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From Cautious, A Boat Adrift by Tommy Sissons, published by Repeater Books, out now.

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The second time Brenda died, Grandad Norman trudged around the house indefinitely, with no real place to rest. The day following his return from the hospital, he busied himself staring at the places she had been. Like a dog whose owner had left the house, he perched on the rug and stared, as if he could stare her back into existence. She would rematerialise, surely, on the armchair, on the end of a cigarette stub, in a shroud of smoke. When this proved futile, Norman nosed through the back garden, toppling gnomes, disturbing the odd earthworm with a curious finger as its towed its corner. Neighbours said he was searching for something, or that something was searching for him.

The ex-foundry men in the Conservative Club, soon to be carted off to the factory in the sky, sank warm pints, their leathered bellies swelling like globes. It’s 2017, one said to another. Globalism’s dead and the sun was out. A rare May heat for Leeds. The sort of heat you want to lock the doors on, so it can’t escape. A terrier wheezed on its haunches. A prune-skinned dear sat on her doorstep, her feet in a bucket of water, asleep. Children were happier, their faces pinched, burnt. A fiesta of life, adjacent to the A61, was underway. I was speeding towards it, on towards Hunslet.

I had but twenty minutes more to be visibly happy, and my joy was rarely observable, so even when the car started its routine shudder I did not care. I grinned, half-crazed in amusement at the bastard thing. Then, drawn to a halt at the side of the motorway, I regarded the worn-out engine of my Vauxhall with a laugh. It was the perfect day to celebrate a death. After more than twenty years, the curse of the witch had been lifted. No longer would mothers bundle their toddlers inside at the sight of Brenda waddling down Jack Lane, Windsor Blue clenched in her teeth like a firecracker. Cups of milk could be lifted in celebration. Cats could roam freely without fear of being kicked. Birthday parties could resume without the police being summoned on a noise complaint. Even when the roadside mechanic arrived, and conjured up an extortionate price, I tipped him cheerfully, thanked him for his service, and would not come to regret it until later.

Hunslet. “Hūn’s creek”, the Anglo-Saxons had called it, “Hūn” being a man, the “creek” being an inlet from the River Aire. “Aire” itself originates, most likely, from Common Brittonic “Isara”, meaning “strong river”. I played with the words, let them sit against my teeth, let them flow out. Hunslet. A man and his river. Somewhere, the Anglo-Saxons, axes in their backs, reclined in peace.

As I cut off the A61 onto Hillidge Road, I killed the speed. Respectfully, my car fell to the pace of a hearse, and on reaching Grandad Norman’s house, the time for smiling stopped completely. The quiet was noticeable. The terraced house was waiting, sniffing the concrete, the hot rubber of the Vauxhall’s wheels, the aged pigeon droppings. It was newer than it had once been. Newer than the house that had stood there before it, but considerably older than the new builds that encircled the Oval. In Norman’s opinion, much of Hunslet had lost its character, as had many parts of South Leeds since the slum clearance, since the regeneration. The curtains were drawn. The bin lid was propped open above a bulk of bags. Flowers, like the bodies of old ladies, were gathered on the doorstep. The sort of flowers that said, “Aye, we are polite for pretending we care. I would have dropped off a bottle of whiskey, but you are an alcoholic these days, Norman.” Those sorts of flowers. Hunslet.

Locating the spare key where it always was, under the potbelly gnome on the windowsill, I slipped inside. The faint waft of burnt toast. The lingering smell of tobacco — not that of Norman, that of Brenda. It was as if she still existed in the untouched ashtray. A narrow and empty corridor, decked with framed family photos. Mam and I, in a chalet in Butlins, on the beach at Skegness, in our garden in Nottingham. Brenda’s daughter, Sherry, tanned in her sickly pink wedding dress, mouth open in mid-belch. Pride of place, above the open door to the compact kitchen, was a framed photo of three doctored Leeds United shirts. HUNTER on the left, BREMNER on the right. WHITBY, our surname, was printed on the back of the shirt in the middle.

The living room was deserted. The television sat expectantly, a muted sports channel talking to no one. On the mantlepiece, boxing trophies from Norman’s twenties, palm-sized golden gloves, figurines of fighters supple with youth, a black-and- white photo of two boys with bruises for eyes, were silent. In the kitchen, the window had been tampered with, as if someone had tried to break in. I gently deposited my bag on the sofa and, on noticing the comfortable black leather shoes by the door, went silently upstairs.

I found Grandad Norman in his bedroom sleeping, spread- eagled across the armchair. The print of Brenda’s body was still visible in the sponge of the mattress, so deep that the springs were unable to breathe. Norman’s face was turned up to the ceiling, where a nicotine stain grinned down, watching over him. He was skeletal for a large man. Having once been the annual Father Christmas at the White Rose shopping centre, now even his jovial fat had escaped him. The slight shadow of hair occupied his wattle. Spittle hung from his lip. With one slipper off and his meagre chest visible through the parting of his bath robe, he was as if a human sacrifice. I unlaced his fingers from the vodka bottle they were grasping and went to empty it.

When I returned to Norman’s bedroom, I perched on the bed and watched him sleep. Mam was due to arrive that evening. I would wait until I could tell her face to face; tell her that he had relapsed after so long, tell her to brace herself before she saw him. It had always been assumed that he would go before Brenda, and that on that day we would tell her what we thought of her. Several times before, however, we had discussed the possibility that Norman may surpass her and that, in that case, much would be required of us. The work to be done was monumental. It was good work. It was work we were blessed to do. In dying first, Brenda had lost, and that, if nothing else, restored some kind of begrudging faith in God.

There was still something of the old cock of the walk about Norman, even in drunken sleep. His life before the death and, indeed, before Brenda, was still gathered around him. It was still present on him. The slight unconscious curl of his lip, as if rising to play his harmonica, his stomach still harbouring an untold joke. Tumbling down from the bedroom window, the rare Yorkshire sun filled his face, made it look supple in the areas it had become sunken. In the hand of the sun, he looked almost unfettered, yet terrified of the liberation that had leapt so suddenly upon him. He had always been young for an old man. His hair had been white since he was thirty. That didn’t age him. It was his body that was nauseating, emptied as it was, a missing person poster discarded on an armchair.

Mam and I would stay for a little while yet. We would see him through the period of mourning. I said a prayer for the first time in ten years as I listened to the life at the window. The summer was coming and thank God for that. Outside, a goal had been saved. A child’s balloon had taken flight. An ice cream cone had been dropped on the curb. Happy hour was approaching in the pubs and the houses and the city. Even the moors were alive and thrashing. A man was there, in the howling winds, shouting at no one, heard by no one, all alone.
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