by Tim Pears
Sheena wanted the past tidied up, so that the future could proceed without impediment. She strolled back out of the clearing smiling to herself, unbothered by the sun, and through the allotments, back towards her bicycle on the other side of the railway line.
Blaise watched her go. ‘That woman,’ she pointed out to Zack. ‘Do you know what she’s doing here?’
‘There used to be a guy there,’ he said. ‘Mole.’
‘Of course,’ said Blaise. Someone had told her he was camping in scrubland somewhere.
‘We chatted once or twice,’ Zack said. ‘Never mentioned he had an older woman.’
The British Medical Association recommends that for optimum health a person should drink at least 1.5 to 2 litres – six to eight glasses – of water a day.
According to the Natural Mineral Water Information Service, more than eight out of ten people in the UK don’t drink enough water. Ezra typed, nearing what he sensed was the conclusion of his discussion paper.
The bottled-water industry’s potential market is thus still, despite its rapid growth, relatively untapped.
How can we claim that market? Well, in the same way that when motorways are built, cars swiftly appear on them, so it is safe to say that with our consumer profile we could flood the market with increased quantities of our product and see it absorbed. But we want to do much more than that.
It might be expected that if, in Britain, rich people drink more mineral water, so poor people drink more tap water. This is hardly the case. In fact, the poorer people are, the less water of any kind they drink – cash rich (that splendid euphemism) they drink alcohol, tea, instant coffee; colas, flavoured carbonates and lemonades. But not water.
They also smoke more than wealthier people, eat more junk food, take less exercise, are in every way less healthy, and die earlier. Why? Because among them there remains an authentic residue of religious faith: hope of a better life to come – through the Lottery rather than reincarnation, maybe – and a fatalism, an acceptance of today’s meagre existence. Not only do circumstances limit a person’s view of themselves in the world, but lack of education means a limited imagination. Poor people value themselves less than the rich.
If with the right aggressive marketing we can play a part in convincing the poor of this country of their inherent and equal worth, we shall not only conquer the market, but we shall do so as a powerful force for good in our world.
Ezra spellchecked his document and read it through once. He then sent a copy to the Chief Executive, and forgot all about it, and such was his mood in the following days: Ezra Pepin bounded into the office, jovially greeting one and all along the way, worked incisively, moved from one task to the next, and bustled home.
Because home was where real life occurred, in the light evenings after the children had retired reluctantly to their bedrooms to study, read, sleep. Sheena and Ezra stepped out on the decking. Arrayed upon the marble table top were crisps and olives and nuts; tubs of hummus, salsa dip, tapenade; anchovy on toast, new-potato salad. Light tapas-style meals were all they desired, neither of them hungry, as if the words they shared to describe their move nourished them. Or as if it was important not to weigh themselves down, for their bodies to sag their spirits with full and heavy stomachs, as they scanned the brochures, the website pages and the emails – for schools, houses, flights – that Sheena flourished daily.
Ezra would open a bottle of wine, and they would weave the fantastic details of their dream with threads of excited speech.
‘You’ve got everyone growling their way to work every damnable morning,’ Ezra heard himself saying. ‘There’s going to be so much gridlock in ten years’ time that the government are already ordering health trusts to plan policies for reaching medical emergencies stuck in traffic jams.’
‘You mean births?’
‘Right. And heart attacks. Strokes.’
‘Helicopters?’
‘I guess. Yeh.’ Ezra found it hard to stay seated. He got up and paced the deck, glass in hand, his lanky frame a little awkward with excess energy, muscles ill-contained in skin, as if at any moment if he obeyed his body’s impulse he’d vault the balustrade, to land lightly on the lawn and take off into the gathering dusk.
‘And I was thinking, this is England, isn’t it, what a perfect metaphor, all snarled up. And how do people escape? When they finally get to work? Or if they’ve had the good luck and sense to work from home? Through the portals of the net, for Christ’s sake. Into virtual reality. And no wonder. It’s the only space left to us – okay, it’s getting clogged up already, true. But the point is, and why our plan, I mean your plan, darling, is so great is because, is this living? No. It’s not. And that’s what Brazil means to me. A stab at reality.’
