Steve has free access to the gym at Hemingway City Hall, which is part of the package for the local councillors and our Member of Parliament, Bart Garrett.
Bart is tipped to resign soon, because the newspapers have featured some fairly wild stories about his offspring drinking and partying in expensive private schools, which turned out to be true. Steve has been following his demise in the press with a watchful eye, which makes me think about our agreement to wait until Max was older before running for any form of government. Steve is a Chief Crown Prosecutor. It’s a worthwhile and interesting job, overseeing all the criminal prosecutions in our area, and I work just under him as a barrister. It’s enough for me while the children are young, and I like being in court, but I know Steve is hungry to be in politics. He always has been. And Max will be sixteen this year.
When I get back to the bedroom from the gym, there is a Steve-shaped emptiness in the bed. He’ll be downstairs, putting on espresso to brew. In a few minutes I’ll smell it, and be aroused enough to go down for a cup. Now though, I luxuriate in the shower for ten minutes, and then I discard the suit I set aside, and pick something else.
I choose the black skirt, high heels, sheer tights, and the pearl-grey blouse, adding a silver necklace, foundation, nude eyeshadow and a brief hint of mascara. My lips are plum. I check myself in the mirror. I look pretty good for forty-two.
I wake Daniel up, and he groans at me hatefully. ‘Mum! I can’t be bothered!’
I kiss his head and he wriggles out from under me, slides out of the bed and then pads down the stairs, sits at the table and stares at me with disdain as I pour milk onto his Shreddies. I smile beatifically back.
Daniel is not a morning person. We have all had to come to terms with this.
Steve is on the phone, a cup of black coffee in hand. We can hear him in the second reception room. I know, even without seeing, exactly what he is doing: gesturing, standing with his feet wide apart, one hand steadily weighing up an option to the side, before tossing it out, fist clenching, driving forward. He makes his point. He wins the point. Stephen Walker, everybody! Once second in his class at Oxford (I was first in mine), then barrister extraordinaire, now Chief Crown Prosecutor!
He comes in for a refill and we salute each other with our cups.
‘Into the fray,’ he says, nipping out to his car. ‘Love you.’
We work in the same building but we take separate cars. I leave about half an hour after him in the morning and take Daniel to school, and I come home about an hour before him at night to sort out dinner.
It’s seven-thirty. Max breezes into the kitchen in his uniform. He takes care of himself, always has. He whips past me, grabs a bagel from the cupboard and smears spread onto it, smiling briefly, slipping past me like a whisper, light on the feet.
‘Light of my life,’ I whisper, kissing Max’s hair. ‘Lights of my life,’ I add, chucking Daniel under the chin.
‘Your fingers smell of butter,’ Daniel informs me.
‘Thanks,’ I reply.
Max’s long fingers flip his tie end round and round and up through the loop efficiently. I lean across to fix his top collar button but he’s already doing it.
I pack my leather bag. I have another cup of coffee. I read my case notes. I yell for Daniel, who has disappeared upstairs again, to get in the car. He yells back something I pretend not to hear.
Sipping from my cup, and surveying the room, I notice a shopping bag Steve brought home last night sitting on the seat across from mine at the table. Emblazoned on it are the words ‘Mike’s Printing Supplies and Services’. I purse my lips, put my coffee down and slip out of my chair. Inside the bag is shining bright red card. I move the plastic down to reveal blue lettering on a white stripe across the centre of the card. I stare at it, trying to decide how to react. It’s a mock-up of a campaign placard, with the words: ‘Stephen Walker, MP for Oxford West, Hemingway & Abingdon’ emblazoned on it.
He’s thinking about it seriously.
He’s thinking about it seriously, I think again.
‘But we talked about it,’ I imagine myself saying.
‘I know,’ he will say. ‘I know.’
Steve always says he knows. He knows, and he thinks that makes it OK.
