The Other Son (13 page)

MAY

Tim pads down the polished concrete staircase to the lounge, and thinks, yet again, that he needs to buy slippers. His feet are freezing.

They have been living here two weeks to the day, and he has had the same thought thirteen mornings in a row.

It’s just before five, so the sun isn’t up yet. Natalya and the kids are still sleeping, and the house feels boundless and empty and as cold as a train station at three am. Tim glances around, almost expecting to discover a tramp sleeping in a corner.

He crosses the lounge and enters the galley kitchen, another over-designed, oversized space, shaped, in this case, like a canal boat. The six-meter countertops running along either side look absurd and empty. They need, Tim thinks, more stuff on them. But Natalya’s against. Natalya likes her surfaces.

At the far end, he switches on the little espresso machine, waits for it to warm up, and then makes himself a cup of coffee before returning to the lounge where he sits on the sofa and stares at the blackness of the window. He watches as the sky beyond begins to lighten. He’s never, as a general rule, awake before dawn, but has managed it three times this week. It’s all the stress of the move, his worries about the markets and the novelty of the new house. It will pass.

He checks his trading accounts on the iPad. There’s been no surprise reprieve overnight and everything’s as grim as it was when he went to bed. He mentally calculates how long he can continue paying the loan on this place as well as the bridging loan on the old one before the well runs dry. He reckons they’ll be OK till July, maybe August. And surely something will give by then, won’t it?

The sky is edging towards pink now, the sun peeking over the horizon, and, seemingly automatically, like a mathematical result, the imminent arrival of daylight makes him feel a little better. There are things you can still count on, the planet seems to be telling him. The sun
will
still rise.

Tim shivers and looks around for a jumper or a blanket he can throw over himself but Vladlena has tidied everything away and he can’t be bothered to return upstairs. He notes, again, the strange space surrounding him and feels vaguely surprised. He keeps finding himself doing this. It’s as if he forgets that they’ve moved houses and has to remind himself of the fact every time he wakes up, every time he looks up from the iPad or switches off the TV. It’s not a comforting feeling. It’s the opposite of comforting, in fact. He tries, now, to remember why they did all of this, tries to remember the vision he had of this house and momentarily it’s there again: Tim, relaxed, trim, well dressed, smiling; Natalya beyond the window, rubbing in sun-lotion beside the pool; Tim’s music blaring from the hi-fi, the kids running around upstairs...

The rising sun is highlighting a series of ugly smears on the big picture window – Vladlena, apparently, can’t reach any higher than five feet from the ground. The sofa beneath him is their old one, and lost in the vastness of the lounge it looks like a small, tatty armchair, it doesn’t fit the space at all.

Tim hasn’t bothered to set up the hi-fi yet because he’s holding out for new speakers and it’s too cold outside to use the pool, which, in any case, has turned in the two weeks since they’ve been here from translucent turquoise to a deep shade of algae green. Tim shivers again. The much dreamt-of picture window creates a permanent down-draught of chilled air. It’s all a long way from his original vision. Thank God summer will be here soon.

He turns the thermostat up to twenty-three and grabs an overcoat from the entrance to use as a blanket and soon he’s asleep on the sofa with the iPad on his chest rising and falling as he snores.

He’s woken at seven by Boris climbing onto his legs, and he opens his eyes to see Natalya, in a dressing gown, looking down at him concernedly. “You can’t sleep again?” she asks softly.

“Uh-uh,” Tim says.

She strokes his hair. “Poor Timsky.”

“Have you seen the state of the pool?” Tim asks.

Natalya nods.

“When’s the pool guy supposed to be coming? It looks like bloody pea soup out there.”

“Pea soup!” Boris repeats. He seems, for some reason, to think that this is funny.

Natalya frowns. She reckons that Tim knows perfectly well that the pool guy was supposed to come yesterday. She’s pretty sure his question is nothing more than disguised reproach. “Today, maybe,” she lies, removing her hand from his head.

“And have you seen the state of the windows?” Tim asks. “It looks like Vladlena’s been cleaning them with a dead cat.”

“Maybe she did. Is Russian tradition, you know?”

“Seriously though, can you buy the woman a stepladder or something? Or maybe even get someone new who knows how to actually clean windows?”

