What You Make It (19 page)

‘Now what I want,’ Susan announced, ‘before anything else, before even the cup of coffee you're going to make me, is a kiss.’ She stepped towards him and put her arms round his shoulders. Heart tightening, Richard put his round her waist. This wasn't the way they normally kissed. Susan slowly moved her face towards his, eyes soft and warm, and he shut his so he couldn't see them.

The kiss went okay, as far as he could tell, and he pulled her towards him, hoping his arms could make up for anything his lips weren't giving. He couldn't remember how he kissed her.

Then he heard a sound, and his eyes flew open. He looked past Susan's, which were closed, and at the dark hallway. There seemed to be a shadow back in there, and he knew he'd heard something. Either a sob or a chuckle. He couldn't tell which.

Susan pulled back, a quizzical expression on her face.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, why?’ he said carefully.

She shrugged.

‘Don't know. That just seemed a little … quiet.’

‘I'm fine,’ Richard lied, glancing at the corridor, ‘It's just… I need to go to the toilet.’

‘Do you?’ Susan asked, pretending to be a schoolteacher, and Richard realized thankfully he'd been given a way out of a potentially awkward moment.

‘Yus,’ he said, sounding like a child, and Susan laughed.

‘Off you go then. I'll put the kettle on. Would you dump my bag in the bedroom?’

Richard walked carefully into the corridor. He wanted to put the light on, but knew that was stupid. It was only five yards long, and enough light seeped from the living room to see that there was no one there. He walked into the bedroom and turned the light on. Leaving Susan's bag on the bed he stepped into the bathroom. He really did need to go, he discovered. In fact, he couldn't remember when he'd last been. After getting a result with the erratic flush he took a deep breath and opened the
door. Then he covered his mouth with his hands just in time to stifle a yelp.

The stern man was standing in the doorway to the corridor, leaning against the wall. The man from the pub was stretched out on the bed, smoking, and the little boy was standing by the window, not crying now, but just staring at him. A chubby, well-dressed man whose fat face seemed to shine like plastic paced in the centre of the room, and turned to smile at Richard.

‘Hello there, Number One,’ he said, and the yob on the bed snorted. Richard stared at them, hands trembling. He didn't think he could handle this. This, he thought, might just be that little bit too much.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he managed, quietly. The oily man chortled, and then tutted.

‘You know very well,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘Now. Situation is this. We're not happy.’ The man on the bed snorted again, more angrily this time. The man in the doorway just looked balefully at Richard, and the little boy turned to look out of the window, nodding his head. This isn't happening, thought Richard. This is not happening.

‘Not happy at all,’ the man continued. ‘There was talk of doing away with you altogether, after the fracture.’ Richard just stared at him. ‘But,’ the man said, smiling brightly, ‘I'm happy to say I won the various parties over, and that's not going to happen. Instead, we're just going to revoke your status. As you can see, things are going to be run a little differently from now on. We're all on a par now. There is no Number One any more. Understood?’

Richard didn't answer, and the man nodded his head curtly in a businesslike way.

‘Good. No hard feelings then. Oh, and one more thing: the alarm
is
set properly. I do it myself.’

‘And I look after the fag butts,’ smirked the man on the bed. ‘Don't you worry. Trust me.’ He grinned, showing his nicotine-stained teeth, and sat up. Richard decided he really couldn't
cope with this any more, stepped back into the bathroom and shut the door.

When he no longer looked as if he'd been crying he opened it again. The bedroom was empty. There was no depression on the bed.

He breathed deeply for a while, composing himself before going back in to Susan. Then he noticed a flash of colour in the gap in her bag, and leant forward. He reached silently in and pulled out the envelope. He slipped the letter out and read the first line. It said ‘Dear Suz’.

He walked into the corridor. Everything felt different now. Some balance had shifted, some scale tipped. He stepped into the living room.

The stern man was sitting in the armchair, gazing with distaste at the furnishings. Richard thought it was probably him who needed the checklist, but also him who made sure the letters went in the right envelopes. It was definitely him who disapproved of the infidelity. The little boy was sitting on the floor. He looked a little more cheerful, almost hopeful. He didn't mind who or how many he had, so long as he had someone. The oily man stood, arms folded, and smiled beneficently at Susan, who was sitting on the sofa. The man from the pub was kissing her hard, his hand squeezing her breast through her blouse. He bit her lip for a moment in the way she liked, and Susan slipped her hand onto his thigh.

