What You Make It (20 page)

The second thing I noticed was less tangible. Something to do with atmosphere. While I'd been in the kitchen, it had changed. People were still laughing, and laughing hard, but they'd moved round, were sitting in different positions at the table. I guess I'd been in the kitchen longer than I thought. Becky and Jan were huddled at one end of the table, and I perched myself on a chair nearby. But they were talking seriously about something, and didn't seem to want to involve me.

There was another burst of laughter from the other end, and I looked blearily towards it. There was something harsh in the sound. Helena and Carol were leaned in tight together, their faces red and shiny. Adam was chortling with Doug and Julia. It was good to see them getting on together, but I hadn't realized they were all so chummy. Adam had only been with the firm for a year before upping stakes and going with Carol back to her own country. Doug and I had been friends for twenty years. Still, I guess it showed the evening was going well.

Then I saw something I couldn't understand. Helena's hand, reaching out and taking a cigarette from the packet lying on the table. I frowned vaguely, knowing something wasn't
right, but she stuck the cigarette in her mouth and lit it with her lighter.

Then I remembered that she'd started a few months before, finally dragged into my habit. I felt guilty again, wishing I'd been able to stop before she started. Too late now, I suppose.

I reached for the bottle of beer I'd perched on the end of the table, and missed. Well, not quite missed: I made enough contact to knock it off the table. Janny rolled her eyes and started to lean down for it, but I beat her to it.

‘It's okay, I'm not that drunk,’ I said, slightly stiffly. This wasn't true, of course, because it took me rather longer than it should to find the bottle. In the end I had to completely lean over and look for where it had gone. This gave me a view of all the legs under the table, which was kind of neat, and I remained like that for a moment. Lots of shins, all standing together.

Some more together than others, I saw. Helena's foot was resting against Doug's.

I straightened up abruptly, cracking my head on the end of the table. Conversation around the table stopped, and I found myself with seven pairs of eyes looking at me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, and went back into the kitchen to get another beer.

A couple later, really pretty drunk by then. Didn't want to sit back down at the table, felt like walking around a bit. Besides, Janny and Becky were still in conference, Janny looking odd; Adam and Carol and Julia talking about something else. I didn't feel like butting in.

Headed off towards the tree, thinking I'd see what the kids were up to. Maybe they'd play with me for a while. Better make an effort to talk properly – didn't want Jack to see Daddy zonked. Usually it's okay, as my voice stays pretty straight unless I'm completely loaded, and as I couldn't score any coke that afternoon, that wasn't the case.

Coke? What the fuck was I talking about?

I ground to a halt then, suddenly confused. I didn't take coke,
never had. Well, once, a few years back: it had been fun, but not worth the money – and an obvious slippery slope. Too easy to take until it was all gone, and then just buy some more. Plus Helena would have gone ballistic – she didn't even like me
smoking
, for God's sake.

Then I remembered her taking a cigarette earlier, and felt cold. She hadn't started smoking. That was nonsense.

So why did I think she had?

I started moving again, not because I felt I'd solved anything, but because I heard a sound. It wasn't laughing. It was more like quiet tears.

At the far end of the yard I found Jack's camp, a little clearing huddled up against wisteria that clung to the fence. I pushed through the bushes, swearing quietly.

Jack was sitting in the middle, tears rolling down his moonlike face. His check shirt was covered in dirt, the leg of his pants torn. Adam's kids were standing around him, giggling and pointing. As I lumbered towards them the little girl hurled another clump of earth at Jack. It struck him in the face, just above the eye.

For a moment I was totally unable to move, and then I lunged forward and grabbed her arm.

‘Piss off, you little bastards,’ I hissed, yanking them away from my son. They stared up at me, faces full of some thought I couldn't read. Then the little boy pulled his arm free, and his sister did the same. They ran off laughing towards the house.

I turned again to Jack, who was staring at the fence.

‘Come on, big guy,’ I said, bending down to take him in my arms. ‘What was that all about?’

His face slowly turned to mine, and my heart sank at what was always there to see. The slight glaze in the eyes, the slackness at one corner of his mouth.

‘Dada,’ he said. ‘They dirt me.’

I fell down onto my knees beside him, wrapping my arms around his thin shoulders. I held him tight, but as always sensed
his eyes looking over my shoulder, gazing off into the middle distance at something no one else could see.

Eventually I let go of him and rocked to my feet again, hand held down towards him. He took it and struggled to his feet. I led him out of the bushes and into the yard.

As we came close to the tree I saw Helena and Doug approaching out the darkness. I sensed some kind of rearrangement taking place as they saw us, but couldn't work out what it might have been.

