Читать книгу The Boy in the Moon - Kate O’Riordan - Страница 6

Alarm bells were ringing. Julia swallowed a mouthful of bile and toothpaste and shouted downstairs: ‘Brian? Are you deaf? Sam’s got the alarm going again … Turn it off and give him his breakfast.’

In the hall, Sam added to the cacophony. Arsenal vs. Manchester United: ‘Goooal! Yes! Bergkamp has done it again. Yes! Yes!’

He was prostrate, punching the air with his fist when she flicked the alarm off and signalled him to the kitchen with a pointed finger, which he ignored. Brian was already there, crunching on toast while he read his horoscope in yesterday evening’s paper. He remained standing, however, just in case she thought he was doing nothing to help. Julia shovelled Coco Pops into a bowl for Sam, thinking that they might at least lend a uniformity of colour when regurgitated later on the ferry.

‘I don’t know why we have an alarm anyway.’ Brian flicked to the sports results. ‘I mean, nothing ever happens when it goes off, and besides, there’s nothing much to rob here, is there?’

Julia downed a glass of orange juice. ‘I guess the alarm is to ensure that no one discovers that fact, don’t you think?’ she said in a levelled tone. Her thin smile said: Failing accidents and breast cancer, thirty maybe forty years to go.

In the hall the ball thumped against the front door. ‘That’s it! Arsenal have clinched it with a mag-nificent goal. Arsenal two hundred and twenty-three to Manchester’s lousy two. And the crowd are going crazy …’

‘Alarms, shutters, infra-red lights and the like, all to advertise what you don’t have. It’s a bit nuts, you have to admit,’ Brian offered. He looked up. ‘I’ll bring the bags down, will I?’

Julia studied her fingernails. ‘You do that,’ she said. ‘And Brian?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I have never wished you a slow, agonizing, horrible death. I just want you to know that.’

As the car pulled away from the house, Julia took one last lingering look back. Her gaze took in the bleached winter bones of the magnolia tree in the front garden and the mellow red bricks of the double-fronted Edwardian house with its large white-framed, multipaned windows. The middle-class dilemma, she thought: more work, bigger house, more work, bigger house, more work, biggest house – death. Big house sold by son to pay for drug habit.

It really does sink, she realized, the heart; it was nearly in her stomach, on its way to her ankles. But there was no way out of it this Christmas – Brian’s sisters would be home from Australia, the first visit in fifteen years. Besides, for some reason entirely unfathomable to her, Sam loved the place. She had refused to accompany them last summer. Off they went – Sam waving goodbye at Heathrow from his perch on Brian’s shoulders – to the rain and wind and the absurdly contrasting stoical countenance of Brian’s father and his equally stoical dog. As it happened, they returned wearing two well-entrenched tans while she was wan and pale from a fortnight’s rain in London.

Sam was in a daze in the back. She craned her neck to check on him. He was staring out the window through bleary eyes. It was still a watery dawnlight. The streetlamps glowed orange against the pallid sky. Julia reached her hand back; Sam grazed it with his own, then contemplated the window again.

‘How long more?’ he asked.

‘We’ve only just left,’ Julia said. ‘Hours to go yet. Play a game of football in your head.’

She watched him in the rearview mirror while he mouthed a running commentary, legs twitching, head jerking from side to side, as he headed the ball into the net. She wondered if any passing drivers would have sympathy for them and the mentally retarded paraplegic in the back.

They drove on through dark, sleepy suburbs. A preponderance of Indian restaurants in one area, followed by DIYs and bleak boarded-up shopfronts in another. Truck-drivers congregated in a caff on a corner, sipping from steamy mugs, staring out morosely at the infrequent passing cars. Julia wondered where they had come from, where they were going. What did they do when they got there? Turn around and do it all again? Not surprising then that they looked so baleful, slumped over their coffee cups. Brian fiddled with the radio dials. Sam fell asleep.

A light rain slanted against the windscreen. The M4 snaked ahead, its grey lanes empty and forlorn-looking. It suited her mood. She looked at Brian from the corner of her eye. He had that fixed quality to his stare which she sometimes found a bit discomforting. He appeared to blank out for whole chunks of time. Since she had known him, there had been times when she’d felt that there was a vacuum deep within Brian, but the impenetrable glaze of nothingness in his eyes masked it entirely. A pie-chart with a slice taken, five minutes missing from a clockface. She attributed it to the fact that he was a surviving twin. Perhaps it was inevitable that there should be an enduring lacuna in the survivor. She couldn’t say; certainly Brian said nothing. He had had a twin; he died; end of story. Fell over a cliff. Matter-of-fact, just like that. Julia had laughed. It wasn’t intentional, but the way he’d said it was so perfectly in tune with her first introduction to Brian’s spartan homeplace – here is the house, here is the field, here is the cliff at the end of the field, here is the cliff at the end of the field which Noel fell over – that she had almost expected him to mime ‘here is Noel, falling over the cliff.’ She simply could not help herself: ‘Was he pushed or did he jump?’ Brian had glowered at her all day after that.

