Читать книгу An Exceptionally Simple Theory (of Absolutey Everything) - Mark Winkler - Страница 5

Chris and Tracy

A scratching, a scraping wakes me into the warm summer dawn. I look over at Tracy. She’s asleep, snoring softly, a dried dribble of blood stretching the corner of her mouth into a clown’s smile.

I want to wake her to ask how she’s feeling, but that wouldn’t make sense.

The scratching continues. It couldn’t be Gabriel, not at this time of the day, so I swing my leg off the bed, grab my crutches, hobble across the wooden floor. The rubber toes of the crutches squeak with each swing. Squeak, thunk, squeak, thunk, I go. I look back at Tracy; I haven’t woken her. She’s used to me squeak-thunking around the house at all hours, has been for the past fifteen years.

There’s a spare bedroom next to ours which Tracy uses as a second dressing room; her accoutrements are simply too numerous to fit into the one we share. Jimmy Choos, Christian Louboutins sit patiently waiting for her, two pairs deep at floor level around the room; some I know have never been worn. Hangers dripping with designer wear, price-tags indirectly proportional to the amount of fabric, are suspended above the shoes. Drawers contain unknown treasures of lingerie. In a corner, her fitness gear, untidily piled, incongruous in the pristine personal boutique. A phone lies on a low set of drawers in the middle of the room. It’s discharged itself overnight – these days it has only about an hour’s battery life. I should replace it but never do, the memory of the chore always crowded out by everything else in my head.

The sound, a threatening, getting-in sound, is louder in Tracy’s dressing room. It’s coming from the sloped ceiling next to the dormer window. I look outside where the sun is spraying its first drops of light onto the green of the plane trees that protect the house, and I see that a family of squirrels has taken up residence in the eaves. They’ve chewed a six-inch hole through a section of facia board, and are now sharpening their teeth on the roof beams. I bang on the sloped ceiling beside the dormer window, but although they’re usually skittish enough to flinch at a falling leaf, they ignore the sound: one simply pokes its little Disney nose out of the hole and smirks at me before withdrawing back into my house. I bang again, harder, longer. The gnawing ceases for all of five seconds, and then starts up again. They’ll give us rabies, those squirrels. They’ll chew up the beams, and while we’re sleeping the roof will come crashing down on our heads. They’ll chew through the wiring and set fire to the place. They’ll have babies, and their babies will have babies, and within weeks the collective weight of squirrel generations will bring down the ceiling and the house will be a disaster of dust, ceiling boards, toxic glass fibre, squirrel shit, and flocks – herds? swarms? nibbles? – of rodents will run around chewing holes in the furniture, devouring shoes, skittering up and down the curtains, boring through mattresses in mere seconds and –

“M-mmm!” A noise issues from the bedroom. My banging has woken Tracy. She’s sitting up, holding her swollen face, fresh blood dribbling into the tissue she holds to her mouth.

“Wha’ – wha’at?” she asks.

“Squirrels,” I say.

She digs a tea bag out of her mouth. It’s soggy with saliva, red with blood from a hole that, just yesterday, had housed a molar. The dentist hadn’t so much extracted it, she told me, as chipped it out with a hammer and chisel. Poor Tracy.

“Squirrels can’t make a noise like that.”

“The banging was me. The other noise is squirrels eating up our house. They’ve chewed a hole the size of a garage door in the facia and have moved in, lock stock. I was banging to chase them away, but they just laughed at me.”

Tracy lies down again. “Don’t exaggerate,” she says, “you always exaggerate. It’s tedious.”

Today I have squirrels; today I don’t feel like fighting.

“How are you feeling?” I ask instead.

Tracy shrugs, tries to wrinkle her nose but the Botox resists. “Terrible,” she says.

You’re exaggerating, I want to say, but don’t.

I bought this squirrel-ridden house almost three years ago, just before my thirty-seventh birthday. It’s in Tracy’s name, a protection from creditors should my business land in trouble. She saw it as an early Christmas present to herself; I saw it as a belated birthday present to me. It was a rambling old place, neglected and syphilitically filthy, but the unbroken view of the mountain and the treetops in the distance and the trees in the garden told me it was mine and I fell in love with it in the way teenagers fall for their first – fundamentally, unshakeably, and oblivious to faults or incompatibilities or consequences. Instead of tearing the thing down, my love dictated that we retain what we could of the original structure. Romantic, but stupid.

In hindsight, a flash of which hits me every morning as I hop down the precarious steps – risers that rise too high, wooden treads that were created for nine-year-old feet – in hindsight, a double-storey house was probably not the best purchase for someone permanently on crutches. And me an architect; who would have thought.

