by Luke Brown
‘It was a bollocks job! He was a fucking shelf-stacker.’
‘Assistant manager.’
‘Fucking arse manager.’ He took a sip of his pint and shook his head. ‘Paid a fucking pittance. I’d earn near what he earned a month in a week out on the rigs. I should have encouraged him more with the books. Like your dad did with you. I’ve been thinking about where he might have gone if I’d made more effort with him.’
‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’
He snorted. ‘Have I even spoken to you since your mum passed away?’
‘Maybe not. It’s OK.’
‘I was there, you know. In church. At the back. When you and your sister spoke about her. It’s not OK, is it? It was a nasty way to go.’
‘A horrible way to go.’
‘You’re angry too, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am. The fucking people round here.’
‘The fucking people?’
‘Not you. Whoever it was who complained about her at school.’
‘What did they complain about?’
‘That she wasn’t in control of the class. And that’s her fault, is it? Those fucking little shits she had to teach. Those fucking scumbags round here.’
Mike shook his head. ‘You are angry. You might be talking about my grandkids.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m not saying your grandkids are scumbags.’
‘They’re not scumbags,’ said Mike. ‘Not yet. Who knows what they’ll turn into? But, Paul. I know you didn’t know Carl as well as you used to, but what do you reckon? Do you think he could’ve done it? Killed himself on purpose?’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’
He shook his head again. ‘How do you do your workings out with that? I wish you were right.’
‘I’ve been gone a while, I know.’
‘You were never here like he was.’
‘I wasn’t anywhere else.’
‘Ah. Yeah. Maybe I’m talking crap.’
I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I’ll get you a Guinness,’ I said.
*
Carl used to lie all the time. His dad’s fingers had been bitten off by a shark when he went for his morning swim off the oil rig. Joanne O’Reilly had shown him her fanny and asked him to touch it. An Olympic trainer had offered him a running contract paying exactly four hundred pounds a week if he’d stop smoking and would travel to Manchester four times a week. It occurs to me now that this sum, more than we’d ever considered in our lives, wasn’t that outlandish, and Carl was the fastest 100-metre runner in the district. Still… He did not travel to Manchester or stop smoking. He lied to us when he failed his GCSEs and pretended he was doing A levels at the sixth-form college when he was actually doing resits. There was no pleasure in catching him out in a lie. We’d always regret it, listening to the long implausible counter-facts we had not considered before we nodded and agreed with him: yes, we hadn’t thought of that. He looked so anxious as he tried to convince us. The fact that we would lie to him to save his face might have been doubly humiliating. He dropped out of the resits too, and took a job working at the fish-processing factory, which had outlasted the fishing.
Joanne O’Reilly was the prettiest girl in our year, or I thought so; she seemed to like Carl more than me but neither of us stood a chance back then. We would watch her in Maths class as she wrote the names of older boys on her pencil cases, on the text books we had to cover with wallpaper, and it wouldn’t have been much more painful if she had scratched their names on our arms with a compass needle. The older boys would never understand our girls like we did, our comrades, solvers of maths problems, destroyers of iambic pentameter, recipients of the same cruel humiliations at the hands of vicious Madames and Fräuleins. We thought about our girls sexually all the time, but secretly, and imprecisely; we knew the older boys would not know the things that were so alluring about them apart from their looks; the tapes they listened to, the band names they also wrote on their text books; the older boys would not know the difference between them except in the most trivial way; they could not identify them blindfolded by the sound of their laughter and the smell of their shampoo and chewing gum.
The older boys who we hated and became.
I wandered over to say hello to Joanne.
*
Amy was still in bed when I got back to the house the next morning. Everything was just where Mum had left it. I took my shoes off before I walked on the white carpet in the living room, lifted the lid of the piano and played a few chords. The remote control for the TV in the corner rested on the arm of the sofa, as though Mum had just popped out to the shops.
In the kitchen I turned the kettle on, opened the cupboard where the cups were kept, took the cosy off the pot and opened the ceramic jar full of teabags that she must have filled up before the crash. When the tea had brewed I poured two cups and carried them upstairs.
‘Do you want a brew?’ I called through.
‘Yes, green, please,’ she called back.
‘I’ve made you a normal one.’
‘That’ll do. Do you want to come in?’
I pushed the door open slowly. She was sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes. ‘You’re still wearing your suit. Oh, God. You’ve just got in.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I was feeling quite impressed with you when I heard the door. I thought you’d gone to get the paper or out for some breakfast.’
‘Yes. Don’t be impressed.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Joanne’s?’
‘Right. I saw she had her hand on your back towards the end. Isn’t she married?’
‘We didn’t talk about that,’ I said.
‘Did she have a ring on?’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘My God, Paul.’
‘It’s… I know. What time did you get back?’
‘Eight o’clock. It wasn’t much fun sober. Not that funerals are supposed to be fun.’
