Close Relations

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘Won’t be open till tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Monday.’

  ‘Don’t you want to phone the police?’ April asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Phone your wife,’ she said. ‘Tell her what’s happened.’

  He went to the front window. The Burger King opposite blazed with light. ‘What a disaster,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Down in the street a woman ushered children through the door; silver balloons bobbed above their heads as they went into the Burger King. ‘See, I didn’t tell her I was going to be here.’

  There was a silence behind him. ‘Oh.’

  He addressed the street. ‘Don’t know why.’

  ‘No.’

  He moved away from the window. ‘Better phone her.’

  Turning his back on April, he dialled his number. When Dorothy answered he found himself stumbling over his words. ‘. . . it’s the blooming gearbox again, been trying to fix it. Didn’t see the time . . . no, it’s okay, I’ll get the train. Be with you in an hour.’

  He put down the phone. For some reason he felt short of breath.

  April fingered the gold chain around her neck. ‘Why didn’t you tell her the tyres’ve been stolen?’ she asked.

  ‘Search me.’ He picked up his things again. ‘Better go.’

  The phone rang. He froze. How had Dorothy got the number?

  Finally, after several rings, April picked up the receiver. Gordon could hear a man’s voice on the line. It seemed to be shouting. April gripped the receiver. ‘Don’t you dare!’ she said. ‘I’m going out! I’ve changed the locks!’ She stopped and listened. ‘Dennis?’ A buzzing sound came from the phone. She replaced the receiver. ‘It’s Dennis,’ she said. Her face looked drained. ‘He’s coming round.’

  She burst into tears. Gordon put his arms around her. She felt familiar to him now – her large, beefy shoulders – she was a big girl – her firm breasts. She smelt of turps, and musky perfume.

  ‘I’m staying,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Ssh. I’m not leaving you now.’

  Imogen’s eyes were getting used to the dark. Above her the black, clotted pines reared up. In the silence she could almost hear them breathing. A few yards in front of her was the paler glimmer of a bank. Within it was the dark mouth of the sett. Hunched in her overcoat, she sat next to Karl. He had laid an old jacket on the ground; this meant that she had to sit close to him, their shoulders touching. He pointed. ‘They’ll be coming out to go hunting. A sow and a boar.’

  ‘Do they mate for life?’ she whispered.

  He shook his head. ‘They’re not that stupid.’

  She smiled. She couldn’t see if he was smiling too. She shifted slightly, to pull out the camera. As she did so, her thigh rested against his.

  ‘Hey, you can’t use that,’ he whispered, his breath warm on her face. ‘It’ll scare them off.’

  ‘It’s infra-red. It’s my dad’s. Look.’ She turned the camera on him and clicked the shutter. ‘No flash, see?’

  He took the camera. ‘Wow.’ He held it close to his face, looking at it. ‘Loaded, isn’t he. Your dad. What’s he do, then? Work in the City?’

  ‘Ssh,’ she hissed. ‘We’re not supposed to chatter.’

  He fell silent. The balance between them shifted. Just for a moment, despite the frisson of sitting next to Karl, she thought about Jamie and their childish battles for supremacy. Her brother usually won, of course – he was older, he was a boy – but on the few occasions when she did, how sweet was her victory!

  Besides, she didn’t want to talk about her father. She didn’t want to tell Karl that he was a venture capitalist. For one thing, she didn’t know what it meant. For another, it sounded so boring. Besides, she didn’t want to think about her parents. Karl was sitting beside her. What a miracle! The trouble was, she had dreamed about it for so many weeks that now it was finally happening she could hardly take it in. She felt numb. She wanted it to be over so that she could sit in her room and luxuriously relive every moment.

  It was damp; she felt the chill seeping into her bones. Karl’s breath, a grey cloud, mingled with hers. How close! As if their spirits were fusing. How she envied his lungs, snug in his body, pumping away. What a miracle that he was alive, and wanted to be sitting next to her in this wood. For the hundredth time she wondered whether he was really interested in badgers or just wanted an excuse to bring her here in the dark. He had long ago let go of her hand. Did he want to take it again? Did he, oh bliss, want to kiss her? She, of course, couldn’t care less about the badgers. She had seen one once, lying dead on the road to Beaconsfield; she had seen them alive on TV.