‘I’ll have to stop at the next service station for petrol.’ He cut across her thoughts.

‘Why didn’t you fill up last night?’

‘Didn’t think of it.’

‘If we stop it will wake Sam up.’

‘So he wakes up.’

She glared at him from the corner of her eye and silently mimicked his last statement with an exaggerated shrug. The shrug which had first attracted her to him. He was so casual. Nothing fazed him. Went into computers because he had had to put something down on the form to apply for the government student grant. Straight from the farm to bollocksing up other people’s computers for them. Milking cows or suckers, what odds? Same shit in the end anyway. Easygoing, hard-working, dumb guy. She had liked that. Thought it was honest. Only he’d turned out to be neither dumb nor particularly hard-working – easygoing, certainly. So easygoing, she thought, that when he walked, one buttock had to wait a second or two for the other to align itself. Easy like treacle pudding, horrendously sweet at first but then you became immune to the taste. Even grew to like it – but only to a degree, of course. She figured now that the very reasons you chose a partner were the same reasons you divorced them. Brian chuckled. He had caught her mimicked shrug.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You.’

‘What about me?’

‘You’re so sharp sometimes I wonder that you don’t cut yourself.’

‘Sometimes I do.’ She smiled in response and settled back with her eyes closed.

She would make an effort, a real effort, she decided. She would just let them all get on with it. Even if the sisters from Australia proved as ghastly as she expected. They regularly sent Brian photographs of themselves and their families framed in cardboard hearts, with little printed notes: G’day from Aussieland. ‘Oh God,’ she sighed aloud.

It was while she was Speech Therapist attached to the North Middlesex, eleven years ago, that she had first met Brian. He was installing the brand-new top-of-the-range computer system into the hospital. The same computer that caused her colleagues’ faces to redden and their fists to clench involuntarily over the next few years, every time it was mentioned. Brian swore that it had nothing to do with his inputting skills that the damn thing chose to offload its data in such an arbitrary fashion from time to time.

She had liked his smile, the way he chatted as amiably to the dinner women as he did to clerical staff. Liked the look of him too, the soft burr of his accent, the constant self-deprecation which usually conceals a healthy arrogance, but which in his case turned out to be warranted well enough. She had liked the fact that he had made a hundred assumptions about her too, felt inclined to prove to him that she was not the archetypical middle-class Hampshire lass he took her to be – even if she was. Moreover, she was a middle-class Hampshire lass (with thighs) fast approaching thirty, desperately busy, happy, ambitious, hectic, social – single. And single every Friday night with a skip of chips and a vat of Chianti.

Even back then, his lack of urgency, which she equated with lack of ambition, irritated her. There had been moments during the past ten years of marriage when the air around him irritated her simply because he was breathing it. Still, they had sort of stumbled into wedlock, though she had never quite figured out Brian’s motivation. He said he loved her. There was no reason to suspect otherwise. She said it too, on occasion. I love you. I wuv you. I weally wuv you. What was that supposed to mean? Until she woke up one morning to find that after ten years of acute, possibly terminal irritation, she had fallen in wuv with her own husband. Now that was scary.

Brian chuckled to himself. He could see Cotter’s spittle glistening quite clearly on the dangling rasher rind, while Cotter cast a slit-eyed glance around the schoolroom. Everyone kept their eyes and heads well down, except for Padraig in the back, of course. Brian was selected again.

‘Oy, you, Donovan. Put that in the bin there for me.’ Cotter sucked the rind into his mouth one more time, then wriggled it again. Brian opened one eye, holding on to the fleeting hope that maybe Cotter meant Edward this time. But the schoolteacher’s whiskey eyes were fixed on him. Edward snickered behind him – Cathal too – as Brian stood up with an inward sigh. He promised himself that he would puck shit out of them later in the yard.

Cotter did his usual trick, holding on to the rind for a second so that Brian’s fingers slid along the spittle before it was in his grip. Then Brian made a mistake: he turned his mouth down at the corners. He tried quickly to upturn it again, but he’d been caught.

‘Oh, now,’ Cotter said expansively, ‘oh, now, what have we here at all?’

Brian threw the rind into the bin and returned to his desk, but Cotter was in no mind to continue with the morning’s lessons anyhow, not with the hangover he had on him and now that he had some serious tormenting to do. Brian winced when he heard his name again.

‘Oy, Donovan. Up here, boy. That’s right … Stand here beside me and explain that little girly face you just did.’ Cotter did an exaggerated moue of disgust for the class, and they sniggered obligingly.