They told the children over supper the first weekend. Sheena laid out the plan in the shape of an adventure, made it sound to Ezra, nodding in parental agreement, like they were off on a voyage in search of Spanish galleons.
Blaise nodded intelligently, and said, ‘Brazil? Very good. Yes. Brazil,’ as if this hare-brained escapade were no great surprise to her, she’d been expecting it, in fact, and it was moderately interesting to hear which specific dot on the globe the grown-ups had decided on.
Louie responded to the football lure with an excited, ‘Mummy. Daddy. I’m is David Beckham.’
‘Yes, Peanut,’ Sheena agreed. ‘Ronaldo is from Brazil. Do you know Ronaldo?’
‘Daddy is Ronaldo.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m is David Beckham.’
‘Yes. But Daddy’s not –’
‘Actually I am, darling,’ Ezra confessed. ‘Quite often, when we play in the park.’
‘Yes,’ Louie frowned, still worried they were missing the point. ‘But I’m is David Beckham.’
Hector listened in silence.
‘Well?’ Sheena asked him. ‘What do you think, Hec?’
‘It’s to do with Daddy’s work, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Absolutely.’
‘I knew it. I told you, Daddy. You denied it.’
‘What did you deny, Ezra?’ Sheena wondered.
‘They’re sending you to Brazil, Daddy.’
‘No one’s sending him, Hector,’ Sheena said. ‘And we’re all going, that’s the beauty of it.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Hector scowled. ‘Wait. They’re sending the whole family? Oh. I see.’
‘No one’s sending us. Are you being deliberately obtuse, Hec? We’re going of our own accord.’
‘Hang on, darling,’ Ezra interrupted, laying a hand on Sheena’s arm, as he recognised in Hector his own barely conscious habit of playing for time, sowing confusion in which he might absorb at his own pace surprising information.
‘It’s not my work now that Mummy’s talking about,’ he explained. ‘I’m leaving my job, you see, and I’ll resume the work I had to lay aside back when Blaise was little.’
‘What work?’ Hector asked, eyes widening melodramatically, as if in some movie in which his father was about to reveal a secret career in espionage. On the face of their introvert boy the effect was extremely comical, and it was all Ezra could do to keep from laughing.
‘He doesn’t understand,’ Blaise told her parents, and turned to Hector. ‘It’s those Indians. The jungle stuff. The lost-tribe stories Dad’s been telling us all our lives.’
‘I didn’t know that was work,’ Hector said in a defensive tone. ‘No one told me it was work. I thought they were stories.’
Sheena and Ezra made clear that they weren’t leaving until the end of the summer – not for months – which calmed the children’s anxiety, and made it easier for them to ask questions.
‘Can I take my slide?’ Louie wondered. ‘And the trampoline.’
‘Do you want me to fight or dance?’ Hector demanded. ‘Is capoeira self-defence or disco or what?’
‘Both,’ Sheena replied patiently.
Blaise seemed unworried, calm, distrac
ted. Although this may have had something to do with the Asian boy Sheena also happened to glimpse her with on Churchill Way, walking her home from school. In between Blaise’s sporadic end-of-year exams, Sheena looked for an opportunity to talk.
That hot Saturday lunchtime Blaise said, ‘My head’s crammed full. I can’t get any more in it.’
‘Do you want to come and pick strawberries?’ Sheena asked. ‘The first ones must be ready. I pumped your bike tyres up for you, by the way.’
They cycled across Port Meadow, over the loose drum-rolling planks of one bridge and the steep iron of the next, and on round to Binsey Lane. Sheena wore sunglasses and a floppy cotton hat Ezra referred to as her cricketing one. She knew how unfetching it was, and would discard it as soon as her white skin was a little tanned. Every summer the sun unsettled her. Sheena regarded her body as an efficient machine, she even admired it, but especially so when clothed, equipped for action in tops, leggings, boots. Summer forced her to peel layers of clothing, bare her white flesh. Perhaps, Sheena thought, two years on the beaches of Brazil might be good for her too, might coax more vanity than she allowed herself, as she watched Blaise cycling abreast, a yard or two ahead, her daughter’s almond hair flowing around her nut-brown face, tanned since the first sunny day of the year. As was her body: who knows what genetic shakedown had given Blaise skin that appeared to colour without the need of direct sunlight; the sun shone on exposed areas – her face and hands – and the rest of her body seemed to blush brown beneath her clothes. It was uncanny.
