In the Fold (15 page)

‘Don’t put the garlic in now. It’ll burn.’

Janie said, ‘I hate garlic. I won’t eat it if it’s got garlic.’

‘Shall I not put it in then?’ said Lisa.

‘Yes, in a minute.’

‘No!’ wailed Janie. ‘Don’t!’

‘Is there any point putting it in if she’s not going to eat it?’

‘She’s not the only pebble on the beach. You’re not the only pebble on the beach, young lady.’

‘But hon,’ said Lisa, ‘think about it, it’s only one tiny thing. You probably won’t even notice the difference.’

‘Neither will she then.’

Hamish stirred on my chest and sat up. There was something seismic in our parting, like the crusty parting of the surface of the earth when the underlying plates force themselves violently upwards.

‘Anyway, didn’t she eat earlier?’

‘No, I thought she could eat with us tonight.’

‘What are those green things? I don’t like those green things.’

‘You see?’

‘Those are peppers. They’re just peppers.’

Hamish looked around the shadowy room silently, as though trying to remember where he was.

‘– the spicy kind. The green kind. They’re there to make it look pretty.’

‘Once you let her get the idea that it’s up to her –’

‘I don’t like them.’

‘You’ve never tried them, Janie. Have you ever tried them?’

‘No, because I don’t like them.’

‘They don’t actually taste of anything,’ said Lisa.

There was a clattering sound.

‘– tell her that. Why are you telling her that?’

‘I’m just saying that they aren’t actually offensive.’

The room was filling with a blue, underwater light. It was like a reflection, a displacement: it seemed to have rolled in off the placid, darkening sea that lay out of sight nearby. Adam told me that the land these houses were built on had once lain under water. Hamish and I were sitting below sea level. The headlights of a passing car fled in a brilliant arc up the walls and across the ceiling, illuminating the empty pieces of furniture.

‘Look,’ said Lisa, ‘I’ll take the peppers out of yours, all right?’

‘That’s completely ridiculous.’

‘All right?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t start crying.’

Mewling sounds came from behind the closed door. Hamish turned his head towards it.

‘Oh, honey, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ I heard Adam say.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

‘I don’t like peppers!’ wailed Janie.

‘Look, she just said she was going to take yours out!’ said Adam. ‘It’s completely ridiculous.’

‘I don’t like them!’

‘Why don’t you just give her something else? What’s the point of wasting good food on her? It’s completely ridiculous.’

‘You’re repeating yourself.’

‘Your mother isn’t a slave, you know! She’s got better things to do than cook three separate meals every evening!’

‘People are allowed not to like things,’ said Lisa.

‘I don’t like peppers!’ wailed Janie.

‘I know you don’t. Mummy’ll take them out.’

‘But I want something else! I don’t want that – I want something else!’

Hamish got off my lap and set off into the gloom. Presently I saw his shape passing in front of the large window.

‘But you said!’ said Janie.

‘Nobody said.’

‘They did!’

‘No they didn’t!’

‘Look, it’s nothing. I’ll just do something else quickly. I’ll do some fish fingers. It won’t take a minute.’

‘You’re giving in to her.’

‘I had fish fingers for lunch.’

‘I’m not giving in! I just happen to think it’s cruel to force children to eat things that disgust them.’

‘We had fish fingers at school for lunch.’

‘Well, in that case she should eat earlier. She should eat with the baby. It isn’t disgusting, you know, just because you don’t like it. Adults don’t eat disgusting things. Why would I eat something if it was disgusting?’

‘You don’t like tomatoes. Nobody forces you to eat tomatoes, do they?’

‘I do like tomatoes.’

‘I hate tomatoes,’ said Janie.

Their voices seemed to agitate the surface of a torpor at whose bottom I lay, untouched, like some sunken object that had slipped out of the bounds of light and fallen far beneath
the reach of a commotion now both meaningless and mysterious. I wondered where Rebecca was, and the thought of her paid out above me, winding and waving upwards through the blue light until I could see its end, far short of any grasp. If she came to look for me, I thought, she would never find me.

