by Tim Pears
‘Give a person time alone to come to terms with being a year older,’ he’d say. ‘To consider where they are in their lives, and what it means. Don’t overwhelm them with the noisy gifts of celebration before giving them this precious one. It’s a matter of discretion.’
So that supper, to be eaten all together at six o’clock, was approached by each member of the family with a sense of anticipation that had been brewing all day.
Before going to work at noon Sheena had come back home and made a chocolate cake in the shape of a hedgehog, whose chocolate icing she covered in chocolate buttons, halved and sticking up like spikes, with a glacé-cherry nose and coffee beans for eyes. Louie was now helping his mother lance fourteen candle holders between the buttons, through the icing to the sponge.
Ezra came through the door breathing hard. ‘I’m not late, am I?’ He kissed Sheena and Louie. ‘Well done, you two, that hedgehog looks well and truly spiked. Do I have time for a shower?’
‘I’m not sure about this,’ Sheena said. ‘We had a terrific row this morning. Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘Well, it wasn’t a row, exactly.’
‘We played ping-pong. She didn’t mention a row.’
‘I don’t know what it was. We’ve not spoken since.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know. She accused me of having brainwashed her into joining the campaign. How glad she was they’re building houses on the Wasteland.’
Ezra stepped towards his wife. ‘You look tired, darling.’
Sheena stepped back, pushing him away. ‘Well, actually, you, for that matter, look exhausted. I’m fine, Ezra. This is not about me.’
‘Blaise is probably ambivalent about being another year older. Fourteen. It’s a difficult time in anyone’s life.’
‘Yes, well, it wasn’t very nice. Don’t blame me if she sulks all the way through supper.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Upstairs. And no, you don’t have time for a shower. Louie, can you go and tell Blaise and Hector it’s time to eat.’
Ezra dropped his briefcase and jacket on one of the living-area sofas.
‘Can you hide this?’ Sheena asked, handing him the cake.
‘Sure. Oh, and I put a bottle of Prosecco in the fridge this morning.’
Toad-in-the-hole was Blaise’s favourite, and the only vegetables she’d always eaten, right through from infancy to the present, were roast potatoes and Bird’s Eye frozen peas, and as these were arranged before her she responded with a smile that to Ezra seemed to wipe all the pressure and distortion of adolescence right off her countenance.
‘Oh, Mum,’ Blaise beamed. ‘My favourite. And gravy too.’
‘Meat?’ Hector queried, as if he’d never seen a tray of sausages embedded in batter before.
‘Don’t fret,’ said Sheena. ‘Can’t you see those two veggie ones for you?’
‘And me!’ Louie chimed.
‘No, Peanut,’ Ezra told him. ‘You like the chipolatas from Feller’s? Those are the ones you like.’
Ezra opened the wine, condensation on the green bottle, and he poured a glass for Blaise with the bow of an obsequious waiter, a tea towel draped over his forearm.
‘Would the señorita care to try the wine?’
‘No, thanks, Daddy.’
‘You like I justa pour?’
‘I don’t want wine, thanks.’
‘Oh. You sure?’ Ezra straightened up. ‘I thought you might like a little on your birthday.’ He moved around the table.
‘I’ll have some,’ Hector volunteered.
‘Sure.’
‘Ezra,’ said Sheena. ‘He’s eleven years old, remember.’
‘Almost twelve!’
‘If it’s Blaise’s birthday,’ Sheena pointed out, ‘you must be eleven and three-quarters exactly, Hector.’
‘You might as well say almost ten,’ said Blaise.
‘Let me see,’ Hector said to his sister. ‘Is eleven and three-quarters as close to ten as it is to twelve?’
‘Yeh, all right,’ Blaise conceded.
‘I mean, that is quite a three-pipe problem, Watson,’ Hector persisted.
‘That’s enough,’ Sheena told him. ‘Let’s remember it’s someone’s birthday.’
‘He can have half a glass, then,’ Ezra suggested.
‘It’s a school day tomorrow,’ Sheena told her husband. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’
Hector’s eyes widened above a thin-lipped smile as his father poured. The bubbles frothed a brief foam in the champagne flute.