Having shed her grungy and hippieish attire, forgoing her sartorial emblems of allegiance for a summer truce, today Blaise was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of last year’s tennis shorts. She looked to Sheena to have grown half a foot in a few weeks; her legs were clearly too long for the bicycle pedals – Sheena should have raised the seat as well.
‘You don’t have the studious pallor of a girl confined to a dungeon of revision, do you?’ Sheena observed loudly above the rattle of her old bicycle.
Blaise glanced across her shoulder, perhaps to check her mother’s intent from her expression. ‘Just lucky, I guess,’ she said.
‘You take it so lightly, you lot,’ Sheena said. ‘When I think how I worried at your age.’ Sheena could see her daughter smile. What this smile might mean she declined to decipher or interrogate, as they cycled along Binsey Lane.
At the Pick Your Own stall they collected a couple of punnets each from a tall man far gone into middle age who, to Sheena’s annoyance, seemed unable to keep his eyes from straying to Blaise’s youthful legs. His gaze kept being drawn back, as if he’d seen something he couldn’t quite believe and had repeatedly to ascertain was true. Sheena wasn’t sure, as she removed her hat, whether she should feel more irked on Blaise’s behalf or her own. She hoped that her daughter was not aware of the lecher’s attention. But then Blaise did something that seemed to mock such naivety: standing in front of the man, she put the punnets back down on the table, crossed her hands at her waist, grasped the hem of her T-shirt and slowly pulled it up over the top of her head. A pale blue bikini top – like the tennis shorts last year’s – barely secured her developing breasts. With her head bent slightly forward, Blaise wrapped the T-shirt around her hair, with a practised and impressive dexterity, so as to improvise a turban.
Seeing her standing there, her burgeoning youth ill-contained in minimal bikini top and tight shorts, Sheena thought her daughter’s action might provoke the open-mouthed paedophile to blood-draining collapse. But then after a final efficient little twist of fabric Blaise secured her headgear, picked up the punnets, and turned and walked away, in the direction of strawberries which their hapless custodian had indicated.
Sheena trotted after her. ‘What was that?’ she asked as she caught Blaise up.
‘What was what, Mum?’
‘What you just did.’
‘What did I just do?’ Blaise wondered.
‘With the T-shirt.’
Blaise shrugged as she walked. ‘I took it off. It’s hot.’
They squatted along the rows of berries on beds of straw, ripening in the heat. Sheena lifted green leaves to find the crimson fruit, and broke off their stalks.
‘They last longer if you pick them like this,’ she said.
‘What’s the point?’ Blaise asked, sliding succulent berries loose from their fleshy pegs. ‘You’ll only be destalking them in a couple of hours back home.’
Sometimes it seemed to Sheena that Blaise was programmed to say things to make her rise, with little idea she was doing it. ‘No, I won’t,’ Sheena replied. ‘We’ll make the boys do it.’
As they picked they chatted, an intermittent, grazing conversation that touched on grandparents, Brazil, exams, until they were well into their second punnets, and Sheena realised she was running out of time.
‘So, who’s the good-looking young man you’ve been seen with lately?’ she asked, in as nonchalant a voice as she could muster.
Blaise neither blushed nor flinched. ‘No one.’
Sheena tried to inject into her voice a tone equivalent to a raised eyebrow. ‘Really?’
Blaise put a strawberry into her mouth, pulling it off its stalk with her lips. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mum.’
‘I just heard about a boy, called Ahmed or something. That’s all.’
‘Oh,’ Blaise intoned, a long, sighing vowel that suggested how obtuse her mother was being. ‘You mean Akhmed.’
