The Other Son (29 page)

“Do you have mosquitos here?” Alice asks.

“Yep. We use those plug-in things, but Virginie prefers nets.”

“Ooh, I think I’ll need a plug too,” Alice says. “I hate mosquitos. So how old is Virginie?” To Alice, it looks like quite a young girl’s bedroom for some reason.

“Not sure,” Bruno says. “Her mother’s ninety-one. And I think she had her quite young.”

“So... seventies?”

“Something like that.”

“And the bathroom?” Alice asks. “I didn’t see a bathroom.”

“Ah!” Bruno laughs. “That’s the catch.”

“The catch?”

“Yeah. I hope you’re not like Matt. I hope you don’t pee in the middle of the night.”

Bruno leads her back down to the ground floor. “Gosh all these stairs!” Alice says.

They step back out onto the courtyard. On the opposite side, a small blue door is set into the stone wall. “Tada!” Bruno says, opening it.

The bathroom, though tiny, contains everything one might need, a toilet, sink, mirror and a small tiled shower area. The ceiling has been painted the same deep blue as the door, and the walls again have been whitewashed. “Is Virginie Greek?” Alice asks, pointing at another photo, this time of two women posing in front of a higgledy-piggledy Greek village.

“Nope. But she loves Greece. Especially Santorini.”

“Is one of these two her?” Alice asks, pointing at the photo.

Bruno leans in and studies the picture. “Yes. That’s Virginie on the left,” he says. “But a long long time ago.”

Alice looks around the bathroom again. “It reminds me of when I was a girl,” she says. “We had an outside loo as well.”

“So, you’ll be OK then.”

“Yes, fine. As long as it doesn’t rain,” Alice says, stepping back out into the courtyard.

“Hah,” Bruno says. “We’ll get you an umbrella. This over here is mint.” He walks to a rockery in the corner and picks a leaf and puts it into his mouth. “You might want to water this for her. It’s a bit dry.”

“And you might want to wash that before you eat it,” Alice says. “It’s probably got cat pee all over it.” A clattering noise behind her makes Alice jump. She turns to see the white longhair bursting back out through a cat-flap. “Oh,” she says. “They have their own door.”

“Like I said, this is their home.”

“But I can lock it, presumably?”

“Why would you want to lock it?”

“Well, to keep them outside,” Alice says.

“But why would you want to lock Virginie’s cats outside? I don’t get it.”

“Not all the time,” Alice explains. “But perhaps at night. I mean, there are no doors are there? I don’t want them running all over me all night. I don’t want them bringing me dead mice and things.”

Bruno strokes his beard. He pushes his tongue into the side of his cheek. He stares at Alice. He looks bemused.

“What?” she asks.

Bruno scratches his neck. “I’m just surprised,” he says. “Matt was right, I guess. He said you were like this, only I thought he was exaggerating.”

Alice frowns. “Like what?” she asks. She’s really not sure what she’s said.

“Is it because you’re stressed?” Bruno asks. “Because I know you’ve had a hard time. And some people get weird when they’re stressed. My dad does actually.”

Alice pales. “Stressed?” she says. “I’m sorry... I...”

Bruno raises his hands in a gesture of peace. He smiles gently. “Hey, I’m not, you know, having a go, Alice,” he says. “I’m just trying to understand.” And indeed, his tone is gentle, friendly, entirely devoid of anger or aggressiveness.

“I’m not sure what I’ve done,” Alice replies honestly. She’s running conversations through her mind trying to spot the error. “I didn’t realise that I
was
being weird, to be honest.”

“Really?” Bruno asks.

“Really.”

“OK, here’s the thing,” Bruno says, chewing his lip. “I guess... Well... You might wanna work on your positives, is all.”

“My positives?”

“Yeah!”

“I’m sorry, Bruno,” Alice says. “But I’m really not following you.”

“OK,” Bruno says softly. “You seem nice, Alice. Really you do. And I know you’ve had a hard time. But since you arrived, I’ve heard nothing but negatives from you. The house is remote. You don’t like cats. You don’t like water. It’s too hot. There are so many stairs... Matt said that in the car you actually asked him who would want to live in a place like this? Is that true?”

