my hair, and that made me feel a better, like I was brave. But when he left, my bravery diminished with every metre he put between us.

  When I tried to clean my teeth, I vomited green bile, the colour of a bad apple. It hurt coming out, and when it was gone my stomach kept trying to squeeze out more, like toothpaste through an empty tube.

  Mum made me breakfast. I tried to eat it. But the thought of food was horrible and the knife and fork felt wrong in my hands. So I put on my school clothes. Mum wet my hair and combed it into a parting. She got her handbag and put on her boots and walked me to school.

  The walls of the school were high and stone-built. They were lower by the main gates, and dotted with black metal nubs, like decayed teeth. Once, they’d been railings, but they were cut down and melted during the war, to make tanks and aeroplanes. Derek told me that.

  The school looked like a church. It had a concrete playground where the graveyard would be, with football and netball pitches marked out in different coloured paint. Children teemed through the gates. Some of their mothers stood in small groups at the gate, talking. The infants went through a big blue door. The bigger children had a separate entrance.

  At the gates, Mum kneeled. I was aware of the current of children rippling past us. As they passed, they nudged each other and nodded. Some of the smaller ones just stared. I was embarrassed by Mum’s attention. I told her I was okay. Then I turned and went inside. I could feel that she was still there, at the gates.

  The corridor smelled of school; of floor wax and old milk and chalk dust and cheesy feet. The floor was polished parquet, much scarred and indented. The classroom doors were of solid wood, half-glazed with wired-glass.