‘Akhmed? Is it important to make that throat-clearing sound when you say it?’
‘It’s his name, Mum,’ Blaise explained good-naturedly. ‘It’s like some foreigner calling you Shinna. It’s not your name. You wouldn’t like it. Your name’s Sheena. His name’s Akhmed.’
‘Is he a foreigner?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, anyway, I heard he was good-looking. Is he Moroccan?’
‘No.’
‘Indian?’
‘I just told you. He’s English.’
‘No, but you know what I mean.’
Blaise glared at her mother, then seemed to change her mind in mid-thought, and shrugged. ‘His parents are from Bangladesh. But Akhmed and all his older brothers and sisters were born here. His dad owns The Raj Cuisine.’
‘On Walton Street?’
‘Right.’
‘We used to go there all the time. Daddy and 1.1 wonder if it’s the same guy.’
‘Probably. I think he’s been there for ever.’
‘But I can’t picture now who was the owner and who were the waiters,’ Sheena said. ‘The waiters were always changing. Daddy might remember. We lived practically next door. Delicious peshwari nan. And their channa marsala side dish. I’ve no idea why we’ve not got a takeaway, even, in years, when Dad could pick one up on his way home from work. Probably all changed now, though. Nouvelle Indian and all that? Fusion?’
‘I don’t know, Mum.’
‘Well. Listen, Bee, anyway, I mean if you want to bring Akhmed round –’
‘Not so much, Mum,’ Blaise interrupted. ‘You’re not hawking up a gob of phlegm. They’re not Arabs.’
‘Sorry, thanks, okay. But if you want to bring Akhmed round, please feel free. I know we’re embarrassing, but –’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘All parents are embarrassing at your age,’ Sheena insisted, trusting, however, the truism was less true of herself than of Ezra.
‘How can you say –’ Blaise began indignantly, but then stopped herself. ‘Well,’ she allowed. ‘Okay. Lose the hat, maybe, Mum. And it is time you bought a new pair of sunglasses. Those are kind of scary. The owl has landed.’
The weather was unsettled: with weak Atlantic fronts and low-pressure centres that roamed above the region; thundery showers broke and fell. There were breezy mornings, and afternoons of rain, after which the urban air filled with the smell of buddleia and lilac, and excrement, a sweet decay underlying the fruitfulness of summer. One e
vening Sheena and Ezra sat outside despite a drizzle pattering on the lean-to roof and murmuring into the lawn.
‘Did Louie show you his Brazil football shirt?’ Sheena asked. ‘I saw it in Next, I couldn’t resist it. I mean, all part of the preparation, don’t you think?’
Ezra rolled himself a cigarette. He’d given up smoking many years earlier, soon after Sheena confided she had begun to imagine the prospect of having children with him. ‘Of course, you’d have to quit smoking,’ she’d added.
‘Maybe,’ he’d said.
‘Let me put it this way, sweetheart: if you don’t, I’m leaving you.’
‘But that is the most unreasonable thing I’ve ever heard,’ Ezra had complained. ‘You can’t just spring something like this on a person.’
‘I don’t mean immediately, Ez. Of course not. What do you think I am? I mean some time. If we’re committed to each other. To having children.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘And if you don’t want children I’m leaving you anyway.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m not having children lose their father to lung cancer.’
‘That is reasonable,’ he’d said, lighting up.
‘Like your mother.’
‘I know,’ Ezra nodded. ‘Although you know she didn’t actually smoke, darling?’
‘Let’s say in about six months’ time?’
‘No problem.’
‘How about the 1st of September, then?’
‘That’s fine,’ he’d said, removing a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Let’s do it.’
And they did. As the date ground nearer Ezra rolled his cigarettes ever thinner, he joined the college gym, he steered away from pubs. At the beginning of September 1988, Sheena put up with a bad-tempered grizzler of a boyfriend for a weekend, during which, she would claim, she tried so hard to palliate – and reward – his withdrawal symptoms with sex that Blaise was conceived.
