Life of Reilly
an excerpt

Ally spent his time doing jobs around the kitchen, real scullery stuff like fetching the water and scrubbing the spuds and the veg. He couldn’t handle anything too dexterous and you definitely didn’t want to let him anywhere near a knife or anything; he’d have had his hand off at the wrist. He had a cough that would have been the pride of a forty-a-day miner, and which I admired deeply, thinking it sounded spectacular. I used to take him cups of tea throughout the day; he used to smile when he took them and call me a smashing little cunt. I loved Ally, really loved him. Poor fucking Ally, poor fucking bastard.

I spent a lot of time with Ally. He would scrub and I would peel. He used to tell me stories about all these colourful people he’d known. If I’d been just a bit older, I’d have been a lot more doubtful – given he’d been locked up for most of his adult life – but I wasn’t, so I just believed everything he told me. I remember him telling me once about a fucking great girl he’d known, who had fallen in love with this fucking smart fellow, but it couldn’t happen because she was married and her husband was a good man that she didn’t want to hurt. He spun that one out across three afternoons. I was well into my twenties before I found out what it was. I was travelling on a long-haul from Mount Pleasant to the Lingholme Station, and they put on Brief Encounter. It was a good job I was travelling by myself that time: I cried like hell at the end, and not just for poor old Celia bloody Johnson. It still happens sometimes, although less and less often as the years go by and I’ve been around, seen a lot more. I’ll be watching something, and I’ll find myself thinking: I know you. You were friends of Ally.