  She gazed at the mouth of the hole; it was so black that it looked solid. The only point of the badgers was to show Karl how patient she was, sitting here minute after minute, how unlike other girls her age; how in tune with nature. And if one emerged from the hole, it would give her an excuse thrillingly to grab his arm.

  Time passed. She could smell his aftershave. Had he washed and groomed himself especially for her, or – horrible thought – was he going on somewhere afterwards? She knew nothing about him, nothing about his life except his address, which she had found in the Yellow Pages under Farriers when she and her mother had looked for a blacksmith. 14, Riverview Close, Tetbury Magna – a village ten miles away, out near High Wycombe. She knew the address by heart, of course, it was engraved in her soul. Apart from this, she knew nothing – just that he was a man, a real one, muscular and ruddy as a gypsy, not one of Jamie’s weedy friends. A man who, it seemed, actually wanted to be sitting next to her.

  Had the badgers already gone? She gazed at the black hole. If she kept her eyes on it, it seemed to expand and contract like a living thing. She stiffened – was that a movement in it, or just a trick of the dark? She wanted to ask Karl but she didn’t want to break the trance in which they sat, their twin hearts pumping.

  Gordon was unused to lying. Like many honest people, once he had to lie he built such an elaborate edifice, so cumbersome and over-embellished, that only those who, like his wife, had had years of trusting him could possibly believe in it. Over the phone he laboriously explained to Dorothy that the car had happened to break down in Herne Hill, near Frank’s place; that he had gone to see his foreman and found him in a terrible state, halfway through a bottle of scotch and heading for one of his binges, so he had decided to get some food in – Frank’s place was a tip – and stay there to sort him out.

  ‘He’s a grown man, Gordon.’ Dorothy’s voice crackled down the line. ‘He can look after himself.’

  Gordon paused. ‘To tell the truth, I don’t feel so hot.’

  ‘Oh, you poor love, why didn’t you say? Shall I come over? What do you feel?’

  ‘Just knackered.’

  ‘I told you not to go out –’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a pill and kip down on his sofabed.’

  He put down the phone. April had removed herself to the bedroom but she had probably heard every word. He felt intimate with her, she was sharing in his lies. He felt sick.

  He dialled Frank’s number. ‘Look, if Dorothy calls, do me a favour. I’m staying at your place, don’t ask me why . . . no, it’s not like that! I’ll explain tomorrow. Thanks, mate.’

  He felt the corruption spread, like dry rot. It pushed its poisonous fingers everywhere. April came in.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not in the habit of this.’

  She picked up the mugs. ‘You’ve not done anything wrong.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can go home. Honest. He probably won’t come.’

  Gordon looked at her. At last he spoke the truth. ‘I want to be here,’ he said.

  Imogen wasn’t prepared for the effect they would have on her when they appeared. A striped face, black and white; first one and then another – friendly triangles. Then she heard them – a snufflin
g, busy sound, a companionable badger conversation that sounded married. She thought they would lumber around but Karl was right; they were surprisingly light on their feet. She gripped his arm without even noticing she was doing so.

  The two badgers sniffled round. When they turned, their bold faces disappeared and they were just a grey bulk in the darkness. She felt deeply moved to be eavesdropping on their emergence into a night which, for them, must be like any other. They turned back, and seemed to inspect her and Karl with benign tolerance. So you’re watching us? Well, you’re welcome to it. They scratched about for a few minutes. She could hear them breathing. It made them seem human – an elderly couple, wheezing. Then they trotted off.

  Up in the trees a bird shrieked. It was an alarm call – a screeching sound like a carving knife being sharpened. Something barked – could it be a fox? Karl’s arm tightened, wedging hers against his side. She thought: I shall remember this night, all my life.

  Down in the street somebody shrieked with laughter. Gordon stiffened. He heard the sound of breaking glass. Was it his car, were they finishing it off? He lay there, tucked up on April’s settee. The pillow had flattened beneath his head, which was wedged against the armrest.