‘Actually, I don’t like alcohol, really,’ said Blaise.
‘All the more for us,’ Ezra smiled weakly, pouring some for Sheena.
‘I’m not even sure why people drink it.’
‘You’ll probably learn in time,’ Ezra told her.
Blaise shrugged, like it was all the same to her what other people did. ‘That intoxication. Why do people want it? Isn’t the perception that nature’s given us good enough? I don’t understand, that’s all, Daddy. I wish I did.’
‘It’s a treat, darling,’ Ezra laughed.
‘Yes, but you and Mum have it every day.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Sheena.
Ezra put his elbow on the table and scratched his forehead. ‘Surely not.’
Blaise tucked into her food. ‘This is so yummy,’ she said.
‘Well, cheers,’ Sheena said, raising her glass, which Blaise saluted with water, Louie with apple juice.
‘Chin-chin,’ said Ezra, clinking glasses with Hector.
Blaise wasn’t challenging them, Ezra accepted as he ate: she genuinely didn’t understand why people drank alcohol, and it wasn’t her fault that her enquiry made her father feel a little louche.
The bubbles in his Prosecco less tickled than irritated the top of his mouth.
‘I’m surprised,’ Hector said, looking across at his sister, ‘that you eat these sausages, actually.’
‘Hector,’ Sheena groaned, ‘don’t bring this up again. Didn’t we agree to live and let live?’
‘It’s not halal, is it?’ Hector persisted.
‘We eat meat,’ Sheena said. ‘Once or twice a week. We buy free range, we buy organic. You know that, Hector. That’s our deal. Your father agrees.’
‘Who, me? Absolutely.’
‘You don’t have to, Hec. That’s fine. Leave Blaise alone. She can make her choice too.’
Blaise stared at her brother with narrowed eyes.
Hector turned to Sheena and said, ‘Okay, Mum. Shall we get our presents now?’
‘Yes!’ said Louie. ‘And me!’
‘Happy Birthday to You,’ they sang as Ezra and Louie came in from the hall bearing the hedgehog cake.
Blaise let Louie help her blow out fourteen yellow flames, which they accomplished impressively, only for the candles to reignite with a magical impudence. And though they’d used such candles many times before they all acted amazed, for Louie’s sake and for their own. Blaise and Louie blew them out again, and again the flames burst up. Sheena shrieked, Ezra cheered, Hector accorded the company his indulgent crooked smile.
‘Shall I carve?’ Ezra volunteered. ‘Wait: I don’t suppose you’ll want any hedgehog meat, Hector, will you?’
They ate the chocolate cake with a pot of tea. Blaise licked her fingers one by one, then opened her presents. From Sheena and Ezra an amethyst necklace from Port Meadow Designs, and a £50 voucher for a clothes shop on George Street. ‘Thanks, Mummy,’ Blaise said. ‘Thanks, Daddy,’ and she kissed and hugged them politely.
From Hector a CD by Television, a seventies band apparently enjoying a revival. Ezra suspected he’d once owned an album of theirs himself – this very one, possibly; it might even still be in a cardboard box of vinyl, in his old room in his father’s Wiltshire cottage.
Sheena said she’d never heard of the band. Ezra didn’t believe her.
‘You know The Ramones, th
ough, right?’ he demanded. ‘I must have played you loads of their songs.’
Hector leaned towards his father in a confiding manner, with a serious expression on his face. ‘I like them, Daddy,’ he said gravely. ‘They’re very good, actually.’
Sheena made a face that signalled her complete disinterest. ‘Never,’ she said. She sat back, observing: an idea, she realised as she watched her family, was forming itself.
‘Thanks, twerp,’ Blaise said, and she and Hector gave each other a kind of emblematic hug that reminded Ezra of Minty Carlyle’s, except that the same degree of contact implied opposite intent: hers of greater intimacy, theirs of a mutual restraint from siblings’ enforced familiarity.
From Louie a tube of tennis balls, and in return, kind of, there was a present for him from everyone, a new hexagon-patterned plastic football; and for Hector a new pair of swimming goggles, which he promptly put on, and wore for the rest of the evening. Birthdays were occasions of joint celebration in the Pepin household.
