The Old Girls' Network. Judy Leigh

      The Jaguar F-type in British Racing Green was motoring briskly down the M5. Bisto huddled in the passenger seat and glanced at the driver, a smart young man in a peaked cap, frowning, concentrating on the road. He must be in his thirties; clean shaven, a rounded determined chin, fair hair like silken corn sticking out beneath the cap around pink ears. The young man had been very kind, offering him a lift from Swindon to just beyond Taunton, which was as far as he was going.

      Swindon. Bisto squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them, he glanced down at his clothes, mud-stained and unkempt. He hadn’t had a shower in several days and he hoped the young man’s rakish aftershave would conceal his own sweaty stench. Bisto rubbed a grubby hand around his bristly chin, scratching his four-day growth with dirty nails. He pushed fingers through his mane of white curls. He badly needed to use a comb, but he had nothing. No suitcase, no toothbrush, no wallet. He’d lost it all. If only, he thought, and a sigh shuddered from him. It was a lifetime full of ‘if only’… it had all worked out differently to the way he’d hoped.

      He shouldn’t have drunk the two pints of Guinness on the ferry from Dublin. He’d been chatting to a pleasant young couple and dozed off. When the steward woke him up, the boat was almost empty and his rucksack was gone, containing his wallet, his rail tickets and the paperwork for the ferry to France. He was lucky that his passport and iPhone had been in the inside pocket of his jacket. He’d texted his son Barney that he’d hitch a ride to the ferry port and then ring him – they’d sort out a ticket from there. But he’d never made it as far as Plymouth.

      The weather had been awful – drifting snow, blizzards, intense cold. He’d waited ages for a lift from Manchester, been dropped not far from Birmingham. It was then he’d slipped over on the ice into a mound of mud and slush, ripped his jeans and become soaking wet. Two hours later, a lorry bound for London picked him up and he realised he’d miss the ferry, so he’d asked to be dropped off at Swindon.

      He’d stopped in Swindon to see Randeep. They’d worked there together twenty years ago, but as usual Bisto had lost touch, put things off, not sent a card or a text for – how many years? Too many. It wasn’t that he didn’t care – he did, but memories brought so much pain with them. Then suddenly he was filled with an urge to see his brother-in-law, to hug him, to see the familiar smile and to ask for help. He’d hoped Randeep and his wife would be at the same address; when he knocked, Ruchi had answered the door and not even recognised him.

      Bisto sighed. How would she have known it was him? He was bedraggled, dishevelled, old. Ruchi, always so beautiful, her eyes shining, told him that Randeep had died five months ago. Bisto had cried there and then, wept bitter tears for Randeep and for his other loss, the funeral in Dublin last week, still too raw in his throat and chest to speak about or to comprehend.

      Ruchi had asked him to come in; she’d offered a meal and he should have asked for a bath and to borrow an old coat of Randeep’s. But he couldn’t. He was sad and miserable, and he was too filthy and unkempt to go into their house and tread his soiled boots on the plush carpet. It didn’t seem right after so many years of forgetfulness and besides, it brought the pain of Nisha’s death back again. He still thought of his wife, every day, and it had been years now since she had passed.

      Bisto had mumbled that he’d be in touch soon and turned away. That night he’d slept in the bitter cold under a tree near a service station. He’d thought he deserved no better. Damp with dew and shivering, ice in his beard, he’d been offered a lift as far as Taunton by the kind man in the Jaguar who was buying petrol.

      A gentle voice brought Bisto from his thoughts. ‘… and we’re nearly there now. I’ll drop you in the main street, shall I?’

      Bisto nodded. ‘Fine, yes. That would be fine.’

      The young man kept his eyes on the road. ‘And how will you get to Plymouth? To the ferry? You have a place in France, you say?’

      Bisto wiped his grubby face on his grubbier sleeve, noticing the dirt engrained in the fabric of his jacket and the fabric of his skin. ‘Yes, I have a place in the Loire. My son is there. Sure, if I hadn’t lost my wallet and tickets…’

      The young man slowed the car, stopping by an old village hall. ‘This is as far as I go now. I live at the end of that long drive.’

      ‘Well, okay – thanks, then.’ Bisto grabbed the door handle, then as an afterthought he held out his hand to the young man, who was instantly dismayed at the sight of the grime embedded in the lines of his palm. The young man took his hand and squeezed it.

      ‘Nice to meet you, Mr—?’

      ‘Mulligan.’ Bisto pulled his hand away. ‘Bisto Mulligan.’

      The man met his eyes with sparkling blue ones. ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that you lost your wallet, Mr Mulligan. It sounds as if you’ve had a horrendous time in Dublin.’

      Bisto scrutinised the open expression and he knew the man didn’t believe him. ‘I lost the wallet and my luggage and tickets on the ferry to Liverpool.’

      The young man gave a cheery smile. ‘Well, I hope you won’t mind if I offer you something. May the luck of the Irish be with you and with me too. Here you are.’ He tugged off his cap, ruffled a hand through the silky blond thatch and took out his wallet, fingering two twenties and pushing them into Bisto’s hand.

      ‘God bless you,’ Bisto mumbled, a saying that owed more to the Catholic priests of his Dublin schooldays than his own faith.

      ‘I hope it will help you get back home. There’s a number eleven bus across the road which will take you to the station at Taunton.’ The young man smiled again, a charming grin, boyish and good-natured. ‘I’m Hugo Garrett, by the way.’

      ‘Pleased to meet you. And very many thanks to you indeed, Hugo, for your generosity.’

      Bisto slithered from the Jaguar, watched it glide away, and waved his hand towards the fading throaty sounds of the engine. His hand held two notes. Forty pounds. He could afford a ticket for a bus, and maybe a train, even a sandwich. He turned to cross the road and a sign caught his eye, swinging in the wind on the side of a large white house with a thatched roof. The sign showed a picture of a cartoon sheep, all smiling face and curly wool, holding up a pint of beer. The sign proclaimed the place was called the Sheep Dip Inn. He rubbed a hand to his eyes. The last few days had been some of the worst of his life. Bisto screwed the twenty pound notes in his fist and muttered beneath his breath.

      ‘The hell with it. I fancy a quick gargle. A fool and his money are soon parted, eh, Bisto?’

      A tall man with neatly cropped dark hair and a t-shirt which proclaimed it was BEER O’ CLOCK was wiping glasses behind the bar. He was probably in his forties. He was talking to an attractive woman of the same age, her hair in a long chestnut plait, wearing a dark shirt and denim dungarees. The man had an accent Bisto couldn’t recognise. He leaned on the bar and caught sight of himself in the long mirror behind it, a short scruffy man in his mid-seventies, his white hair thick and curling over the collar of a putrid blue jacket. Bisto knew he looked like a vagrant. He snorted softly to himself: he was a vagrant right now. There was no other word for him, except perhaps tramp. Or drifter. He wiped his nose; the nostrils were damp and his fingers came away wet.

      The man behind the bar turned to the woman. ‘Justina?’

      Bisto scrutinised his own face in the mirror again. His eyes were shining, circled