Visiting Old Friends

It was almost a ritual; after we had drunk the coffee, usually
accompanied by some small almond-flavoured biscuits from Italy, Geoff
would bestir himself and utter the word "walkies", at which Sandy, the
golden Labrador, would run round in circles woofing madly. Geoff and I
would then do a tour of the village whilst Sandy chased imaginary
rabbits and investigated the other neighbourhood dogs. Owning a
well-behaved dog is a good way to meet new people, as Geoff and Lucinda
had discovered; they declared that moving out of the city had been the
best thing they had ever done. They had made several new friends, but
loyally declared that this could never replace old friendships such as
ours, which had survived several house moves and family crises. The
former mining village, long devoid of real miners, had been gentrified
by the addition of several small modern estates; there was still a
Miners' Welfare club in the village, but it now sold wine and lasagne
and even the unashamedly middle-class were welcome there. The unsightly
slag heap had disappeared by the simple expedient of taking it away bit
by bit in lorries and using it to fill up an equally unsightly old
quarry, the abandoned railway track had become a bridleway and there
was now little to betray the village's industrial origins. The two of
us took to the bridleway as Sandy sniffed in the rank foliage on either
side.

"How y' doing, Geoff?" I asked, but this wasn't a real question.

"Fine," came the inevitable reply, but nor was this a real answer, just
a courteous preamble to a masculine conversation. For Geoff and I,
these man-to-man conversations were a relatively recent phenomenon;
thirty years ago there were earnest four-way discussions with the girls
on the finer points of seventies rock bands, then career and wedding
plans, then for nearly twenty years we had to shout to make ourselves
heard above the bedlam of hyped-up pre-schoolers, eager young
footballers, acned door-banging sulkers and finally the blare of new
rock bands who appeared to have no fine points whatsoever. But now we
had five offspring between us who had finally made it to university or
gainful employment and left us empty-nesters with time, space and
quietness on our hands. Debbie and Lucinda had always been chatterboxes
but Geoff and I had to relearn the art of conversation after knowing
each other thirty years.

"Think United will pull through?" I ventured.

"If they can land that striker from Real Madrid," said Geoff. "Though
where they'll get twenty million from's beyond me."

That was football covered; politics was next on the menu. Geoff, an
early-retired teacher, was Labour-turning-Lib Dem and I was what I
described as "conservative with a small c", but we both agreed that
though the economy wasn't in bad shape there looked like trouble
brewing on the Europe front; hardly the stuff of fierce conviction.
Having forgotten exactly which of Geoff's children were at which
university, I then asked how Sandy was doing. Geoff had always been a
big-dog man, and now owned a small modern house with a big garden
surrounded by open spaces, ideal for a Labrador; Debbie and I, on the
other hand, now had an over-large old house with tiny garden on a busy
urban main road, ideal for cats which didn't need walking and would
watch the world go by through the bay window. Geoff at last began to
speak with some animation on one of his favourite subjects, and
described Sandy's recent visit to the vet and the new tablets which she
had prescribed, and how Sandy had playfully interrupted a junior
football game and undergone a tricky contretemps with a badly-trained
Alsatian, by which time we were turning back into Geoff and Lucinda's
street.

Walkies were invariably followed by a bowl of water for Sandy and a
glass of beer for Geoff and myself. As I slumped on the settee, I
wondered what the women had been talking about; I usually found out the
real family news in the car on the way home. This time Lucinda looked
worried:

"Did Geoff tell you, Neil, he's been quite poorly recently?"

A chill which had nothing to do with the beer settled on my stomach, as
I realised that I now knew more about the dog's state of health than my
oldest friend's. "Quite poorly" had so many shades of meaning; a "quite
poorly" work colleague had died of cancer three weeks later, and he had
been younger than Geoff or myself. I could now see that Geoff's eyes
showed signs of pain, and he lowered himself very carefully into his
chair. The eyes were green, I told myself; Geoff has green eyes. I'd
never noticed before.

"Bloody hell, Geoff, what's wrong?" I asked, alarmed.

Geoff described his symptoms; a band of pain across his midriff as
though he were wearing a fiery sash, raw marks and strange numb patches
on his skin. It sounded bad.

"Shingles!" declared Debbie authoritatively, short-cutting the
diagnosis. "Get yourself to the doctor first thing Monday, but I'm
pretty sure that's what he'll say." Being married to a nurse has its
advantages.

"That's exactly what I've been telling him to do!" declared an
exasperated Lucinda. "But will he heckers like!"

"I thought it might go away," explained Geoff weakly.

Shingles. I knew what shingles were; a virus, painful but not too
serious. My mind had been dragged back to the scenario I knew would one
day come, but which I constantly threw to the back corners of my
consciousness; that one day there would only be three of us round the
table, and then later perhaps only the two women, now wrinkly widows,
walking a dog Geoff and I would never stroke and fussing over
grandchildren whose taste in music would have us turning in our graves.
But not yet, maybe not for a long time yet.

My eyes filled with tears of relief and I went to embrace Geoff,
something I had never done in thirty years but, mindful of the
shingles, I sat on the arm of his chair and merely tousled his hair
instead.

"Gerraway, yer big soft bugger!" he growled, but his eyes also shone
softly through the pain.