by Kim Newman
You experiment with a cheek-peck of the kind you rarely bestow on Marie-Laure, but are encouraged by the press of your wife’s body to move to her mouth, to taste apricot lipstick, and slip in some tongue. Breasts press against your chest and a new scent brushes your nose.
This is amazing!
‘Mum sends her love,’ Rowena says. ‘She’s picking things up.’
‘The kids make a mess?’ you ask.
‘No, silly,’ she says, shoving you away. ‘After Dad.’
Click. Rowena’s mother has just been widowed. Or her husband has walked out. Did you ever meet Mr and Mrs Douglass? Weren’t they customers at Dad’s bank?
The children have rushed upstairs.
‘Mum gave them a new game. I think it’ll only run on your computer, but Jeremy wants to try it on his PC.’
Jeremy? Gag! You’ve got a son called Jeremy!
‘I told J and J you’d help them get it running later. I hope you don’t mind.’
You wouldn’t know where the On switch was.
‘We’ll see,’ you say, non-committally.
You are a genius.
Jeremy, you instantly twig, is a know-it-all. LifeBuilder, the new game, won’t run on his PC (personal computer), so he’s dragged you and his sister — Jessica! — into your study and turned the computer on, then keyed in some commands.
You see you can play this cleverly.
‘Show me you can do it on your own,’ you tell Jeremy — your son — ‘as if I didn’t know anything.’
Jeremy likes the game. You deliberately mismanage sitting in the chair, and adopt a Goofy expression.
Jeremy and Jessica correct you. Jessica rearranges your features like plasticine. Jeremy swings the chair round until you’re facing the screen.
The children want to get LifeBuilder running, but you first have them show you other things. Of course, seven-year-olds can’t run a business. But they can tell you what the business is. You pretend to think you’re a dustman and scan the screen for files relating to bin-liners and Christmas boxes. Jeremy gets tired of the game before Jessica, but still explains to you what some of the oddly codenamed files on your computer actually relate to.
You’re a genius, but you’re in trouble.
Keith Marion — you — is some sort of international trade negotiator. Fluent in French, German, Spanish, Japanese and, probably, fucking Klingon. He has deals going in countries whose capital cities you can’t even name.
As the children start LifeBuilder, you sit back and worry.
The game is weird. The player has to furnish a house and allot time, money and effort to puzzles relating to work, spouse, children, hobbies and sleep. If the balance is wrong, the player goes bankrupt or has a nervous breakdown. It’s a bizarre thing to put a child through. And it’s what you’re now going to have to do. Without knowing the commands or the rules.
After the twins are in bed and you’ve eaten the best cooked meal you’ve had since you left home — Rowena keeps apologising for not being as good a cook as you, promising another impossible hoop to jump through in the near future — you snuggle on the sofa with your slightly tipsy wife, initiating clumsy foreplay which must be as familiar to her as it is strange to you. Can you go through with this? Won’t she notice if her husband is suddenly making love to her as if it were the first time, either awkwardly or explosively? And will that be a disappointment or a revelation?
You are overwhelmed by desire.
You and Rowena — Ro, you call her, which slips by unremarked and is probably right — make love on the sofa, then go upstairs and do it again in a canopied bed.
She doesn’t remark on the strangeness of this. That suggests the other Keith has had a far more satisfying sex life than you. When was the last time you and Marie-Laure got it together? Weeks ago.
Lulled together, not quite asleep, you play the card you’ve been saving.
‘I’ve decided to slow down,’ you say, ‘to take things easy, spend more time with you and the kids. I don’t want to miss out by obsessing over the business.’
This is a set speech from LifeBuilder.
Ro stiffens in your embrace. You worry she has played the game too and recognises the line. Then she relaxes.
‘I love you,’ she says.
‘And I love you,’ you reply, wondering if you mean it.
As weeks go by, you pick stuff up. Things bleed into your mind, including scraps of Japanese and memories of this life. You got here by being able to remember, but that faculty is clouding. Life in the flat with Marie-Laure seems distant, a phantom. You tell yourself that was the dream and this is the way it was always supposed to be.
You get through meetings and discover resources. You find your Idiot Act versatile, working on adults as well as children. People think you get them to tell you things you already know as a way of forcing them to think them through for themselves.
You work out who your friends are.
The biggest surprise is Victoria, whom you now have to think of as VC. Here, she’s a successful pop singer, not a near-crusty drop-out. Your family — Mum, Phil, James, Laraine — are the same people, but think a lot more of you.
Otherwise, no one from your old life is here. After all, there weren’t many people.
You wonder if you should try to discover what happened to Marie-Laure without you. You even ask Rowena if she remembers Marie-Laure from school, but she doesn’t.
Piecing it together, you see you diverged from the old Keith by passing the Eleven Plus. Now, new memories overlay the old like cobweb curtains. They grow thicker. Soon, the Keith who did nothing will be buried.
That thought makes you panic a little.
One night, you are all — as a family — watching TV, the Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This Keith, who has spent less of his life watching the box, has never seen it before.
Screen characters seem insane when they claim close friends and relatives have ‘changed’. They look and act the same, but are somehow ‘different’.
