The Rules of Play

by Jennie Walker

  ‘You have a key?’ I demand, or exclaim.

  There’s a noise from the living room, from the TV. A noise made by several thousand people. We go to look. Pietersen is out for a duck. We watch the replay: Anil Kumble bowling, and Pietersen takes a mighty swipe and the ball flies high, high in the air, up among the seagulls, and straight down into the hands of the fielder at deep square leg. The fielder is mobbed by his gleeful teammates.

  ‘Idiot!’ we say, every one of us, even though Selwyn has never expressed any interest in cricket at all since he was nine years old.

  THE SECOND INNINGS, this reincarnation business, is not straightforward. Firstly, you can’t wipe the slate clean: whatever mistakes you’ve made before still count and have to be made up for before you can really start again. Secondly, unless you have a good fitness coach the first innings has left you so exhausted you can hardly lift up the bat. And you become aware of how little time you have left, and the math gets more complicated.

  ‘DO YOU WANT anything to eat?’ I ask.

  The loss-adjuster has gone out, to leave us alone. As if he were an obstacle that we’d have had to talk around or through. I’ve often wondered what heads of state talk about when they meet in private session, without all their minions and minders: the new Johnny Depp film? The servant problem? If they could only discover some passionate interest or hobby in common—butterflies come to mind—they might save the world.

  Selwyn, rightly, ignores my question.

  ‘Why are you here, Selwyn?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Because this is the place where a man I love is. Lives.’ But I’m not looking at him when I say this, and when I do focus on what I seem to be looking at, it turns out to be a photograph on the wall of the loss-adjuster in some group of other people. Strangers, anniversaries. I chose this man, yes, but I didn’t choose to be here.

  ‘You mean someone you fuck?’

  The prudishness of the young: when Alan, coerced into this, and I took Selwyn to an exhibition at the Hayward showing how artists have portrayed bodies— anatomy, the nitty-gritty—he backed away, didn’t want to know. Or look at; or look at with Alan and me there with him.

  ‘It’s a part of life,’ I say weakly, and immediately I understand the loss-adjuster’s reluctance to explain things—it isn’t just laziness—and how explanations so often get in the way and yet also may be downright necessary: how else is anyone supposed to work out, or even take an interest in, with no help from outside except maybe a guidebook that’s written as if it’s been translated into Japanese and then back again, what’s going on in the middle of the green field, what the players are doing as they run or hit or throw or stand still or sit with their feet up in the pavilion reading the paper? And why.

  ‘It’s a part of my life. A good part. It’s what I want to do. I enjoy it.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘Your life. And the rest of us can piss off, so you can have fun.’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean . . . I mean, if I didn’t love him, this wouldn’t be happening. But it is happening, and it isn’t just about me, it’s all of us. And nothing, nothing in any of this means that I love you any less than I’ve always done.’

  ‘So what about Alan?’

  Not ‘Dad.’ We are equals, without being equal. Something has dissolved while I wasn’t looking. A family. We have nothing that links us except what we want to link us. I know that’s not true.

  ‘It’s not something that you seem to be getting much of at the moment,’ I say. ‘I see that.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Enjoyment. Fun. Love.’

  ‘How do you know? You don’t even know who my friends are, you always get their names wrong.’

  ‘Because I hardly see them for long enough to—’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’

  ‘Mine, probably.’

  Circles, round and round. I’m getting dizzy. He’s right, it’s true there’s a lot in his life, now, that I don’t know about but surely he doesn’t want me to know, or maybe he does, but in some magical way that doesn’t involve asking and telling. And now we seem to be playing roles in a Sunday-night TV play and I was never any good at watching those—after the first ten minutes, twenty at most, I’d get confused by the plot, I never knew who was having an affair with who—so how can anyone expect me to be good at being in one?

  Then Selwyn does something astounding. From somewhere about himself, as if it’s completely habitual, he takes out a cigarette and lights it. With a lighter from his jeans pocket. For a moment, it’s like him telling me he’s gay. Or has a child. He’s sixteen. Has he had sex?

  ‘Do you want one?’ Offering me the packet.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I know. You don’t smoke. But you must have done at some time?’

