The Outsiders Read Online Free PDF Page A

team to history, but the tribe stays strong. One day, I promised him, it’ll happen.’
     
    The taxi driver hooted.
    They were at the front door, the two bags were outside on the step. The keys were in her hand, but the phone had rung.
    ‘Leave it,’ the flight lieutenant (ret’d) said.
    ‘Of course I won’t,’ she retorted.
    So, she was back inside and the hall lights were switched on. He heard her repeat the name she’d been given and knew she was speaking to Penny, a niece by family arrangement, not blood. She was nodding firmly as if she was hearing good news. She’d sat in the chair beside the hall table and was asking about flights and times. Geoff  Walsh glanced at his watch and tried to catch her eye, pointing at its face. Her hand flapped at him as if her conversation was more important than their departure. Her head twisted away from him and he was left with a view of the wall and the framed photographs: himself in front of a Hawker Hunter jet on a runway at the Khormaksar base in the Protectorate of Aden, forty-eight years back; himself in the open cockpit of a Lightning interceptor on an apron at Leuchars on the Scottish east coast, forty-two years before, and with his navigator beside an F4 Phantom on a stop-over at RAF Wildenrath in Germany in 1977. He had never really got the hang of the promotion thing . . . He could see the state of the paintwork on the wall where the pictures were mounted – he’d never really got the hang of the money thing either.
    When he had come out, his flying days over, Fran had had a persistent bad chest, respiratory difficulties, and their dream had been a home on a hill above the barely developed fishing harbour at Marbella – the first few hotels had sprouted by the beach. They’d bought a bungalow on a quarter-acre plot and had planned a big extension and a good life. There had been an investment in an Australian mining company, an odds-on certainty, a bucketful of Marconi shares and . . . Geoff and Fran Walsh lived off the RAF pension and the extension had never materialised.
    She was saying what she had left in the fridge. Did it bloody matter? His hip hurt, but he started down the path towards the front gate, his stick tucked under his arm, pulling the two cases. They bounced and lolled on the uneven stones. Because of the pain, he could be short-tempered. The operation was to be funded by a veterans’ charity associated with the Royal Air Force, and Fran would stay in an attached hostel until he was considered fit to return to Spain.
    The lights went out behind him. He heard the door slam and the locks turn. Her torch came on. If he didn’t come through the operation – had to be a possible outcome – and the Villa Paraiso was sold, any likely purchaser would call in a bulldozer, flatten it and start again. That was pretty much what had happened on either side of them. Fran had relieved him of the heavier bag and the torch beam showed the weeds in the gravel. The light caught their car, an Austin Maxi from the long-defunct British Leyland factory, which he had driven from the UK when they’d emigrated. Either side of them there were castles of opulence. A banker from Madrid had the one to the left, and the Russian fellow was on the right. Both would have paid a couple of million euro each to the developer, then chucked, minimum, another million at their villas. The developer had tried to buy Villa Paraiso but Geoff Walsh had turned him down. He and Fran were sandwiched between top of the range, and themselves were bottom of the pile. Since his hip had deteriorated he’d hardly had the car out and a committee man from the local British Legion called by every week to take Fran to the mini-mart. It seemed a hell of a long time ago that he’d done the bloody sound barrier, set off the boom and been half flattened by the G forces.
    She had the gate open, scraped it back. Fran Walsh said, ‘That was Penny.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Her boy’s coming. Tomorrow or the