During one of these scenes, Jessica looks at you with a sudden cold stare. The moment passes but it stabs you. Your daughter doesn’t put it into words and may not even formulate it as a thought, but on some buried level she knows.
Game over?
Nothing like that ever happens again. If anything, you’re the one who feels your family are strange. You have inherited love for Ro and J and J, but they seem pretend people. They have joys and darks, but are somehow less real than the family you occasionally dream of.
One day, fingers flying over the keyboard, you systematically delete every file on the hard disk and wipe the back-ups. You seriously damage the business.
‘What were you thinking of?’ Ro asks.
You get over the problem, piecing it all together, but it means long hours of panic.
You think of other things that can be broken.
But not reassembled.
You play with this life until it falls apart.
It was a good game while it lasted.
And so on.
Begin again?
106
Over supper, Sean chatters about a breakthrough with the Discount Development. It’s a municipal project Hackwill is masterminding, a big investment which will make several people — including Hackwill, and maybe even Sean — a lot of money. It sounds dodgy: if you weren’t preoccupied, you might consider researching it for an article. Your previous pieces have tended to concentrate on corrupt Tories, but you personally hate Robert Hackwill more than any Conservative politician except Margaret Thatcher.
At first, you let Sean rattle on. Then you get paranoid and worry Sean will twig that there’s something amiss. You and Laraine, thinking as one, start smiling brightly and asking questions. Your sister is your mirror. You realise you’re both overdoing it, eyes a little too gosh-wow, fascination with finance a little too pat. Sean is so wrapped up with the intricacies of the planning that he doesn’t notice. But he will, i
n the end.
You have a blazing need. You want to make love with Laraine again. She feels the same way.
Sean talks about cross-collateralising loans. He sprinkles his technical talk with ‘and you should find this interesting, Keith’ and ‘by the way, Laraine’. Every time he uses one of your names, it’s like a tiny bullet in your heart.
You take Laraine’s hand under the table. Her grip is as fierce as yours.
You both nod and smile and question.
Sean displays for you. You’d like to stick a meat-fork in his heart and fuck your sister/his wife on the dining-table before his cooling eyes.
Is this madness? Or just love?
‘Very nice, darling,’ Sean comments as the last of the home-made ice cream disappears into his fattening face. ‘Would you make us coffee?’
Laraine lets your hand go and meekly gets up.
Is this how Sean treats her? Like a waitress or a maid. No ‘Wonderful dinner, honey-lamb. I’ll make the coffee and take care of the washing up.’ No ‘Don’t stir yourself further, dearheart. I can look after myself.’
Sean is a cunt.
As Laraine makes coffee in the kitchen, Sean escorts you from the dining-room to the living-room. He wants to show you the gadgets attached to his ‘home entertainment system’. He always has to be the first to buy something. He plays Genesis, and twiddles the knobs to make the music come from different corners of the room.
Laraine brings in coffee on a tray.
You and Sean sit on the sofa — where this afternoon you and Laraine oralled each other before going upstairs — and Laraine pours out coffee from the pot.
Sean sighs with the satisfied smile of a man whose world is revolving perfectly.
Laraine perches on a low chair, coffee cup on her knee, a strand escaping from her tied-back hair. When she bends forward to take a lump of brown sugar from the bowl, her neckline flops a little.
You catch Sean looking down the top of Laraine’s dress. It surprises you that a married man will still try to sneak a glance at his wife’s breasts.
What a bastard.
After his second cup of coffee, Sean goes upstairs for a piss. While he’s out of the room, you french-kiss Laraine, intensely, briefly, passionately. As you tongue each other, you cup her warm breast in one hand.
You break apart at the sound of the flush.
Sean comes down and says, ‘More coffee, darling.’
It’s not an offer. It’s a request. Laraine goes back to the kitchen. Sean sprawls on the sofa, almost as if drunk — though he only had a bottle of beer with the meal — and looks up at the low ceiling. He is proud of his directional lights, installed round the edges of the room so people don’t bump their heads on fixtures hanging from beams.
In the old fireplace — the sixteenth century heart of a house knocked down and rebuilt many times over the years — Laraine has set a wood fire. Your attention is drawn to the brass poker hanging next to the wood-tongs from hooks set into the stone. You remember your vision of Sean wielding the poker.
You are, for a moment, afraid. Not of what Sean will do, but of what you might do. And Laraine.
She comes back with more fucking coffee.
You’d like to see her pour it scalding into Sean’s lap, boiling his cock. Or dash it into his face, burning out his blasted eyes.
You are quivering.
At the end of the evening, you leave.
‘Come back soon,’ Sean says at the door, conventionally.
‘Yes, Keith,’ adds Laraine, with an intensity her husband misses, ‘do.’
You shake Sean’s hand and kiss your sister’s cheek.
As you get into your car, the porch light goes off. You sit in the Beetle, engine not yet on, and try not to think of anything.
Will you go back?
If you continue the affair with Laraine, go to 113. If you resolve that this will never happen again, go to 122.
107
You’d forgotten so much and here it is.