  I nod. It’s not heroin.

  ‘Did you stop because of me?’

  ‘I can’t remember now.’ Oh but I can—the struggle to be virtuous, the feeling that if this was virtue, then let me choose hell. ‘But yes, I think partly because of you.’

  ‘Go on, have one.’

  I take a cigarette, he lights it for me. I breathe in and almost choke but it’s a huge relief, him taking charge.

  ‘He’s nice,’ he says. ‘I like him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who lives here. The man you love.’ He does that smile, that sheepish grin. ‘The man you have sex with. The man you fuck.’

  He stands up. He goes to the kitchen—he lives here, in this functional, story-book flat, he has slept here a whole night, which I have never done, which I have never done—and he brings back a saucer and places it on the table. An ashtray.

  Which he uses, nonchalantly, and brings the cigarette back to his mouth, and inhales. ‘He says I can work for him. He says there’s work I can do.’

  And I think: work—Selwyn in a suit? Collar and tie? A haircut.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘Selwyn, what are you telling me? Do you know what time people get up in the morning, to go to work?’

  ‘Yes. It’s like school. I’ve done it for years. But this is different.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’d find things.’

  ‘Find things to do?’

  ‘No. Find things.’

  Car keys—we’d be ready to go out, and Alan couldn’t find the car keys, and Selwyn would find them. In the kitchen, where I’d taken the shopping. By the kettle. The tax letter, one of many but this one was crunch, so I lost it, and a day before the deadline—panic—Selwyn walks over to Alan’s folder of holiday brochures, those islands we will never get near to, and even if we do we will be stuck in the bank at the airport arguing forever about currency conversion rates, and picks it out. The Gameboy we bought him for his birthday, two months early because of some special offer, and hid it in the drawer where Alan keeps his socks—he found it. The TV remote, almost daily. My credit card, pound coins, Agnieszka’s bus pass. He was a child, low center of gravity and close to the ground, where things tend to end up. But maybe, maybe, it was more than that. On a walk in the country he picked a twenty-pound note out of a bush. A natural talent.

  ‘He’s a loss-adjuster, isn’t he?’ Selwyn goes on, with a fine and undeniable logic. ‘He explained what that is. Sometimes it’s bad, when factories get burned down or cars get smashed, but sometimes he gets called in just because people have lost things. He told me about this woman who—well, I mean, if it’s just that, if it’s just losing stuff, then I could go and look for it. I’m good at that, finding things.’

  A human metal detector.

  A gap in the market.

  He can do anything, anything in the world, this boy. He could stop wars. He could be the second-youngest pope.

  And then the loss-adjuster has returned, and is walking across the room towards me. He kisses me on my forehead an
d sits down on the sofa, next to Selwyn.

  Why, whenever there are three people, does it always have to be two against one?

  I stub out my cigarette on the saucer. It was horrible. I say, ‘I should go home.’

  Strange word: ‘home’ is where Selwyn is, and Alan, but if Selwyn is here . . . The other place seems very far away, and much longer ago than this morning.

  I’m not expecting to be contradicted, and no one does.

  ‘Are you coming with me?’ I ask Selwyn.

  ‘If you’re going home, yes.’ He doesn’t get up.

  ‘Where else would we be going?’

  ‘I mean, if you’re going home.’

  Oh. He means, of course, a woman’s, a mother’s, place: home, and not ever to come to this flat again. But right now, which is exactly the time I should be having this argument, I’m suddenly too tired. I know there’s something I should be fighting for but the focus is blurred.

  I get my bag. Now Selwyn stands up and seems to be waiting but there’s nothing to wait for. I put my arm around his stiff, sharp shoulders, as sharp and as hard as that thing I fell against in the cupboard beneath the stairs, and we head for the door.

  The loss-adjuster offers to drive us and I say no, no, we’re fine, without even turning to look at him, and already we’re standing by the lift, waiting for it to arrive. But now there’s a heaviness, a sluggishness, encasing us, the lift torpid and pompous, its light yellow and old, time slowing down, and to shake this off I start walking, as soon as we come out of the door to the street, faster than usual. Selwyn strides to keep up.

