Us (38 page)

Perched impertinently on the bonnet of a police car was Kat.

‘Hey,' she said, offering her fist to bump. I obliged.

‘Hello, Kat. What are you doing here?'

‘Waiting for you. How was your first night behind bars?'

‘Better than some hotels I've stayed in. I regret the tattoo, though.'

‘What tattoo did you get, Mr P.?'

‘Just gang-related stuff. Big dragon.'

‘Your tan's evened out. On your face. You look less like a road sign.'

‘Well, that's something, I suppose.' She smiled and time passed. ‘Well, Kat, I should get going. Nice to meet—'

‘Have you tried texting him, Mr P.?'

‘Of course, and calling too. He said he'd ignore them all and he has.'

‘Then send him one he can't ignore. Here, hold Steve.' Kat slid off the bonnet, handed me accordion-Steve then reached into her pocket and produced her mobile phone, tapping on it with her head down. ‘I shouldn't do this. It's a betrayal of trust, Mr P., and I feel bad. Plus there's the cost to my personal dignity and integrity. But given that you've come this far …'

‘What are you writing, Kat?'

‘… and “send”! There. All done. Take a look.'

She held her phone out to me, and I read:

Albie I need to talk to you about something. Urgent. Has to be in person so don't call me! Just meet me tomorrow eleven am on the steps of the prado, do not be late!!!! Love you still kat

‘There you go,' said Kat. ‘I'm delivering him to you.'

‘Good God,' I exclaimed. ‘I don't know what to say.'

‘No thanks required.'

‘But … but doesn't the message sort of imply …?'

‘… that he's knocked me up? You do want him to be there, don't you?'

‘Well, yes, but—'

She took the phone from my hands. ‘I can always tell him I was kidding …'

‘No, no, no, I think … let it be. But tomorrow morning? Can I get to Madrid for tomorrow?'

‘You can if you run.'

I laughed, bundled the wheezing accordion back into her arms and with a certain wariness – we were neither of us daisy-fresh – embraced Kat, and began to trot across the car park before halting and turning back.

‘Kat, I realise I'm pushing my luck, but the money I gave you yesterday – could I get it back? My wallet is in Florence, you see …'

She shook her head slowly and sighed, crouched and reached into her backpack.

‘And maybe if I could borrow twenty, maybe thirty euros more? And your bank details, so I can return the money …'

I confess I made this offer in the expectation of her declining, but she took some time to write out her account numbers, including IBAN and SWIFT codes. I promised to make good my debts as soon as I returned, and then I was off, running down the hill, running, running, running towards Spain.

–

There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together, is at best a euphemism to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads.

Andrew Solomon,
Far From the Tree

Time being what it is, we got older. We thickened and sagged in ways that would have seemed implausible, comical even, to our younger selves, just as our son, before our eyes, began to elongate. We accumulated things; vast quantities of moulded plastic, picture books, scooters, tricycles, bicycles, shoes and clothes and coats and paraphernalia that no longer served a purpose but which we couldn't quite throw away. Connie and I entered our forties in quick succession, and though we suspected we'd never need a bottle steriliser or rocking horse again, we found we couldn't quite discard them, and now there was a piano, too, now a train set, a castle, a tangled box kite.

My new salary meant that the fridge seemed fuller, the wine tasted better and we bought a bigger car, took Albie on trips abroad and came back to the same small flat we'd bought together before we were married, cramped and tatty now. We ought to move house, we knew it, but the effort required was beyond me. Five years of commuting against the tide had begun to take their toll, and I was perpetually tired, perpetually stressed and bad-tempered, so that my nightly homecoming brought no pleasure to either Albie or Connie, or indeed myself.