I’m halfway down when Tracy calls for me to take the phone downstairs and place it on the charger. I ignore her and open the front door for Schultz, who is whining to be let inside in his old broken-voiced way. He tries to jump up on me, as he does every morning, as he used to do when he was younger, but now his front paws only lift a few inches off the floor. The brown dots of his eyebrows are raised expectantly, and he bounces until I give his head a good rub and a hard pat. Wags his curved tail and heads off to lie farting under my desk. To be so measurably, consistently happy to see the same person every day for eleven years, well.

I squeak-thunk my way to the kitchen where, as usual, the kettle is empty. Hop to the sink, hop back, kettle on, hop to the fridge for milk, hop past the cooker to get two mugs from the cupboard. The instant coffee and sugar are in a separate cupboard across the kitchen, require more hopping to retrieve. Somehow, in three years we’ve never contrived to arrange fridge, kettle, mugs, coffee, sugar within reaching distance of each other. Hopping complete, I pick up a crutch that’s slid to the floor from its resting place against the counter, and then I stare at the shiny silver kettle as it makes its warming-up noises. The kettle stares back with its own version of my face, bloated and distorted, cheeks distended and drooping, hairline pushed back as though the hair has been violently knotted behind the head. Suddenly-thyroid eyes, each buttressed by a bag. I raise my eyebrows and the hairline retreats further. I lower my head, and the face grows an enormous forehead as the chin shortens, forcing the lips into an imploded little slit.

An unkissable mouth in an unlovable face.

Is this how I will look when I am old – older? My hands rest on the counter; my forearms are powerful from all the crutching about, but the skin has developed a web of tiny wrinkles punctuated with deepening pores. There’s a mole I’ve never noticed – or is it a liver spot? – between the first and second knuckle of my left hand. I turn my hands over. The years of crutching about have calloused my palms: they’re as thick as soles. The kettle shakes as it comes to the boil, and so does the face in it. I think of those pop statistics that people trot out without checking the maths: if you live to be seventy, you will have spent twenty-three years sleeping, seven driving, three shaving, seven having a dump, and so on and so forth. I am thirty-nine and a quarter; how much time have I spent waiting for kettles to boil? How much time do I have left to wait for kettles to boil? Because I always wait. I’ve learnt that if I wander off I’ll find something to do in the meantime, become distracted and only remember much later that I’d been trying to make coffee. By then, the kettle will be cold, and the milk in the mug gone strange, and I’ll have to start all over again.

I’ve learnt other useful things as well over the years.

That instant coffee tastes better if you put the milk in before the water. That the slow lane moves quicker than the fast in morning traffic to town. That if you crimp your fingers inwards when chopping a carrot – just like so – you won’t slice off their tips by mistake.

I take my coffee to my study – well, I squeak-thunk there, deposit a crutch, squeak-hop back to the kitchen, drink off the spillable portion, squeak-hop to my desk. Where I Google and write down the numbers of pest-control people who might want to come and make the squirrels go away. I learn two more useful things doing this. Firstly, that squirrels are a protected species, and as they may not be poisoned most pest controllers want nothing to do with them; and secondly, that because today is New Year’s Eve, it takes twelve calls before one guy answers his phone – then tells me he’s driving up the coast, won’t be back for three weeks.

Between the Googling and the documenting of squirrel people, after checking the news sites and my share prices, I find myself with nothing really to do. I suppose the word is “bored”, but. I’ve been bored for a while, I realise – or imagine – but it’s more than that. There’s a tugging in me, but I don’t know what’s doing the tugging or where it’s trying to tug me to. It’s attached to my abdomen, to the lower region of my stomach, my navel perhaps, and it feels like that moment when you’ve just woken up to a recollection of something awful and for a minute or so you’re not awake enough to identify it. But now there’s no revelation, no resurgence of memory to decode the feeling, and it remains, not quite gut-ache, not quite nausea, just a quiet nagging.

So I poke around Google, sipping coffee that’s cooling and beginning to grow a grey scum over itself. There are apparently a billion web pages out there; something, surely, must be worth its pixels.

But no.

Perhaps the holidays have gone on too long. I can only watch Tracy paint her toenails so many times before I know it’s time to get back to the office. I’m not sure what to Google so I type in “what’s tugging at me” and get 12,600,000 results in an instant. They contain links to religious tracts, solipsistic blogs, New Age waffle, porn sites. I guess you could type anything into Google, say, “Indonesian macroeconomics in the nineteenth century”, and it’ll turn up at least three porn sites. But none of the results – or at least none of the dozens I look at – can answer my question. So I Google myself and find that it turns up 15,300,000 results. After twelve pages, not one of them is me. I suppose I’m not the only Chris Hayes on the wired planet.

I hear a noise, a thumping on wood, too big for a squirrel, followed by a muttered curse. Schultz twitches in his sleep: it has to be Gabriel, sixteen and six foot tall, all arms and legs and size eleven feet, the everything of him connected by bones and skin and not much else. He has been overwhelmed by teenaged clumsiness and yet insists on going up and down our ridiculous stairs in his socks. The noise tells me that he didn’t clear the last three on the way down.