Brian picked them out one by one in his head as he gazed up at his teacher, rounding his eyes innocently. ‘I – I don’t know what you mean, sir.’ Just a little stutter for effect. Cotter liked stutters; mostly he laid off Edward for that reason. Stutters and stammers were suitably deferential, they showed a respectful hesitancy. All of Cotter’s children were hesitant, respectful and speech-impaired.

Brian weighed up the odds: on the one hand, slow crucifixion by whiskey withdrawal throughout the long day ahead of sums, catechism and English; on the other, instant gratification by means of extradition of torture into waiting repository of stupid boy who asked for it. Brian knew which one he would choose. He lowered his eyes humbly and awaited his fate. Cotter farted. That meant he was excited. Brian feared the worst. He looked up and followed Cotter’s sadistic gaze to the back of the classroom where it fell on the grinning, rocking figure of Padraig, the class half-wit. Brian groaned.

‘Oh, now,’ Cotter began, farting again. ‘Master Donovan, sir, you’re telling me that your lips did not … What way will I put it at all?’ He craned forward. ‘Ahh, twitch? Did they or did they not twwwitch when your, ahh, fingers encountered my, ahh, saliva?’

‘They never twitched, sir. I swear it – on my brother’s life, sir. I swear it.’ Brian had time for a thundery glance in Edward’s direction.

‘So you’re not a gedleen then?’

‘Oh, no, sir.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I am. Because I won’t have gedleens in this classroom and so I won’t – except for the girls themselves, of course.’

The girls, including Brian’s twin sisters, twittered appreciatively. The veins stood out on Cotter’s nose; his eyes, of now indeterminate colour, filled with patriotic tears.

‘Because’ – he had to stop for a plaintive snort – ‘because, one of these weekends, any day now, I’ll be expecting you lads there to march by my side, to march like MEN, and what’ll we do, lads?’

‘We’ll take back the North, sir,’ resounded the chorus.

‘Aris!’ Cotter shrieked.

‘We’ll take back the North, sir.’

‘Spoken like men.’ Cotter dabbed his eyes. He reached under his desk flap and pulled out a Woodbine, fingers trembling poignantly as he struck the match. ‘A bit of spit won’t put us off now, will it, young Donovan?’

Brian shook his head. ‘No sir.’

‘You’ve a mind to share Padraig there’s victuals with him so, I’m taking it?’

‘’T’ wouldn’t be fair to him, sir, but I’ve a mind to do it if it – if it would help the North, sir.’ Brian’s mind cast desperately around for a way out. He couldn’t think fast enough. Maybe he should try a bit of cheek to incense Cotter into a strapping, but then he might end up taking the strap and the worst of all punishments anyway; there was no time, damn it, Cotter was farting with every draw on his cigarette which meant it was all over bar the shouting.

Brian turned his head. He gazed over the bowl-and-scissors haircuts, delighted to a lad that it was not them facing the worst of all possible fates: Victuals with Padraig. The same Padraig who came to school every morning resplendent in his one grey suit and navy blue tie, all of twenty-five if he was a day. But there was no place else to send him. So he came to school and rocked and beamed his way through every lesson, until Cotter rang the bell for break or victuals and then Padraig came into his own, unwrapping slices of lard, two Ginger Nut biscuits and a heel of white bread. This was washed down with a screwtop sauce bottle of milk, and that was the problem. Padraig never quite got the hang of his eating co-ordination. He licked his lard, stuffed the bread into his mouth, then shoved the bottle neck into the mixture – and chomped. While he chomped and sucked, he also beamed. Padraig was good-natured. He was compelled to smile or laugh through every meal, which meant that his food was compelled down his chin. When that happened, his tongue was compelled after the food which had escaped it, so he ate and drank and beamed and retrieved, all simultaneously. Brian’s heart sank. He knew what was expected of him. To the right, by the window beaded with slanting rain, Edward’s eyes shone with belief. Brian had no great desire to disappoint his younger brother, but he felt aggrieved. He had done nothing so heinous as to merit this, the worst of all possibles. Cotter’s eyes gleamed. He reached for and tolled the bell. Brian slouched to the back of the class and nudged Padraig sideways.

Padraig was already rifling through his small cardboard case for his lunch. He licked the slab of lard and offered it to Brian. Brian licked, then turned away. All heads craned back towards them. Padraig bit into his slice of bread. He chortled to himself happily. Nobody blinked as the bottle neck intruded into the hedonistic mess. Glug glug. A merry Padraig extruded the bottle, leaving a glutinous residue of lard and dough and milk encasing the top. Not a breath as Padraig extended the bottle toward Brian. Cotter released a resonant volley for Ireland from the forefront of the room. Brian held the bottle; he blinked rapidly; his hands trembled. He pursed his lips. He clamped them to the glass, shuddered for an instant, then drank with such fervour that the classroom erupted into cheers and roars of such approbation as to make Cotter keel sideways headlong into the bin harbouring his own beloved bacon rinds. He was so overcome by fervent love of his country that he called a halt to the rest of the day’s lessons, and pronounced that from that day forward, 19 April 1966 would be remembered as the beginning of the South’s incursion into the North’s silent but awaiting bay. Brian stood for his bows. He was twelve. And triumphant.