Take, for example, the famous Glitter Wars that scarred the December of Albie's ninth year. Albie and Connie had been making Christmas cards at the kitchen table, heads close together in that way they had, Phil Spector's
Christmas Album
playing, the kind of home-spun artsy-craftsy activity that occupied their evenings while I struggled to stay awake on the 1957 into Paddington, self-medicating with a warm gin and tonic from the station buffet then another from the trolley, hurrying through the rain to a flat that felt too small and entering to no greeting, no loving kiss or filial hug, just a scene of utter disarray; music blaring, tissue-paper and cotton wool everywhere, poster paint daubed all over the table. Here were my son and wife in their own little self-contained world, laughing at a self-contained joke, and here was Albie shaking glitter onto PVA glue and the table, too, and the floor and onto his pyjamas. Anyone who has attempted to clean away large quantities of spilt glitter will know that it is a pernicious and vile substance, a kind of festive asbestos that clings to clothes and burrows into carpets, sticks to the skin and stays there, and now here were great snowdrifts of the awful stuff blowing across the table.

‘What the hell is going on in here!' I said, I shouted. They noticed me now.

‘We're making Christmas cards!' said Connie, still smiling. ‘Look! Isn't this a beauty?' She held up one of Albie's efforts and a shower of gold and silver cascaded to the floor. ‘Your son is an artist!'

‘Look! Look what you're doing. It's going everywhere! For Christ's sake, Connie,' and I threw down my briefcase and went to the sink to dampen a cloth. ‘Would it kill you to put newspaper down first?'

‘It's glitter, Douglas,' she said, forcing a laugh. ‘Because it's Christmas?'

‘And I'll be picking it out of my food and brushing it off my clothes until July! Look at this paint! Paint and glue on the table. Is it washable? No, stupid question, of course, it isn't—' I stopped scrubbing, threw the cloth down. ‘Look! Look, it's on my hands!' I held them up to the light, to show how brightly they sparkled. ‘I've got to go into meetings like this. I have to do presentations! Look! How is anyone supposed to take me seriously when I'm covered in this bloody …' My son was staring at the table now, his brow creased, lips protruding. Here you are, my darling boy – some memories for you.

‘Egg, can you go next door please?' said Connie.

He shifted off his seat. ‘Sorry, Dad.'

‘I like your Christmas card!' I said to his back, but it was too late now. Connie and I were left alone.

‘Well, you can really suck the joy out of pretty much anything these days, can't you?' said Connie.

But I was not quite ready to apologise yet and the battle that followed, erupting in skirmishes over the remaining days and weeks leading up to Christmas, was too painful and unpleasant to recount in great detail here. The glitter, as predicted, found its way into clothes and hair and the grain of the kitchen furniture; its sparkle would catch my eye as I ate a solitary breakfast in the dark, and the silences, the sniping and bickering continued until Christmas.

If my own mother ever caught me pulling faces, pouting or sneering, she would tell me: if the wind changes direction, you'll stay that way. I was sceptical at the time, but as the years passed I was not so sure. My everyday face, the one I wore at rest or when alone, had set and hardened, and wasn't one I cared for much any more.

The day itself was always spent at Connie's parents, a noisy, boisterous and boozy affair, the tiny terraced house packed with a mind-boggling number of nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles, both Cypriots and Londoners and combinations of the two, the children ever-multiplying, everyone laughing and joking and arguing in a smoky room with the TV on. Later, there'd be ridiculous dancing, four generations trampling walnut shells and Quality Street underfoot. Once upon a time these Christmas Days had seemed like a refreshing change from the rather chilly and restrained affair I was used to from childhood, but since the loss of my parents the event had taken on a melancholy air for me. I was the stranger here, an elderly orphan, an appendix to someone else's family, and the discord between my wife and me served only to heighten my gloom. There was work at home in my briefcase – perhaps I could sneak off early and do that? No, only lemonade for me. No, thank you, I don't smoke. And no, thank you, I do not wish to conga.

Of course Albie loved it there, sipping creamy cocktails when no one was looking, flirting with his cousins, dancing on his uncles' shoulders, and so I sat and watched and waited. We returned home after midnight, Albie falling asleep in the backseat, and I carried him up to our top-floor flat – the last year I'd be able to do this – and fell backwards on to our bed. The three of us lay together, too exhausted to undress, my son's breath hot and sweet on my cheek.

