Your Father Sends His Love

by Stuart Evers

  I looked down. I was sending a text message or email, not waiting. Not ever. Not waiting at all. I smiled. He sat down. He took a sip of his drink and he had water blooms on the cuff of his jacket.

  ‘Before,’ I said. ‘There was a man sitting over the other side of the bar. He was wearing full battle fatigues. Desert warfare – sand coloured and all that. But he looked too old to be army. How old can you be as a soldier?’

  He shrugged and looked out of the window.

  ‘I read somewhere once that most soldiers don’t ever kill anyone,’ he said. ‘That when confronted with the idea of killing another human being they simply can’t do it. There’s a sort of switch that just stops them from functioning. From finishing the job. It’s like there’s a basic humanity, a kind of hard-wired notion of preserving the species.’

  The question hung, but neither of us asked it. There was a conversation there. Something to say. A long, involved conversation. One that mattered. One of us just needed to ask: do you think you could? Do you think you could kill someone? Who would you kill? We didn’t ask. Neither of us. Another time, this would have been the whole afternoon.

  Rish is my oldest, closest friend. The Tap has twenty-seven beers on draught and only one toilet. Rish is the only man I trust with my life. The toilet is upstairs, too; at the top of a spiral staircase, steep and narrow. Rish is the person I love most in the world. You wouldn’t have thought it would be allowed, what with Health & Safety. Rish understands me better than I understand myself. The bingo call Kelly’s Eye references the famous fugitive Ned Kelly. Rish called me first when it happened. There was a man in here in battle fatigues. Rish had a child he named after me. James Mason was born in Huddersfield. Rish has seen things that I will never see, and has felt things that I can never share.

  Outside a delivery from the Camden Hells brewery was in progress. Rish watched it. I watched it too.

  ‘This place has twenty-seven beers on draught,’ Rish said, his eyes on the kegs and casks rolling down into the cellar. ‘But only one toilet.’

  ‘The toilet’s upstairs too,’ I said. ‘Up those narrow stairs.’

  ‘I’m amazed it’s allowed,’ Rish said. ‘What with Health & Safety and all.’

  ‘How was your flight?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t fly American,’ he said. ‘Never fly American. Seriously. The stewards are the most miserable bastards. And the movies are shit. Never again.’

  The Tap has twenty-seven beers on draught. Twenty-seven beers on draught and only one toilet. This is something to say.

  Yes.

  SUNDOWNERS

  He is still talking. She sits, wrapped in a green towel, underwear in her right hand. She catches part of a sentence – ‘And this is what people don’t understand; you’re right, Evelyn, it’s exactly as you said . . .’ – but Ross does not explain what Evie has said, or he has already explained it and she has not heard, and she smiles though he is not exactly looking at her. On the dressing table is her hairbrush, wooden-handled, a present from her husband.

  Evie brushes out her hair, caramelized at the root, pale ale at the tip. She brushes out her hair and wrinkles her feet. The carpeting is thin and she can feel the boards beneath. There is dust on the mirror, a fine sheen, not quite enough to sign her name.

  He doesn’t wash the towels. He has never washed the towels, this she has recently realized.

  ‘. . . bastards just don’t get it—’

  ‘Ross?’ she says.

  ‘. . . it’s all coming down and they’re all just—’

  ‘Ross?’ she says. ‘Please can you please just stop?’

  He looks away from whatever imagined audience he’s been addressing and turns to her; he pushes his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, a tic to pause time.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asks.

  He wears his struck-dumb face, his how-have-I-offended-you? face, his this-is-the-face-of-a-penitent face. Such a sensitive flower. Such a stupid, clever boy. Once, early on, she told him she could listen to him talk all day and all night. That he had liked.

  ‘You really need to clean this place,’ she says. ‘Wash your towels. And your sheets. Everything really.’

  ‘What?’ he says. The springs of the long-rented bed twang as he stands. He looks around. The open wardrobe, the broken lamp on the bedside table: the view as imagined by an impartial observer.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ he says, his hand leaning against the window sill. ‘It’s just cosmetic is all.’

  ‘I’m not arguing with you,’ she says. ‘Clean this place up or I’m not coming back.’