‘Oh shit, what's happened now?’ Helena said, reading Jack's state instantly and stepping towards us. Doug hung back, in the deep shadows.

I couldn't answer her. Partly just because I was drunk; I'd obviously over-compensated for my dealer's coke famine by drinking way more than usual. But mainly because there was something wrong with her face. Not her face, which was as beautiful as ever. Her lipstick. It was smudged all over.

‘Christ, you're useless,’ she snapped, and grabbed Jack's hand. I didn't watch as she hauled him back towards the house. Instead I stared into the darkness under the tree, where a faint glow showed Doug was lighting a cigarette.

‘Having a good evening?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, laughing quietly. ‘You guys always throw such great parties.’

We walked back to the trestle table, neither of us saying anything.

I sat down next to the girls, glanced across at Becky. She looked a lot worse than the last time we'd seen her. The chemo obviously wasn't working.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

She looked up at me, smiled tightly. ‘Fine, just fine,’ she said. She didn't want my sympathy, and never had since the afternoon I'd called round at her place, looking for some company.

Behind me I heard Doug getting up and going through into the kitchen. I'd never liked Julia, nor she me, and so it would
be no comfort to look round and see her eyes following her husband into the house, where Helena would already have dispatched Jack up to bed with a slap on the behind, and would maybe be standing at the sink, washing something that didn't need washing.

Instead, I watched Adam and Carol talking together. They at least looked happy.

I stood at the front door as the last set of tail-lights turned into the road and faded away. Helena stood behind me. When I turned to take her hand she smiled meaninglessly, her face hard and distant, and walked away. I lumbered into my study to turn the computer off.

Instead I found myself waking it from sleep, and clicked into my mail program. I read the letter from my sister, who seemed to be doing fine. She was redecorating her new house with her new boyfriend. I nodded to myself; it was good that things were finally going her way.

I turned at a sound behind me to find Helena standing there. She plonked a cup of coffee down on the desk beside me.

‘There you go, Mister Man,’ she said, and I smiled up at her. I didn't need the coffee, because I hadn't drunk very much. Sitting close to Helena all evening was still all the intoxication I needed. But it would be nice anyway.

‘Good evening?’ she asked, running her fingers across the back of my neck.

‘Good evening,’ I said, looping my arm around her waist.

‘Well don't stay down here too long,’ she winked, ‘because we could make it even better.’

After she'd gone I applied myself to the screen, but before I could starting writing a reply to my little sis I heard Helena's voice again. This time it was hard, and came as usual from outside the study.

‘Put your fucking son to bed,’ she said. ‘I can't deal with him tonight.’

I turned, but she was already gone. I sat with my head in
my hands for a little while, then reached out for the coffee. It wasn't there.

Then something on the screen caught my eye. Something I'd dismissed earlier. ‘Read This!’ it said.

As much to avoid going upstairs as anything, I double-clicked on the mail icon. A long text message burped up onto the screen, and I frowned. My killfile tests usually only ran a couple of lines. Blinking against the drunkenness slopping through my head I tried to focus on the first sentence.

I managed to read it, in the end. And then the next, and as I read all the way through I felt as if my chair was sinking, dropping lower and lower into the ground.

The message was from me. It was about Same Again, and finally I remembered.

Before I'd come home that afternoon, I'd gone to their offices in the business district. It was the second time I'd been, the first when I signed up for the service and had a preliminary backup done a year before. When I'd got up that morning, woken by Jack's cheerful chatter and feeling the warmth of Helena's buttocks against mine under the sheets, I'd suddenly realized that if there were any day on which to make a backup of my life, today was surely that day.

I'd driven over to their offices, sat in the chair and they'd done their thing, archiving the current state of affairs into a data file. A file which, as their blurb promised, I could access at any time life had gone wrong and I needed to return to the saved version.

I heard a noise out in the hallway, the sound of a small person bumping into a piece of furniture. Jack. In a minute I should go out and help him, put him to bed. Maybe read to him a little, see if I could get a few more words into his head. If not, just hold him a while, as he slipped off into a sleep furnished with a vagueness I could never understand.

All it takes is one little sequence of DNA out of place, one infinitesimal chemical reaction going wrong. That's all the difference there is between the child he was, and could
have been. Becky would understand that. One of her cells had misbehaved too, like a 1 or 0 the wrong way round in some computer program.

Wet towels. Heavy rain. A leaking ceiling.

Suddenly I remembered going to a dark office on Montaigne in the wet small hours of some future morning. The strange way the man with the towel had reacted when I said I needed to do a restore from a backup they held there. And I knew what had happened. There'd been an accident.