‘What are you laughing at, Dad?’

‘Oh nothing. Nothing.’

‘You must have been laughing at something,’ Sam persisted.

‘I’ve forgotten already.’

Sam grumbled to himself as Brian pulled into the service station. Julia was pretending to be asleep. He filled the tank and joined the motorway again.

‘Are we there?’ Sam asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Mu-um …?’

‘Shh, she’s sleeping.’

‘How long more?’

‘Couple of hours. Go back to sleep.’

‘I wasn’t really asleep. I just had my eyes closed.’

‘Well, just close your eyes some more then.’

‘Let’s play something.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. I Spy maybe?’

‘All right. I spy with my little eye something beginning with M.’

‘Em … Mum?’

‘No. Motorway. Your turn.’

‘You didn’t give me a fair chance …’ Sam was about to protest.

‘Do you want me to take over?’ Julia interrupted, shifting up on her seat.

‘OK,’ Brian said.

‘Pull in.’

‘I thought you meant with I Spy.’

‘Pull in, pull in. I’ll drive now.’

‘You’re not supposed to stop on the motorway.’

‘Pull in.’

Brian sighed and stopped on the hard shoulder. They swapped seats. The rain was pelting down in fat crackling drops. Julia swerved out on to the motorway. She was nervous, he understood, about the journey, about the destination. He experienced a spasm of pity for her. And then he felt a spasm of pity for himself, because he would pay the price for her nervousness.

Halfway across the Severn Bridge, Brian turned to Sam. ‘We’re in Wales now, Sam.’

‘How long more?’

‘Oh, we’re a few hours off Pembroke yet.’

Julia stopped at the next service station and they all got out. She stalked ahead to the Ladies with Brian and Sam following behind her. When she came out again, Brian was standing by the large rain-streaked windows, sipping coffee from a cardboard cup.

‘Where’s Sam?’ Julia asked.

‘Isn’t he with you?’

‘What do you mean?’

Brian held the cup in mid-air. ‘He followed you.’

‘No he didn’t – I thought you were taking him to the Gents.’

‘He ran off – after you.’ Brian held his gaze steady and sipped from the cup. ‘Check the Ladies, will you?’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Julia cast him a contemptuous look and whirled around. Her feet pounded the floor away from him. She returned within seconds, breaking into a run as she approached. Brian frowned and sipped again; he knew he should be doing something but he was overcome by the peculiar sensation of being grounded that he experienced whenever Julia charged into action. ‘He’s not there.’

‘Don’t panic. He’s probably in one of the shops.’

‘Well? Are you going to stand there drinking coffee all morning or are you going to help me look?’

Brian drained the last of his coffee and observed over the rim the whitening of her face and the clenching of her left fist. ‘Take it easy,’ he said, deliberately drawing his words out slowly. ‘C’mon, you check that one there’ – he nodded toward the newsagents behind her – ‘I’ll check the Gents.’

As he headed for the Gents he saw her running up and down the aisles in the shop. They met by the window again. ‘Not there,’ he said with his mouth pursed, jerking his head back toward the male toilets.

‘Jesus – Jesus Christ – Jesus Jesus Jesus.’ Julia was frantically looking around her. ‘Run around, quick,’ she shouted over her shoulder.

‘Julia, it’s …’ he called out, fixing a smile on his lips for the people who had begun to stare at them. He shoved a hand into a trouser pocket, formed his mouth into a whistle and broke into a trot after her.

‘Sa-am!’ Julia was calling. She stopped suddenly and turned. ‘Not after me, you fool. You check upstairs.’

Brian veered toward the escalator; he took the steps two at a time. There were probably video games up there, that’s where Sam would be. He started to run to the left, stopped, turned and walked to the right, his mouth still silently whistling. He checked the upstairs grill room, the toilets, the shops. His palms were sweaty by the time he returned to the escalators. Then he whistled aloud and descended with both hands in his pockets. There was no sign of Julia at the bottom. He raised his eyebrows and gazed around.

She came running from the area behind the shop. Her skin was stretched tightly over her face, her blue eyes opened wide and unblinking. She stopped stock-still when she saw him. Her mouth opened. ‘You’re sure he’s not upstairs?’ She panted.

Brian shrugged and his forehead creased into a frown. He gazed out toward the carpark.

‘The carpark?’ She was screaming now, people were beginning to stop and edge toward them, attracted perhaps by the almost palpable scent of her fear.