I heard Lisa say:

‘That’s a lie.’

‘What?’

‘I said that’s a lie. You’re lying. You don’t like tomatoes.’

Adam said: ‘I can’t believe you’d accuse me of lying.’

He appeared to wish to confer on this accusation more seriousness than the dislike of tomatoes alone could sustain.

‘I’m just stating the facts.’

‘There aren’t any facts. I know what I like and what I don’t like.’

‘When I don’t like something,’ said Janie, ‘I put it in my pocket.’

‘What, food? You put food in your pocket?’

‘I take it out later and throw it into the bin.’

‘You put it in your pocket?’

‘When I don’t like something I do. Like stew – it’s got all those bits in it.’

‘You put that in your pocket?’

Hamish bumped into the darkened television set. It rocked on its stand and he cried out in alarm as a cascade of videos fell to the floor. Immediately the kitchen door opened. Hamish stood as though naked in the new path of light, his face petrified.

‘Oops-a-daisy!’ cried Lisa, before I could speak.

She trod swiftly over the carpet and gathered Hamish into her arms, and without a glance in my direction she carried him into the kitchen.

At ten o’clock, as I did the night before, I phoned Rebecca before it could be established, definitively, that she was not going to phone me.

‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘I just walked through the door.’

This, at least, was ambiguous: she might have been accusing me of pestering her, or she might equally have been mentioning her absence as the excuse for not having called earlier. There was a third possibility, which was that she meant to convey both things, irritation and guilt, at once. I envisaged these three interpretations as a sort of diagram, like a drawing of the chambers of the heart. In such drawings there were always little arrows to clarify the direction of flow, in through the blue veins and out through the red. Then there was the heart itself, which in spite of its centrality to all those veins, in spite of the appearance it gave of turning bad blood to good, was remarkable only for the intricacy with which it maintained separation between them. In those neat little chambers the blue and the red dwelt side by side, not mingling but merely proximate. It was the closest possible arrangement, like marriage, for contradictory traffic.

I distinctly remembered that when Rebecca and I first began our relationship we were possessed by the need to maintain spotlessness in our dealings with one another. As soon as a smear or mark appeared we cleaned it up, and although it was usually clear which one of us had, by error or accident, put it there, there was no sequel of recrimination or blame, merely the mutual desire to reinstate order. We were like two people running their separate businesses out of shared premises. I don’t know precisely when this decorous era ended, but by a certain point our modest, hopeful square footage had been abandoned for a different, more sprawling joint enterprise. I remembered that when Hamish was a very small baby Rebecca became distraught with him one afternoon, actually angry, and I was surprised that after six weeks she thought she knew him well enough to carry on like that. It suggested to me that her good conduct at the same stage in our own relationship was the result of a great and uncharacteristic exercise of self-restraint, an exercise that could be considered somewhat fraudulent, given that as far as I knew it
was repeated nowhere else in her history. Rick and Ali were always pleased to fill me in on the parts of that history that predated my arrival. It sometimes occurred to me that Rebecca had seen in me the possibility for reform, if not outright escape from herself; that she saw me as some new, prosperous, unhistoried country, like Australia, to which she could emigrate and forget her problems. She discussed those problems with me, which mainly had to do with her childhood and her family, and owing to my inability to solve them, or perhaps merely to hear and respond to them correctly I soon superseded them and became the problem myself; leaving her, I suppose, with strong but muddled feelings of what appeared to be homesickness for the original problems, compounded by the sense that in allying herself with me she had effected some sort of betrayal of the things she loved. The real problem, in the end, seemed to be that I wasn’t related to her. If I had been her cousin, or even some old family friend, she would not have suffered so from divided loyalties, nor found herself to be carrying the disease of my difference from her, my innate hostility to the organism that was her life. That was as close as I could come to solving the problem – or rather diagnosing it, for there was of course no actual cure for this particular difficulty.

