Always the Sun

by Neil Cross

  Mel dropped tea bags into three mugs, topped them up with boiling water. Jamie joined them. He perched side-saddle on one of the bar-stools.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Sam.

  ‘Cool. Can I see my room?’

  ‘You can do what you like. It’s your house.’

  Jamie vaulted off the stool and thundered upstairs.

  Mel scooped the tea bags from the mugs; squeezed them with her thumb, dropped them on the granite worktop. Broke the seal on a warm carton of milk.

  ‘You don’t think it’s over the top?’ said Sam.

  She handed him the cup of tea.

  ‘There’s no sugar,’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘Is it all too much, just for the two of us?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Anyway, it won’t be just the two of you for ever.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right.’

  Jamie came crashing down the stairs and back into the kitchen. Sam handed him a mug of tea. Jamie took it in two hands and went stomping in the direction of the living room. He paused in the doorway; noticed the door was missing a handle.

  He said, ‘Do we have to unpack today?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘But I’m knackered.’

  ‘Me too, sunshine.’

  ‘Is Frank going to help?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Mel. ‘He promised to try.’

  Frank was Mel’s ex-husband.

  Sam reached into his trouser pocket. He fished out a crumpled ten-pound note and a number of pound coins, balled them and threw it to Jamie. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Run down the chippy. The one down the Merrydown shops.’

  ‘That’s miles.’

  ‘It’s five minutes. And it’s nicer. I’ll have cod and chips—large if they’ve got it. Mel?’

  ‘Jumbo sausage.’

  ‘Get Mel a saveloy. And get whatever you want. Get a bottle of Coke too.’

  ‘What about Frank?’

  ‘Pasty and chips,’ said Mel. ‘I expect.’

  ‘Can I keep the change?’

  ‘If there is any.’

  ‘Cheers, Dad.’

  He ran off down the corridor.

  Sam called after him, ‘Do your laces up!’

  But Jamie didn’t hear. Or if he did, he ignored him.

  ‘And watch the road!’

  Jamie returned unlaced and undamaged. They ate their chips on the floor of the living room, watching motes of dust describe slow, incandescent spirals in shafts of late-afternoon sunlight. They waited for Unka Frank. But Unka Frank didn’t show, and he didn’t phone. So, as the sun grew low in the sky, Jamie, Mel and Sam unloaded the hire van. There wasn’t much to unpack. Most of their bulkier furniture, including the beds, Sam had sold for a pittance to a ‘house-clearance specialist’—a cadaverous creature in whose company he would not have chosen to spend one second more than entirely necessary.

  That night, they slept in sleeping bags on the smooth, wood-fragrant floors of their respective bedrooms. Sam was awakened by the early sun bursting through the curtainless window. Excited, he rose almost immediately. He crept through to Jamie’s room. It was already a mess.

  Sam stood behind a pile of boxes, looking at his sleeping son. In yesterday’s T-shirt and pants, Jamie lay on his back. He was starfished across his sleeping bag, his bare heels touching the floor. He’d flung a thin forearm across his eyes, warding off the morning.

  2

  It took a couple of weeks to get the house in proper order. So much jumble remained that Sam found it difficult to recall exactly what he’d worked so hard to sort out and throw away. In bin bags and boxes he found ancient chequebook stubs, wads of yellowing bank statements, folded and peeling beer mats, dead batteries, coverless paperbacks swollen and stained with ancient coffee spillages and a toddler’s crayon swirls; unmarked cassette tapes, empty video-cassette boxes; jackets and trousers he could never wear again, even if he wanted to. There was so much crap. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, bringing it all the way here. Finally, in a fit of self-directed pique, he dumped it all, still boxed and bagged, in the smallest of the spare bedrooms and closed the door on it. He resolved never to set eyes on it again, at least until the day when he would pay somebody to visit the municipal dump on his behalf.

  On Friday morning, he took Jamie into town. They had McDonald’s for breakfast, then went to choose the boy some bedroom furniture; a single bed and wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a desk for his PlayStation and television. It was all delivered the following week. They hauled the flatpacks and plastic-wrapped mattress upstairs, unzipped them with carpet knives, threw angular blocks of Styrofoam packaging into the far corner. All morning, they worked silently to assemble the furniture.