“Gabriel, don’t say ‘fuck’ please,” I call.

“I’m fine thanks, Dad,” he says. “And I didn’t say ‘fuck’. I said ‘that sucks’.”

Gabriel’s dyslexia is so bad that half the time he probably can’t tell whether the steps are going up or down. He’s struggled ever since the other kids in the class were reading “cat” and “hat”. Often, people think he’s stupid, which he isn’t, and I’ve told him to allow his intelligence to be his secret weapon, but he hasn’t got the hang of that either.

I can hear him starting to make coffee – should sixteen-year-olds drink coffee? I don’t know; I’ll Google it some time. I find myself waiting for the crash of a dropped mug, but it doesn’t happen.

I’m on page thirteen of the Google results for Chris Hayes and still none of them are about me. Besides the Waspy locations where you’d expect to find people with the same name as mine, there are Chris Hayeses living in Shanghai, in Nairobi, in Lima. Some are property developers, others musicians or teachers or freelance chauffeurs. One, like me but not me, is a partner in an architectural firm. He’s based in Dubai; but what if Dubai was code for a parallel universe – would expat Chris Hayes have a teenaged son too, a wife who becomes blonder and skinnier as time goes by? Would he also have a missing leg, and if so would it be the right one and not the left, because surely a parallel universe would be a mirror of this one? I imagine a snapshot of him and his family with the Burj al Arab or the Yacht Club or the streets of Jumeirah in the background, his Hayes family’s faces on backwards and his Tracy’s beauty spot on her right cheek instead of her left. Even the Arabic writing behind them would only make sense if read from the left, and that only if you could read Arabic.

This non-finding of myself is becoming tedious, so on a whim I decide to Google Kathy Whatshername. I haven’t thought of her for years: we copulated frantically, manically, during the summer holidays when I was twenty-one and she was twenty-six. Once I start doing the maths it all seems to be a very long time ago, so I stop. It takes a while to remember her surname and when I do remember, Google turns up 4,880,000 results, but the first ten pages aren’t her. For a while Tracy tried to get me onto Facebook, and maybe I should, but then she’ll have to be my friend and she’ll see the weird people I might dig up out of the past, which is all Facebook seems to be good for, and then I’ll have to explain myself. Not that there would be a lot to explain. I only Google Kathy because of an impulse that hits me like a small stroke, unwanted and unexpected. I don’t want to hook up with her or even speak to her. I just want to see if she looks like the face in the kettle yet.

Gabriel sticks his head into my study.

“Morning, Dad,” he says over my shoulder. Sometimes he greets me, sometimes he doesn’t.

“Hi, Gabe,” I say.

“Who is Kathy Simons?” he asks. I really need to turn my desk around. I’ve been meaning to ever since we moved in: I can’t stand my back to a room, mostly because of what Gabriel’s just done.

“New employee, and none of your business,” I say, hiding the browser window, which makes me look guilty – of what I don’t know, but guilty anyway.

I turn around to look at the ironing board that is my son. Streaks of coffee decorate the outside of his mug.

“How are you, Gabe?” I ask.

“Fine.”

Everything’s fine with him. How’s school? Fine. How was your test? Fine. How’s the weather, your new shoes? Fine, fine. How do you like being ravaged by hormones and confusion, what’s it like falling down the stairs twice a day, how do you feel about the fact that you may die a long and painful death from a dread disease one day? Fine, fine, fine. What’s not fine is the sorry kid’s face with its furious pizza-textured rash that nature has inflicted on him precisely when he is least equipped to deal with it. It makes him look at once older and younger than he is. Becoming a teenager has made him not only spotty but moody and unpredictable, and to deal with it I have had to remind myself repeatedly that at this point in his life, Gabe himself doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. Although it’s probably more of the former, judging by the wads of used Kleenex Tracy finds in his waste-paper bin every day – a snippet of information that made me shiver at the time: there are some things you don’t need to know about your child. Yet there are many things I know but have never needed to, things that take up precious bytes of my brain, an organ which unaccountably does not come with a delete button.

“What are we doing tonight, Dad?” he asks, cheerful in a brittle kind of way. I know that something is coming, can’t quite spot what it might be.

“Going to the Joneses.”

“Aw, Da-ad.”

“It’ll be fun. Barry says that Peter is dying to see you.”

“He’s such a p–, a dork, I mean.”

“You were going to say pussy, weren’t you?”

“No, actually, I was going to say prick, but thanks for the suggestion. But hey, listen Dad, can’t I, like, um, go to the beach instead?”

There it is, then. “Let me think about that a moment . . . Like, um, no.”

“But all my friends will be there.”

This is when it’s hard to be a parent.