  She gives her hair one last violent brush and Ross nervously laughs. His curls bounce; his white teeth visible, framed by a scrub of beard.

  ‘I mean it.’ When she says this, she hears her mother-voice.

  ‘It’s never bothered you before,’ he says. The spread of dark hair across his chest converges in a line down to his penis. His nipples are tiny, like a boy’s.

  He walks over to her and puts his hands on her shoulders, rubs up and down her arms, crouches to meet her eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll clean up.’

  She knows he will lean his forehead against hers. This is when he asks her, always now.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know. I’ll call you when I can.’

  ‘Will I need to provide evidence that I’ve cleaned?’ His smile is tentative and is left unmet.

  ‘I’ll just walk straight out again if it’s like this,’ she says.

  He moves his hands up from her hips, attempts to unfurl the knot of her towel.

  ‘And don’t start that now,’ she says. ‘I need to get to the shops before they close.’ The mother-voice again.

  Evie’s kiss is swiftly finished and kills any hope Ross might have that she’ll throw the towel to the floor. He watches her walk across the landing to the bathroom and as she feels him watching, her gait slows. She looks back over her shoulder, flashes a pin-up girl smile and closes the door.

  In the small bathroom two condoms are draped over the lip of the wash-hand basin. She throws them into the small bin and washes herself. The room smells of urine deep in the carpet pile, toothpaste, lemon zest from the soap. Her jeans and blouse are folded on the toilet seat. She pulls them on quickly. Ross walks past the bathroom door; she can hear the hem of his jeans scuffing the cheap carpet. She waits and hears the soft thump of music in the next room. She ties back her hair, picks up her small bottle of perfume and unlocks the door.

  Ross is sitting on the corduroy sofa, drinking the wine she spurned on arrival, his jeans low on his hips. Woodchip walls, books on brick-and-plank shelves, papers spread across a glass coffee table, a portable television, a record player.

  ‘I hate you leaving,’ he says as she applies perfume. ‘I wish you could stay for ever.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ she says. ‘You’d like to think that, but you don’t.’

  He stands. He is not as tall as her husband, but fills space more effectively. Even in an empty room he could never be coy.

  ‘Sometimes you scare me, Evelyn,’ he says. ‘You know that?’

  But she just smiles – you cheeky boy – as she picks up her handbag from the armchair and checks for her purse and car keys. He drinks his wine. He is the only man she knows who drinks wine.

  She points at the glass. ‘You keep on like that and you’ll get flabby,’ she says. ‘The women won’t flock to you then. When you’re fat and flabby.’

  Know a lover’s weak spots better even than their erogenous zones – a tip from a magazine. As a child and youth, Ross had been an improbable kind of fat – like a body inflated with sausage meat: his own description. Everyone called him Chip Shop. Not everyone, he realized even as he told her this, but enough to make it feel so. They said he smelled of the deep-fat fryers his father owned and operated. They said he smelled of fish. It was, he told her, better than being called Yid.

  ‘I only drink when I’m with
you,’ he says. For a man proud of his acumen, he says things like this too often.

  ‘Well it’s best I leave now, then. Before you turn fat and unlovable.’

  He shakes his head and drains the glass.

  ‘Must you do this every time?’ he says.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You know . . . this,’ he says windmilling his arms, the tiny red heart in the wineglass jumping. ‘This . . . decompressing.’

  ‘What does that even mean?’ she says.

  ‘You know exactly what it means,’ he says. Evie moves towards him, leans in, kisses him, holds her right hand to his left cheek.

  ‘You credit me with far too much intent, Ross. It’s endearing.’

  He kisses her in a violent manner he is only now learning to enjoy.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she says. ‘I don’t know when. But I will.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be waiting?’ he says. ‘For more of the same?’

  ‘If you have the time, yes,’ she says.

  ‘Time’s running out, I keep telling you this,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ she says, walking to the door. ‘The bombs could drop at any time.’

  Evie closes Ross’s front door in soft afternoon light and follows the row of doors – all the same shade of blue, some with pot-plants outside, some with children’s bicycles tethered to nearby drainpipes – towards the stairwell. The road and cars below are sun-lit, but the walkway remains in shade. She holds her breath against the piss smell as she descends.