“I... I was only thinking about how remote it is,” Alice says. “For youngsters like yourselves.”

“That is your point of view,” Bruno says. “But you’re here for a month, eh?”

Alice nods and swallows with difficulty. She’s being gently berated by a seven foot, twenty-nine-year-old Canadian boy – her son’s boyfriend. And she has absolutely no past data on how to react to that.

“So you might wanna try to find some positives here,” Bruno continues. “You might wanna try to execute this whole thing with a bit of elegance, for us, but for you too. For you mainly, in fact. That’s all I’m saying here.”

Alice nods and wipes a bead of perspiration from her top lip.

“Your son’s driven for five hours today to pick you up before going off to work a seven hour shift. We’ve found you this great place to stay.” He gestures around him. “Most people say... In fact, you know what? I think you’re the first person
ever
to come to our cabin and not say how awesome it is. And this place? Look around you, Alice. It’s fucking incredible.”

Alice nods. “I hear you,” she says.

“You’re going through some really difficult shit, Alice. I know that, OK? We all know that. But we don’t need to make this whole thing as difficult as possible do we? We can actually find some pleasure here if we try, don’t you think?”

Alice swallows and nods silently. She can’t think of a single word to say. She feels about five again.

“It’s like Mum always says. You have to take the time to smell the roses.”

Alice sighs deeply. She has an inexplicable desire to say, “I’ve just left my husband. He beat me.” Instead, she licks her lips.

“
I’m
sorry,” Bruno says, concernedly. “I think I’ve upset you, huh?”

“No, not really,” Alice says vaguely. “I’m not sure how I feel.”

“OK. Well, I’m going to go home and give you some space. I’m gonna make some dinner, too. And then I’ll see you about eight, OK? You remember the way?”

Alice nods robotically.

“Great,” Bruno says. “Oh, the keys are on the side, there. And don’t forget to feed the cats. The crunchy things are under the sink. And they need water too. Otherwise they die.”

Alice watches Bruno as he skips down the stone steps and strides off into the distance. She sinks onto a hard cast-iron garden chair behind her and remembers seeing a round cushion for it somewhere indoors. She can’t find the energy to go and get it right now, though.

One of the cats, an old, skinny, grey one, jumps up onto her lap, but she pushes it off and crosses her knees to discourage it from returning. The cat rolls onto its back at her feet instead. It looks like it wants its tummy tickled, but Alice knows how quickly cats go from tickle-
me
to bite-
you
. She’s not falling for that one.

She tries to think about her conversation with Bruno, but she’s feeling stunned. Her brain seems devoid of sensible thoughts about it, or even any kind of emotion, yet his words – many of which are
her
words – are running, as if on a loop, through her head.
Nothing but negatives... driven for five hours... who would choose to live in a place like this?

And yes, she
had
said that to Matt in the car. She had asked him exactly that question. And yes, perhaps she had been tactless. But then who
would
choose to live up the top of a mountain? Who would look at a map of the world and choose somewhere without a shop, or a restaurant, or a bar? It was hardly unreasonable to point out that most single young men did not actively search out this kind of isolation. But then Matt, she remembers,
isn’t
single. And he’s not really young anymore either. As a parent, one tends to forget that. As a parent, one often
tries
to forget that.

And this Bruno – the way he spoke to her! No wonder she’s in shock. Because, frankly, how dare he?
He’s nothing to me
, Alice thinks.
He’s not my son. He’s not my friend. So how come he dares give me lessons in etiquette?

Some feelings, finally, are surfacing. Alice is starting to feel angry. The heat of it is rising up from deep within like the uncomfortable rush of a blush. It sweeps through her body like that scorching wind they have in Spain. The Scirocco, isn’t that the one? “How
dare
he,” she whispers, as her skin prickles with the heat.

Bruno is young enough to be her grandchild, for God’s sake.
“You might want to work on your positives,”
indeed. The impertinence of it, that’s what gets her, an impertinence so typical of all these new world cultures, these people from places where no one ever learned how to speak to an elder, where deference and tact are unknown values, where only brashness and newness have any worth, where so-called honesty trumps politesse every day of the week.