When we spoke about this the other week, I told him I didn’t feel that it’s the right time to run, not while Max is still in school, but I do understand why he wants to run now. Steve would be a wonderful MP, and now would be a strategic time to stand. It’s not a general election, so there will be fewer candidates, and Steve will get more financial support if less people are looking for backing from local businesses. We always discussed that it might happen someday. But we never really saw eye to eye on it actually happening.
How long does a card like this take to design and print? When did he arrange this?
The boys run past me, out the back door, and I pick up my bag and coat and follow them. There is no more time to think about the significance of the campaign card.
Before I go I leave a note for the cleaner to tidy away the piles of books and files from the front hallway. We don’t use the front door, and we should. It doesn’t look good to use the back door all the time. The detritus of our lives is here in the mud, the discarded footwear, the rucksacks. Plus we store all the wine at the back door. I don’t want people to think we’re heavy drinkers.
I slip my Bulgari coat about my shoulders. It’s the first time I’ve used it in six months, and it smells faintly of the closet, but the material is rich and thick, and September is cooling off, the brief heat replaced all too soon by a chilling breeze. Max is talking to Daniel by the car and I give him a kiss before he leaves for the bus. The stop is at the end of our street, the opposite direction to Daniel’s school.
‘Got everything you need?’
‘Yep.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yep.’
‘Are you OK?’ I touch Max’s cheek. ‘You’re a little red.’
‘No.’ He lifts his eyes and beams at me. ‘I’m great, thanks, Mum.’
‘Work hard, have a good day.’
‘I will.’
‘Be good!’ I call as he walks away.
I see him faintly roll his eyes at me, but he nods, good-natured, sunny, smiling, and slips out the gate at the end of the drive. And I remember the conversation with Steve a few months earlier.
‘We would need to get an automatic one,’ I told him.
‘Why would we need an automatic gate?’
‘Everybody has an automatic gate.’
‘Do they?’
‘Steve, you know what I’m saying makes sense. If you run for election, we’ll need to protect Max and Daniel.’
‘Protect them? From who? Kidnappers? The mafia? This is England. This is the countryside. This isn’t London.’
‘From prying eyes, Steve. We need to protect them from journalists and other people and—’
‘Prying eyes? That’s a rather antiquated expression.’
‘Look, I can’t stop you from running if that’s what you choose to do. But this is the reality. The only reason you can run is because Bart Garrett is about to resign after the papers plagued his family.’
‘Let them plague us. There’s nothing wrong with our kids. They’re not some ungrateful idiots at an overpriced school like Bart Garrett’s kids. They don’t go out and get drunk and smash up someone’s car. They’re smarter than that.’
‘People will want to know about him, Steve.’ I paused, sighed, and added quietly, ‘Can you imagine what would happen if it got out?’
Max
The seats in English class are this eggshell blue fabric-cum-plastic. My fingernails scratch lightly over it. My nails are neat. Everything about me is so neat. Everything I do, I do well. I can’t remember the last time I messed up. This is a big mess up. I feel like it’s my fault. I know it’s not, but that doesn’t stop me feeling like it is.
‘You got forty-six out of forty-seven on the first dr
aft!’
‘What?’
‘You got the same thing last time. Dick.’
I look down to my English essay, scrawled all over in red pen: ‘Excellent’, ‘eruditely, mellifluously communicated’, ‘fantastic’, all followed by exclamation points larger than the words.
‘Oh, no wait, you got forty-five last time.’
‘Did I?’
‘You’re still a dick.’
I can feel Carl grinning at my left ear, but I can’t turn to look at him. It’s almost ten-fifteen in the morning. Carl is spouting the usual rubbish we spout in class and we’re sitting at the back where we usually sit and we bought Coke cans and Maltesers on the way like we usually do, but today I’m not here. I’m thinking about STDs. I’m thinking about that splitting sound. I’m thinking about blood.
‘So what’s up?’
‘What?’
‘Are you pissed off at me?’
‘No.’