  And then, suddenly, I’m aware he’s no longer beside me, and I turn.

  He’s standing at the edge of the pavement. A party of teenage foreign backpackers threads between us, their voices loud and carefree—Spanish, my other language. He’s forgotten something, I think. We’ll have to do this all over again.

  ‘Actually,’ Selwyn says, ‘I think I’ll hang around for a bit.’

  Okay. He’ll follow, in his own time.

  ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘I’m going back to the flat.’

  That sheepish smile. And then he’s walking away, walking back. He has a key. He puts things in cupboards.

  I HAVE A pounding headache, not nagging but bullying, despotic. I have been force-fed with deep-fried sugar for lunch, I have been messed around by Selwyn whom I love, I think, and I have smoked my first cigarette in ten years. Of course I have a headache. As soon as I get home I walk upstairs to the bathroom, ignoring Agnieszka’s attempt to detain me, and take down a box of painkillers from the shelf in the cabinet. I sit on the edge of the bath and read the small print on the back of the box. More common side effects may include: abnormal dreams, abnormal ejaculation, abnormal vision, anxiety, diminished sex drive, dizziness, dry mouth, flu-like symptoms, flushing, gas, headache, impotence, insomnia, itching, loss of appetite, nausea, nervousness, occasional forgetfulness, rash, sinusitis, sleepiness, sore throat, sweating, tremors, upset stomach, vomiting. Less common side effects may include: bleeding problems, chills, confusion, ear pain, emotional instability, fever, frequent urination, high blood pressure, loss of memory, palpitations, sleep disorders, weight gain, vertigo. In children and adolescents, less common side effects may also include: excessive menstrual bleeding, hyperactivity, mania or hypomania, nosebleeds, personality changes.

  I chuck the box in the bin. I decide I am feeling better.

  ALAN IS IN the kitchen, in darkness. He must know I’m here, but he doesn’t turn round. What he’s doing, I gradually realize, is rearranging the recipe books on the shelf beside the cooker in alphabetical order. By author, or title? He reaches up—he has short arms, whenever he buys a new jacket he has to get the sleeves shortened— and brings down a book, and examines its cover, and reaches up again to place it back on the shelf in a different place. Again and again. It’s like an improvised performance in a small room above a pub, one the actor doesn’t know how to bring to an end. But that’s okay. Although I’d like to know what happens next I’m also happy just watching, leaning against the doorframe. I’ve paid for my ticket.

  Then he sits down, still without turning on the light. It’s possible that he too is training his eyes, to see in the dark. I want him to tell me what he sees.

  Before that, Agnieszka must update me. She is ironing in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. ‘Fffshhhh,’ she has said, while I was watching Alan, imitating the noise of the iron. And now she is singing. Calling me.

  The trip to the hospital with Harvey was an anticlimax: they put him on a nebulizer, gave him a prescription and sent him home. And last night Harvey took Agnieszka to a musical in the West End. She laughs and waves her arms around as she tells me about the dance routines and the special effects, and I suggest she switches off the iron before she knocks it over. Then she laughs even more when she tells how Harvey got annoyed and told her that what they were watching was moving and tragic. I am not enjoying hearing this. It’s clear that Harvey’s all-round blockheadedness is exactly what’s making Agnieszka very fond of him.

  After the musical he took her to a hotel, a Hilton hotel.

  ‘So he’s rich, Agnieszka? That helps.’

  Agnieszka is not sure. ‘He pays with tickets, like at the theatre.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We go to room, drink champagne.’ She screws up her nose.

  ‘Not good?’ I have sat down at the top of the stairs. I am tired. Agnieszka is standing behind the ironing board with hands far apart, like Manet’s woman behind the bar at the Folies-Bergère. Agnieszka is no less formidable.

  ‘Not fizzy. Not cold.’ She clearly expected more from a hotel calling itself the Hilton.

  ‘There are two beds, thin ones,’ she goes on, ‘but bouncy. You know?’

  I can guess. She tried them out. She sat, or maybe even lay, on the mattress, and bounced up and down. She’s a practical girl.