  On the street all is quiet. The newly built flats opposite are a grid of windows, six by six. In three across, two up, a woman stands, her body framed by purple curtains. Evie sees her most times she visits – how quaint to call it a visit! – and had once waved to her. The woman had not waved back, but disappeared quickly into darkness. She does the same now, sees Evie and, holding her cup of tea and saucer, darts back into the gloom. Evie can imagine the woman sitting on a plump-cushioned armchair, biscuits arranged on a plate, telling the policeman – so young, so short these days – that she’d seen the woman many times. Yes: many times. She looked the sort, you know.

  Evie’s car – rusting, a small red Ford with just enough room for the four of them – is parked next to a dirty-panelled white van. Kids have used their fingers to write obscenities on it, jokes on it, DS 4 RB on it. Phil and Chris will soon be old enough to do the same: leave a mark, show off to their friends, or a girl. Their fingers, their only current offence being to pick at their noses, might soon write fuck or cunt anywhere.

  Evie sits in the car with the key in the ignition. She doesn’t like to drive away immediately; she enjoys the airport feeling of concurrence: the wish to stay, the wish to return home. The car is hot and her thighs would stick to the leatherette seat if she was wearing a skirt. When Jim used to pick her up in his car, his borrowed car, her then-narrower thighs did that; made a sucking sound too when she got out of the passenger side. Somewhere in the loft those skirts are bundled and folded inside a packing case. She reminds herself to hunt them out, but her attention is diverted by something sticking out from under the passenger seat. She leans over and with her fingertips teases out some brightly coloured paper. When she straightens it, she’s holding the wrapper from a chocolate bar.

  Evie does not eat chocolate bars. She holds the wrapper, holds it like it could be infected, and wonders whether it could somehow incriminate her: whether it could have covert meaning to someone else.

  No, she could not have left it there. Nor Ross; he has never been inside her car. It is just a Mars Bar wrapper. Advertising and branding as distraction. Ever more sophisticated stratagems to ensure we are good consumers. Work, Rest and Pay. Talking, talking the way he does, impatient. She admires and is amused by his seriousness. Everything is important. The world is connected and running towards its end. Can you please just stop?

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘The kettle’s boiling.’

  She blows the wrapper from her palm and it floats down to the rubber mat on the passenger side.

  Waiting for the kettle to boil while the world burns crazy. Another Ross phrase. At functions, coffee mornings, schoolyard gates, she finds herself thinking the kettle’s boiling as she smiles and listens to people talking at her. Sometimes she says it out loud and people look at her blankly. She ducks her head then, pours more tea or buttons up her cardigan. No one has ever asked her what she means.

  ‘Come on,’ she says again. The key remains unturned in the ignition, the car still sticky hot. She looks at her watch but there’s plenty of time to pick up the boys. She turns the key and turns on the radio. But the radio is broken, it just plays static, and she tells herself to remind Jim to mend it. On the passenger side, on the rubber mat, the chocolate bar wrapper lies. She picks it up and stuffs it in her handbag. We are all detectives.

  She starts the car and pulls into the road. The car has had no other passengers, which means either the boys or Jim must have eaten it. The boys are not allowed sweets during the week, even during the school holidays. So it has to be Jim’s chocolate bar. She is uncomfortable with this deduction.

  In all the years she has known Jim, all the intimacies they have shared, she has never seen him eat a bar of chocolate. Does he even like chocolate? She brakes at a red light. Does he even eat chocolate cake?

  How can I not be sure of this? Stopped at a box junction, she tries to remember him eating cake, not as part of any ritual, no wedding or birthday cakes, but just cake: at people’s houses, at coffee mornings, at her mother’s home years ago. She cannot recall a single chocolate cake amongst them.

  Evie turns onto the A-road. To her right and left there are fields and hills and Friesian cows. She lists Jim’s favourite food: medium-rare steak and chips; liver, onions and bacon; roast lamb on a Sunday. Food that he chooses when there is a choice – birthdays, anniversaries. The dishes only he cooks: cawl, corned-beef hash, toad in the hole. Tonight is rabbit-food night, salad and the last of the beef, sliced thinly. There is beetroot? There is beetroot. Tomatoes looked a little tired this morning, but cut up chunky will be fine. A chocolate bar. Just one. It has to be him. Enough salad cream? There is for tonight.