I read somewhere that the bits of the brain that understand the concept of consequence finally knit together only in the early twenties. I don’t doubt this at all. So while I want to discourage him by listing the dangers of New Year’s on the beach, the examples I have, each of which demonstrates a likelihood of being killed, maimed or at least mortally embarrassed, will simply sound like fun amplified, like placing an iPod into a powerful docking station. Consider a few snapshots of New Year’s Eve, 1989, twenty-two precious and vanished years ago:

Here’s Warren Greathead getting stoned on something a surfer gave him to smoke, and then losing his car keys in the sand while the surfer’s girlfriend gives him a blowjob;

There’s Kevin Thingummy, doing loud wheelies up and down the road and then forgetting to put his foot down when he stops and ending up with the bike pinning him to the ground. We are too paralytic with laughter to help him up, so he lies there being bottle-fed more Carling by his adoring fans until one or two of us recover sufficiently to pull the bike off him;

Jason Whatshisname generating third-degree burns when he tries to rearrange the logs on the bonfire with his bare hands because he doesn’t like the shape they made;

The unobtainably beautiful Sonya Oelschig – some names you never forget – swallowing most of my tequila only to throw it all up down my back as I hug her a happy New Year, and then crying like a baby that I don’t love her because I won’t take her home with me;

Kirsten Something and her well-endowed friends skinny-dipping while everyone in the parking lot turns on their headlights – onto their headlights, so to speak;

Et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth.

I know it’s different now. We drank whatever we could get our hands on, back then, and some of us smoked grass, and while that was pretty much it, we still managed to wreak havoc. Endangered our lives, even though there was no crack or heroin or coke or crystal to be had, no Rohypnol or Ritalin to fall victim to. Today, you’re not allowed to drink on the beach, let alone make bonfires, so you’d have to end up doing other things, things that are far more clandestine, far worse. There are so many more things, stupid things, for kids to get up to on New Year’s Eve with no sense of consequence, because when you’re a kid you’re nothing short of immortal.

Back then.

I sound like an old person.

“Not all your friends will be there. Peter Jones will be with us.”

“He’s not my friend, Dad. He’s just a kid the same age, that’s all, like a dork the same age actually. Please can I not, like, go to the Joneses and go to the beach instead?”

“Er, like, let me think about it for a moment –”

“Stop doing that.” He is beginning to shout; his red-splotched face is tending towards purple.

“Okay. No, you can’t go.”

“Why not?”

Good question, but completely expected.

Because you will meet people who are just the same as I used to be, or worse, as most of my friends were, and those people will be worse still. Because I won’t be there to make sure you’re okay. Because when I was your age, being sixteen meant doing your homework or suffering your father’s headmasterly clothes-brush and drinking Horlicks every night and being in bed by nine and sipping half a glass of wine at Christmas lunch. Because like every other sixteen-year-old you have the discernment, discrimination and decision-making ability of an oyster: viz. none. Because you are living under my roof. Because thou shalt do what I say, not what I do – did. And because I was eighteen before I got to spend my first New Year’s on the beach.

“Because you’re sixteen years old.” I know I have only two or so years left of that argument, but at least it means I have two or so years to concoct a new one. “And I am not hauling you around the Peninsula on New Year’s Eve. It’s not safe.”

“What’s not safe, giving me a lift or me being, like, on the beach?”

“Both, actually. Because I’m not planning to drink Coke all night to play taxi driver. Because even if I do, there will be hundreds of other drivers full of New Year’s cheer. And for God’s sake, please stop saying ‘like’.”

“Well, give me taxi money then,” he says. Dyslexic maybe, but not thick, my Gabriel. He’s missing the point, though.

“Gabe, look into my eyes – look at me. It’s not the sober taxi driver, it’s the drunken other guy. So, no. Not going to happen. Understand?”

Gabe changes tack. He lets his shoulders droop, a coat hanger holding up an over-washed shirt. He hangs his head, takes a deep breath.

I wait for the whine.

“Ah, please Dad!” he whines.

“Gabriel, look at me.” He slowly looks up. His old-young eyes are pleading but he has forgotten to rearrange his mouth and the bits around his nose; they come together to snarl at me in a nasty, lupine kind of way.

“No,” I say.

He lets out a roar, or what would have been a roar if his voice was properly broken, and he stamps his foot and turns and runs up the stairs. I hear him trip on the second step from the top.

“And don’t slam the door,” I shout over his stumble.

He slams the door.

I turn back to my laptop. Select Google’s “Images” option for my Kathy Simons search. And there she is, just the third image along, pretty, still, in her round-faced way. I click on the picture; it takes me to a page with a larger image. I’m horrified to see the dry tributaries at the corners of her eyes, the eyelids that droop and yet have somehow swollen, the rings that encircle her neck, each separated by a centimetre or two. The thickening of her nose, the deep furrow cutting upwards from the inside of her left eyebrow. The hair gone mousey, unsprung, no longer glossy, flicked up. The scrotummy texture of her cheeks shameless on the slick screen of my Mac; not even middle-aged, grandmotherly rather.

