The Other Son (19 page)

Her phone rings so she slides it towards her and peers at the screen. It’s Dot calling.

Alice had forgotten. She was supposed to call her back last night. “Hello?” she says. She’s not quite sure why she’s answering. Perhaps to share some of the blame with Dot. This is partly her fault, after all.

“Hello!” Dot says brightly. “I’m bored to death with this bloody rain! I wondered if you fancy a film this aft’.”

So surreal is Dot’s enthusiasm that Alice struggles to think how to reply.

“Alice?” Dot says. “Alice? Are you there? Damned phones.”

Alice clears her throat. “I can’t come.”

“You
can’t?”

“No, I’m... I’m busy.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“OK,” Dot says. “Go tell that to someone who
doesn’t
know you. You’re upset about something so tell me what. Is it me? Have I said something?”

Alice swallows with difficulty. It’s not that she doesn’t want to tell Dot, it’s just that she’s struggling to find the energy required to even begin to explain any of it.

“Alice!” Dot says. “Tell me!”

“I’m sorry,” Alice says. “Ken found out. About the account. That’s all. They sent a letter.”

“He
found out
?!”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Jesus. What did he say?”

“I...” Alice’s voice starts to wobble. “I’m feeling very confused right now, so perhaps we can talk later?” Her voice doesn’t sound like her own.

“Is he there?” Dot asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“Is Ken there?”

“No. He’s gone to the pub.”

“You should come here then.”

“I can’t.”

“OK, I’m coming there then.”

“No don’t.”

“I’m coming over,” Dot says. “I’ll get a minicab. I’ll be half an hour, OK? Don’t move.” The line goes dead.

Alice phones Dot back twice. She sends her a text, too. She tells her not to come. She warns her that Ken will be back soon. But she knows Dot well enough to know that she’s coming, and that nothing can stop her coming. And she’s glad. She needs a friend right now. She needs someone to tell her what to do. The only trouble is that she knows what Dot will say and she doesn’t think that it will be the right advice. And even if it were, she doesn’t have the courage to follow it.

After fifteen minutes, Dot’s imminent arrival shakes her from her stupor. Pausing to look in the mirror (Mike Tyson looks back out at her) she climbs the stairs to the bathroom. She showers and painfully applies makeup, then dresses and pulls her old sunglasses from a chest of drawers. Looking at herself in the mirror she thinks, a little obtusely, of Jackie Onassis. When she was younger she used to convince herself that the sunglasses hid everything. She used to tell herself that they made her look like Jackie O. But at sixty-nine on a rainy May day, the only thing they look is silly.

I’ll just open the door a crack and send her away
, she tells herself. But even as she thinks this, she’s imagining Dot saying, “
Oh my God! Did he do this? Has he hit you?”
And she knows that she won’t send her away. She knows that she’ll collapse instead into Dot’s arms. She’ll fold into a fresh bout of tears.

***

Alice stares at her mug of tea. She watches the steam rising from it, then raises her head and looks out of Dot’s window at the rain, gentler than before, but still falling. She’s avoiding Dot’s concerned, questioning regard. Her friend is waiting for her to say something profound, something definitive about the situation. She can sense this without looking at her. But her mind is a complete blank so she stares at her tea instead.

At her feet, on Dot’s wooly rug, sits her hastily packed bag. So unable was Alice to think about what she might need for whatever comes next that the contents of the bag are, she knows, almost useless. But Dot had insisted, so, through tears, she had thrown random things into the bag. She sips at her tea and clears her throat, and this is apparently a mistake, because Dot takes it as a sign that she’s ready to speak. She isn’t.

“So what are you going to do?” Dot asks, predictably.

Alice shakes her head. The spirit of Joan of Arc is a mere memory. She’s just another bashed up housewife now.

“OK...” Dot says slowly. “Then do you want to know what
I
think you should do?”

Alice half shrugs but still doesn’t look up. She’s feeling ashamed. She should be more like Dot, she thinks. She should have a plan all worked out. She should have a flat and money and the gumption to build a new life for herself, but instead she’s just a woman on a sofa with a mug of tea, a badly packed bag, and a black eye.

“We need to go to the bank and get you some money out,” Dot says. “That’s the first thing. As much as we can.”

