Acid Song

by Bernard Beckett

  She wasn’t, Sophie realised, being offered a choice.

  ‘What time is it?’ she shouted from beneath the covers. Outside the rain was battering her window. An excellent reason to stay in bed. Saturday. Another excellent reason.

  ‘Time to be getting up.’

  And that was a crap reason. But reasoning, Sophie knew, didn’t come into it. Karen, her mother (she’d insisted upon Karen, ever since Mark, who still insisted upon Dad, left) had a way of … insisting. A taste for battle. She would fight harder and longer, until the only choices left were to obey or leave.

  For a while after Dad left – six months by Sophie’s count – Karen gave up on fighting and drank instead. Those Saturday mornings had been for sleeping. It ended when Sophie was stood down for three days at school (a friend who needed protecting and a tired teacher spoiling for a scrap) and Karen began to worry she was rearing a delinquent daughter. Karen attended a course on single parenting – hoping to find there a single father who didn’t tell lies – but returning only with a determination to get fit, give up the drink, and put time aside for her daughter.

  The gym membership had since lapsed and the drinking had crept back in, but so far Sophie’s fading mother wasn’t showing any sign of letting the third resolution lapse. Friday nights were mother/daughter time; they rented DVDs, drank vodka and ate chocolate biscuits. Karen would ask Sophie questions about her life, which Sophie would deflect. Rather than let this evasion deter her, Karen would simply use it as an invitation to share her own worries and frustrations: the injustice of the job she hated; the deficiencies of the man she had married, and the cruel indifference of a world that had no place for ageing women. Which of them was to be mined depended on many things: the movie they had rented; the time that had elapsed since her last attempt at marital reconciliation; where she found herself in the monthly Visa cycle – but every time the teary conclusion was the same.

  ‘I just don’t want you to make my mistakes. That’s all girl, do you hear me? Just tell me you won’t, and this won’t all be wasted.’

  It was an easy reassurance to give. Sophie would make many mistakes, she was sure, but they would be her own. Mr Krane could say what he liked, but biology couldn’t explain everything. Karen had stayed at school only until the end of the fifth form, and with typing and shorthand under her belt, had gone off to keep books for a haulage firm. Sophie’s dad was a diesel mechanic. Sophie was conceived in the back of a sheep trailer, during a Christmas party, a detail which Sophie was sure she would never share with her offspring. Sophie by contrast was bound for university. She didn’t know what she would study yet … something with late starts.

  ‘Do I have to come and drag you out?’

  ‘Okay, I’m fucking coming.’

  ‘Watch your language.’

  That was a laugh.

  Sophie turned the shower up to scalding and felt the warmth seep into her bones. He had texted her last night, a simple SRRY. Would an extra letter really have been that much trouble? Sophie had ignored him. He would have been drunk by then anyway, and this morning wouldn’t even remember sending it. In the mirror Sophie’s body took on its usual disappointing form. She wasn’t fat, or thin, or short, or tall, or muscular, or anything. That was the problem, or as near to the problem as she could come. It was her body’s sheer ordinariness which crushed her, a collection of uninspiring parts which collectively added to something less. As if she was growing old already, without ever having been young. Her skin didn’t have the smooth glow of her friends’, but instead was dry and prone to irritation. Her breasts hung too low, and her hips flared comically wide above her narrow legs. In health classes they told them to learn to love their bodies, that it was the most magnificent thing they would ever own. Which was fucking ridiculous. Health classes were fucking ridiculous. She was glad she had outgrown them.

  Breakfast was coffee, thick and black.

  ‘You have to eat something,’ her mother told her.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Sophie replied.

  ‘I’m not feeling too flash this morning.’

  ‘Wonder why?’

  ‘If you don’t eat breakfast, it affects your metabolism for the rest of the day. Not eating breakfast makes you fat.’

  ‘You calling me fat now?’

  ‘I’m saying I don’t want you to get fat.’

  ‘What’s it to you how I look?’

