Matt watches him for a moment, and notes how different he looks when calmly seated. Older, perhaps. More serene. Wiser, maybe. Matt looks at his neat, dark beard, studies, as he approaches, the thick, closely cropped bristle of his hair. God, he’s beautiful, he thinks, now close enough to spot Bruno’s long eyelashes. And as Bruno turns, automatically, to face him, as the Bruno he knows and loves somehow inhabits and animates this face, Matt feels a spurious pang of almost unbearable sadness. He’ll leave me, one day, Matt thinks. He’ll leave me, and I’ll never find another like him.
“Hey!” Bruno says, smiling broadly now. “You find somewhere to park?”
“Sure,” Matt replies as he reaches the table. He forces a smile even though he’s still reeling from the unexpected wave of melancholy. “And the flight?”
“Still not here,” Bruno says. “We didn’t need to rush after all. You OK, hon?”
“Sure,” Matt says. I’m gonna get myself a Coke. You want anything?”
Bruno gives his cup a little wave. “Good here, thanks.”
When Matt has returned and sat down, Bruno says, “I’m quite excited, actually.”
“I know,” Matt agrees. “Me too. I wonder what she’s like.”
“Do you think your ma will be pissed? Because we didn’t warn her?”
“I think she’s more likely to mind the fact that we didn’t ask her,” Matt says.
Bruno pulls a guilty face. “Yeah,” he says. “Still…”
Matt sips at his Coke and then smiles and nods towards the arrivals’ gate. “Actually, they don’t look too upset,” he says.
Bruno follows his regard and sees Alice and Joe bumping along side by side, dragging their suitcases behind them. Joe is hanging onto Alice’s arm and Alice is laughing out loud, apparently, judging by her expression, at something risqué that Joe has told her.
“Mum!” Matt shouts, jumping to his feet.
The two women pause and spin to face him and then, still tittering like two guilty schoolgirls, start to cross the concourse towards them.
Bruno downs the remainder of his coffee and stands to greet them. “So, you must be Matt,” Joe says, laughter still in her voice. “And you, I’m guessing, are Bruno.”
Bruno looks from one to the other, and then glances at Matt questioningly before leaning in to kiss Alice on both cheeks. “Welcome back to France,” he says. “As you can see, we organised a little surprise for you.” He bows towards Joe here then leans in to kiss her on the cheek.
“Wow,” Joe exclaims. “I expected you to be nice, and I even somehow thought you’d be cute. But I certainly never thought there would be so much of you!”
“You see what I mean?” Alice says.
“They say that size isn’t everything,” Bruno replies, now straightening from the kiss.
“Hum,” Matt says. “Not so sure ‘they’re’ right about that. Hello Joe. I’m the short one. Is it Joe or do you go by Joanna these days?”
“Nope. Still plain old Joe.”
Alice looks puzzled. “Joanna?” she says. “It’s Josephine, isn’t it?”
Joe pulls a face and swivels theatrically to face Alice. “Alice!” she says. “Shame on you!”
“Joanna?” Alice says again.
“God! How long have I known you?”
“Yes, she didn’t make finding you easy, did you, Alice? I had to go through all of the Josephines first.”
“Alice actually told you my name was Josephine?” Joe laughs.
“Uh-huh.”
“Not tonight, Josephine,” Joe says, in a mocking saucy voice.
“Oh, give me a break,” Alice tells her. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use your full name. Not once.”
Joe wobbles her head from side to side. “You may be right,” she concedes. “I was never keen.”
“So!” Matt interrupts. “Food, or drink, or home?”
“Home, I think,” Alice says. “I’m not really hungry yet, and we’ve had quite enough to drink.”
“Quite enough!” Joe confirms.
“God, that’s it. I knew there was something. They’re wrecked!” Bruno laughs.
“You’re drunk?” Matt asks, concernedly.
“Not drunk, dear,” Alice says.
“Just slightly sozzled,” Joe laughs.
“Pleasantly pickled,” Alice offers, nudging her friend in the ribs.
“Terribly tipsy?”
Matt groans. “How much have you had?” he asks.
“Just two gin and tonics,” Alice says.
“Two each,” Joe explains.
Matt shakes his head with mock reproach and takes a deep breath. “Come on, girls,” he says. “I think it’s going to be a long drive home.”
***
“Jesus, it’s colder than a caribou out here!” Joe exclaims, reaching for Alice’s arm.
They have just eaten dinner with Matt and Bruno and have chosen to walk the half a mile home.
“They did offer to drive us,” Alice says. “Do you want to go back and tell them we’ve changed our minds?”
“No, it’s not far,” Joe says. “And the night sky is amazing.”
“It is,” Alice agrees. “In summer, I used to lie out on a bed chair and just stare and stare. The longer you look, the more stars you can see.”
“Jesus, though,” Joe says again. “How cold is it out here?”
“About minus two, probably,” Alice says. “That’s what it was last night, anyway. But think yourself lucky. Apparently it has usually snowed by now.”
“I don’t mind a bit of snow,” Joe says. “In fact, I rather like it.”
“Me too,” Alice agrees. “But they’ve been forecasting it for weeks, and it just never happens.”
“I’m relieved the boys are veggie, anyway,” Joe says, after a pause. “I was worried they’d be serving up French food. You know, meat at every meal.”
“Personally, I’m still hoping that Bruno’s parents will bring a turkey. Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a turkey.”