Richard stood aimlessly in the doorway for a moment, and then moved to lean against the bookcase, to wait his turn in the limelight, to get used to no longer being Number One, but just one of many.

As soon as I walked out of the hospital I knew what I was going to do. It was one a.m. by then, for what little difference that made. I was on hospital time, crash time, blood time: surprised by how late it was, as if I'd believed that what happened must have taken place in some small pocket of horror outside the real world, where the normal rules of progression and chronology didn't apply. Of course it must have taken time, for the men and women in white coats to run the stretcher trolleys down the corridors, shouting for crash teams and saline; to cut through my wife's matted clothes and expose wet ruins where only an hour ago all had been smooth and dry; to gently move my son's head so that its position in relation to his body was the same as it had always been. All of this took time, as did the eventual slow looks up at me, the quiet shakes of the doctors' heads, the forms I had to sign and the words I had to listen to.

Then the walk from the emergency room to the outside world, my shoes tapping softly on the linoleum as I passed rows of people with bandaged fingers. That took the most time of all.

The air in the car park was cool and moist, freshened by the rain. I could smell the grass which grew in the darkness beyond the pools of yellow lamplight, and hear in the distance the sound of wet tyres on the freeway.

I suddenly realized that I had no means of getting home. The remains of the Lexus were presumably lying by the side of the road where the accident had taken place, or had been carted off to a wrecker's yard. For a moment the problem took up the whole of my mind, unnaturally luminescent: and then I realized both that I could presumably call a cab from reception, and that I didn't really care.

Two orderlies walked across the far side of the lot, a faint laugh carrying to me. The smell of smoke in their wake reminded me I was a smoker, and I fumbled a cigarette from the packet in my jacket pocket. The carton was perfectly in shape, the cigarette unbent. One of the very few things Helena and I had ever argued about was my continued inability to resist toying with death in the form of tubes of rolled tobacco. Her arguments were never those of the zealot, just measured and reasonable. She loved me, and Jack loved me, and she didn't want the two of them to be left alone. The fact that the crash which had crushed her skull had left my cancer sticks entirely unmolested was a joke which she would have liked and laughed at hard.

For a moment I hesitated. I couldn't decide whether Helena's death meant I should smoke the cigarette or not.

Then I lit it and walked back to reception. If I was going to go through with it, I didn't have much time.

The cab dropped me at the corner of Montaigne and 31st. I overtipped the driver – who'd had to put up with a sudden crying jag which left me feeling cold and embarrassed – and watched the car swish away down the deserted street. The crossroads was bleak and exposed; an empty used car lot and burnt-out gas station taking two corners, run-down buildings of untellable purpose squatting kitty corner on the others. It couldn't have been more different from the place where I'd originally gone to visit the Same Again Corporation, an altogether more gleaming street in the heart of the business district. I guessed space was cheaper out here, and maybe they needed a lot of it: though I couldn't really understand why. Data storage is pretty compact these days.

Whatever. The card I'd kept in my wallet was adamant that I should go to the address on Montaigne in case of emergency, and so I walked quickly down towards 1176. I saw from across the street that a light was on behind the frosted glass of the door, and picked up the pace with relief. It was open, just as the card said it would be.

As I crossed the street a man came out of Same Again's front door, holding a very wet towel. He twisted the towel round on itself, squeezing as much of the water out of it as he could. It joined the rain already on the sidewalk and disappeared.

When he saw where I was heading he suddenly looked up.

‘Help you?’ he asked, warily. I showed him the card. An unreadable expression crossed his face. ‘Go inside,’ he said. ‘Be right with you.’

The reception area was small but smart. And very quiet. I waited at the desk for a few moments while the man finished whatever the hell he was doing. Then I noticed a soft dripping sound. A patch of carpet near one of the walls was damp, and there was a similar spot on the ceiling.

I turned to find the man reaching out a hand to me.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, but didn't offer any more explanation. ‘Okay, can I have that card?’