  Through the curtains, the street light glowed. A lorry thundered past, rattling the window-panes. It was well past midnight but outside the place still seethed with life. In fact, it was bloody noisy. How loud it was, compared to the hush of Purley. How strange, not to be sleeping in his own bed. He was lying on the settee of a young black woman whose surname he didn’t even know. He had eaten a takeaway pizza with her. He had sat next to her on this settee, watching episode three of some TV drama she was hooked on. In fact, now he thought of it, Dorothy liked it too but he had never seen an episode – well, one week he’d been in hospital, hadn’t he?

  He had used April’s toothbrush. He had showered under the shower attachment in her bath, gazing at her shelf of intimate items – body gel, shampoo, a tube of something called Black Beauty Hair Relaxer. The strangeness of all this obliterated the guilt. After all, he had done nothing wrong except lie to his wife. Apart from this, he had simply helped April sort out her flat and comforted her when she’d cried. That was all. Today was just a bizarre adventure, the sort nobody believed he was capable of. He hadn’t believed he was capable of it. He felt a tweak of pride that he was behaving like a student – like one of his own grandchildren.

  Down in the street a man started shouting. Gordon stiffened. Maybe it was the boyfriend. Maybe he would start battering at the door downstairs. Somewhere in the high street a shop alarm wailed.

  The bedroom door opened. Light shone into the room. April appeared. She wore pyjamas; they made her look like a child. Wordlessly she came over to the settee.

  Gordon said nothing. He lifted the duvet; she slid in beside him – it was a tight fit, with the two of them. Awkwardly he put his arm around her. She grunted. For a moment he thought she was sleepwalking but then he smelt the sharp, animal sweat of fear. She lay there in his arms, her chin resting on his chest. And soon her breathing deepened and she slept.

  In the silence of Purley, in the floral-papered bedroom, Dorothy slept. Outside it had started to rain. A car swished by, and then all was quiet. Dorothy was dreaming. The white Mercedes estate, smeared with mud, was driving the wrong way down an underpass. It was loaded with bodies, wrapped in heavy-duty builders’ bags. She could see Gordon in the driving seat. She ran along the tunnel, shouting to stop him, but no sound came from her mouth. The car, disappearing round a corner, was weighed down so heavily that its undercarriage scraped along the road. Dorothy slept, and the next morning all that remained was a feeling of unease.

  In the Old Vicarage, in the big brass bed, Louise lay alone. Robert was downstairs, drinking whisky and watching an old video of Die Hard with Jamie. She was glad, of course, that he was bonding with his son. For two people who lived in the same house they managed to have minimal contact with each other, a fact she put down to Jamie’s age and their mutual contempt for each other’s lifestyles. More and more often, however, Robert seemed to stay downstairs until late, only coming to bed when Louise was asleep. He shut himself in his study and worked; he fell asleep in front of the TV. For many years they had gone to bed at more or less the same time, an unspoken erotic synchronisation. They had withdrawn from the family spaces downstairs, the dog hairs and domestic tasks, and had retreated into the intimacy of their preparations for bed.

  Why was he avoiding her? They hadn’t made love for ten days, not since they had returned home, flushed and giggling, from dinner with the only other villagers that Robert found marginally amusing, a sozzled old journalist and his boyfriend. And yet this neglect alternated with periods of fierce lovemaking – no, not lovemaking: sex. There was something impersonal in Robert’s passion. Gripping her in his hairy arms he seemed to be penetrating her body without somehow acknowledging it, as if she were irrelevant to some angry dialogue between himself and his penis. Afterwards, he kissed her abstractedly and fell asleep. Throughout their marriage she had felt that her body had a separate sensual existence for her husband but there was something different in his split impulses now. It was as if he had split off altogether from her.

  Louise turned off the light. Despite her beauty she had had a limited experience of sex; Robert had snapped her up too fast. Since then she had remained faithful to him, and now she had been married for so long she had no comparisons to make with him and his behaviour. As she curled up, phrases from her magazines rolled around her head: ‘male menopause, mid-life crisis . . .’ Finally, she fell asleep.

  Imogen lay in bed. Below her, machine-guns rat-a-tatted; plate-glass windows were blown to smithereens and Bruce Willis leaped across the TV screen. Imogen lay there, her eyes open. On the floor her damp clothes lay in a heap. Far away, a dog barked.