James runs around like a dervish and Laraine sighs at her brothers’ ‘immaturity’. You’ve discovered your pirate’s chest, and the scraps of home-made maps are genuine treasures.
Dad is alive, striding about the house like a giant, booming comments, distantly affectionate. Mum is younger than you remember, scarcely older than Marie-Laure, disturbingly pretty with her ’60s helmet of blonde Lulu hair.
It’s like having Christmas again.
Of course, everyone thinks you’re gone potty. Every minute affords fresh rediscovery. Objects taken for granted seem magically evocative: here’s a vacuum cleaner you think of as an antique, there are your Tintin books shelved in order of preference. Even your pyjamas knot you up inside with nostalgia.
But, of course, nostalgia is a yearning for something you can’t have. This is a past you can have, over and over again. You wouldn’t change anything.
You find yourself see-sawing between now and then. The then end of the see-saw is heavily weighted.
You wonder if you could stay in the past.
If you try to stay in your childhood, go to 177. If you let yourself drift back to the present, go to 192.
108
Within six weeks of your marriage, Chris is pregnant again. With twins, Joseph and Juanita. You buy a bigger flat in a less salubrious area. In 1989, house prices in London are insane. The game plan is to move back to Somerset, at least somewhere in the country, before the kids are school-age. You are a PE teacher in the kind of school you don’t want your kids to have to go to. Chris gradually gets back to work on Katie Reed between feeds and nappies and mother stuff.
James sends you cuttings from the Sedgwater Herald.
Hackwill’s house is broken into. Several times. Hackwill’s new car goes the way of the old one. Hackwill’s friends — old ones from school, new ones from his businesses — have skulls and crossbones sprayed on their front door. Hackwill’s wife gets funny phone calls.
Every time Hackwill gets his picture in the paper — about every week — you see James in the background, often cropped just to an ear or an arm.
You’re working too hard to worry about James and Hackwill. Obviously, it’s got personal.
It’s not just the work, the rearrangements, the sacrifices. It’s the twins. All that guff about parenthood. It’s true. J and J are a constant delight, even when screaming and shitting. You’re besotted with them. You never make an equation in your mind between having the twins and not having adventures. Parenthood is a huge, draining, rewarding adventure.
Katie Reed — who campaigned for birth control and called motherhood tyranny — is less of a presence in your home. Chris has decreed your lives should not end with the coming of J and J, but they absorb so much attention, so much enthusiasm. You look at your children and think ‘We made them.’ You have never been happier. You finally think of yourself as a grown-up. You discover maturity by crawling around gurgling wordless love at these wonderful arrivals.
Mum phones to say James is in hospital. He was set on in the street by two men in balaclavas with cricket bats. All very professional.
You want to go down to Somerset at once.
But …
You look at the babies and know they need you here, now.
You try to phone James in hospital but can’t get through. It’s Hackwill. You know it is. And you are out of it.
James gets out of hospital. Mum reports that he’ll be all right once he’s got used to the crutches. Your brother talks with you only briefly.
‘It’s all down to me, Keith,’ he says. ‘I’ll make sure your family is out of it.’
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ you say, knowing how stupid that sounds.
‘I won’t,’ he says. ‘I’ll do something effective.’
The next cutting you receive reports a fire at Hackwill’s home. In a picture, Hackwill surveys the damage, with his wife, Helen. James is in the crowd. An upper room has exploded, making a black hole in the mock Tudor eaves.
The fire took hold in Hackwill’s gunroom and detonated a cache of shotgun shells. Samantha, the councillor’s small daughter, is in hospital, eardrums damaged by the explosion. Her room was next to the fire.
You tell Chris you’re worried about James.
Juanita has an infection. You lose a couple of nights to real worry, listening to her breathe through a fistful of phlegm. You contemplate losing everything. Juanita’s chest clears up.
A petrol bomb is thrown into Phil Parslowe’s shop, destroying his entire stock, shutting down his business. There’s some insurance but not enough. The bank won’t help and insists Phil and Mum keep up mortgage payments on the house in Sutton Mallet. You can’t believe Sean is treating his old boss’s wife, his almost-mother-in-law, like this. But Sean, as James says, is Hackwill’s fuckbuddy.
Interest rates hike again. You have to take extra classes to meet your own mortgage. Chris has to do proofreading and indexing jobs for her academic publisher’s, who have long since given up expecting the promised delivery of Katie Reed, and the twins wring every extra ounce of energy out of you. Life is divided between drudgery and bliss; the latter earned only by an excess of the former.
Reg Jessup is beaten ‘within an inch of his life’ and dumped on the Corn Exchange steps. Hackwill vows the culprit will be caught and claims rampant lawlessness in Sedgwater will be wiped out. ‘There’s a new sheriff in town,’ he claims, ‘and outlaws are drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.’
Joseph gets an ear infection and you think you’ll die. It clears up. You know joy.
One night, late, your telephone rings.
‘Keith Marion?’ The voice is male, flat, neutral.
‘Yes.’
‘Control your family. Or lose members of it.’
Click. Hang-up.
The ringing has woken one of the twins, who wakes the other. Chris, bleary and scraggle-haired, clamps one to each breast — a lovely sight — and gives herself to them.