‘Sam would never leave the building on his own,’ Brian offered. He could feel the skin on his own face begin to tighten and stretch.

‘On his own?’ she shrieked. ‘But what if someone told him that we were there?’

He fervently wished she had not said that. ‘He’s here somewhere, let’s look together,’ he said, brushing past her outstretched arm. ‘Where are the video games in this place?’ he called over her shoulder.

She ran after him. ‘At the back there,’ she pointed.

They looked around. A boy not much older than Sam pulled and hauled at a lever and stared into the flickering screen. ‘He’s not here.’ Julia’s voice sustained a quavery note that set Brian’s teeth on edge. ‘I’m going to the carpark – you stay here in case he appears,’ she said.

He watched her from the glass doorway. Her hair was matted to her scalp by rain as she ran up and down the labyrinth of parked cars. He saw her stop for a moment to catch her breath with her torso bent forward and her hands resting on her knees. She glanced up and he could feel her eyes sear him from the distance. He looked around for a security guard. Julia burst through the doors, blinking rapidly. ‘Jesus. Jesus,’ she said.

‘I’ve been looking for a security guard,’ he said.

‘And?’ She looked around hopefully.

‘Haven’t seen one yet,’ he said.

‘He’s got to be here,’ she said. It was a question, he realized too late. She brushed past him and ran up the escalator.

‘He’s not –’ he began but she was gone. Brian started to run around the downstairs shops and eateries. He ran in circles. Around and around. He kept ending up by the video games. That was where Sam should be. The boy was still there, staring at a blank screen now. He gazed up at Brian.

‘A boy,’ Brian gasped, ‘about this high – dark wavy hair, freckles, brown eyes, red raincoat. Have you seen him?’

The boy looked around for his parents. He shrugged. Brian ran back to the escalators. Julia was pulling her wet hair back with two hands and shouting at some man in a uniform. Brian heaved a sigh of relief. A uniform. At last. But the uniform was not looking very reassuring; his face wore a decidedly worried expression as Julia gesticulated at it. Then the uniform turned and ran up the escalator, speaking into a radio at the same time. Brian’s heart beat twice, then seemed to stop; he had to remember to breathe. Julia’s expression was dazed when she turned to him. She staggered backwards with her hand over her mouth. Brian approached slowly but her other hand began to make a waving motion, a film clouded the blue of her eyes. Brian remembered to breathe again. He took another step but she ran sideways and crashed through the door of the Ladies.

She was blacking out. Little sparks of light erupted then vanished on the periphery of her vision. Her heart felt like a huge dysfunctional machine within her chest. It hammered down on her ribcage. Beads of sweat solidified on her forehead. She ran to a sink and splashed cold water on her face. A long, slow moan erupted from the pit of her stomach; she felt it carry up, through her gut, into her lungs, strum silently on her vocal chords for a moment, until it broke free and the sound made her body shudder. She saw little fat legs kicking, she heard the muffled sound of his terrified screams, she saw his exposed, vulnerable white belly, she heard him call her name … She splashed water again. Her legs could not sustain her weight. They buckled. She hunkered down and from some unknown corner of her consciousness she saw, beneath the cubicle door which skirted the floor by a foot, a pair of white sneakers, standing perfectly still, perfectly aligned, and perfectly familiar. She dry heaved and called his name. The lock on the cubicle slid back. A brown eye peered through the crack.

‘Mum?’

‘Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Sam. Sam darling – Sam darling …’

He ran to her. She clutched at him. And had to turn her head away to stifle the dry heaves. Sam was crying. He shook her shoulders. ‘I only went to the video things,’ he said, ‘then I couldn’t see you or Dad so I came in here in case the bad men … like you told me …’

She had to swallow a mouthful of saliva. ‘It’s OK now. I’m here. Mummy’s here. It’s OK, darling …’

They rocked together for some minutes. A woman entered the toilet area and stood staring indecisively at them. A drunken mother perhaps? One of those drug addicts? Julia gazed up at her and laughed. She had to force her grip to loosen on Sam’s shoulders. He would show bruises tomorrow. When his crying subsided, she staggered to her feet, reached down and scooped him up. He clung to her. She covered his face with kisses and carried him out to his father.

Brian was standing beside the security guard. As Julia approached with Sam’s head nestled between her cocked head and her shoulder, a cry went up from the surrounding onlookers. She ignored them, she ignored the visible double take of the guard. She ignored the woman to her left who repeatedly made the sign of the cross over her breast. Gimleteyed, she approached Brian, who did not move, did not emit a sound or display a single, solitary show of emotion. He stood motionless, his hands by his sides, his face white and taut-looking. Sam turned and reached out his arms.

‘Dad,’ he said.

‘Sam.’