He took it and went behind the desk, tapped my customer number into the terminal there.

‘My name's …’ I said, but he held up his hand.

‘Don't tell me,’ he said quickly. ‘Not a thing. I assume something pretty major has happened.’ He looked at my face for a moment, and decided he didn't have to wait for an answer. ‘So it's very important that I know as little as possible. How many people have already been involved?’

‘Involved?’

‘Are aware of whatever event it is that has brought you here.’

‘I don't know.’ I didn't know who counted. The doctors and nurses, presumably, and the people who'd loaded up the ambulance. They'd seen the faces. Others knew something had happened, in that they'd driven past the mess on the freeway, or walked past me as I stood in the parking lot of the hospital. But maybe they didn't count, because they had no knowledge of who had been involved in what. ‘Maybe ten, twelve?’

The man nodded briskly. ‘That's fine. Okay, I've processed the order. Go through that door and a technician will take you
from there. May I just remind you of the terms of the contract you entered into with Same Again, most specifically that you are legally bound not to reveal to anyone either that you are a subscriber to our service or that you have made use of it on this or any other occasion?’

‘Fine,’ I said. It was illegal. We both knew that, and I was the last person who wanted any trouble.

The door led me into a cavernous dark area where a young woman in a green lab coat waited for me. Without looking directly at my face she indicated that I should follow her. At the end of the room was a chair, and I sat in it and sat quietly while she applied conductant gel to my temples and attached the wires.

When she was finished she asked if I was comfortable. I turned my head towards her, clamping my lips tightly together. My teeth were chattering inside my head, the muscles of my jaw and neck spasming. I could barely see her through a haze of grief I knew I could not bear. In the end I nodded.

She loaded up a hypo and injected something into the vein on the back of my hand. I started counting backwards from twenty but made it no further than nine.

I got home about four o'clock that afternoon. After I'd locked the Lexus I stood in the driveway for a moment, savouring a breeze which softened the heat like a ceiling fan in a noisy bar. The weather men kept saying summer was going to burst soon, but they were evidently as full of shit as their genus had always been. Chaos theory may have grooved a lot of people's lives but the guys who stood in front of maps for a living were obviously still at the stage of consulting entrails. It hadn't rained for weeks and didn't look like it was going to start anytime soon – and that was good, because in the evening we had a bunch of friends coming round for a cook-out in the back yard.

I let myself into the house and went straight through into the kitchen. Helena was standing at the table, basting chicken legs, half an eye on an old Tom Hanks film playing on the set
in the corner. I noticed with approval that it was an old print, one which hadn't been parallaxed.

‘Good movie,’ I said.

‘Would be,’ she replied, ‘if you could see what the hell was going on.’

I'm against the ‘enhancing’ of classics: Helena takes the opposite view, as is her wont. We'd had the discussion about a hundred times and as neither of us really cared, we only put ourselves through it for fun. I kissed her on the nose and dunked a stick of celery in the barbecue sauce.

‘Dad!’ yelped a voice, and I turned in time to catch Jack as he leapt up at me. He looked like he'd been dragged through a hedge sideways by someone who was an internationally acknowledged expert in the art of interfacing humans and hedges to maximum untidying effect. I raised an eyebrow at Helena, who shrugged.

‘How many pairs of hands do you see?’ she said.

I set Jack down, endured him boxing my kneecaps for a while, and then sent him upstairs for a bath – promising I'd come up and talk to him. I knew what he really wanted was to rehearse yet again the names of the kids who'd be coming tonight. He's a sociable kid, much more than I was at his age – but I think I was looking forward to the evening as much as him. The secret of good social events is to only invite the people you like having in your life, not the ones you merely tolerate. Tonight we had my boss – who was actually my best friend – and his wife; a couple of Helena's old girlfriends who were as good a time as anyone could handle; and another old colleague of mine over from England with his family.

I hung with Helena in the kitchen for a while, until she tired of me nibbling samples of everything she'd painstakingly arranged on serving plates. She was too tall to box my kneecaps and so bit me on the neck instead, a bite which turned into a kiss and became in danger of throwing her cooking schedule out of whack. She shooed me out and I left her to it and went through into the study.