  Just before lunch, a flat-blade screwdriver slipped from the head of a Phillips screw and gouged a chicken-skin wound in Sam’s thumb. He ran the cut under the cold tap in the bathroom while Jamie went hunting for the Elastoplast. After lunch, Sam watched with a mug of tea and a plate of Jammie Dodgers as Jamie erected blinds at the bay window. Although they hung slightly and variously askew, they at least stayed attached, and Jamie was proud of the job done.

  Soon Jamie’s room was ready. There remained a great deal of summer to kill. Jamie spent most of it at Mel’s.

  Jamie and Mel had begun to grow truly close when Jamie’s lack of siblings began to impair Sam and Justine’s cheerful attempts at family holidays. Jamie was never able to make new friends quickly, and too much exclusive parental company bored and embarrassed him. So Mel looked after him while Sam and Justine were in Tuscany or North Africa or Rome. And because Mel didn’t mortify Jamie the way his parents did, it was she who took him away. Together, they’d been to Cornwall, to Brighton, to Spain, Disneyland Paris, and three times to CenterParcs.

  Usually, Mel cooked the kind of food Jamie wasn’t allowed at home. But she made him wash the dishes, too, and sometimes do the vacuuming. Mysteriously, Jamie didn’t mind taking out the rubbish, or cleaning the upstairs windows, or running to the shops to get milk and cigarettes, as long as it was Mel who asked him to do it.

  Mel always phoned if Jamie was staying over and—although Sam knew she’d feed him on frozen potato waffles and Findus crispy pancakes, and that she wouldn’t make him bathe if he didn’t feel like it, or go to bed until he was staggering with fatigue, or make him clean his teeth, or put on clean underwear—he always said yes. But when he suggested that Jamie should keep some clothes—just a few T-shirts, some socks and underwear, perhaps a toothbrush—at Mel’s, his sister and his son took lofty offence and he was forced to apologize, as if for barging in on a private game.

  One afternoon, Mel and Jamie walked to the Dolphin Centre to return a rental video (The Evil Dead II). Propped against the NSS newsagent’s window, Jamie noticed a mountain bike that he recognized as belonging to Stuart Ballard, a ratty little kid he’d known since they were both three or four years old. Sam had always thought that Stuart belonged to another age: he should have been dressed in grey shorts and tank tops, clambering, scabby-kneed, over postwar bombsites or collecting tadpoles in a jam jar with string for a handle. Once, Stuart’s parents had been Mel’s neighbours. Three years ago, they’d moved to a slightly smaller house on the Merrydown Estate.

  Stuart was inside the NSS, buying a PlayStation magazine and ten Silk Cut for his mum. Mel and Jamie surprised him on the way out. Stuart went back to Mel’s with them, pushing his bike. They pulled the curtains on the afternoon and watched Halloween H2O on fizzy, jumpy VHS. Stuart warned them it was crap, but they enjoyed it anyway. That afternoon, Jamie ate his tea at the Ballards’; grilled lamb chops, chips, peas and HP fruity sauce.

  Sometimes, two or three days might pass without Sam catching sight of Jamie, and when he did come home, he’d be worn out and crabby, still wearing the clothes he’d left in
. The trousers would be grass-stained, the collars grease-blackened, the socks mossy-damp and odorous. Sam took care to welcome him jauntily, repressing the powerful urge to order him immediately upstairs and into the bath.

  Sam wasn’t due to start work at Agartha Barrow, the local mental hospital, until October. He had never spent so much time alone. But it wasn’t so bad. At first, he kept busy by unpacking the stuff he hadn’t crammed into the smallest spare room. When that was done, and when he’d found a place to put everything, the house felt emptier. It swallowed those belongings by which he was content to be surrounded. The rearing expanse of living-room wall miniaturized the television and sofa. The rug, still grubby with their London footfalls, was a postage stamp.

  Although Sam lacked any real sense of aesthetics, he’d long ago become adept at second-guessing Justine’s taste. It started as a survival mechanism contrived to abbreviate shopping trips; now he found himself furnishing the house on Balaarat Street as if Justine might soon arrive at the door, browned and relaxed and pleased to see him after an extended painting holiday (to where? Morocco? Andalucía?). She would clap her hands to her mouth and exclaim her surprise and delight in his cleverness, his thoughtfulness, his eagerness to make her happy.