Julia felt life itself drain from her arms as she surrendered her grail to the outstretched arms before her. People clapped. The security guard moved to disperse them just like on the television. Sam was nuzzling the side of Brian’s face. Brian’s eyes met hers for an instant, then he hooded them and whispered something to his son. Julia swung past the dispersing crowd, the newly officious security guard, the glass doors, and as she headed for the car, she felt her shoulder bag slap against her waist in a rhythmical, rain-drenched adagio. She reached the navy blue estate and slumped against it. Inside, she could see the meticulously packed suitcases, the crates of wine, the well-concealed Santa boxes – Sam’s new bike, his puzzles, his stocking-fillers – and she felt entirely alone for a moment. As if in a way Sam had really been taken from her. She lifted her head and gazed at the approaching sight of Brian with his arms wrapped protectively around Sam. Even at this distance, she could see the tremors still quake through Sam’s otherwise limp body. She wrenched at the door, then remembered that Brian had taken the keys from her.

Julia was silent for so long that Brian instinctively knew that she was mouthing to herself first, the familiar litany of his past transgressions. He could feel little waves of sympathy emanate from Sam in the back. Brian stared blankly ahead. The trick with Julia was to keep apologizing, over and over again, in the same modulated tone and never to flinch or show her a wound, because if she saw a gash or suspected one, she would tear at it with her teeth. Brian cleared his throat, it was difficult to get the timing right in these matters. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.

He could see her shoulders stiffen. Her palms clapped together silently. ‘It is one thing to try and bring up your son as best you can,’ she began, enunciating each word as if speaking to someone learning English, ‘but it is quite another to have to do so in direct competition with a father who would appear to have some sort of a death wish for his son …’

‘I am really sorry,’ Brian said.

‘What is it with you? Is this a macho thing between fathers and sons that I haven’t been told about – or are you just inconceivably stupid?’

‘I thought he was with you.’

‘Did you think he was with me the time you took him up the loft ladder in your arms?’ She flexed her lips. ‘You walked down that ladder – frontways – with a two-year-old child in your arms. A week later, you fell from that ladder yourself and broke your arm …’ Her foot was tapping. ‘Did you think he was with me the day I caught him running around the garden with a secateurs pointing up at his throat? Or the day I just happened upon you chopping wood in your father’s shed with your three-year-old son behind you, swinging – swinging, I say – an axe over his head? Hmm?… I didn’t hear you …’

Brian rubbed his jaw. This was a two-hour job, easily. He longed for Pembroke. Sam had covered his ears in the back.

‘This is going to be a bad one,’ Sam said.

‘Of course I have only myself to blame really,’ Julia continued. ‘I mean, you’d think I’d know by now that I must not under any circumstances, not even for one lousy fucking second of the day, allow my son out of my sight when his kamifuckingkaze father is around –’

‘Mum, you used the fu word. Twice,’ Sam interjected.

‘I know, Sam, and I apologize. Forget everything I’ve ever told you – you may, from now on, occasionally use the fu word. All right?’

‘I do already in the playground sometimes,’ Sam confessed soberly.

Brian observed from the corner of his eye the double tic of Julia’s features as she digested that bit of information. He felt a sharp spasm of love for his son, aware of what he was trying to do. But Julia was in mid-flow and would not be appeased until she had tasted blood. She was working herself into a frenzy, fisting the glove compartment and crashing her knees together.

‘… And another thing,’ Julia continued. ‘Sam is seven now. Old enough to notice things. I won’t have your father drinking from his saucer like he does, do you hear me? He can bloody well use a cup like the rest of us, at least while we’re there … And that dog – that dog is not to come inside the house while I’m in it – filthy, flea-ridden creature …’ She continued, without stopping for a breath, saying all the things she had vowed to herself that she would not say.

Brian adjusted the windscreen wipers to accommodate the sweeps of rain which made visibility almost negligible. He stuck his tongue in his cheek and tried to wander in his mind to a safer place. Instead, he thought of last Christmas. He had rarely been so miserable. A misery he could see etched on the faces of Julia’s parents and her sister also. Carol, Julia’s only sibling, younger by six years, had spent her time slipping into the kitchen after Brian, lighting surreptitious cigarettes and downing extra stiff measures of her Canadian rye so that she could fix a smile on her face before she returned to the living-room for yet another of Julia’s party games. Charades, Happy Families, What’s My Line … Evening after interminable evening. Julia had collapsed into bed each night, exhausted from entertaining. Brian had almost felt sorry for her, but he felt sorry for Richard and Jennifer too when he saw them put aside their newspapers with weary sighs and teeth-gritted smiles when Julia’s exhortations for them to join in grew steadily sharper and more demanding. There was something so desperate about the way Julia entertained, as if, in a way, she were following a manual, some guide to happy families, only she had missed out on a whole slew of the rules and could not allow for a moment’s silence.