There were screeds of email to be sent before I could consign the day to history and settle down into the evening and weekend, but most of it was already written and the rest didn't take long. As my software punted them out I rested my chin on my hands and gazed out onto the yard. A trestle table was already set up, stacks of paper plates at the ready. The old cable spool we used as a table when it was just family had been rolled to over by the tree, and bottles of red wine were open and breathing in the air. Beer would be frosting in the fridge and the fixings for Becky and Janny's drink of choice – Mint Juleps, for chrissake – ready and waiting in the kitchen. I could hear Helena viciously chopping some errant vegetable in the kitchen, and Jack hollering in the bath upstairs.

For a moment I felt perfectly at peace. I was 36, had a wife I'd die for and a happy, intelligent kid; a job I actually enjoyed and more money than we needed; and a house that looked and felt like an advert for The American Way. So what if it was schmaltzy: it was what I wanted. After my twenties, a frenetic nightmare of bad relationships and shitty jobs – and my early thirties, when no one around me seemed to be able to talk about anything other than houses, marriage or children – my life had finally found its mark. The good things were in place, but with enough perspective to let me exist in the outside world too.

I was a lucky guy, and not too stupid to realize it.

The machine told me it had accomplished its task, and that I had new mail. I scanned the sender addresses: one from my sister in Europe, and a spam about ‘Outstanding business opportunities ($$$$$$)!’. I was mildly surprised to see that there was also one from my own email address – entitled ‘Read This!’ – but not very. As part of my constant battle to design a killfile which would weed out email invitations to business opportunities of any kind – regardless of the number of suffixed dollar signs – I was often sending test messages to myself. Evidently the new version of the killfile wasn't cutting it. I could tool around with it a little more on Sunday afternoon, maybe aided by a glass of JD. Right now it hardly seemed important.

I told the computer to have a nap and went upstairs to confront the dripping chaos that our bathroom would be.

Doug and Julia arrived first, as usual: they were always invited on a ‘turn up when you feel like it’ basis. Helena was only just out of the shower so Julia went up to chat with her; meanwhile Doug and I stood in the kitchen with bottles of beer and chewed a variety of rags, him nibbling on Helena's cooking, me trying to rearrange things so she wouldn't notice.

We moved out into the yard when Becky and Janny arrived, and I started the Weber up, supervising the coals with foreman-ship from Helena at the table. I'd strung a couple of extension speakers out the door from the stereo in the living room, and one of Helena's compilation minidiscs played quietly in the background: something old, something new, something funky and something blue. Jack sat neatly on a chair at the end of the trestle in his new pants and checked shirt, sipping at a diet coke and waiting for the real fun to begin. Becky chatted with him in the meantime, while Janny reran horror stories of her last relationship: she's working on being the Fran Liebowitz of her generation, and getting there real fast. When everyone round the table erupted as she got to the end of yet another example of why her ex-boyfriend had not been fit to walk the earth, Helena caught my eye, and smiled.

I knew what she meant. There but for the grace of God, she was thinking, could have gone you or I.

Being funny is cool; being happy is better. I left the coals to themselves for a bit, and went and stood behind Helena with my hand on her shoulder.

But then the doorbell went and she jumped up to let Adam and Carol in. Jack stood uncertainly, waiting for them to come through into the garden. Their two kids, whose names I could never remember, walked out behind them. There was a moment of quiet mutual appraisal, and then all three ran off towards the tree to play some game or other. They'd only ever met once before, on a trip we took to England, but obviously whatever they'd got up to then was still good for another day. As the
evening began to darken, and the adults sat round the table and drank and ate, I could hear always in the background one of my favourite sounds of all, the sound of Jack laughing.

And smell Helena's barbecue sauce, wafting over from the grill; and feel Helena's leg, her thigh warm against my leg, her ankle hooked behind mine.

At ten I came out of the house, clutching more beers, and realized two things. The first was that I was kind of drunk. Negotiating the step down from the kitchen was a little more difficult than it should have been, and the raucous figures around the trestle table looked less than clear. I shook my head, trying to get it back together: I didn't want to appear inebriated in front of my son. Not that he was on hand to watch – the kids were still tirelessly cavorting off in the darkness of the far end of the yard.