‘Are you unhappy?' said Connie.

‘No. No, just a little blue.' That silly word again.

‘Maybe we need to make a change.'

‘What kind of change?' I asked.

‘Perhaps a change of scene. So that you're not tired all the time.'

‘Leave London, you mean?'

‘If that's what it's going to take. Maybe find a house in the country somewhere, so you can drive to work. Somewhere with a good state school nearby. What d'you think?'

What did I think? In truth, I didn't love the city any more. It didn't belong to us in the same way. I did not like explaining to Albie why there were bunches of flowers tied to the railings, or instructing him to avoid the vomit on the way to the shops on Saturday morning. I was bored of road works and building sites – when would they ever finish the place? Why couldn't they leave it alone? When I returned at night, the city seemed an unnerving and aggressive place; I could feel my grip tightening on the handle of my briefcase as I left the tube, keys clenched in my other fist. Every siren, every terrorist threat seemed more urgent and more personal. And yes, there was all the great art, the wonderful theatre, but when had Connie last been to the theatre?

Perhaps the countryside was the answer. Sentimental, perhaps, but wouldn't it be great for Albie to know the names of birds other than magpies and pigeons? When I was a child, on walks my mother would habitually name all the grasses, flowers, birds and trees we passed –
Quercus robur
, the oak,
Troglodytes troglodytes
, the wren. These were my warmest memories of her, and even now I can recall the binomial for all the common British birds, though I've yet to be asked. But Albie's knowledge of nature came from trips to the city farm, his sense of the seasons from changes in the central heating. Perhaps exposure to nature would make him less sullen, moody and resentful towards me. I imagined him racing off on a bicycle with fishing net and spotter's guide, all rosy-cheeked and tousle-haired, then returning at dusk, a jam-jar full of sticklebacks sloshing on the handlebars, the kind of childhood I'd longed for. A biologist in the making; not hard science, but a start.

It was much more difficult to imagine Connie outside London. She had been born here, studied and worked here. We had fallen in love and been married here, raised Albie here. London exhausted and maddened me, but Connie carried the city around with her; pubs and bars and restaurants, theatre foyers, city parks, the top deck of the 22, the 55, the 38. She was not averse to the countryside, but even in a Cornish cove or on a Yorkshire moor, it seemed as if she might lift an arm and hail a cab.

‘Well?' she said.

‘Sorry, I'm just trying to imagine you in a field on a wet Tuesday in February.'

‘Yeah, me too.' She closed her eyes. ‘Not easy, is it?'

‘What about your work?'

‘I'll commute for a change. Stay over at Fran's if I have to. We'll sort that bit out. The main thing is d'you think you could be happy there?'

I didn't answer, and she continued:

‘I think you would be. Happier, I mean, or less stressed. Which means that we all would be. In the long run.' Albie shifted in his sleep and curled towards his mother. ‘I'd like you to be happy again. And if that means a new life in a new town … village …'

‘Okay. Let's think about it.'

‘Okay.'

‘I love you, Connie. You do know that.'

‘I do. Happy Christmas, my darling.'

‘Happy Christmas to you.'

Madrid in August; the dry heat and dust of it. Flying over the great plains of central Spain that afternoon, peering down, I had never felt so far from the sea.

After the chaos of the last few days, the journey to Spain had been blissfully smooth, the 0732 train from Siena bringing me to Florence in a little under ninety minutes, the journey slow but pleasant past great vineyards and
zone industriale
, the pleasure heightened by the excellent sandwich that I gorged on like some kind of caveman, followed by, in quick succession, a banana, an apple, a wonderful orange, the juice dribbling down my chin. Unshaven and not yet bathed, I suspect there was something a little feral about me, hunched in a corner seat, sticky-faced. Certainly the commuters who joined at Empoli regarded me with wariness. I returned their stares. What did I care? Like some newly freed jailbird, I was out and back on the streets, and I slid down in my seat to dream of hot baths, new razor blades, clean white sheets, etc.