‘I don’t know. They normally are. People are at their best.’
‘Their drunkest.’
‘Apart from you. What’s with that? Did you go on some super-bender in Thailand you’re compensating for now? Did your liver explode?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
‘Good.’
‘Except… Prepare for a surprise.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I did get pregnant.’
‘Ha!’
‘No, Paul. I got pregnant.’
‘Are you still pregnant?’
‘Yes, I’m still pregnant. Two months pregnant. That’s why I came home.’
‘Are you really pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re staying pregnant?’
‘Not forever. About seven months more.’
‘No, really? You’re pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘This is very dull.’
‘You are pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s the dad?’
‘I think a guy I met from Bristol.’
‘You think?’
‘I’m certain.’
‘Right. Who is he?’
‘He’s an acupuncturist.’
‘An acupuncturist. No way.’
‘Who promotes jungle nights too.’
‘Who promotes…?’
‘Stop smiling!’
‘Does he know?’
He did not know. Not yet.
‘And you’re sure you’re keeping it?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been going through it for weeks now. I thought I’d have an abortion. But I don’t want to. Not after Mum going. It just feels – it shouldn’t only be us two left. I have this awful feeling that somehow it might…’
‘What?’
‘It’s stupid. Like what if she was trying to come back and I prevented it.’
I looked away from her, at the little bookcase filled with children’s novels about ballerinas.
I left the room and came back with some tissues.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. Will you tell the dad?’
‘Do you think I should? Do you think he has a right to know?’
‘I don’t know. It depends. Is he a wanker?’
‘Why would I sleep with a wanker?’
‘For sex?’
‘You would sleep with a wanker for sex. He was nice. It just wasn’t the sort of relationship either of us were intending a lifelong connection to result from.’
‘And are you excited? About having a child?’
‘I’m terrified. It’s going to be hard. But yeah. I did want to have one at some point. In theory.’
‘Congratulations, then.’
‘It’s so sad too, without Mum. Who am I going to ring up when I don’t know what I’m doing? Who’s going to help me out?’
‘That’s what I was thinking. Your friends?’
‘I keep imagining what she’d have said when I told her. Our conversations. Remember her stories about how easy it is to give birth? About what a fuss modern mums make of it. She’d have driven me crazy with shit like that.’
‘She was only twenty-five, wasn’t she?’
‘With you.’
‘With me,’ I said.
‘Imagine.’
‘Weird to grow up so much earlier than our generation.’
‘No wonder she thought we were whingers.’
‘She hardly thought you were a whinger, Amy. She was in awe of you, how tough and effective you are.’
‘I feel very far from tough. I feel like I’ve been whacked with a hammer all over. God, it would have been so much easier with her here.’
She reached down to take a sip of her tea and put her other hand to her eyes.
‘But look,’ I said. ‘I’ll come to the hospital, for the scans, for the birth, for whatever. I’ll come and stay with you if you want. I’ll do everything I can, I’ll be there all the way…’
She turned away from me and put her head in the pillow, and I knew then what small consolation I could be, how my good intentions were only a little more use to her than indifference. I put my hand on her shoulder anyway, all I could do to let her know I was there with her.
Seven
The new White Jesus was back from the printers, and Jerry’s photos did not seem to document an atrocity. Emily had given in just a little. She wasn’t wearing antlers, or high-waisted PVC hot pants and bikini top, but she’d put a different dress on, and the photo they’d used had caught her turning round to hear something Jerry had said – something ambiguously offensive rather than outright – her facial expression incredulous but amused, at least in that split second, though she might have become angry in the next seconds. But this at least captured something of her brusque charisma.
I followed up the email Emily never replied to by sending her a copy of the magazine in the post with a note, saying I hoped she liked it.
And I asked again if she might like to meet me for a coffee one day, or a Coca-Cola. In the first week after I’d sent it I kept checking my emails, but when I didn’t hear back again I didn’t give much more thought to the matter. And that might have been that.
*
But towards the end of one shift in early spring, when I was digesting some particularly bitter news about my books page, Leo asked me if I wanted to go with him to a public debate about the dangers of Brexit.
‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Don’t we breathe in enough of that without having to seek it out?’
‘Your man Lancaster is speaking.’
‘He’s not my man.’
‘You’ve been reading his books.’
He gave me a look and I worried that he suspected me of stealing Lancaster’s short history of the Russian Revolution. ‘All right, I’ll come.’
It was round the corner in Senate House, a building of such imposing grandeur that Hitler was supposed to have earmarked it for his headquarters upon his successful invasion.
‘Yes, I know that,’ I said to Leo.
‘But did you know this?’ he said, and talked some more while I let my thoughts drift elsewhere. Something, something, terrible curators. Something, something, Georgian terraces. Something, something, knock it all down and start again, don’t you think?
‘How do you have so many opinions?’ I asked.
‘I think about things. Have you ever thought of doing the same?’