It would not be such a bad thing, Brian always thought, to end up like Julia’s parents. They were mild, easygoing people, comfortable in company, comfortable with one another. While they took on. the forms of a cauliflower and a tortoise separately, together he saw them as a gentle sudsy lather, the kind his hands made when he rubbed them with those half-cleanser, half-moisturizer bars of soap. A dissonant note had struck him one evening when he tasted those suds in the bath. They looked so creamy, so enticing, but the reality was just like soap, bitter and harsh as any disinfectant.

Sometimes, he saw their eyes narrow in wonderment as they gazed at their eldest daughter, as if they could not quite figure out where she had come from. She was impatient with them. When her mother clapped her knees and said: ‘Shall we have some tea?’ Julia invariably snapped: ‘You want tea? Then make it – Just make it. It’s your decision.’ And Jennifer would flush most miserably, move to rise but Julia would be in the kitchen already, flicking the kettle on and crashing cups on to saucers, in an access of guilt, Brian understood. Once, Jennifer had whispered to Brian: ‘We should have called her Matilda,’ but that was the closest she ever came to a direct criticism.

‘Sometimes I think you do these things just to hurt me,’ Julia was saying.

‘Mum, leave Dad alone now, he’s said he’s sorry,’ Sam said.

The gurgle was out. Brian bit his lower lip. But it was too late. She had caught it.

‘What?’ she spat. ‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say a thing.’

‘Yes, you did. You went “hmmph” – I heard you.’

‘I feel sick,’ Sam said.

Julia craned around. ‘Sam, stop whingeing.’

‘I’m not whingeing. I really do feel sick.’

‘Do you want me to stop?’ Brian asked.

‘Roll your window down a bit and take deep breaths, Sam,’ Julia ordered.

Sam fumbled with the window. He breathed in and out in an exaggerated fashion.

‘Better now?’ Julia asked. Her voice had softened.

Sam nodded his head. Brian looked in the rearview mirror. He met Sam’s eyes and crinkled a smile with the corner of his own eyes. Sam beamed.

They drove on in silence for the rest of the journey, Julia pressing an imaginary accelerator to overtake other cars on the single-laned, winding road which took them the rest of the way to Pembroke. Theirs was the second last car on to the ferry. The roll of the vessel was almost immediate. Julia craned back to check on the sprawled, white-faced figures on the Pullman seats behind. Sam was moaning softly.

‘The rest of my natural,’ she cackled, just loud enough for Brian to hear.

They were going to break the journey in County Waterford to spend the night with Brian’s brother, Edward: a two-and-a-half hour drive still ahead of them once the ferry docked.

It seemed to Brian that a million years had passed since they had left London by the time Julia indicated into the close of houses on the outskirts of the town where Edward lived. He had to admire the unerring way she had arrived there having only ever visited once before. She drew the car up to the correct house. Edward opened the front door. He had a brush and pan in his hands. Julia got out and hauled Sam from the back seat. Edward made for Brian’s side of the car. Brian rolled the window down and they slapped one another on their forearms. Edward leaned against the car murmuring his greeting. His clothes were soaked in an instant. Julia lunged at the front door, prodding Sam in front of her. She called over her shoulder: ‘It’s raining, for Christ’s sake …’

Brian and Edward followed her in. She was already by the fire in the living-room, stripping off Sam’s vomit- and cola-stained clothes from the ferry trip. Sam hugged his body, his knees trembled, his teeth chattered.

‘Hi, Edward,’ Julia continued to address him over her shoulder, ‘listen, run a hot bath for Sam, will you please? He’s frozen … And Brian? Check the fridge – Sam needs something hot to eat, it doesn’t matter what. Are there eggs? Fine. Scrambled eggs and toast. If there’s any bacon there, bacon too –’ She suddenly checked herself and cast Edward a cheek-splitting smile. ‘Sorry, Edward, we’ve just had the most horrendous journey.’

Edward, who was looking slightly dazed, shrugged and moved a step closer to his older brother. ‘No p-p-problem,’ he said.

Julia’s shoulders lifted. She’d forgotten his stutter. Brian thought that it should be inscribed on her tombstone the day she first met Edward and he asked her what she d-d-did and with a perfectly straight face, without so much as a blink, she had responded that she was a speech therapist.

Edward shot upstairs to run the bath. Brian headed for the kitchen. Sam began to slowly defrost by the fire. The welcome smell of frying bacon made him lick his lips in anticipation. Julia smiled and moved to help him to the bathroom.

‘I can walk,’ Sam said haughtily.