  It had been a magical evening. When the badgers had gone she and Karl had walked back through the wood. It started to rain, but that only intensified their separateness from the rest of the world, boringly tucked up in front of their TVs. They drove to Beaconsfield. Sitting in the van as the houses slid past she felt like an outlaw; she felt as raffish as a gypsy, her hair plastered to her forehead. Karl bought her some chips. The man behind the counter knew her, she bought chips there after school, but she was a different person now and she smiled at him condescendingly from her adult status.

  Karl drove her back to Wingham Wallace. He fiddled with the knobs on the radio – lucky knobs! – and found The Doors singing Come on baby light my fire. She liked it because the guitar solo went on for ever, not breaking the spell. The chip bag lay in her lap. Karl reached into it, took chips out one by one and put them into his mouth. This seemed more thrillingly personal than any amount of kissing. At the church he dropped her off. No kiss, he just ruffled her hair and said, ‘Be seeing you then. Take care.’

  Twenty miles away, in Clapham, Prudence lay awake. She had consumed a whole bottle of Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon but it hadn’t put her to sleep. She hadn’t heard from Stephen since their break-up the week before. No phone call, nothing.

  Her cat, Cedric, lay on her stomach. Even at this hour, cars still swished past on the one-way system; Titchmere Road was always busy. If all the parking spaces were full, which was usually the case, anyone who wanted to stop had to double-park, forcing the traffic to slow down and squeeze past. Only the fearless dared stay parked there for long.

  Stephen was not of their number. He had only visited her life, his indicators winking. For a year he had been poised, his hand on the gear-stick, ready to drive off. He hadn’t wanted commitment – a ghastly but appropriate word. He hadn’t bothered to search for a parking meter, let alone apply for a resident’s permit.

  Prudence was laughing – hard, dry hiccups. The cat rocked up and down on her stomach. She thought: all this time he’s kept his engine running, the bastard. And now he’s safely back in his fucking garage in Dulwich.

  She wasn’t laughing, s
he was crying. Dry, wrenching sobs. Finally, the cat could stand it no longer and jumped off the bed.

  Maddy spoke into the darkness. ‘My father hated me because I was different. I didn’t do the things normal little girls did. I didn’t try to please him.’

  ‘He sounds a deeply conventional man,’ said Erin, lying beside her. ‘Nothing’s going to shake him up. He lives an unexamined life and your mother colludes in that, she’s got the role down to a T. Good little wifey making his dinner, helping him with his work.’ She yawned, and nuzzled Maddy’s neck. ‘He’ll never break out. Sad, isn’t it?’

  Maddy suspected she was too old to moan about her parents; it was an adolescent thing to do. But Erin encouraged it. Besides, it drew her and Erin closer, it was a mild kind of aphrodisiac. She twined her feet around Erin’s. Down in the street a car alarm wailed; in Erin’s neighbourhood cars were regularly vandalised.

  ‘I always seem to rub men up the wrong way. That’s why I left Nigeria.’ Maddy paused. She had told nobody, not even her sisters, what had happened. ‘This man, Pierre, who ran our project, he was a pig. God, he fancied himself. He hated me because his charm didn’t work on me. He was a crook. He was screwing this Ibo woman, she was the daughter of some general or something, and he used to get Ibrahim, that was our driver, to take him to the local hotel to have it off with her. And some money we’d been given, for a consignment of powdered milk, he bought her an air-conditioner with it.’ She paused. ‘Then one day I discovered that he’d been using the workmen, who were supposed to be building our baby clinic, he’d got them to build him and his wife this veranda on the back of their house. I told my colleagues but they didn’t believe me, they thought I just didn’t like him. They all ganged up on me. Pierre got me sacked. I could have fought it, I suppose, but suddenly I felt too bloody exhausted.’ She lay there, gazing into the blackness. Something in Africa, in the very air, had seeped into her bones. The inertia, the corruption. After a lifetime of speaking up and battling against the odds she had given up – brave, fearless Maddy. ‘So I packed up and left. He’s still there. Oh, I despised him all right, but I despised myself more for doing bugger all. Do you understand?’