Alice snorts. Dot’s advice is based on the assumption that Alice isn’t going to go back and she has never been less sure of anything. Fifty years feels like an eternity. After fifty years it’s impossible, it seems, to imagine anything different. But she’s too ashamed to tell Dot that.

“And then we need to go to the police,” Dot says.

Finally Alice looks up. She pulls a face, and the process of pulling it hurts her swollen eye causing her to flutter one eyelid behind her sunglasses. “I’m not going to the police, Dot,” she says imagining just how tooth-numbingly embarrassed that would make her feel.

“Why the hell not?” Dot asks. “He punched you in the face for God’s sake.”

Alice shrugs again and pushes her sunglasses a little farther up her nose.

“No, come on,” Dot says. “Tell me why on earth you
wouldn’t
go to the police.”

Alice clears her throat again. “Because this isn’t a sitcom,” she whispers. “Because this is my life, not some Channel 4 documentary.”

“That makes no sense, and you know it,” Dot says. But Alice doesn’t know it at all. It makes perfect, albeit inexplicable, sense to her.

Dot gasps with frustration and runs one hand through her hair. She still has lovely hair, Dot has. “OK. We can think about it later. In the meantime, let’s at least deal with the money thing. Whatever happens next, you’ll need money. So we need to go get you some money from the bank. Ken could lock you out of the joint account at any moment. He could transfer all of the money to a different account. So you need to get there first.”

“Stop,” Alice says. “Please. Just stop.”

“Look, I understand that you’re not thinking all that clearly...”

“Stop, Dot,” Alice says again.

But still Dot continues. “You have to trust me on this one thing, Alice. Money is everything.”

“Money is
nothing
,” Alice replies.

“You won’t be saying that in a week when you’re penniless living under a bridge,” Dot tells her. “Let me take you to the bank.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Dot! I don’t want to think about money. And I don’t want to go to the bank.”

Dot looks exasperated. “Why the hell not? Is it your face?”

“Yes,” Alice says, simply because it’s easier than trying to explain to Dot, trying to explain to herself even, why she doesn’t want to go to the bank. “Yes. It’s my face.”

“All-right,” Dot says hesitantly. “OK... Um. Then give
me
your card then. I’ll go.”

And again, because it’s easier than fighting, because giving Dot her card and her PIN code means that she gets a break, alone, Alice gives in. “It’s two-two-seven-three,” she says as she hands over the card. “And don’t take too much. I don’t want
Ken
calling the police.”

During Dot’s absence, Alice lies on her back on Dot’s sofa. She stares at the ceiling and listens to the refrigerator clicking on and off, to the neighbour upstairs walking around. She doesn’t think about what’s next, and she doesn’t think about what happened. She’s numb, but that numbness feels comfortable. And didn’t Matt once like a song about being comfortably numb? It was by Pink Floyd, she thinks. She can almost remember the tune.

It’s almost an hour later by the time Dot returns. “I only managed to get three hundred,” she announces, handing over Alice’s card and a wad of banknotes. “I asked inside the branch and it’s a daily limit, so we can get more tomorrow. And if you go inside, they’ll give you as much as you want. You just need to take ID with you.”

“Thanks,” Alice says, stuffing the cash into her handbag. She’s glad that Dot could only take out three hundred. It’s still enough to make Ken angry, but at least he won’t be able to claim that she was trying to clean out the account.

“Now,” Dot says. “I had a think and–”

“I did too,” Alice interrupts, realising only as she says it that it’s true. “I’m going to Tim’s place. I’m going to go back and get my car and then I’m going to Tim’s place in Broseley.”

She knows, as soon as she has said it, that it’s the right decision. Dot’s flat is not a neutral space. Dot is not neutral, either. And what Alice needs now is neutrality. She needs to be able to think properly in an unhindered way about what to do next. She needs to be able to decide without Dot pushing her this way and that. Tim and Natalya will have a much more balanced view of things.

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” Dot says.

“It’s OK. You don’t need to,” Alice replies.

“I think you should stay here.”

“Thanks. But that’s not what I’ve decided,” Alice says. “But you’re a sweetheart for offering.”

“Oh Alice,” Dot says. “Please.”

“I’m going to get a taxi back and pick up my car. And then I’m going to Tim’s.”

“I don’t think you should drive either.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“And what if Ken’s there? What if he sees you?”