She squidged his naked bottom as he passed and he squealed. Brian smiled and began to hum in the kitchen. Edward rejoined him and opened a couple of beers. They talked about the rain, the journey, Edward’s house, his new job as an accountant for the local sugar factory. Although his clothes still stank and his hair still plastered itself across his scalp, Brian felt a warmth, an ease permeate through his sodden body. This was a nothing conversation in which he could participate. It carried no hidden messages, meandered toward no hidden agenda. It was complete in itself. A circle of nothingness yet within that circumference, somewhere in the vacuum, lay mutual childhoods, shared remembrances, secrets told in trust – lifetimes. For a moment, he felt happy and secure. He always felt like this around his siblings: Edward, younger by two years; the twins in Australia, who called every month and, despite a gap of fifteen years since he had seen them, Brian still felt that familiar sense of ease when one or other of the slightly Australianized accents greeted him on the phone. Then there was another brother, Cormac, the second youngest, in Edinburgh: Brian rarely met him these days but they stayed in touch; and finally the baby of the family, Teresa, married in Dublin with six children of her own. She had visited him in London a couple of times but did not care much for Julia, although she had never said as much. Two children had died apart from his twin Noel: a stillborn girl before Brian and an older boy, of meningitis, when Brian was three. A couple of miscarriages as well. Their mother had lasted long enough to bear the others and succumbed to breast cancer not long after Teresa was born. Now, Brian was the eldest. He saw the gleam of admiration in Edward’s eyes as he watched his brother deftly flick the bacon over. Brian pointed at the fridge and Edward intuitively understood that butter was required.

Sam and Julia came downstairs. Julia still looked exhausted but Sam’s cheeks glowed, his dark hair was slaked to the side and he looked renewed and cosy in his Batman pyjamas. He sat by the table and held his fork and knife up. Brian dished out the food and rumpled Sam’s hair. Julia was feeling guilty so she rattled on at length about the new kitchen decor, to make up for her earlier surliness. Edward stood with his hands by his sides, unsure where to place himself amidst this admiration. He showed her the new washing machine. She oohed appreciatively.

During the meal, Brian noticed that Edward never stuttered when he was addressing Sam. He inscribed the notation on a part of his brain, certain that Julia would comment on the same thing tomorrow. Sam was kind to Edward, Brian further noticed, in a way that children could be kind to elders who were somehow different. He felt proud of his son and, sitting there, mopping up the bacon grease from his plate with a swatch of bread, proud of his wife too. She looked so ethereal, so pale and almost vulnerable-looking. He longed to touch her. She lifted her gaze from her plate and cast him a smile. He could see the complex vein patterns stand out, throbbing and bluish on the sides of her smooth milky forehead. Instinctively, he reached out and wiped a speck of food from the corner of her mouth. He saw her smile again, and saw Edward’s look of wonderment, and he realized, a little sadly, that his action had not been so instinctive after all.

Edward suggested that he might take them for a little tour in the morning, if they agreed, of course, and weather permitting, of course.

‘We’d love to, wouldn’t we?’ Julia said, her gaze taking in Sam and Brian, ‘but it’s bound to be terrible, isn’t it? … The weather I mean …’

Julia took Sam to bed. Brian had to go to the toilet upstairs. He stood outside Sam’s bedroom door and listened to them. He loved the sound of Julia’s voice when it crooned and coaxed Sam to sleep. She could be so gentle, so irresistible; he could feel his own lids heavying, his breathing decelerate.

‘… Beyond all measure of space and time and …’

‘… Everything.’

He heard.

‘Sorry I was so cross with Daddy.’

‘’S’ OK.’

‘I’ll be the nice mummy tomorrow, I promise.’

‘OK.’ A loud yawn.

‘Sam?’

‘What?’

‘It’s not really OK to use the fu word.’

‘I know.’

‘Am I a horrible mother?’

‘No. You’re lovely.’

Brian smiled and crept downstairs. Later, when Edward had gone to bed having poured two enormous brandies for his guests, Brian turned to Julia. ‘You are lovely,’ he said.

‘Am I?’ She flushed prettily.

‘I’m sorry about … earlier today. And all the other times. You’re quite right, I am careless with Sam sometimes.’ He sighed and swallowed a mouthful of brandy. It left a pleasant little sting on his tonsils. ‘It’s just that – well – I just don’t want him to be afraid all the time –’ Brian broke off and smiled sheepishly. ‘Maybe it’s a father thing …’

‘But why should he be afraid?’

‘Like I say, maybe it’s a …’ Brian shrugged, he reached for her hand. ‘Anyway … Forgiven?’

‘Yes.’ Julia smiled. She cast him a sidelong glance, unsure if she was picking up the right vibes. The steady gleam of his blue eyes told her that she was. He stared meaningfully at the rug beside the still blazing fire.

‘Here? Now?’ she asked, a giggle catching at the back of her throat.

Brian raised his eyebrows. Julia drained her glass and shunted toward him on her knees. As they made love with their ears straining for any creaks on the stairs, she thought about the absurd revolutions within an ordinary married day. The pendulum swings through every contrasting emotion – five minutes – the difference between anger and reconciliation, love and hate.