  ‘You’ll hate yourself if you let yourself get fat.’

  ‘You’re not fat.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I mean it doesn’t seem to have helped so much.’

  ‘Cheeky bitch. Here, pour me another one will you?’

  Karen was still in her dressing gown. Lurid pink, it made her look like a hooker. She wasn’t fat, it was true. She was taller than Sophie, and her features were sharper, more severe. When she looked at you her eyes wavered, like she was expecting to be hit. He never did though. Karen would have said. Dad never hit her.

  ‘So, we still going biking?’ Sophie asked. They had reached this agreement just after midnight.

  ‘Bit cold.’

  ‘You said I wasn’t allowed to let you make any excuses.’

  ‘I talk shit when I’ve been drinking.’

  ‘You said the drink wasn’t an excuse either.’

  ‘You want to go cycling in this?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘When are you voting?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The election. It’s today.’

  ‘I know,’ Karen replied, but Sophie wasn’t convinced. Since Mark had left there’d been no newspapers in the house.

  ‘So who are you voting for?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘What do you mean you’re not?’

  ‘I’m not the voting sort,’ Karen shrugged.

  ‘Don’t light that inside.’

  ‘I’m just rolling it.’

  ‘You have to vote,’ Sophie told her.

  ‘Actually smart arse, you don’t. You just have to be enrolled to vote. That’s the law.’

  ‘I mean not voting’s gay.’

  ‘My one vote’s not going to make any difference.’

  ‘It’s not just about you.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So what if everybody thought like you do?’

  ‘But they don’t, so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Okay, so let me use it,’ Sophie said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you’re not going to vote, let me go down and use your vote. Go on. I’m almost seventeen. If it was held a year later I’d be able to.’

  ‘You’re not using my vote.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s against the law.’

  ‘Since when have you ever cared about the law?’

  ‘You wouldn’t even know who to vote for.’

  ‘Yes I would.’

  ‘How?’ Karen challenged.

  ‘I’ve been following it haven’t I? We talked about it at school, in biology.’

  ‘What’s biology got to do with voting?’

  ‘He gets side-tracked.’

  ‘So you’re going to vote the way some teacher tells you?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it for myself.’

  ‘So, who?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you.’

  ‘There’s no point voting. They’re all arseholes.’ Karen stood and pattered her way to the sliding door. She pulled it open and lit her cigarette.

  ‘Right outside,’ Sophie told her.

  ‘Fuck off, it’s raining.’

  ‘I didn’t make the rules. Here, give us a drag.’

  ‘You told me you’d given up.’

  ‘It’s pretty hard with you around isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right, blame your mother for everything.’

  Sophie took a long dry drag. There was the first beautiful moment of holding in: the dry tickling of the lungs, the nourished blood rushing t
hrough her veins, the half-second of anticipation before it hit the brain. At first she started because it made her look hard, but now she was a smoker for smoking’s sake. And for the way people looked at you. The disapproval. That too was addictive.

  ‘Don’t you want to keep Peter Wilson out of government?’

  ‘Peter Wilson isn’t going to be the government,’ Karen told her. ‘He’s what they call a minority party. See, that’s why you can’t vote. You don’t know enough.’

  ‘He might make a coalition,’ Sophie countered.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So doesn’t that worry you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘He’s a racist.’

  Karen could have been a teacher, she had the look exactly. The condescending half sigh before launching into the sentence she knew in advance the young could not properly appreciate. And the hint of the missionary, prepared to do her duty regardless.

  ‘Some of them hate you because you’re black, some of them because you’re a woman, some of them because of the clothes you wear, some of them because you haven’t read any of the books they think are important. I get up in the morning and I go to work, and I get screwed by my boss, I get screwed by the people who own the car park, and when my car breaks down, I get screwed by my mechanic. I get screwed by the narg on the corner when I buy my groceries, and I get screwed by your fucking school on a regular basis. The only people not screwing me these days are the men who used to screw me without thinking about it. So who cares if some politician wants to screw me too? They’re going to have to wait in fucking line.’