Natalya pulls a face, shakes her head, and blows out through pursed lips in an apparent indication of despair.

“What?” Tim asks, as she turns back to the staircase. “Seriously? What’d I say?”

“And good morning to you, darling,” she says sarcastically.

Once she has gone back to bed, Tim turns his attention to Boris, wide awake and attempting to bounce on his stomach. “Whoops. Looks like Daddy’s upset Mummy,” he says.

“Whoops,” Boris repeats, smiling mischievously.

“We’ll buy her some flowers later,” Tim says, realising that he
has
been being mean to Natalya recently. It’s the shock of the new house; it’s waking up at four a.m and not knowing where he is and never being able to find anything. It’s all been getting to him, and he’s been taking at least part of it out on his wife. He vows to make up for it today. “She likes flowers, yeah?”

“And chocolate?” Boris asks.

“Yes. Chocolate too.”

“For me?”

“Sure, OK,” Tim laughs.

“Not for Alex, though.”

“Why not?” Tim asks.

“Alex is
baaad,”
Boris says, starting to bounce up and down again.

By the time Natalya resurfaces, Tim has left for work. Vladlena is playing with the boys on the big grey rug.

“Dobroye utro,” Vladlena says, looking up and smiling. –
Good morning.

“Good morning,” Natalya replies, in English. “Tim is gone, yes?”

Vladlena nods and raises an eyebrow. “Da,” she says. “He told me off about the windows, but I told him, I’m only little, I can’t reach that high.”

“I know,” Natalya says. “It’s fine.” She kneels between Boris and Alex. “What are you two making?” she asks.

Alex shrugs. He’s holding a block of randomly stuck together Lego pieces.

“Mine’s a space motorbike,” Boris says.

Vladlena glances at her watch. “We need to be off soon,” she says. “You want a coffee before I go?”

Natalya nods. “Yes,” she says. “That would be nice.”

She lies down on the rug and allows herself a brief moment of comfort as the boy’s physical presence swarms around and over her. What with the move and everything, she’s been ignoring their needs almost as much as she’s been forgetting her own need for them. As Alex drives his unnamed object through her hair and Boris runs his space motorbike along her leg, she glances up at the ceiling, so high above them. She notices the way the sunlight cuts across the room.
Wow
, she thinks.
We did it.

Once Vladlena has returned with her coffee and has whisked the boys off to school (the school is on her way home, after all) Natalya’s emotions shift slowly but surely from awe of the new house, through pride, to a strange sensation of loneliness.

It’s peculiar, the effect that space, that the
shape
of space, can have upon your psyche. She never once felt lonely in the old house, but it’s the sheer volumes of the rooms here. They make her feel smaller than usual, as if she’s dominated by the building, as if the house, perhaps, is winning some unnamed battle.

She shrugs off the feeling and takes a hot shower. The downstairs water pressure here is amazing, more jet-wash than shower. Afterwards she dries herself, gets dressed, and begins to hunt for her makeup bag. It’s not where it should be.

She checks the upstairs bathroom three times, checks the bedroom twice, then returns downstairs to look there. This search, this wandering from one unfamiliar semi-furnished room to another does nothing to lessen her sensation, this morning, of being lost. There are so many damned rooms, here. There are so many unpacked cartons still to get through – boxes and boxes containing thousands of individual tiny items that each had their own place in the old house, items she can’t even
think
where to put now they’re here. Perhaps she can just leave them all in boxes in one of the rooms. Perhaps she can just close the door and forget them forever. But her makeup bag – she had that just yesterday. So how can it be lost today?

She starts checking unlikely places. The kitchen. The refrigerator. The children’s rooms. She returns upstairs and checks the bathroom, which is silly because she already looked three times. But sometimes things vanish and reappear. She has no explanation why, but she knows it to be true. Poltergeists, perhaps. She should look for her glasses first, she decides, and so she starts to hunt for those instead.

Eventually, feeling almost distraught, she hurls herself onto the sofa, and there, beside her, poking from beneath a cushion, is the god damned makeup bag. And inside it are her glasses. She feels almost tearful at the discovery, or perhaps at the wasted hour. She not sure quite which.