  There are five separate almost-incidents on the way home but they amount to nothing: she misses other vehicles or they miss her. At the roundabout, a man sounds his horn as she undercuts him. She sees him dumbshowed behind the driver’s side window; an angry reddened face shouting. Evie keeps her eyes on the road, vigilant and chastened. Stupid girl. Her mother’s voice. She turns onto Buglawton Street and approaches St Mark’s Church.

  The other parents, mothers all, are already gathered at the churchyard railings. Evie pulls in by the corner shop and gets out of the car, throws the Mars Bar wrapper into a yellow litter bin bracketed to a streetlamp. Keep Britain Tidy. She spots Deborah to the right of a yew tree and waves. Evie can hear the kids singing in the church hall as she crosses the road, a chorus of plaintive voices over a pounding upright piano. It takes her a while to make out the tune, the Match of the Day song again. The lyrics I want to live my life with Jesus / and walk his narrow way fitting surprisingly well. The boys have been singing it at home, singing it as they kick a ball to each other, as they dribble past each other, singing it even as the game ends in the inevitable scrap and tangle.

  ‘My Stephen won’t stop singing that bloody song,’ Deborah says under the flopping brim of a sun hat.

  ‘My two are the same,’ Evie says. ‘They don’t know what it means though. Not a clue as far as I can tell.’

  ‘The vicar must despair.’

  Deborah is freckled and sun-blushed; fine auburn hair, thin body and perfect pregnant bump. The two could be sisters, though Evie has her Gallic nose. Deborah’s second child is asleep in a pushchair, the same model Jim gave away to a neighbour. No: not the same model, she sees looking at it again; older, actually, bigger wheels.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ Evie says. ‘Must be hard now it’s warm.’

  ‘
I get hot at night, but it’s not so bad. Better than the last one anyway. Alan bought me one of those electric fans and that’s lovely. Like being on holiday.’

  The kids reach the end of the song – they can’t call it a hymn, it’s too much fun – and the parents hear the young vicar ask for quiet and calm before prayers. All the kids know when to say Amen and all the words to the Lord’s Prayer, though Chris and Phil have been arguing over exactly what constitutes daily bread: does it include the crusty loaf Jim buys only on Saturdays?

  ‘How is Alan?’ Evie asks. Deborah’s husband Alan has a tool for every job and a ready smile: the brand of man her father admired, the brand of man Ross says will be swatted by technology. Computers will come and destroy these men, he has said, and we will not mourn them as we should. When it comes, they will inherit the earth. As Ross said this, she’d laughed.

  ‘What’s funny about that,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘That we’re quite useless. That books will count for nothing if there’s nothing to eat, no shelter, no power. That chopping wood is—’

  ‘You’re mocking me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Someone has to.’

  Evie looks down to the baby in the pushchair.

  ‘He’s fine. Jim?’ Deborah says.

  ‘Fine,’ Evie says and smiles at the little girl, Deidra. Huge eyes and eyelashes, thick fronds below auburn eyebrows. Crusted snot on the nose, odd numbered teeth: perfect. The cheek skin is cool, the hair thin and priceless. Evie momentarily remembers herself taking Ross’s circumcised penis in her mouth. His beard against her thighs. Sees him walk to the bathroom removing a condom. Evie is relieved to hear an emphatic Amen at the end of the Lord’s Prayer.

  The kids flood through the graveyard, behind them the young vicar and his volunteers. Some of them are holding drawings, oversized pieces of sugar paper. Evie scans the small crowd and can’t see Phil or Chris. They are not there. They have been taken. She darts her head left and right. The boys are not there. They are under the mud and turf of the moors. She’ll have to explain where she’s been. That earlier today she was fucking a man five years her junior in a rented flat a few miles over the county border. That she has done so almost every day of the summer holidays. Then Chris and Phil are there, kicking a tennis ball between them, Deborah’s Stephen bringing up the rear.