The same rain which had totalled the car which for the moment still sat out in the drive, had corrupted the data I'd spent so much money to save.

At the bottom of the mail message was a number. I called it. Same Again's 24-hour switchboard was unobtainable. I listened to a recorded voice for a while, and then replaced the handset.

Maybe they'd gone out of business. Backing up was, after all, illegal. Too easy for criminals to leap backwards before their mistakes, for politicians to run experiments. Wide scale, it would have caused chaos. So long as not many people knew, you could get away with it. The disturbance was undetectable.

But now I knew, and this disturbance was far too great.

I could feel, like a heavy weight, the aura of the woman lying in the bed above my head. Could predict the firmness with which her back would be turned towards me, the way Doug and I would dance around each other at work the next day, and the endless drudgery of the phone calls required to score enough coke to make it all go away for a while.

‘Hi Dad – you still up?’

Jack stood in the doorway. He'd taken three apples from the kitchen, and was attempting to juggle them. He couldn't quite do it yet, but I thought it wouldn't be too long now. Perhaps I would learn then, and we could do that stuff where you swap balls with one another. That might be kind of cool.

‘Yep,’ I said, ‘but not for much longer. How about you go up, get your teeth brushed, and then I'll read you a story?’

But he'd corrupted again by then, and the apples fell one by one, to bruise on the hardwood floor. His eyes stared, slightly out of kilter, at my dusty bookcase, his fingers struggling at a button on his shirt. I reached forward and wiped away the thin dribble of saliva that ran from the bad corner of his mouth.

‘Come on, little guy,’ I said, and hoisted him up.

As I carried him upstairs into the darkness, his head lolling against my shoulder, I wondered how much had changed, whether in nine months the crash would still come as we drove back from a happy evening in Gainesville.

And I wondered, if it did, whether I would do anything to avoid it.

Or if I would steer the car harder this time.

‘That was
bollocks,’
said Nick amiably, leaning on his cue. ‘You've produced some terrible shots this evening, but that really has to take it. Go to the library, get out a book on basic physics. Start again from the ground up.’

I stepped back from the table and replied with a cheerful obscenity before taking a sip of my beer. I wasn't playing that badly on the whole, but the last couple of games had been very erratic. When I play a pool shot, it's either very good or abysmal. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground in my game, any ‘fairly good’ or ‘not bad’ shots. How I'm playing depends solely on the ratio of the sublime to the ridiculous.

‘If this comes off…’ Nick muttered, lining up an ambitious double cannon. ‘You'll have confirmed your standing as the luckiest player in the cosmos,’ I finished for him.

Not only did the shot not come off, it sent the cue ball clear off the table to bounce loudly on the wooden floor and rocket off towards the other side of the hall. Because I was nearest, I went after it. Players at the other tables watched impassively as I tried not to look as if I was scurrying.

The pool hall in the Archway Tavern is on the first floor, a large bare rectangular room with high ceilings that covers the area of the two bars on the floor below. There are two snooker tables and five for pool, an area of seats and tables around the nuclear-powered juke box, and a bar set into the wall near the door. Not an especially prepossessing room, in a fairly rough Irish pub (painted entirely green on the outside, just in case anyone should be in any doubt), but I'd been going there to play pool regularly for over a year, and there'd never been any trouble. While the locals are generally too taciturn to be called
friendly they always seem fairly affable, and with discs full of the Fureys and the Dubliners in the juke box the atmosphere on a good night is pretty good.

The cue ball made it all the way to the far corner of the room, banging to rest under the pool table there.

‘Sorry,’ I said, trying not to sound too English, and crouched down to retrieve it. The two youths at the table continued playing. Reaching under, I scrabbled with my fingertips and eventually dislodged the ball. I stood up rather quickly and felt my head dizzy for a moment as I turned to head back to the other side of the room.

Then suddenly the evening, which was already fine, took a turn for the better.

They had arrived.

I walked back to our table, trying to look nonchalant, willing myself not to look back at the bar.

‘Two shots,’ Nick conceded.

‘No, really? I had to catch a fucking bus.’

I took my time putting the cue ball in position, ostensibly lining up the next break, but in fact covertly glancing up the room. The only free table was the next but one to ours. If they were going to play pool rather than just hang around and chat with their mates near the juke box, then they would be less than five yards away.

I sent the cue ball rocketing towards a stray red near the end of the table, not really expecting it to go in. The hidden agenda of the shot was to get Nick back on the table so that I could carry on looking up the room. Unfortunately, I'd judged it too well and the ball smacked into the pocket. Nick tapped his cue sagely on the floor in approval. Choosing a shot which would allow me to glance up to the bar, I leaned over the table to see that, drinks in hand, they were indeed heading towards the free table, a gaggle of their mates in tow. I tightened up and missed an easy shot into the centre pocket.