This move, it’s true, has worn her out. Tim thinks that she’s taking the Mickey when she says that, but it really has. She’s on the edge of tears all the time. She’s feeling stressed and exhausted and lonely. She’s waking up every morning feeling disoriented, wondering where she is. Yet she can’t be seen to complain because it’s her own fault, she pushed for this move. It was she who wanted it, after all.

And this getting people to do things... getting the pool guy to actually drop by when she’s here, getting the delivery guys to unbox things in the right rooms, getting Vladlena to clean the windows properly, it all turns out to be as hard, if not harder, than doing it all yourself. Who knew?

She looks up at the smears of Windolene. It’s true that in the sunlight, they really do look horrible.

She walks to the kitchen where she snatches a roll of kitchen towel from the counter, takes the proper window cleaner from the cupboard (not that horrible white cream Vladlena uses), and returns to the lounge. She drags the new coffee table to the window and puts a chair on top of it. She climbs uncertainly up and begins, angrily, to rub away Vladlena’s smears. It really
does
look like she used a dead cat.

Her anger, Natalya realises as she works, is not against Vladlena, and it’s not against Tim. She’s angry, it transpires, with life. She’s angry with life for making everything so difficult, with making everything so god-damned
disappointing.

Vladlena, she thinks, as she climbs down and drags the table and chair to the right, is going to leave them. She’s not sure where the thought came from, but she’s certain, now she’s thought it, that it’s true.

Vladlena has been complaining about the distance she has to travel to get here. She’s been complaining about dropping the boys at school too. And she’s upset about not being able to manage the windows. They do, it has to be said, have acres of the damned things, and whoever the architect was, he doesn’t seem to have ever planned for quite how they might be cleaned. To do them properly you’d need to be that comic hero who climbs buildings... Spider Man – that’s the one. And even Spider Man would leave little sucker traces. Natalya needs to have a word with Tim about that. He needs to lay off criticising Vladlena until he’s tried to do them himself.

Yes, unless they sweeten the deal, perhaps reduce her hours or up her pay, Vladlena will leave them. And that would be more than a shame.

Natalya remembers the search that led them (eventually) to Vladlena. Jenny, the previous girl – a live-in au-pair – had slapped Boris across the face. She’d threatened him with another slap if he told his parents about it too. If it hadn’t been for his bright red cheek and Natalya’s intuition, her tenacity in interrogating the boy, they might never have found out. Natalya had slapped Jenny back, and then had fallen out with Tim, who insisted that slapping employees wasn’t acceptable behaviour even if they
had
abused your children.

Natalya remembers how happy she had been once Jenny had gone. The house had been a mess, and their dinners had all been take-aways, but she had loved being with Alex all day. She had loved picking Boris up from school.

The chair on which Natalya is standing wobbles and slips a little, and she realises that she’s taking risks by leaning too far out so she climbs down and drags the table and chair a little farther.

And poor Tim, what is the move doing to her lovely Timsky? He’s working more than ever in an attempt to pay for everything. He’s trying to sell the old place and worrying about Greece, and when he isn’t at work he’s staring into the middle distance through these same smeary windows, looking almost as lost as Natalya feels.

She peers back at the window to her left – it’s definitely an improvement – then returns, encouraged, to the task at hand.

Yes Tim looks lost, his brow seems permanently furrowed these days. And they haven’t had sex once since they moved here, not since Boris interrupted them in the old place, in fact. And that’s not like Tim at all.

He’s waking at three in the morning, and complaining of chest pains as well. And it’s all Natalya’s fault, because she
knew
. She had read the damned article about how moving houses was as stressful as bereavement, yet she’d pushed for this all the same. If she had never mentioned seeing the house on the market then Tim wouldn’t be having chest pains, and they’d still be having sex and Vladlena wouldn’t be thinking of leaving them, and Natalya wouldn’t be standing on a wobbly chair on a table trying to clean Vladlena’s smears of Windolene from these stupid bloody windows.

There had been a moment when she had realised, when she had grasped, briefly, the meaning of the word ‘enough.’ There had been a short window of opportunity through which she had been able to identify the comfortable advantages of stasis, of being happy and contented with what they already had. And then something had happened and she lost it again.