‘So, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’d normally be gloating by now.’ Carl nudges me. ‘What is it?’
‘Shut up. Nothing.’
I was thinking last night about how I live in the country just outside the town, but the town centre is ten minutes away by car. It’s about five miles and that’s where the doctor is, and they don’t even take patients without an appointment. Then I realised it was going to be Monday in a few hours, and I’d be going to school. I could take the bus in and then walk off the grounds.
I didn’t sleep after. How could you sleep? I lay in bed around 2 a.m., after I had dealt with it all as best as I could, washed myself off and changed the bedsheets, and I thought, So what now? Do I go to sleep? I turned over and started to wiggle my leg in my pyjamas in the way that you do when you’re not tired, but then I realised it was hurting to move. It was stinging. I got still, and stared at the wall. The wall is a light blue. My dad painted it himself just before Daniel was born, so I didn’t feel threatened. The new baby was getting a brand-new room. We had just moved from the centre of Hemingway to the suburbs, to this massive house on Oakland Drive. The house was big enough, but they built an extension over the garage to house the new baby, and Dad painted it yellow. I walked in the new room when it was done and felt really bummed, because they were getting a perfect new baby, after getting over the shock of me, their old, faulty one. I was worried they were going to forget about me.
Then Dad said, ‘So, what do you want your room to look like?’ and I grinned. Sometimes I’ve felt so close to my dad. Sometimes not so much.
I chose light blue and I got blinds, which at the time felt really grown up. I was five, almost six. Dad did the roller work, and then built me a cupboard for my games consoles, which back then just included the Sega and a PlayStation One. This was before he worked all the time. He just used to work normal hours then: nine to six like Mum does. I helped paint the delicate bits around the door and windows, joyously ripping the masking tape off afterwards to reveal perfect straight lines of paint. I can’t remember Mum being around much when we were decorating, but I remember her teaching me how to make the straight lines on the walls, how not to go over the edge. She was round with pregnancy, a huge bump that pushed against me when she stood behind me, holding my hand as we painted, then, her voice stern and strained as if her throat were constricted, telling me off when I went wrong.
Then Daniel was born. He is an awkward little guy, but I’m glad I’ve got a brother. I can’t remember life before him much now. That time seems so hushed and temporary and unstable, as if we weren’t yet living, as if we were waiting for Daniel to secure us in space, to make whole a family that wasn’t yet fully complete.
The wall is grey in the dark, the night that Hunter comes in, when I’m lying there afterwards, pressed against the wall, breathing in and out, trying not to think. The pain is heightened with nothing else there, no sound or colour. It hums and grows, gripping my back. I screw up my eyes and bury my face in the sheets. I sit up again and quietly open the drawer next to my bed. No pills. I take out a pair of socks and put them on. I pick up a jumper on the floor. It’s green and knitted and from Topman. I open the door to my room slowly, so it doesn’t creak, and I walk downstairs, the socks dampening the sound of my feet.
I go down to the large living room, where my parents entertain people. Mum used to smoke all the time, before we were born, but now she only does it socially. It stinks, and it makes all the cushions in the living room stink, so Daniel and I never hang out there after she has. I know she’s smoked that night, with all her friends over, because the smell is hanging in the air at the half-open door. The coffee table has wine glasses and bowls of nuts on it from their evening, but the room is quiet now, the lights off. The door to the living room is wood, with two panes of frosted glass in the top two-thirds of it. Next to it, towards the back of the house, is the small living room, which is cosier and has the TV in it. Opposite the little living room is the kitchen, with a full wood door. I walk beneath the stairs to the kitchen door, push it open, reach to the wall on my left and turn on the light.
My ghostly reflection appears in the window over the sink.
I walk towards the other me, pull out a drawer and get some Ibuprofen out of it. I pour a glass of water and down two pills. I think of chucking down a third then decide not to be stupid and dramatic.
The other me looks across the kitchen to the first me.