The ravages. And so un-long ago.

And then my eyes play tricks: my memory of her superimposes itself onto the screen and I see the younger Kathy emerging, her eyes growing brighter and her skin smoothed out; I manage to hold the illusion only for a moment before the younger woman recedes and the elder returns, weathered and thickened and aged. And with it, the thought that this is exactly how people must see me. When I don’t feel like that at all, when I feel so much like the memory of me.

“Wha’ you doing?” Tracy asks me later. I look up and see that she’s still dabbing blood from her mouth. The red of it matches her lipstick, her nails.

What I’m doing is kneeling on the floor outside Gabe’s room with my weight on my good knee, keeping my balance with the painful end of my stump, attacking the hinges of Gabe’s door with an electric screwdriver.

“I’m taking his door off.”

“Why?”

“Because I told him that if he slams his door one more time, I’m going to take it off.”

Tracy lifts a Botoxed lip, shakes her head, minces off on her Louboutins, descends the stairs like a cautious antelope. Gabe is lying on his unmade bed with his arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling, iPod pummelling those so-fragile, once-perfect membranes in his ears. If you look at the maths of it, 3(½) ≠ us. Somewhere, there’s more, has to be more than the pieces of ourselves which we present to each other.

There was a time when Gabriel was young and malleable, virgin clay in my hands, a soft ball of possibility. It may not have been for a very long time, but while it lasted we’d sit on the carpet in front of the roaring winter fire and I’d teach him how to draw. Proportion: how the parts of the human body relate to each other; dimension: how to bring out shape from the flatness of things; perspective: horizon lines, vanishing points, foreshortenings, all the two-dimensional tricks of three-dimensional depth discovered by the Renaissance masters, perfected by Hergé. So why has he chosen to forget everything I taught him? On his walls are scratchy, insecure little works that crouch on lined paper in unashamed medieval distortion. I’m not so much concerned with the content – demons and monsters, reptiles with claws, maidens with the odd tit hanging out, a woman being poured out of a Coke can, a man carrying himself in a wicker basket, a levitating heart squirting cartoon drops of blood – as I am worried about how badly they are drawn, how his drawing style is deteriorating as he grows older. I’m concerned about the derivativeness: long flat horizons, stretched shadows, stolen directly from the Dali posters and postcards stuck on the opposite wall. I accept that it’s no longer cool to sit and draw with me, but why has the boy not taken on any of my expertise and experience; indeed, why has he thrown off what he once knew? You try to teach your kids two things: how to do some things better, and how not to do other things worse. You don’t expect them to go backwards from there.

We go to the Joneses, laden with beer and wine and chips and a twelve-year-old bottle of Chivas that’s now eighteen years older than it was at the time of bottling. Barry was a New Year’s baby, and every year I give him the same bottle of Chivas that he gives back to me on my birthday in September. The label on the bottle is fraying at the edges and the cap is scratched and slightly dented. It was funny for the first two or three years; now it’s just habit, this endless swapping of a scruffy bottle of whisky that neither of us can bring ourselves to drink.

Barry and Lynn live a block away. In a normal suburb, getting there would have meant a short walk, but here among the oaks and the plane trees, here where financial accrual is declared loudly on plots with tennis courts and twenty-metre swimming pools, a walk is out of the question: here, we drive. Besides, Gabriel reasons, what if we were mugged and stabbed on the way home in the middle of the night? Which, I concede, is a valid point. So we pile into the Range Rover once we’ve loaded our share of the refreshments, drive for forty-three seconds. I ring the buzzer, wait for the wrought-iron gates to swing open, park behind a string of other four-by-fours in Barry’s second-gear driveway, unload ourselves and the pointless stuff we’ve brought. Hooked over my wrists in bags that bang against my crutches are three bottles of wine, the Chivas and a two-litre bottle of Coke; a sulky Gabriel is carrying two six-packs in a plastic supermarket bag. Tracy’s high heels force unnatural, bird-like little steps – or perhaps it’s the tightness of her jeans that’s preventing her legs from swinging from her hips. She’s carrying the heavy stuff – two bags of prawn-cocktail chips and a packet of pretzels – elbows in, wrists out, the packets pinched between thumbs and forefingers like dead mice. Gabriel, at sixteen, is hormonally incapable of walking beside his parents. It’s either fifteen steps behind, or rarely, as now, five steps ahead. In the yellow of Barry’s driveway lights I see him swinging the bag of beer at the end of his arm. I open my mouth to warn him of the likely outcome, but before I can form any words the bottom of the bag rips and the two six-packs crash onto the fake cobblestones.

“Oh my God,” says Tracy. “Are you all right, Gabe?”

I’m amazed.

The beer has landed miles from the boy; how could he possibly be hurt? My beers, on the other hand, are lying on the cobbles, hissing and foaming. Three of the bottles are broken; another is terminal, its contents squirting out from under the cap.