  Engaged by this fantasy, he allowed consideration of the tiniest domestic details to fill his day. He would rise, shower, shave, then make breakfast and wander to the bus stop. In town he might spend an entire morning examining and comparing curtains or lampshades, rugs or kettles. He bought curtains to please Justine—bleached Egyptian cotton, just long enough to brush the wooden floor. He hummed and hawed and scratched his big, square jaw, examining items of cutlery from all angles, testing them for weight and balance and quality of line.

  In the evenings, when the curtains were hung and the cutlery was in the drawer, when the new kettle or new toaster stood in its appointed place in the kitchen, when the new mirrors were hung in the hallway and bedroom and bathroom, when the telephone stood on its new table in the hallway and the CDs were ranked in their new shelves, when the new towels hung folded on the heated rail, the walls receded from him.

  Justine was not coming back from holiday and he missed his sister and his son, eating oven chips and fish fingers and tomato ketchup in a small, crammed, chaotic, tobacco-smelling house half a mile down the road. It didn’t occur to him to join them. He was as unwelcome as he was loved.

  Instead, he watched television and yearned to sleep. Often, he consulted his watch to find it was somehow 2 or 3 a.m. He couldn’t read. For weeks, he’d been carrying round the same spine-broken and unread paperback. Several times a day, he attempted to read a page, but even if he was able to muster the necessary concentration, he’d lost his place and the passages he read and re-read lacked context and continuity.

  Television didn’t relax him. It flickered and glimmered, spectral blue on the walls behind him. As it grew late, he lowered the volume. Yet it seemed to shriek ever more stridently. In direct proportion to diminishing content, the programmes became frenetically edited until, after 1 a.m., it was easy to believe he was watching a random, flashing sequence of unconnected images, most of which depicted young people shouting at one another.

  Once or twice, he tried the radio instead. But the sound of a small, intimate voice echoing from the unadorned walls of the big, empty house made him feel lonely and spooked. Sometimes when he was alone, he thought he heard movement upstairs—footsteps on the hallway and bedroom floor. Quickly, he turned on the television.

  Eventually, he went upstairs. He had yet to buy a bed for himself and was sleeping on the bedroom floor, cocooned in a sleeping bag. In the morning he woke with a sexless erection, solid and springy as a rubber cosh. According to his need to urinate, it soon deflated. He looked down sadly as his penis relaxed in his hand like a dying bird.

  Eventually the day arrived when he decided it was no longer quite rational to keep delaying the purchase of something decent to sleep on. His clothes, although few, hung neatly from a chromium rack at one end of the bedroom. His socks and underwear were stuffed and rolled into the top drawer of a new, glue-smelling­ chest that had arrived, flatpacked, with Jamie’s. It seemed stupid to be sleeping on the floor.

  He caught a bus to John Lewis. He wandered round the bed department, his hands clasped Napoleonically at the small of his back. Once or twice, he tested how a certain mattress was sprung. An assistant, a nervous woman in outsize spectacles, asked if he required help. Hastily, Sam selected a bed and demanded to buy it.

  It was delivered a few days later by a high-sided, racing-green van. Sam signed for it and, alone, he lugged the flatpacks and plastic-wrapped double mattress upstairs. It wasn’t easy. He sat on the daytime twilight of the highest step, sweating and breathing heavily. Then he went to his sunny bedroom and assembled the bed. When it was finished, he stood back and admired his work. The bed was iron-framed, with a new-smelling, unstained mattress whose protective plastic, ripped open, was now unfolding itself loosely in the doorway. He tested it by springing up and down on his arse. Soon he remembered that this was the only bouncing on beds he was likely to get up to for some time and he stopped bouncing and looked disconsolately around himself. He realized that he’d neglected to buy any bedding. He spent another night in the faintly odorous sleeping bag, like a giant pupa on the naked mattress.

