Inconvenient for Years

Chapter One: Eight Bars

The last mile into Hollinbeck was all downhill, which Chris Metcalfe thought was about right.

He had taken the slow train from Leeds because it was cheaper, and then the 219 bus because it was cheaper still, and now he stood at the top of Chapel Brow with a suit bag over one shoulder and a trumpet case in his hand, looking down at a town he had spent twelve years describing to strangers as somewhere he was from rather than somewhere he went.

The viaduct still cut across the valley on nine brick legs. The pit had gone in 1993, and where the winding gear had stood there was now a retail park with a tyre place and a shop that sold hot tubs. Above all of it the moor rose brown and patient, and below, halfway down Institute Row, the Miners' Institute sat with its stone lettering blackened by a hundred and eighteen years of weather: HOLLINBECK MINERS' INSTITUTE, 1907, and beneath that, in smaller letters, KNOWLEDGE IS OUR LAMP.

He could hear the band from up here. They were in the yard behind the church, warming up badly, and the sound came up the hill in fragments — a chord that leaned, a horn player noodling, somebody's low D flapping like a bird in a chimney.

Chris had been sick twice on the train. He'd told himself it was the sandwich.

St Hilda's was full. He had not expected that, though he should have. Wilf Shackleton had conducted the Hollinbeck Victoria Band for forty-one years, and had taught, at a rough count, four hundred children how to make a noise into a length of brass tubing, and roughly ninety of them how to make music. The pews held farmers, retired miners, three generations of the Kilburn family, teachers, a man in a hi-vis coat who had come straight off shift. There were cornets on knees.

Chris slid into the back and immediately regretted it, because the back was where you could see everyone turning round.

"Christopher Metcalfe," said a voice at his elbow. Hilary Eccles, second horn, social secretary, hair set like architecture. "Well. You came."

"I came."

"He'd have liked that." A pause with a hook in it. "He'd have liked a letter back, an' all."

"Hilary," said someone further along the pew, warningly, and Hilary sniffed and faced the front, and Chris sat with his hands on his knees and let the coffin come past him, six feet away, carried on the shoulders of men he'd gone to school with.

The funeral was run by a tall man in a charcoal coat who did not hurry and did not fuss and never once looked as though he was checking a watch. Chris watched him because there was nothing else safe to look at. He moved through the church the way a good rhythm section moves through a bar — invisibly, holding everything up. When an elderly woman in the second row couldn't find her order of service, he had one in her hand before she'd finished patting her handbag. When the vicar lost his place, the man in the charcoal coat simply waited, unbothered, and somehow made the silence look intentional.

At the graveside the wind came off the moor with rain in it. The band played the hymn Wilf had asked for, and played it well, and Chris felt his eyes go hot and hated himself for it, because he had not written back in ten years and had no right to a wet face.

Then Colin Dewhirst turned round.

Colin was seventy-one, Eb bass, built like a stack of paving slabs, and he had a way of speaking that suggested he'd already lost the argument and intended to win it anyway. "You'll play him out," he said.

"Sorry?"

"Wilf's tune. 'Evening Ground'." Colin's jaw worked. "He said, any time anybody asked him what he wanted at his own do, he said that, and he said you."

Thirty faces. A hundred more behind them. Somewhere in the crowd a phone was already up.

"I haven't got a cornet," Chris said.

Colin held one out. It was Wilf's. Of course it was Wilf's.

There is a version of this that Chris played through in his head a thousand times afterwards, walking to the corner shop, lying awake, standing at a sink. In that version he says no. He says, kindly, in front of everyone, *I can't, I'm sorry, I'm not able*, and there is a bad ten seconds and then somebody else plays it and the world keeps turning.

What he actually did was take the cornet.

It was cold. The valve caps were worn thin on the left side where Wilf's thumb had sat for four decades. Chris warmed the mouthpiece in his fist for a moment, and set his feet, and thought about the boy of seven in the Institute bandroom being shown how to buzz his lips against the back of his hand, and about Wilf saying *again*, forty times, kindly, forty times.

He took a breath, and played.

The first phrase came out true, and the sound went up into the rain and came back off the church wall, and he heard someone in the crowd make a small noise, and for eight bars Chris Metcalfe was the thing his town had always said he was: the lad with the gift, the one who was going to be somebody.

On the ninth bar the air stopped.

It was not a wobble. It was not a crack. It was the same thing that had happened eighteen months ago in a studio in Wandsworth, on the eleventh take of a high trumpet line for a film about submarines: a door closing somewhere behind his sternum. His lungs went shallow, his hands went cold and wet, his vision narrowed until the coffin was a bright rectangle at the end of a corridor.

He lowered the cornet.

The silence that followed had a specific quality he would remember for the rest of his life. Not shocked. Worse. Embarrassed *for* him. Two hundred people at a graveside in the rain, deciding all at once to look at their shoes.

Colin took the cornet out of his hands, gently, which was the unbearable part.

Somebody started the hymn again on the euphonium — one voice, low and warm and steady, no vibrato to speak of, just a line that went where it needed to go — and the band came in underneath it, and the funeral resumed without him.

Chris walked away. He got as far as the lych gate, and then the hedge behind the hearse, and there he was sick into the privet with his hand braced on the wall, in a suit he had bought in 2016 for an audition he didn't get.

He was still there ten minutes later when footsteps came round the front of the car and stopped.

The man in the charcoal coat looked at him for a moment. Then he took a folded handkerchief out of his inside pocket and held it out at exactly the height of Chris's hand, so that Chris didn't have to look up.

"Thanks," Chris said, into the hedge.

"Mint?"

"What?"

A small tin appeared. "Extra strong. I keep them for the readings. People get dry."

Chris straightened up and took one. His hands were shaking hard enough that he had to make a second attempt.

He waited for it. The head-tilt. The *don't be so hard on yourself*, the *he'd have understood*, the *it's grief, that's all it is, love*. He had had eighteen months of variations on that and every single one of them had made him want to put his fist through a wall.

The man said, "You've got privet on your shoe."

Chris looked down. He did.

"There's a tap round the side of the vestry. Cold, but it runs." The man consulted nothing at all. "We've eleven minutes before I need to be moving the family. You can either come to the wake, in which case I'd get that off your lapel, or you can go out through the allotments and nobody will see you leave. I'd not judge either."

"Which would you do?"

"Allotments," said the man. "But I'm not the one Wilf Shackleton bored everybody about for a decade."

It was said absolutely flatly, without a shred of accusation, and it landed harder than any amount of sympathy. Chris laughed — one short, ugly, surprised bark of a laugh — and then had to press the handkerchief against his eyes for a second.

"You're the undertaker," he said.

"Patrick Speight." He didn't offer a hand, which Chris understood; his hands had been on a coffin all morning. "Third of us to do it. My grandad buried your grandad, if that's any comfort."

"It isn't, particularly."

"No," Patrick agreed. "It never is."

He was, Chris registered with an odd delayed lurch, somewhere in his late thirties, with dark hair going grey at the left temple only, and a face that gave the impression of finding most of the world quietly funny while remaining far too professional to say so. He was also, Chris realised, the euphonium. The line that had come in and held the hymn up when Chris let it drop.

"That was you," Chris said. "Playing."

"Somebody had to." Patrick tucked the mint tin away and turned his collar up against the rain. "Wake's at the Institute. There's a ham that would frighten you."

He walked back towards the church, unhurried, and Chris stood in the wet with a stranger's handkerchief in his fist and the taste of mint and bile in his mouth, and did not go out through the allotments.