Nick shook his head. ‘Sometimes I wonder if there are two
completely different people inside you,’ he said. ‘A twenty-six-year-old veteran and a five-year-old paraplegic, taking alternate shots. Oh.’ Noticing the new arrivals, he gave me a knowing smile. ‘I see. Distraction.’

I grinned sheepishly, feeling like a fourteen-year-old accused of fancying a girl in the sixth form. This time the relationship was completely the opposite, but it still evoked the same mixed feelings of pride and utter stupidity.

The source of these emotions was the girl at the next table but one. She and her virtually identical twin sister were regulars at the Tavern, sometimes playing pool, sometimes just hanging out with a group of other locals. The twins were both tall, extremely slim and unnecessarily pretty. The difference between them was that my one had slightly more prominent cheekbones, and her long wavy brown hair was cut slightly shorter than her sister's. Her skin was pale, and her lips were red. She and her sister were, I guessed, about seventeen.

‘Any day now. When you're ready.’ Nick sighed theatrically.

‘What?’

‘It's your shot.’

Down at the other table they were racking up the balls, the second twin talking to another of the regular girl players. My one was standing slightly apart, taking her jacket off, causing a simultaneous feeling of joy and despair in me. The loose jeans she was wearing I could cope with, but her top appeared to be the upper half of a grey leotard, and clung to her like a swimming costume. It wasn't worn smugly, which made it even worse. She was just wearing it because she could, and I knew that faced with that length of slim perfection I was going to find it impossible not to keep looking at her.

‘Jesus wept,’ I whispered to myself, and tried to concentrate on the shot. The centre pocket pot was easy, but I had to do some work to get position on the next shot. Aiming at the bottom of the cue ball I dug in hard for maximum backspin. The white leapt neatly over the red and left the table, nearly hitting Nick in the stomach.

‘Shame,’ he said, when his hysterics had subsided, ‘they were watching.’

I smiled at him, hoping he was joking. He didn't look as if he was, and my smile turned rather tight-lipped as I sat down to wait. Given two shots and the position of the yellows, he'd almost certainly finish up with this break. As he moved methodically round the table, potting away, I sipped my warm Budweiser and looked up the room.

Intent on her shot, she was bending over the table, her back to me. I let my eyes wander over the slim strength of her lovely long back, and felt a crushing weight of unhappiness settle into me. I felt like I was watching her through glass, staring in from the outside, as she chatted with a friend, waiting for her next shot while her sister made a creditable attempt at a long pot. Her voice, which I heard for the first time, was pure London, though the accent was pleasantly mild for the area. As she leant over to take her next shot, this time in profile, the misery I was feeling deepened. There are some things I find unbearably attractive in a woman: cheekbones, a definite nose, long and thick brown hair, slim upper arms and shoulders, a long back and willowy stomach, a small chest and graceful hands. She had every single one of these. And she was seventeen, and I was pathetic.

A resounding
thwak
signalled the end of the game as Nick drilled the black into one of the end pockets. He was having a very good evening.

‘Your set-up,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘You ready for another?’

As I was waiting for attention at the bar I wandered over to the juke box and put on my two favourite songs of the time, Heart's ‘Secret’ and Bruce Springsteen's ‘I'm on Fire’. I was obviously in a queue, however, because the next to come on was a delightful piece entitled ‘Yeah Baby, Do It Again’, by some American heavy metal band. Returning to the table I shook my head at Nick to signal that this wasn't my choice.

‘Thought not,’ he said, accepting his cider. ‘Can I guess what you've put on?’

‘Probably,’ I grunted, and broke the pack. Nick always gives me a hard time for the songs I select, claiming that they are without exception morbid and about failed relationships. Nick is in a position to laugh about things like that, because he's happily married. He has someone who cares about him, someone to love, and he's not so fucked up that he can get obsessed with slim girls he'll never speak to who are ten years younger than he is.

As the game wore on my play improved. Reds are usually a good colour for me. The girl sat out the next game as her sister played the blonde-haired regular. She sat staring into space, semi-expertly dragging on a cigarette. I wondered what she was thinking about. I forced myself to be more cheerful, not wanting to spoil Nick's evening.