“Jesus, Gabriel,” I say.

“Don’t say ‘Jesus’,” Tracy says. Put your tits away, I want to reply, but I don’t.

I feel a Gabriel lecture coming on about the importance of considering the possible results of one’s actions, but he pre-empts me. “Sorry, Dad, but I’m not, like, clairvoyant or something.”

I hold my bags out to Gabriel. He looks at me, at the bags, baffled.

“Take them, Gabe,” I tell him. Then I get down on a knee and a stump, scrape the broken glass into the remnants of the broken bag. I open the screw-cap of a leaking beer, run my finger over the neck to check for splinters, and take a drink. It tastes flat and warm and strangely sour, so I empty it onto Barry’s driveway and add the bottle to the contents of the broken bag. Tracy looks on, a curl on her upper lip. I take the bag with the Chivas back from Gabriel, add the remaining beers, hook the bag over a wrist, stand up, make for the house.

Why we do this thing of carting stuff to each other’s homes, dragging these coals to Newcastle when we know that the hosts are unlikely to run out of beer, wine, soft drinks, chips – not tonight, not ever? I don’t know.

Petitely plump Lynn opens the door, gives us each a hug. I’m surprised, as always, at how well her body fits into mine. Her dark hair hangs loose, smells fresh. If she’s wearing make-up, I can’t see it. She takes the dripping bag from me, looks up with raised eyebrows.

“Don’t ask,” I say.

The La Vitas are already here, along with two other couples we don’t know. The Unknowns. Tony La Vita, third-generation Italian, second-level friend, now an A-list pizza chain king, together with his beautiful, terminally sad-faced wife, Julie. Barry takes the bags of alcohol from Gabriel, deposits their contents into the fridge and hands me a beer. I can feel the Unknown couples’ eyes on me. I know their expressions without looking at them: they’re slightly doe-eyed with sympathy, eyebrows and corners of mouths turned down. I know that each of them is burning to know how the leg was lost. I know they’re dying to make empathetic noises; they’re hungry for the details, hungry to mourn its loss vicariously, craving the story of the gore and the pain that wasn’t theirs, hoping that it never will be.

There are kids, of course, small ones and middle-sized ones, some in the pool, others watching the Disney Channel, the smallest tearing about, sensing an extraordinary night and testing to see what they can get away with. One of the boys hurtles around a corner and sets an expensive-looking vase rocking on its base. An Unknown mother shoots out an arm, sun-browned, gold-bangled, to stabilise it.

“Daniel! Grow up!” she hisses at the boy.

Be careful what you wish for, I want to warn her, but I don’t.

Shortly after Gabriel was born he contracted some kind of rotavirus, as young kids do, and I’d bitched about the lack of sleep to my parents. “Just remember. Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” my father responded. My epigram-laden, pipe-smoking father.

I glance at the growing problem that is my son. Peter hasn’t appeared yet, and Gabriel is leaning on the kitchen counter scowling into a glass of Coke. He looks like he is trying to compress his long frame into a small one, stands hunched, slouching, his shoulders rounded and his head hanging forward off his neck like a blotchy and too-heavy fruit. He looks on the verge of losing all control of his bones and his joints, and for a moment I wonder if this infrastructure might give way altogether, collapsing into a handful of pick-up-sticks that rattle to the floor. I want to berate him because a son should be someone who makes his father proud, is supposed to be a being who holds his head high and confronts the world face-on and is thrilled at the young blood that flows through his veins and the growing strength of his four intact limbs and his untarnished lungs and unscarred liver that process the clean air and the good food and the pure juices (Coke aside) that find their way into his body. I want him to be shaking a dry, firm hand with the adults. Want to watch him introduce himself with a smile and a strong voice and then stand around and join the banter with the confidence and wit that should be his. But Gabriel has nothing to give them, nothing to gain from them; to hide his thoughts in the sibilant bubbles of Coke is at worst a brief distraction, at best a temporary tactic for invisibility.

Meanwhile, Tracy has intercepted the aw-shame looks that the Unknown couples have been casting my way. She’s very good at this, distracts them with her oft-proven techniques, which include looking the women up and down sniffily and shoving her cleavage under the noses of the men. Barry drags us all away to the deck that looks out onto the galaxy of lights that define the Flats below, the lights of the little people, stretching to the black void of the ocean beyond. He has made a fire in a large steel contraption at the end of the deck. When its flames have calmed to coal, Barry will throw on steaks and chops. He may have a Maserati and a Cayenne in the garage these days, but Barry’s culinary tastes never really left home. He knows me well enough not to offer me a chair, but one of the Unknown husbands doesn’t and drags one up while exhorting me to sit as though I was a sick person, which leaves me with the choice of accepting the seat or cracking him across the shins with a crutch.

I sit.