As Sheena watched one and then the other of her husband and children, she seemed to see them as being both individuals and members of a family with a clarity that was entirely new. They were of the same flesh and blood, living in a web of symbiotic relationships – yet each one was also an autonomous individual, with needs entirely separate from the others. ‘Well, of course,’ Sheena said to herself, but still, this truism shone in her mind with the lucidity of a revelation, and it gave her the answer to Ezra’s needs. As they sat there around the kitchen table, watching Blaise open her presents, a proposition came to Sheena: just as his family had – as Simon perceived – made Ezra a heroic prisoner, so it could provide him with the escape. Yes. He could take them with him.
There were more presents for Blaise: from her godmother, Jill, and godfather, Ian, a joint present, a digital video camera; various gifts from maternal grandparents, from uncles and aunts and cousins. And a Jiffy bag with the spidery handwriting and the Devizes postmark of Grandpa Clive Pepin.
‘Wonder what’s in there,’ said Hector, as he left to test his goggles in a deep bath, tottering a little tipsily towards the stairs.
‘What could it be?’ Blaise agreed, tearing the bag and then a small package open, to reveal (along with a characterless birthday card. A deteriorating scrawl across it, To Blaise, with love from Grandpa) a box of After Eight mints, which Ezra’s father gave each of the children every birthday; and which Blaise now ritualistically handed over to her parents, in exchange for its cash value, rounded up to a five-pound note.
7
The Best Idea You Ever Heard
Tuesday 24 June
Sheena was right, Ezra conceded as he yawned through Louie’s bedtime read: he was dog-tired. Between his eyes and the inside of his eyelids he could feel minuscule granules of grit. Insomnia and the outlay of energy involved in the presentation yesterday had drained him. Today was a restless snarl of phone calls, faxes, emails to get the prototype bottle into production as soon as possible. Word had come down from on high early this morning: plant capable of such a process needed to be in place by the end of the summer. What kind of quantities, and in which location, did not appear to have been decided, so that Ezra and Chrissie Barwell had an impossible task: to put together variable speculative tenders and offer them to appropriate companies for provisional costings. It had been an unreasonable and exhilarating day’s work – sandwiched in the middle of which was a seven-game ping-pong thriller, on his daughter’s birthday.
‘What will you dream of?’ Ezra asked his son.
Louie lay in bed, embracing his new football. His eyes wandered the room. ‘It’s a secret,’ he decided.
‘Sleep tight.’
‘Don’t let bed bugs bite.’
‘Night, darling.’
Ezra repaired to his desk in the spare room to plan a schedule for the following day. He’d taken the unusual step of emailing home various documents to deal with in peace. But Sheena was using the internet on the computer downstairs, and it would break their unspoken pact if he insisted upon the need to use it for his work, would in an instant elevate his job to a position of preposterous importance. And Sheena, to be fair, never used the home computer for Home Holidays business.
When he’d done as much as he was able to, Ezra looked out and saw the sun had gone down. From the window by his desk he could glimpse, beyond the chimneys and aerials of Blenheim Orchard and Waterways, a patch of Wytham Wood on the horizon: between the black of treetops and the blue-black of sky was a single thin streak of burnt orange. Ezra gently pressed the light switch off, lest a loud click should wake anyone.
He looked in on Hector – he and Louie dissimilar asleep as awake. Floppy brown hair in place, mouth cagily closed, he lay on his back, unnervingly still. It was Sheena’s opinion that Hector had been a sentry in a past life, on some frontier of civilisation: he’d fallen asleep when the barbarians came. As if he weren’t really sleeping now, Hector took a deep breath into his eleven-year-old chest and held it, listening out for evidence of threat. Sleeping still alert, still holding his breath, Hector’s respiratory system working in some mystically anxious way.
Peanut Louie in his room had already started to scuff and strain beneath his duvet, torment scrawled in his three-year-old features, on the very brink, it seemed, of waking, in tears. This was how Louie spent his nights, thrashing about, grinding his teeth, tossing his wild mop of blond hair.