Basically, in most areas, I'm fairly together. I have a reasonable job as editor of a video trade magazine, and pick up good money on the side as a freelance journalist. I don't have that many friends, but the ones I have are good, and I'm not lonely much more often than anyone else, I don't think. Emotionally, things aren't quite so good, but I don't really want to talk about that. I've been over my last relationship in my head so many times that it's boring even to me, and I've given up hope of ever making sense of it or exorcizing it from my mind. It's no big deal, just another relationship that started off well and then took a very long time going off the rails. I was hurt, and now it's over. So what.

Nick missed an easy black and set me up nicely to take the game.

‘Once more the god of pool craps on my head,’ he said mildly, reaching for the chalk.

I like playing Nick because he doesn't care who wins, and for a non-competitor like me, that's essential. As I bent to take the shot the song on the juke box finished, and after a pause I heard the piano introduction and then the crashing opening chords of ‘Secret’. Nick groaned from behind me.

‘Not
again.’

I smiled, feeling buoyed up by the music, and slotted the
penultimate red down. Songs about the trials of love and how much grief it is to be alive always cheer me up, and as I lined up the last red I felt my heart loosen. Mooning after a perfectly ordinary, if unusually beautiful, seventeen-year-old was beneath even my currently sterile life. I was just lonely, and being silly. Fuck it, I told myself, relax. Forget about it. As the song slammed into the first chorus I glanced up at the girl, a wry smile at myself unthinkingly on my lips.

She was looking at me.

For a long moment time stopped as our eyes met. The moment went well beyond a casual coincidence, and far into extra time. Around us the chorus raged, telling of a love that must remain a secret, ooh yeah, and still we looked down a long tunnel at each other, unblinkingly staring into each other's eyes. Her eyes were blue, and beautiful, and there were no scars round them.

‘You better come quickly, Doctor. The patient's blown a fuse again.’

When I looked back after registering Nick's crack, she had turned the other way, talking to the blonde-haired girl. For a moment I doubted that it had happened, but from the tightness in my chest and the perspiration on my forehead, I knew it had. I cracked the cue ball down the table and the red zipped into the pocket as if pulled on a piece of taut elastic. The white reversed with perfect backspin and edged the black off the cushion and over a pocket.

‘My friend's body has been taken over by an alien force,’ Nick said, tapping his cue on the floor again, ‘one that is considerably better at pool than he is.’ Grinning, I ignored the open pocket and doubled the black into the opposite one instead, to Nick's good-natured chagrin.

‘Flash bastard,’ he muttered, slotting in another fifty-pence piece.

My streak continued and I took the next two games easily. During the first I looked up to see the two sisters in a huddle by the side of their table, and got the very clear impression that it was me they were talking about. She could, of course, be saying
that the weird bloke down the end was staring at her, but ‘I'm on Fire’ was playing and I didn't believe she was. She had stared at me just as much as I had at her. Then, looking like someone in a video for the song, she raised her head slightly and our eyes met again. There was a faint smile curling on her lips. I was right. It was mutual.

Halfway through the second game they left the pool hall. Something immediately went out of the evening and my game lost a bit of its sparkle, but I was on enough of a roll to win. We were about to set up again when Nick noticed that it was nearly eleven and, doubtless keen to get back to Zoe, called it a night. I gave him a dose of my running joke about him having to get back before curfew, which he accepted with good grace while giving me one of his customarily alarming lifts home in his mad Mini.

While I waited for the water for a final cup of coffee to boil, I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. It's not especially good-looking, but it's all right, apparently. I genuinely can't tell. I have greeny-brown eyes and a high forehead, prominent cheekbones and dark brown hair that insists on a slavish adherence to the laws of gravity. My lips are full, my nose is definite and my skin is generally pale. I hate my face, and have done for as long as I can remember.

The kettle in the kitchen pinged electronically to signify that it had boiled, but I ignored it for a moment, just to piss it off.

Around my right eye there are a number of scars. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but by far the majority of people have a little scar somewhere near their eyes, the remnant of some childish fall. Most people can remember how they got them, and the ensuing frantic trip to the hospital, panicky parents and ice cream afterwards for being good. I can remember how I got mine too.

Sitting on the sofa with my coffee in the silent flat, I noticed that the answering machine was flashing. It was a message from Jo, my ex-flatmate, asking if I was doing anything tomorrow
night. I called her back, knowing that she went to bed late, and arranged to play pool with her in the Archway Tavern. The girl might be there again and now that contact, however nebulous, had been made, I didn't want to miss a chance of seeing her again.

I took the remainder of my coffee to bed with me, and drank it with a cigarette, staring across the bedroom. It's far too large, the bedroom, given that nothing interesting ever happens there any more. There's a huge walk-in wardrobe down the end, crammed with my junk from the last two years, and a large dresser up against one wall. Stuck in the mirror are two photographs, one of my parents and one of Siobhan.