  ‘Been practising that speech have you?’ Sophie asked, too used to her mother’s self-pity to be impressed.

  ‘You know what makes me sadder than anything in the world?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Thinking I’m going to make the same mistakes you did?’ Sophie said.

  ‘Knowing you don’t know all the things I know, and knowing how much it’s going to hurt you finding them out. Come here, give us a hug.’

  Karen was a terrifying hugger. Her fingers were like talons, and she held on too long and too tightly.

  ‘Jesus, Mum!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your fucking cigarette. It’s burning me, you bitch.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  THE FUTURE WAS about to split in two. Either Robyn’s father would bring up politics, or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t then neither would they and the lunch would be bearable. Long and unpleasant, in the way that eating Robyn’s muesli each morning was long and unpleasant – but bearable. But if politics was mentioned there was the chance of somebody saying something honest, something they would regret. Visiting on election day was a mistake. They should have thought of an excuse. Luke eased his car into the driveway taking great care to slow, lest he disturb the gravel. Something to do with the mower, the foolish red ride-on his mother-in-law used to make stripes of the grass.

  ‘Darling!” Ruth stopped at the border of the lawn and knelt so that Alicia could run to her outstretched arms.

  ‘Hi Mum.’ Robyn smiled. She relaxed around her parents, just as surely as Luke tensed. He knew they considered him the uptight one.

  ‘Garden’s looking nice,’ Luke offered. Ruth, entranced by Alicia counting on her stubby fingers, did not hear him.

  The clouds opened, hurrying them into the house. Nigel waited at the drinks’ cabinet.

  ‘Robyn, Luke, lovely. Have a drink.’

  Nigel was a tall man, generous in his formality. Charming and entertaining to friends, dismissive of humanity’s remainder. Luke orbited on the boundary, held in place by the fierce gravity of family. Nigel cast his eyes around in search of his first and forever favourite granddaughter, but the little traitor had scurried through into the next room in pursuit of Lindt, the huge chocolate ball of feline fluff for whom she would surely give her life.

  Nigel dressed for Saturday dinners with a country club formality: a navy blazer over a carefully pressed shirt chosen by Ruth, who had an eye for these things. His shoes were freshly polished, a quiet reprimand to the slovenly. The smugness of a heat pump made it too warm for Luke’s sweatshirt but he did not trust the T-shirt beneath. How disappointed they must have been, when Robyn first brought him home.

  ‘So, have you voted yet?’

  ‘I can only speak for myself,’ Luke replied, trying, as he always did with Nigel, to ingratiate himself by making light of things. And failing, as always.

  Nigel leaned in and down, confused.

  ‘He’s joking,’ Robyn explained.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I just meant, we both voted, but not together,’ Luke added, more afraid of the silence than his further butchering of the conversation.

  ‘You went to different polling booths?’

  ‘No, I just meant …’ Nothing. He meant nothing. The sort of nothing other people let pass with a smile. ‘That we didn’t vote together. We didn’t cast the same votes.’

  ‘You voted for different parties?’

  From the kitchen ancient smells of slaughter wafted through the house.

  ‘No. I don’t know. Maybe. We don’t know. We don’t discuss it. We vote individually you see. That’s what I meant.’

  Robyn was embarrassed for him, Luke saw it in the way she looked to the painting behind her father’s head. If Robyn followed her mother into the kitchen, Luke decided, he would divorce her.

  Nigel had a long obtrusive nose which dominated his every expression. He looked down it now, a marksman sighting along his barrel.

  ‘So you both vote for different parties?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Luke said.

  ‘Well it’s not hard to find out,’ Nigel told them. ‘Who did you vote for?’

  ‘I thought that was meant to be private,’ Luke tried.

  ‘We’re family.’ This was Nigel’s favourite, and possibly only, debating technique. Single statements, often factual, mostly irrefutable and rarely linked to the topic at hand, forced upon the world like a cork upon a bottle: the final word.