  ‘He kisses me, then he tries to move these beds to make one big bed. I am wanting to help but he says no, so only I am watching. His face gets red. I am worried, I am trying again to help, he pushes me away. He makes this noise, like in the park?’

  I wheeze, putting a lot of exaggeration into it. It comes surprisingly easily, as if a small animal inside me is trying to come out. ‘Wheeze,’ I say, drawing breath.

  ‘Yes, wheeze. He wheezes, but worse than in the park. He starts to make like the bird again—’

  ‘You mean his arms?’

  ‘Waving, like the seagull on the ground, when it starts to fly.’ She demonstrates.

  ‘I tell him to lie down, breathe like this.’ More demonstration, and this time I join in. Slow, deep breaths: in, out, in, out.

  ‘He has some pills in his jacket, I find them.’

  ‘Oh, Agnieszka.’

  ‘We lie down, very quiet. The pills make him better. After some time he tells me he must take these pills every day but he doesn’t, they make his skin very bad.’ She scratches her forearm.

  ‘Yes, scratchy. A rash.’

  ‘One time, he says, he went to psychology—psychology something.’

  ‘Therapist. It’s easier.’

  ‘This woman, she ask him why he thinks everything so dangerous, why he must be punished, what he done wrong? But really, Harvey has done nothing wrong, ever.’

  She shakes her head. ‘So one time is it, he doesn’t go to see this woman again.’

  ‘No,’ I say, after a pause. I stand and hug Agnieszka awkwardly, over the ironing board. But she stiffens, resists, the Communist poster-girl again, determined. She doesn’t cry. She’s not going to let me off so easily.

  Because it’s true I’ve been remiss, and more. I haven’t spoken to her about married men. (Is Harvey married? I will believe, now, everything Agnieszka tells me, and most of what he tells her.) I haven’t warned her about single or separated English men whose smiles are not easy, not relaxed. Let alone the ones whose smiles are too easy, too relaxed. I haven’t warned her ab
out cheap champagne in Hilton hotels, nor men playing three-card tricks, nor love. Unforgivably, my lack of sympathy for Harvey—my active dislike—has been conspicuous. Why couldn’t I simply be happy for her, that she was happy?

  I haven’t taken care.

  Agnieszka has gone to her room. One of Alan’s office shirts lies on the ironing board, a creased arm dangling limply down.

  SOMETIMES THE BATTER ’ S job is to score lots of runs as fast as he can, and sometimes it’s to stay in and not get out and the runs are secondary. The bowler’s priority is almost always to get the batter out but there are times when stopping the batter getting runs is the main thing.

  God, this is a stupid game.

  Agnieszka is proud, intelligent, ambitious, and she offers herself to an overweight buffoon who slouches over crosswords in the stale air of coffee bars. Selwyn— Selwyn is gorgeous, and if I were a fifteen-year-old girl I’d make sure he understands what that means—and he spends all day grumping about the injustice of the world. Me, I am married to a caring, conscientious man who rearranges cookery books by the light of the moon, and I rush away into the arms of man who wears yellow Wellington boots and whose job—and possibly whose life too, if I cared to investigate further—reeks of doom, disaster, things gone awry.

  Stupid, stupid game. To decide who bats first, the umpires toss a coin. You can play the most brilliant game of your life and still end up on the losing side. You can be totally out of form and score zero and zero again and still prance with your team-mates in triumph at the end. And that’s another thing: the spraying of champagne by the winners, the conspicuous waste. Fools. Champagne is for drinking, whether you win or lose. Just pass me the bottle.

  I COME DOWN to the kitchen. The night of the long knives. The long, long night of the knives. The short knives, which so often get lost. And Selwyn will find them. Alan is sitting as before, in the one comfortable chair in the kitchen, with the cat on its arm. But in deeper darkness. Really, I cannot speak to an invisible man.

  I switch on the small light over the cooker. ‘Is that okay?’

  It appears to be so. Indeed, Selwyn is safe, Agnieszka has not been raped, no rash crime of passion has been committed, no one has thrown him- or herself under a train. But it is not okay.