We have changed. We have split into two. The me surrounded by the window frame looks a little tired, but otherwise healthy and happy, confident, OK, normal. A fit, unremarkable, soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old boy, wearing a forest green jumper. My slim frame has been ameliorated by football and weights and a short course of hormones when I was thirteen. Testosterone and something else. I don’t know. Mum wrote everything down. My chest is a good size. Not large but not small. Well-developed compared to other boys in my year, which has a lot of skinny, scrawny and spotty guys who don’t play sports. I’m an OK height for my age, and I think I’m still growing. I’m five foot nine, nearly ten.
The round neck of the jumper is kind of eighties, because right now those kind of jumpers are all over the shops and I like them because they’re knitted and warm. It suits my neck, which is smooth and a light golden colour from spending hours outside in the summer playing footy on the school field and going to Spain before school started.
My face is soft-jawed for a boy, but not too much, not remarkably. Maybe I just notice it because that’s what the doctors told me the last time we saw them, that I am soft-jawed for a boy. There is no facial hair there, not even any sprouting. My nose is small to medium, my eyes are a light green-blue. I used to have a lot of freckles as a kid and now I have just a few, on the tops of my cheeks. My eyelashes are quite long, but there’s really no reason, right now, for anyone to suspect that I’m anything other than a teenage boy.
But wait until my facial hair doesn’t grow. Wait until I don’t look any manlier. Wait until all the other guys in my year become men, and I stay smooth-chinned, under-developed, androgynous. Wait a year.
I never think about these things, but now I am thinking about them, touching my chin, peering closely at the pores of the other me. My hair is blond, the yellow-blond colour of a newborn chick, and slightly fluffy. It hangs down from a very slight side-parting, not lank, but full and nicely. The hair at the back of my neck is cut closer.
I like how the other me looks. I mean, I know there’s a clock ticking. I don’t know what will happen after I reach eighteen, but we didn’t know what would happen after puberty, after thirteen, and we got through that. Mum and Dad have always been OK about it. We don’t talk about it much but I’ve never been made to feel that it was a huge deal. I mean, I know it is, I guess.
The other me touches the back of his hair, where lying on a pillow has fluffed it up and tangled it. The other me looks relaxed. The other me looks like he did yesterday.
But the first me, the flesh and blood me feels
. . . weird. I’m hollow. I’m blank. I’m going through the motions of walking and getting and swallowing and rinsing the glass and putting it on the sideboard but I am just. Not. Here. I can’t be, because any sane person would be freaking out, and I don’t feel much right now. I’ve gone into survival mode. I’m tired, and shaky, and I know if I’m not a blank, if I allow myself to feel, I’ll shake and shake and shake until my legs give way.
I think back to our Sex Ed classes. So far we’ve had:
1. How boys and girls work. Black and white line drawings on sheets of A4. I felt, understandably, left out. I wondered where I fitted in.
2. Checking for breast and testicular cancer. Foam models.
3. Where babies come from. Plastic models of different sized wombs, which we had to ‘fit’ to different sized babies. The clue: the bigger the womb, the larger the baby. We were twelve. I go to a grammar school. It wasn’t rough, let me put it like that.
4. Rolling a condom onto a carrot or banana. The teacher tried to buy all bananas but the market had run out. The carrots were not shaped like penises. I know. I piss at urinals; I also have one.
5. STDs. This was a slide show our form tutor had to show us. We had to guess what they were. He then looked at a sheet he had been given with the slides and told us we were wrong, then frowned in amazement, not knowing himself what the slides were. Halfway through he ran out the room and never came back.
So. I have to go to the doctor. I could take the school bus in then walk away from it, towards town, towards the doctor’s surgery. They can’t tell anyone; I saw it on the clinic wall when I went there with Carl for him to have an STD test. If you’re under sixteen it’s confidential. Still confidential, I mean. I don’t think if you’re nineteen they run and shout it to the masses in the waiting room or ring your parents or anything.
Golden Boy: A Novel Page 4