  Silence followed. Luke received a Scotch, which he detested, and Robyn a lemonade, because of the baby. They knew of course. Had done for over a fortnight. Nigel waited for the answer. Ruth emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron.

  ‘Almost there, just finishing off the gravy.’ She smiled at them and made for the drinks’ cabinet.

  ‘I thought you had one,’ Nigel reprimanded.

  ‘Put my glass down somewhere,’ she told him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the dishwasher. Now pour me another or move.’ She swatted Nigel aside. Luke could like Ruth. She was the only person in the room who he was sure didn’t consider him a failure.

  ‘We’ve voted the same way every election since we married haven’t we dear?’ Nigel announced as he monitored the level of his wife’s glass.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ruth agreed. ‘Always have.’

  ‘That’s what she tells you anyway,’ Luke tried. Nigel ignored him.

  ‘National. Both of us. Eleven elections in a row now.’

  ‘That’s remarkable,’ Luke said. Later he would blame the drink, but he could have floated to this point on water alone.

  ‘It is,’ Nigel agreed.

  ‘Thirty-three years, and every time the same party puts up the best candidates and the best policy options. What are the odds of that happening, just by chance, would you say?’

  Nigel sensed he was being criticised, but that was secondary. They were talking politics, as he had no doubt been looking forward to all morning. It enlivened him, just as later it would make him angry. Politics in the end was the art of the inevitable.

  ‘The fashion for policy analysis is a thoroughly modern, and I would have to say, misguided one.’ Nigel took a sip, maintaining eye contact, lest Luke assume he had finished.

  ‘Take for example, choosing a babysitter for young Alicia. What’s more important to you? Her philosophy on child-rearing, or her character? Any f
ool can learn the right answers Luke, any fool can turn up on your doorstep with a diploma in child care from some bogus polytechnic, but that’s not going to hold sway with you, is it now?’

  He paused to give Luke a chance to nod his affirmation.

  ‘Exactly so. A school teacher should understand that better than anyone.’

  Nigel had a way of making ‘schoolteacher’ sound like a disease, an affliction one might be expected to live with, but not recover from.

  ‘What counts is character. How will they act, when push comes to shove? Can you trust them? That’s the question you ask yourself.’

  Nigel spoke slowly when he lectured, convinced the world struggled to keep up.

  ‘And National party candidates are of superior character are they?’ Luke asked. Robyn nudged him with her elbow. He caught in her eyes a look bordering upon panic. Luke emptied his glass.

  ‘That would be my opinion, and the opinion of Robyn’s mother. And, I would be willing to wager, the opinion of your wife.’

  ‘Nigel, it’s none of your business how they voted,’ Ruth said.

  ‘I smell something burning,’ Nigel replied. Ruth sniffed the air. Robyn blushed. Alicia did not appear.

  ‘Well,’ Nigel prodded, ‘am I right?’

  Robyn’s blush grew deeper and she looked from the painting to her feet and back again. Luke suspected as much, and most days it didn’t bother him. Today though there was a slot in his irritation, waiting for exactly this detail to fill it. ‘Party vote. Not the list vote. I didn’t like the local candidate.’

  ‘The local candidate’s wife doesn’t like the local candidate,’ Luke snapped. ‘The party vote’s the one that matters.’

  ‘I know that,’ Robyn told him.

  ‘So what were you thinking?’

  ‘She was thinking,’ her father intoned, ‘about her children.’

  ‘Dinner’s almost ready,’ Ruth interrupted. ‘And please, no politics at the table. I’ve spent a lot of effort on the food.’

  They walked through in silence. Nigel poured the wine, and grape juice for the pregnant mother. Ruth lifted her fork to her mouth, so permitting the rest of the table to turn their focus to the food.

  ‘Delicious,’ Luke declared, having extracted every last chew from the mouthful. There was a way through this. Slow, purposeful eating and an excuse for early departure, which would come to him before dessert. Hope floated slowly to the surface.