Each morning, though, Louie woke cleanly, and with one slow blink of his eyes wiped away the entire night, a mere blip of neurotic unconsciousness of which he retained no memory, yet which had replenished him fully. Then Louie would jump out of bed and begin rearranging his train track, sleep a brief pause in the vital, self-important labours, never completed, only repeated and refined, dismantled and begun again, of a three-year-old at play.
While Hector would wake in the same position he’d dropped off in, and gaze at the ceiling, before rising slowly, in the regretful resurrection of a tomb effigy. For sleep’s blank intermission had done nothing to alter the world or himself in it.
Ezra kissed Hector’s still forehead. His hair smelled like straw.
Light leaked from the bottom of Blaise’s bedroom door. Ezra knocked lightly.
‘Who is it?’
Ezra opened the door. Blaise was lying in bed, reading: whatever book or magazine it was she slid under the duvet.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Okay, Daddy.’
Ezra picked his way through the junk and detritus across Blaise’s carpet. Clothes were strewn across bed, chair, floor. A being from outer space might have searched for meaning in such chaos, he thought: evidence of passion, a psychological condition, natural disaster? He was the alien, and the meaning eluded him. In recent months Blaise seemed to have threaded her way through a crazed succession of different styles – goth to skateboard hip-hop to retro grunge – trying on masks of tribal youth. Nowadays she tended, as far as he could tell, to mix everything up, in an eclectic rag-bag of her own devising. Ezra hoped that his daughter possessed the self-confidence not to need to belong to any one group; rather that than the gauche aloofness of a misfit. He thought he should mention the violence from the Wasteland. There was surely more to say. But perhaps not on this day.
Ezra reached the bed and sat down. ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he said.
‘Thanks, Daddy.’
‘Does it feel good to be fourteen?’
Blaise shrugged. ‘Good? Bad? I don’t know. Not much I can do about it, is there?’
‘I guess not.’
‘I can’t turn the clock back, or wind it forward, can I?’
‘Would you want to?’
Blaise frowned at her father. ‘Daddy. Why do you ask questions that don’t have answers? You always do. I suppose you always have, all my life.’
Ezra was delighted that Blaise appreciated his enquiring consideration of the complexities of existence. It was a vindication.
‘You as
k, I don’t know,’ she said. Attempting to express what she meant, she tilted her head and screwed up her eyes, as if the words might be hiding along her hairline. She glimpsed them: ‘You ask unnecessary questions,’ Blaise told her father.
Yes, Ezra thought. That’s right. That’s what he did. Perhaps that was as good a definition of civilisation as any. The asking of unnecessary questions.
Blaise said, ‘I should think it drives Mum mad.’
‘Mum?’ Ezra asked, disconcerted. ‘You had a fight today, right?’ he continued, as if by reminding Blaise of it he might tip the balance back in his favour.
‘No,’ said Blaise. But then, Ezra’s eyes upon her, she lowered her head. ‘Kind of.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Nothing.’
Ezra sandwiched his daughter’s right hand between his. ‘Blaise, I know Mum jumps off the deep end. And I know she doesn’t always listen. But if you could just bite your lip sometimes.’
‘I know, Daddy.’
‘You need to be tolerant. That’s what I’ve learned. Your mother sees the world in black and white, Blaise. She’s a passionate person. At any one moment we’re a hero or a villain. Then it changes.’ Ezra rubbed the back of Blaise’s hand. ‘She loves you very much, you know.’
Blaise nodded, her head still lowered.
‘She doesn’t mean what she says when she yells.’
‘She didn’t yell.’
‘It’s not nice, I know that. Just give her a little room. It’s not difficult to do. Tiptoe a little around her. She’s the most wonderful person in the world. She really is.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m just telling you this, darling. I mean, you’re fourteen. You’re not a child. I don’t know.’ Now it was Ezra’s turn to shrug, his hand on the back of Blaise’s rising into the air and opening out its palm towards her in a gesture of self-effacing generosity. ‘It might be helpful.’
Blaise raised her head. She had an odd expression on her face: bemused; indignant. ‘I don’t know, either, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Mum thinks if we do the right thing, the world will be a better place. And she’s right.’ She looked up at Ezra. ‘But what’s at stake, Daddy? Nothing.’