‘Where have you been?’ I said. I said it with lively curiosity rather than accusatory grimness, but there was only so much camouflage the words themselves would accept.

‘At mum and dad’s,’ she replied, somewhat stonily. She didn’t say anything else. Again I had the sense of two unambiguous meanings combined to make a force of highly systematised confusion. This time it appeared to me as the coloured tubes of copper filament, one live, one neutral, that lie side by side in the white plastic vein of an electric flex. Either she had gone to her parents as a place of refuge from me; or she had gone there and been made unhappy by them. Or both: her refusal to elaborate left the question charged.

‘Did they give you something to eat?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They were just in a complete state.’

‘What about?’

There was a second of tinny silence.

‘Mum found a lump on her breast. Or rather, dad found it, as he kept telling everyone. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be nothing.’

‘When was this?’

There was another pause. I heard Rebecca take a drink of something and swallow.

‘This morning. They went down to the hospital and had some tests done on it.’

‘When will they get the results?’

‘I don’t know. A few days, I think. I’m sure it will be nothing.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.

‘I’m sure it will be nothing,’ said Rebecca again. ‘Anyway, they’ve gone completely wild over it. They’ve really gone for the amateur dramatics. There’s no, you know, let’s wait and see what the test says. Dad won’t let her out of his sight – he even followed her to the toilet and stood there talking to her through the door. They sat there all evening holding hands as though mum had just been told she’d got a week to live. What’s really annoying,’ she continued, ‘is that dad’s already wanting to scale things down at the gallery so that he can look after her. He’s even saying he wants to cancel Niven’s show.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

‘I told him, you know, wait until we’ve actually got a diagnosis before you start cancelling things! Whatever happened to, you know, positive visualisation?’

‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’

‘Oh, they’re still in the dramatic phase, you know, big statements, big gestures, the whole roadshow. But that’s exactly when they can decide to make an example of someone. It’s right when they’re in the middle of an emotional trip that they suddenly need something to bite on, you know, just to
show that they’re not all talk. What I hate,’ she continued, ‘is the fact that they think their world is more real than anyone else’s. I know we all think that in a way, but with them it’s all
about
other people. It’s in being witnessed that their life becomes real for them. Have you ever noticed,’ she said, ‘how they’re always losing friends and making new ones? Everywhere they go they find more people. You turn your back for a second and they’ve collared someone else and started telling them about their sex life. Then when they’ve done that they tell them about
your
sex life. Then eventually everyone gets into the habit of this frankness thing and they all start to behave badly, and then they fall out. People like that shouldn’t have children. All they want children for is so that they can have more material, more life, more things to talk about, more actors in their pathetic domestic drama –’

‘I think you’re being a little hard on them.’

‘It’s no wonder that none of us have had children of our own,’ said Rebecca. ‘We know what they’ll be made into – victims, food for the predators!’

‘Except you, of course,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You. You’ve had a child.’

Rebecca gave a strange little laugh.

‘I was thinking about something else,’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, they’re sort of down on Niven at the moment.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, something to do with dad giving him money to get something for him and him not getting it and not giving dad the money back. It was grass, I bet. They make a big point of never mentioning drugs in front of me. They think it atones for something.’

I said nothing. I steadily extended my silence forwards like a hydraulic arm with which I intended to push Rebecca over the precipice of enquiry.

‘How are you, anyway?’ she finally said.

Now that she’d asked, I found that I didn’t want to tell her
anything about myself. I found myself thinking about Ali’s lump, identifying with it almost, with the lump itself. Wrongly, I suppose, I attributed to it qualities of vulnerability that I felt myself in that moment to share. I realised presently that it was the prospect of its excision that caused me to feel this.

‘I miss you,’ said Rebecca.

Still I did not speak. A little surge of adrenalin caused my heart to thump. This did not signify excitement exactly, more a feeling of fear. I did not in that instant make a native connection between Rebecca’s missing me and the possibility of mercy or benevolence or love. It seemed, rather, to hint at the possibility of violence.