  In the morning, he returned to John Lewis and, somewhat sheepishly, wandered again around the bedding department. He was worried that he might appear to be some kind of fetishist, but the nervous woman wasn’t there and no other member of staff gave the least sign of remembering him. Back home, it took him a great deal of time and effort to stuff and cajole the new duvet into its cotton sheath. That had always been Justine’s job and, he had long supposed, more trouble to learn than it could ever be worth.

  When the job was done, the bed looked virginal and white. He thought of a photograph in a magazine. It seemed a pity to defile it by sweating and dribbling into its crisp, cotton whiteness. That night, he laid the sleeping bag on the wooden floor alongside the iron bedframe. He bundled up an old jacket to use as a pillow and set the still-unread and much deteriorated paperback talismanically alongside him.

  Once he felt settled in, there was nothing to do. During the day, he sometimes allowed himself to wander round to Mel’s, even if it risked spoiling their fun.

  He’d walk through her front garden gate and round the back of the grey, pebble-dashed house. If the weather was very good, Mel would be in the scurfy, psoriatic back garden whose half-collapsed fence backed on to a cul-de-sac of garages. The garages were a design-feature of the estate, and for years they’d been put to most frequent use by kids: during the day they were playgrounds, somewhere to ride bikes and play football and cricket. During the hours of darkness they were the location of those heady adolescent pursuits that in hindsight seem so innocent. In such terrain, Sam lost his virginity to a girl called Tina Marie, both of them drunk on cider. He remembered the T-shirt gathered and ruched at her neck, the raindrop pattern of lovebites on her breasts and neck, her cigarette breath, her chipped nail varnish, her knickers hooked on one ankle, her doll-blank eyes. He remembered something like dread as the orgasm surged at the root of his penis.

  At the far end of Mel’s garden there stood the rusty swing she’d bought for Jamie, second-hand, ten or eleven years ago. Despite its decrepitude, she still treated it as a bench. As he approached the house, he knew by its gentle creaking if Mel was in the garden. It was a sound he associated with midsummer torpor.

  Mel would be talking in a gossipy murmur to her friend, a woman who for so long had been known as Fat Janet that all the insult had drained from it. (When opprobrium was called for, she was known instead as Janet the Planet.) Fat Janet had baby features packed into the centre of her face and fine, blonde hair pulled into a ponytail that was hazy-tipped with split ends. In theory she had a husband called Jim, a limp, grey cardigan of a man. But Sa
m couldn’t remember meeting him since a party in the mid-1980s, when he’d made a pass at Justine and she had laughed, assuming he was joking.

  Sam would join Mel and Janet on the grass, or on a patch of dry soil where grass had once grown. Wordlessly, he would accept the cigarette one of them chucked at him. Sometimes they said nothing at all. But mostly, they discussed ephemera, local and celebrity gossip. Janet had a joyful, malicious sense of humour. Her cackle erupted from the garden like a startled crow.

  Sometimes Jamie and Stuart Ballard roamed by. They were hungry or thirsty or both, and summer-scruffy, in need of haircuts, engaged in conversation from which adults were excluded by intent and temperament. When the mood struck him, Sam would stand, brush his arse clean of grass and dried soil, and go inside to make a round of tea, or to watch TV. Jamie and Stuart might be huddled on the sofa, watching The Simpsons or Robot Wars.

  One afternoon, Mel and Sam challenged Stuart and Jamie to an improvised, half-arsed game of badminton. The rackets were crumpled and half-strung, and the shuttlecock was fletched with a few desultory feathers. Despite Sam and Mel’s best and genuine efforts, the boys won easily.

  Sam welcomed the first muddy trainers in the hallway of the house on Balaarat Street, and the first rank of dirty T-shirts hanging on the banister; the first wet-trampled towels in the bathroom. Such were the first cryptograms of domestic normality. Jamie was beginning to feel at home.

  One day, Sam wandered upstairs with a bundle of laundry folded in his arms and came across Jamie and Stuart, cross-legged before the portable TV, playing Gran Turismo III. They were surrounded by crisp bags and biscuit wrappers, crushed, empty Coke cans, toppled mugs and glasses. They spoke a language foreign to him, a cant of cryptic insults and surreptitious debasements.

  Without letting them know he’d seen them, he sneaked downstairs and turned on the TV.