‘About which buildings to tear down?’
‘Yes.’
‘For aesthetic purposes?’
‘Yes!’
‘No.’
We entered the foyer and I read the poster advertising the event. What the history of British isolationism should teach us about the impact of leaving the EU. Andrew Lancaster was arguing the case for disaster against another historian who was in favour of us leaving. There were wine glasses on a long table but no wine in them yet. You had to do the time to earn the wine. We were five minutes late and a man on the door to the hall beckoned us over, just as a door opened at the other end of the foyer and three late-middle-aged men walked in, one of whom was Andrew Lancaster. I waved in his direction. He gave me a puzzled look and nodded; he hadn’t recognised me.
The seats were nearly all taken, so Leo and I had to sit separately. I squeezed past people’s knees to find an empty chair in the middle of an aisle, and as I did I looked up and caught sight of Emily a few rows behind me. She raised her hand and smiled at me, just as the man who had accompanied the speakers spoke into the microphone on the stage to start proceedings.
*
Lancaster was as impressive as you may have seen from the YouTube clips people post on Facebook. He took ten minutes to neatly sum up his position. British isolationism has always been associated with Continental disintegration. Not to mention the harm we would do to ourselves in terms of trade. Furthermore, its focus on stopping immigrants from the EU will do little to slow the changes to our society that the anti-immigration voters are justified in wanting to be acknowledged, even if they’re wrong about what to do about it, easily manipulated by nostalgic rhetoric. Looking up at him from the front row was the student I suspected he was sleeping with, the one who looked a bit like Emily, the one I had assumed was his daughter. She wrote something every so often in a little notebook, and I kept myself interested by imagining this was a list of all the delicious transgressive fantasies that had occurred to her while watching his commanding performance, which she would later push under his office door along with instructions to come round to her flat in Kentish Town as soon as he was able, so she could submit to the force of his powerful arguments. I was too distracted by thinking about what I was going to say to Emily to fully follow the man arguing against Lancaster, though when I remembered to listen to him I found that what he was saying about the interests of those on low incomes, people who might claim reasonably that the worst thing that could happen to them would be that things stayed the same – all of this sounded plausible enough to be worth further thought, even though Leo, a little to the front and right of me, was screwing his face up while listening to him.
Lancaster set about explaining why what had sounded plausible was not plausible, and I resisted the urge to turn around again to look at Emily, resisted it again, and again, and wondered if she was looking at me, at the back of my head, and then the audience was applauding and I did look round, curious to observe Emily’s style of clapping, which from where I was sitting seemed only to be delicate and dutiful and not rapturous, unlike the student in the front row, one of a number of people there who had let out a mini-whoop, who was still bashing her hands together and flapping her elbows as if she were trying to take off.
When we had finished applauding we were invited to have a glass of wine and have books signed by the historians. I would have waited in my seat but the man next to me had stood up and was looming, so I stood up and loomed over the woman to my left, who did the same,
and we all queued on our feet to be among the first out, as though we were very keen to escape or be first to meet the historians. I turned to Emily again. She was looking past me, to the front of the room, where I turned to see that Andrew’s mistress had approached him and put her hand on his arm. She was speaking quickly and touching her hair with one hand, and he nodded then looked up to the back of the room to see Emily looking back at him. He smiled. I turned back to look at Emily. She was looking at me now. I put an imaginary glass to my lips. She nodded and got up, and we met in the aisle, awkwardly, not knowing if we should shake hands or kiss, doing neither.
‘What did you think?’ she said. ‘That’s, er, Andrew, did you know he was my…?’
‘Uncle. Yes.’
‘Boyfriend.’
‘Yes, I knew.’
‘“Boyfriend” is too childish a word, isn’t it? “Partner” is such a legalistic word. We need something in the middle.’
‘Fucktoy.’
‘That’s not it. Anyway, that was my man on stage, holding forth.’
‘You sound like Tammy Wynette now.’
‘I give up. That was my Andrew.’
‘Holding back the tide of nationalism.’
‘Doing his best. I didn’t have this down as your scene.’
‘I was dragged along by a colleague.’
‘It’s not really my vibe either. Perfectly engaging though, I thought.’
‘Perfectly. Very educational. Like live Radio 4. Here, what colour do you want?’
‘Red.’
I passed her a glass and looked down at the floor. I had never seen her in shoes before, and so I was momentarily fascinated by those she chose to wear, the black patent-leather heels with a delicate strap to fasten across the light-brown nylon that covered her feet.
‘Thanks for sending the magazine, by the way,’ she said. ‘Sorry I didn’t get back. Andrew tells me the interview was good, so thanks for that.’
‘It’s a pleasure.’
‘I didn’t read it myself, I’m sorry to say.’
‘No?’
‘Too embarrassed to. I can’t imagine what stupid things I said.’
‘You weren’t stupid.’
‘Our opinions might differ about that.’