In my wardrobe at home, standing in a corner, is half a leg. It has titanium bones and a skin of high-tech rubber that feels almost real but doesn’t, like the skin you feel and don’t feel when you do the old dead-man’s finger trick. I wore it for a while, or tried to, but I could never get used to the pain of my weight bearing down on the stump stuffed into the thing. Besides, my limp drew other kinds of stares, pretty much as a toupee might – does he have a leg or doesn’t he? Isn’t he too young to have had polio? Hobbling about on crutches with my trouser leg neatly folded up was, I reasoned, an honest way to declare to the world that yes, I am an amputee – I am not wearing new shoes, have not twisted my ankle, have not had a toilet accident – I have simply lost half a leg.

“You’re lucky,” the surgeon said to me when I came around after the operation. “We’ve managed to amputate at the knee, which is the best result for wearing a prosthesis in the future.” That was the first time I heard that I’d lost my leg; I didn’t feel lucky at all.

Barry pulls up more chairs so that everyone can sit. He’s that kind of guy – says nothing, just does something about the mutual discomfort of me sitting and everyone else standing. Unasked, he brings me a beer, a trendy boutique beer. It’s colder and crisper than the beers I brought. I try to relax and make a few comments that aren’t that funny but get the Unknowns laughing more than they should. One of the husbands asks what I do and I tell him that I’m an architect, and I can feel everyone weighing my profession against the fact of my missing leg, and then I feel their surprise that there’s no logical contradiction between the two. Everyone relaxes a little more. It’s not a seismic shift – the men don’t kick off their shoes and the women keep their tops on; it’s a miniscule exhale, a barely perceptible dropping of the shoulders, but I’m sure that greater things – peace agreements, multinational mergers – have rested on even smaller changes in the prevailing mood.

There’s a brief hiccup when more Unknowns – three, including the couple’s daughter, down from Johannesburg for the holidays – arrive late, having lost themselves amid the foliage of the suburb. The new Unknowns smile, awkward. But the rest of us exude an aura or a cloud of pheromones that reassures the newcomers. Which is just as well, because this time I’m the one staring, firstly at the daughter, who is sixteen and flawless, wearing a tiny silver figure nailed to a tiny silver cross that hangs between breasts I suppose I should not have been looking at, so I look at the mother instead. She reminds me of some famous actress from years back whose beauty was amplified by eyes that were ever-so-slightly crossed; I can’t help but notice a similar crucifix to her daughter’s trying to fight its way out of her cleavage. And then I try to remember exactly when it was that I stopped looking at daughters and started looking at their mothers, but I can’t.

Lynn leads the girl off by the hand to introduce her to Gabriel and Peter, who has by now emerged and is trying to interest Gabriel in some hand-held electronic device. Peter is shorter than Gabriel, much, and he’s podgy and bespectacled. With his pasted-down and side-parted hair, he has the air of a little old man – a professor or an accountant – but when he looks up at the approaching girl his eyes widen and his jaw drops. I hope that Gabriel will draw himself up to his full height and smile broadly and shake the girl’s hand, but instead he shrinks a little more, nods, pulls his fringe down further over his forehead.

We eat. We drink. We talk. The glances have now all stopped sliding towards the trouser-end that is folded over my stump. There’s no history with the Unknowns, no past indiscretions to gloss over, no rusty hatchets to keep buried under carefully chosen words. Easy. One of the Unknown wives says the word “fuck” and we relax more. There are no prudes here, we know. We are adults. We can swear if we want to. We can tell rude jokes and relate off-colour stories as long as we rubberneck first to make sure that there are no kids in earshot. I look over towards the kitchen counter to see if Gabriel is bending his ear in our direction, but Peter is sitting alone, fiddling with the gizmo in his hand. I’m glad Gabe can’t hear us, us old people telling boring anecdotes and swearing to try to impress – comfort? – one another.

We finish eating and fill the awkward time between eleven and midnight with more anecdotes, a few more drinks. I’m sure that Tracy has snuck open another button on her blouse, but I don’t care. Her eyes are glassy; she shouldn’t be drinking while on antibiotics, but. Then, midnight, more or less, because of course everyone’s watches and cellphones are out of sync and nobody is sure when the moment actually arrives. An illegal barrage of nearby fireworks settles the debate, and we wish each other all the best for the coming year, dragging the kids into the adult circle for a moment. Hugs and good wishes, goodwill glowing with sentimentality and alcohol.

