Ana Soria

The Palace 

Meet me at The Palace, Cal’s text said. 

Bob read the message aloud, trying to work it out. 

Meet

me

at

The

Palace. 

The words bounced off each step as he walked downstairs to the kitchen. The same old photos were tacked to the fridge, seen so many times he was blind to them: Julie and her sister at an over-forties rave, matching bikinis. She’d put it at eye-level so there was no escaping it. He pulled a t-shirt from the laundry pile, turning over the final word of the message in his mind. A typo maybe, a useless correction by his mobile phone. Or perhaps it was a symptom, some confusion caused by the…

Then it twigged. The Palace, a yellow concrete tower in Brimmington Park. It was the kind of thing you’d make with sand and a bucket: four crumbling turrets, one on each side. A long-abandoned council project. It was thirty years since they last met up there, a bloody mausoleum.

“You’ll catch something if you go in there,” Julie said when he told her where they were meeting. “It’s full of hyper-dermics.” She was on the sofa, already into her Saturday night bottle of rosé.

“What are you on about?” he said, retrieving his car keys from the hall table. 

“You know, needles,” she said. He sighed and looked longingly back towards the kitchen, where there was a bottle of brown ale with his name on it.

“It’s hypodermic, you nutter,” he said, twisting open the Yale lock. She pretended that she hadn’t heard, her usual trick. 

“I dunno why he can’t just come round here,” she shouted as he stepped out of the door. “I’ve made a lasagne.” 

An hour later, he was leaning up against the chipped yellow wall listening to the tick of rain on the hood of his anorak. The park was emptying out, the last of the hopeful sunbathers scattering to the pubs. He looked up at the onion-shaped dome on top of The Palace. It had seemed huge to him as a boy, but the whole thing wasn’t more than ten feet tall. The outer walls were mostly grey now, so many people had scratched away the paint to carve in their initials. 

There was Cal, crossing the scrubby grass towards him. From a distance he looked like he always had, twitchy and quick to flash his wonky grin. Cal waved, wobbling as he stepped into a furrow. The shaved head was new, and he definitely looked thinner.

“Alright?” Cal said, when he was close enough. He wore a football scarf tied tight around his neck and had turned up the collar of his sheepskin jacket. It was early June. 

“Still after them losers eh?” he said, gesturing to the scarf. Cal caught the joke immediately; it was an old one they often fell back on.

“What’s that mate?” Cal replied, cupping a hand to his ear and then nodding as if he’d heard an answer. “It’s the sound of relegation, and it’s coming for ya.” 

“Bollocks,” Bob said, and they both laughed. Except this time Cal’s jaw clattered, and he felt a pang of guilt that he’d agreed to meet him out here in the rain. 

There was a silence and Bob fiddled awkwardly with the toggles on his jacket. You’re being stupid, he told himself, it’s only Cal. Cal with the babyface that used to get them out of trouble. When he turned on the charm, he’d win anyone round. It was impossible to believe that for this particular trouble, there was no escape. Cal grinned and rubbed a hand over the stubble on his head. He looked hollower, more breakable, but still handsome. Bob wondered again how Cal had stayed single all these years. There’d been that fling that turned into a situation. But even that came good in the end, Daz was a great kid. 

Nearby, a siren wailed its way through heavy traffic. The rain came down harder, and Bob hunched his shoulders against it. ‘How’re you doing?’ he wanted to ask, but the question had taken on an impossible weight. It grew huge in his mouth, stopping up all other conversation. 

“Looks the same as it used to,” Cal said, walking up to The Palace and patting the concrete. Bob looked at the tower. Decades of names were gouged into the yellow paint. Their own initials were in there somewhere too, several layers deep. Cal circled The Palace studying the walls intently. As he disappeared out of view, Bob let the smile he’d been holding drop from his face. He felt self-conscious standing there in the kids’ play area. Anyone watching him would think he was a creep.

He wasn’t sure exactly when he’d become an old man. His dad had seemed ancient at fifty-five, monolithic. Now that he had reached the same age, he realised that it felt the same as any other. He still went to the monthly Ska night at The Drovers.

“We’re not old,” Julie insisted. “We’re in the middle of life, fifty and flirty!” Still, she had insisted on buying him some industrial-grade earplugs to wear at gigs so that he could protect what was left of his hearing. The months and years rushed by. Young people got younger. He struggled to keep up. 

The speed of ageing surprised him, given that his own old man had grown increasingly static as he got older. When he popped off the family barely noticed, so embedded in the fabric of his armchair had he become. Bob wouldn’t have minded if they’d tipped his Dad into the ground right there and then, chair and all. Even so, Julie was great at the funeral. Back at his mum’s afterwards Julie did the rounds with a hipflask, topping up everyone’s tea with whisky. She wore a black dress that showed off her figure. Upstairs, she told him he looked handsome in his suit. At fifty-six she wanted it more than ever. They had sex for the first time in a year with the wake still going on below them.