The form of it, that’s part of why she’s feeling so shocked, she realises. No one has ever spoken to her like that before. Yes, she’s seen people have these heartfelt ‘for your own benefit’ conversations in American films, but it’s not the English way. It’s not the English way at all.

We prefer to say nothing,
Alice thinks.
We bottle it up until we’re so upset that we cry. Or we bottle it up until we’re so angry, we punch our partners in the face.
That’s one thing she has always understood about Ken’s anger, for example. That the punch was never the result of whatever had just happened, but the culmination of a thousand unmanaged slights. Or perceived slights, anyway. Ken’s punches were always expressions of an entire life of bottled up disappointments, that’s why there was no sensible way to deal with them. Alice meets the revelation that she is crying again with a sense of exhaustion. Will the tears
ever
end?

She wonders if Bruno talks to Matt in the same patronising tone he used with her. She wonders how he copes with it. Perhaps he has learned to talk like an American, too. But no, because when Alice, in the car, had asked why anyone would live here, Matt hadn’t asked her why she had said it, had he? He hadn't pointed out that it wasn’t a very nice thing to say, either. He had smiled at her blandly and then bitched to Bruno about it behind her back. Like Alice herself, English to the core.

Alice pulls a handkerchief from her pocket and wipes at her eyes. So why
had
she said that? She runs the rest of the conversation through her mind and decides that, no, it was not an
unreasonable
question to ask. But all the same, why would a mother complain about the heat, complain about the bends, about the distance, about the isolation? Why would a mother choose these things to say to her son rather than thanking him for driving for five hours? Simple habit, perhaps? Simple
bad
habit?

She thinks about being (supposedly) the first ever person not to comment on how pretty the log cabin is. It’s not something to be proud of. And yes, now she thinks about it, it
is
pretty. So why
hadn’t
she said so?

At the time, she simply hadn’t noticed, she decides. But then that begs the question,
why
hadn’t she noticed?

She thinks about the river that Bruno tried to get her to look at. Because she hadn’t been able to ‘see’ that either. Yes, she had looked at it. And yes, like the house, once she had looked at it, she had perceived that it was pretty, that, in a logical, rational way, it was something worth looking at. But she’d had no emotional response to the river or the cabin. She’s had no positive emotional response to anything for a long time.
Perhaps I’m clinically depressed
, she thinks.
Perhaps this is what it feels like.

Alice struggles to look afresh at her immediate surroundings, and again rationally, she can see that the vines are pretty, that the dappled shadow beneath them is picturesque. She looks at the mint in the corner of the rockery – vibrant, almost fluorescent in the sunshine – and her words come back to her.
Cat pee,
she thinks, shamefully. That was the only thing she had found to say.
Cat pee!

Perhaps
I can’t see beauty anymore,
she thinks.
Perhaps
I’m dead inside
.
Perhaps fifty years with Ken killed me.

The tears are flowing freely now and Alice lowers her head into her hands and lets herself sob.
She’s been busy, that’s the thing.
She’s been very very busy for a very long time – busy avoiding conflict. She’s spent her life
not
mentioning things,
not
noticing things. She’s had to become an expert at not thinking about things, at
not
having emotional responses, just to survive. Yes, she understands that now. It’s not really her fault. She’s just been too busy surviving to even think about smelling the bloody roses.

When Alice’s tears run dry, she feels exhausted and a little hopeless. So, coming here was a bad idea after all! The problem is that wherever you go people expect things from you. No matter what’s happening in your life people have expectations of how you’re supposed to behave. And Alice has nothing left to give. Not tonight at any rate. Perhaps not ever again.

A car drives past, the first one she has seen since she got here, and suddenly aware of the fact that other people must live here, and fearing a challenging conversation with one of the French locals (a conversation which she really doesn’t have the energy for) she returns to the interior of the house. She locks the front door behind her.

She looks around at the hard chairs of the kitchen, two of which are occupied by cats, then climbs the stairs to the lounge. Here, she opens the windows and shutters. A strip of sunshine falls across the sofa. “Huh!” she thinks. “So, I finally get my sofa in the sun.”