Why are they so important now, these embracings and blessings? Why not on 5 January or 19 March or 27 October? I don’t know. It depresses me always, these happy, three-quarters-pissed New Year’s people, smiling with all their teeth hanging out and sloshing their drinks around, wishing total strangers whatever their Hallmark vocabularies can dredge up, hugging those of the opposite sex just a little too tightly, just a little too long. Celebrating what is to come, when all that is certain about New Year’s Eve is another stroke through the threescore-and-ten. It should be a mourning for the passing of time – just last week, just yesterday – when we were younger than we are now. And then Barry makes things worse and appears with an old six-string which he tries to tune as he walks towards us. I can see that the B-string is broken, hanging useless off the head of the guitar, but he’s not deterred and launches into “Auld Lang Syne”, appallingly, belting out the lyrics I’ve never understood. Tuneless, meaningless. I’m surprised that the neighbourhood dogs stay quiet, because Lynn, Tracy, the Unknowns all join in the discord. I can’t, can’t let go like that, though I envy their lack of inhibition, their willingness to howl along with Barry’s jarring guitar. A glance at Gabe tells me he can’t bring himself even to watch; like me, he’s cringing and wishing that Barry would reach the end of the song.

When he does, we all clap and laugh.

“More!” one of the Unknown husbands shouts. “Encore!”

Barry smiles a “no” and leans the old guitar against the wall. “Always leave them hungry,” he says. He sits down next to me. “Actually, it’s the only fucken song I know,” he mutters. Encore Boy gets up and walks over to the guitar. He isn’t that steady, I hope he’s not driving. He picks it up, holds it left-handed, strums, opens his mouth to sing, sees I’m the only one watching, puts the guitar down again, rejoins the circle around the dying fire. Lynn and the Unknown wives have begun clearing things up. Plates with chop bones that still have pink attached, boerewors ends, shreds of salad. I’m pleased to see that the clean-up has started; I’d like to go home. But Barry disappears into the house again and emerges with a bottle of tequila, making my heart sink. If the world accepted honesty, if we could just say what we were thinking, I’d stand up and announce that I’ve had enough, I’m heading for bed. But I can’t, of course: any words of departure would be understood to mean that it’s been a shit party and I can’t wait to leave, now that the formality of twelve o’clock has come and gone. The devil is in the unsaid bits, in the gaps between the words and the spaces between the lines. So I resign myself to sitting around for another hour or so, to swallowing a shot or two of tequila, having another helping of dessert, talking more. Which everyone else seems to be doing very well. Some of the Unknowns are in stitches over a common recollection. Tracy is leaning in to an Unknown just a little too closely while he regales her with God-knows-what, making her laugh. She’s easily amused by other people. Barry is handing around shot glasses. Beyond the glass doors, I see Gabriel and Peter and the pretty girl sitting on barstools at the kitchen counter. Peter is on the right, talking and gesticulating. I know that he knows that his physique allows him to be comfortable: he has nothing to gain with the girl, and therefore nothing to lose. She is sitting between the boys, her eyebrows raised and a hand over her mouth in amusement or shock – I can’t quite decide – as she listens. Her back is turned to Gabriel, whose only visible means of support are the elbows he’s tucked behind him on the counter, the bony wings of a sad pterodactyl. He is looking at his jiggling foot, watching it as he flips an untied shoelace from one side of his shoe to the other, outside to inside, inside to outside. My son, my teenage son. I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him and slap him on the back of the head and tell him that soon I’ll no longer be able to hold him back from his friends and his beach parties. That the weight of a few more years will remove the zits and the clumsiness and will fill him out a bit and allow his brain to grow a little more so that he is better equipped to tell right from wrong. That he will then face a glorious, untainted future stretching like a blank canvas from his feet to the horizon – and I want to warn him that the canvas will be far less forgiving than his father ever was, because every mark he makes on it will govern the next mark, so he had better make every choice fucking count unless he wants to hit thirty-nine and a quarter looking over his shoulder, unless he wants to become the next generation’s forensic archaeologist and sift through a sandpit of past choices in the hope of finding the seminal potsherd, the traces in the cop­rolite, the original artefact of misdirection to understand where, when, how it all went wrong.

Tracy catches a heel between cobbles in the driveway, almost falls over. “Oops,” she giggles. Gabriel walks five paces behind me, scuffing his shoes. I’m thinking about squirrels and teeth. I’m thinking about how teeth are removed not from the heads of young people, but from the heads of old people, and I am trying to reconcile this with the fact that, at thirty-seven, my wife is hardly old. Or is she? In ancient times thirty-seven would have been a fine lifespan. If you hadn’t composed your first symphony by twelve or conquered Asia Minor by twenty-three, chances were you wouldn’t live long enough to do it. And here, in a tooth, was empirical evidence that the decay had begun – no, it began long ago and now was simply manifesting: today a splintered piece of enamel and old fillings and infected nerve-endings, tomorrow arthritis, frigidity, impotence, gallstones, strokes, incontinence, cancer, dementia, and the sneering looks of the young who cannot conceive how very soon it will all come to them. And squirrels; I have squirrels. Squirrels living in the roof, bent on destruction. Young people do not have squirrels, and if they do it’s somebody else’s problem – the parents’, the landlord’s.

Squirrels are an old person’s problem.