“He won’t,” Alice says. “The car’s around the corner, and I’ve got the keys. I don’t even need to go in.”

“Let me come with you, then,” Dot says. “Just in case. You can drop me home afterwards.”

“No,” Alice says. “Thanks Dot, but no. My mind’s made up. And that’s what I’m doing.”

As the taxi approaches the end of her street, Alice thanks her lucky stars that there were no spaces available in front of the house when she had parked her car. “Can you do me a favour, dear?” she asks the cab driver, a young, muscular Pakistani lad with a pink turban. “Can you just wait till I’m in my car and my doors are locked before you drive away?” Though she had entertained the idea of entering the house and re-packing her bag properly, her heart is racing now that she’s here.

“Sure,” the taxi driver says, looking worried. “You having problems, lady?”

“Hopefully not,” Alice tells him as she hands him a twenty pound note. “But I’d just feel safer that way.”

The cab driver nods and frowns, then reaches for the keys and switches off the ignition. He climbs out, rounds the car and yanks open Alice’s door. Then standing over her like a bodyguard whilst constantly scanning the horizon, he walks her to her car. She’s so grateful to him that it’s as much as she can do to avoid crying again.

She throws her bag onto the passenger seat and starts the engine immediately. The young man, after all, is waiting. With a wave from her trembling fingertips, she drives away.

After about a mile, she turns down the same road to the cemetery from which she had phoned Dot just a few weeks before. Here, she turns the engine off, and sits and watches the drips from the recent rain as they fall from the trees onto her windscreen. Once her nerves have settled, she continues on her way.

At Tim’s house, she can tell even before she rings the doorbell that only Natalya is home. Neither Tim’s nor Vladlena’s cars are outside.

“Alice!” Natalya says when she opens the door. She looks more surprised than pleased. “Tim’s not here,” she says, confirming Alice’s perception of the situation.

“Can I come in please?” Alice asks – Natalya is body-blocking the entrance.

“Um...” Natalya replies, clearly struggling to invent a circumstance whereby refusing entry to your mother-in-law might be acceptable.

“It’s a bit urgent,” Alice tells her.

“Urgent?” Natalya repeats. And then she notices something about Alice’s face. Perhaps the sunglasses don’t hide everything, or maybe Natalya has simply worked out their significance. “Of course,” she says, stepping aside. “Come in. Something is wrong, yes?”

“Yes,” Alice confirms. “I’m afraid it is.”

Natalya leads Alice to the lounge. “Boys are still at school,” she tells her.

“Yes,” Alice says. On the lounge table, playing cards are spread out. “You’re playing Solitaire?” she asks.

“Sorry?”

“Solitaire? The cards?”

“Ah,” Natalya says. “Nearly. This is Russian game. But almost Solitaire. Yes. You want a drink, Alice? Tea or coffee, or...” Her voice peters out. She leans, frowning, towards Alice. “Your face!” she says, now reaching, rather rudely it seems to Alice, to remove her sunglasses. Alice raises one hand to retain them but then relents and removes them herself instead.

“Bozhe moy!” Natalya exclaims breathily.
– My God!
“Who do this to you?” she continues. “You are rob or mug or something?”

Alice shakes her head gently. “I had a fight,” she says. “With Ken.”

Natalya is frozen in a caricature of shock. Her eyes are wide, her mouth ajar.

“Do you know what time Tim will be home?” Alice asks. “I tried to phone him but there was no answer.”

“He is meeting all day,” Natalya says shaking her head. “Maybe seven. Maybe eight. But God, Alice...” she reaches out to gently touch Alice’s cheek. “
Ken
do this to you?”

Alice nods.

“So you need to stay here,” Natalya says. “Yes! I put Boris in with Alex tonight. There is no bed in the spare rooms yet, but...”

“I can sleep on the sofa,” Alice offers.

“No. Boris’ room is better. And he likes to share.”

“OK. Then, thank-you,” Alice says.

Natalya slides her hand into her pocket. She is, she realises, trembling. She has seen many bruised faces in her time, including a few looking back at her from a mirror. Horrible memories are surfacing, memories of every bruise she ever tended to.

“You need a drink, maybe?” she asks, heading for the bar. “Vodka, or whisky. Oh... Martini, yes?”