“What are we doing here?” he asked, as Cal strolled back into view around the other side of The Palace. He knew he sounded pissy and regretted it, but Cal only laughed, his mad hyena impression that now felt comforting. Nothing can be that wrong if he’s laughing, he thought stupidly. He was about to suggest that they up sticks and head to the pub, but before he could Cal vanished like a ferret down a tunnel into The Palace. 

“I felt nostalgic,” he shouted from inside. His voice sounded tinned. Bob squatted to look inside the dank entrance, noting with disgust the bright foil of a condom wrapper. He could just make out Cal’s skinny legs in the dark. “Come in!” he called, and the excitement

in his voice made Bob swallow his irritation. Knees creaking, he shuffled forwards scanning the ground for needles. He was glad he’d worn his thick-soled work boots. 

The Palace had seemed, well, palatial when they were kids. Now, he couldn’t believe their parents had let them near it. He thought of Daz, who he’d bumped into at the pool hall a few months back. He was a quiet lad. Eighteen now, but it was still weird to see the kid holding a pint. He pictured Daz living alone in Cal’s empty flat. The council would soon find out that he was a single lad in a two-bed place, premium real estate, and ship him out into the border counties. His eyes stung and he coughed violently to hide it. 

“You having an attack, old man?” Cal said, chuckling as Bob joined him inside The Palace. 

Since they’d been there last, a section of the roof had fallen away. Raindrops slanted in. Cal swept a beer can into one corner with his foot.

“Well,” he said, “it’s definitely still a shithole.” Bob lowered his hood so that he could look around. The whole thing was only about six feet wide and had the feel of a bunker, thick walls that blocked out sound. Cal looked around at the floor.

“Lie down with me,” he said. Bob snorted, waiting for the punchline, but Cal was serious.

“No way I’m lying down in here,” he replied.

“You used to do it.”

“I used to be an idiot.”

Cal lowered himself into a seated position, brushing away bottle tops. The floor was hard-packed earth, but dry. 

“Come on,” he said, grinning. His cheekbones were sharpened by the dim light.

“Jesus,” Bob replied. But Cal was lying down now and there was something deeply unsettling about standing over his body.

He had to stick his feet part way down the entrance tunnel so that he could lie flat. His right thigh was pressed against Cal’s left, their shoulders touching. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands, so he folded them awkwardly in his lap. Unstoppably, blood rushed to his groin, and he felt a twitch of movement in his underwear. He wondered if Cal felt the tension too. It was very hot now inside his anorak. He wanted to take it off, but he wasn’t sure what that might signal. 

They lay for a while, watching the shifting sky through the roof. Side by side he felt easier, like the change of position had shifted a weight.

“How’re you doing?” he asked. When Cal said nothing, Bob turned his head to him. Cal looked up at the sky, his breathing shallow through his mouth. Their faces were almost touching. He saw the black dot beside Cal’s left pupil: his third eye. Bob had named it the last time they’d lain together in The Palace, aged sixteen. Back then, they had done things to each other that he still dreamed about. His body ached with the wanting of it. He knew that if Cal turned his face to him now then it would be too much to bear. He wanted to hold him, to comfort him, but also, also…

“Will you hold my hand?” Cal asked, quietly. Above, clouds tore themselves apart, came back together. He felt a light touch on his wrist, and then it brushed slowly over his knuckles. Cal’s skin was cool and dry. He imagined that skin turning to leather, becoming mummified beneath the earth. The Palace of Cal. Their fingers laced themselves together, squeezed tight. There was a sound next to him and he knew that Cal was crying too. He pressed the other hand to his eyes, wanting to push the tears back. Wetly, Cal rubbed at his nose with a sleeve. 

“Look after him, won’t you?” he asked. Bob flailed.

“Stop it,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “Stop talking like that.” It was more than he could take. They said nothing for a while and then suddenly he felt Cal move beside him. 

“There it is!” he said, pointing at something scrawled low down on the wall. Bob squinted, trying to make it out. “Remember? It’s that picture of Liam’s ballsack you drew in year eight.” 

A patch of blue sky appeared above, and evening light pooled around them. Bob closed his eyes. Their breath slowed into the same rhythm. 

A year from now Julie would be spoiling Daz rotten, packing him off to his apprenticeship each morning with far too much lunch. Bob would talk football with him and take him out to gigs. He’d be fatherly but sometimes distant because all he would see in the kid’s face was Cal. 

Lying there in The Palace, he didn’t know any of this yet. All he knew was that his old mate, his rock, his lover was there holding on to his hand. From somewhere outside came the faint thud of a car stereo. People were going out on the town; it was Saturday night.