“I suspect that the turkey in question might beg to differ,” Joe says.
“Oh, don’t you start. I have enough of that with those two and their nut this and nut that.”
“That chickpea curry was lovely though.”
Alice nods, albeit reluctantly. “It was,” she says, “but all these pulses they eat give me tummy troubles.”
Joe giggles. “And there was I about to suggest we not bother setting up the sofa bed.”
“You mean sleep together?” Alice asks, sounding shocked.
“I mean share a bed, that’s all. Don’t get your hopes up, love.”
“Hum,” Alice says. “I’m not sure about that. I quite like my own bed.”
“It’s huge, that bed is. It’s a king size, isn’t it?”
“It is, but… Oh, I don’t know. Do you snore?”
“Tell you what,” Joe says. “I won’t snore if you don’t fart.”
“Joe!”
“What?”
“Well! Really!”
“Oh, do loosen up, Alice,” Joe says. “It’s like you’re stuck in the eighteen-hundreds or something.”
They have reached the steps up to Virginie’s house, and Alice pauses, and places one hand on the railings, then quickly removes it. They’re so cold, she can sense her skin sticking to them. She turns to look at Joe. “Is it really?” she asks. “Do I really come across as stuffy to you?”
Joe rolls her eyes and gives Alice a gentle push towards the stairs. “Joke, love,” she says. “Don’t take everything so seriously.”
Christmas Eve - The Alps
The next morning, Alice wakes before Joe. She lies in bed listening to her friend’s breathing, and almost imperceptibly senses the heat of Joe’s body radiating from the other side of the bed.
She asks herself if she feels any sense of desire. It’s not a question that she could ever voice, not a subject she could even think about discussing. Just imagining such a conversatio
n is enough to make her flush with embarrassment.
But alone, in her head, she lets herself ask the question. Does she feel any desire for Joe? And the only reply that she can come up with is that she doesn’t know.
She would like a hug. That much is undeniable. Yes, she would very much like a long, tight hug with someone, and if with someone, then why not with her oldest, long-lost friend? It’s been so long since anyone held her, after all. Isn’t it strange, she thinks, how that desire for simple animal comfort has become so complicated in our modern societies?
She remembers sleeping in her mother’s bed when she was a child, remembers how ecstatic that warmth had felt. She remembers Tim and then Matt, and occasionally both of them climbing in with her when they were little and ill with some bug or another.
And she had loved it. That contact and the love she had felt had been a source of nourishment to her. It was as if she had a battery that needed occasional recharging and could only be recharged through a simple hug with a loved one.
But that had all ended years ago. Ken, who had never been much of a cuddler, who had always been an in-and-out kind of a man, had ceased even his limited demands many years ago (not that she had regretted that coming to an end.) But, no, the truth would be that no one has held Alice in their arms for years. And now she thinks about it, it feels as if that space within her, that battery of warmth and love, has not only been emptied, but perhaps been packed with ice and dropped in a freezer for storage.
So, yes, she’d like a hug. She’d like a cuddle. She’d be intrigued to find out how that feels.
But beyond that, her imagination fails her. In fact, now she thinks about it, she can’t remember ever having felt the desire to “do” anything with Joe, not even back in the day.
She had just thought that Joe was the bee’s knees, that was all. She had wanted to hang out with Joe, and only Joe. She had wanted to hear Joe’s jokes, Joe’s thoughts, Joe’s opinions more than anyone else’s. Which was, she can admit it now, a kind of love.
The first hint of daylight is now drifting through the bedroom curtains, cold and weak and grey. A bird braving the winter somewhere nearby is tweeting.
Joe, apparently asleep, now rolls halfway towards Alice. She throws one arm across her chest.
Alice closes her eyes and feigns sleep so that she can ask herself once again how that feels. And nice, but confusing, is the best she can come up with. But nice. Definitely nice.
It makes her feel younger, for some reason. It’s as if Joe’s presence makes her able to relink the Alice of today with the Alice she had been way back when… She’d almost forgotten that they were one and the same person, but she senses it now. Continuity, that’s the word. She feels a strange sense of continuity between the Alices of past and present, a continuity that, bizarrely, she hasn’t felt for years.
Alice slides gently from the bed and Joe murmurs but doesn’t wake. Alice stands over her, watching her sleep. She smiles gently, then turns to the staircase, at the top of which Paloma is sitting watching Alice. Does she look jealous? Can a cat look jealous? Alice decides that she’s probably just imagining it.
As she approaches the top step, Paloma begins to arthritically clunk down the steps towards the kitchen below. It’s only when Alice reaches the ground floor that she realises that she’s been noticing something in the air without noticing something.
The light is strange. The sounds are strange.
She rushes to the window and looks outside.
It’s snowing.
After breakfast, Alice and Joe crunch their way through the fresh snow to Matt and Bruno’s cabin. As soon as Bruno opens the door, it’s evident that something’s amiss, a sensation confirmed when Bruno says no more than, “Hi,” before turning his back on them and returning to the kitchen.
Alice glances nervously back at Joe, then pulls off her boots and follows Bruno.
In the kitchen, she finds Matt shaking Jarvis upside down. The dog looks like he’s enjoying this new game, but Matt’s face is green-tinged with concern. “What’s happening?” Alice asks, noting the saliva dribbling from the dog’s mouth.
“He ate some chocolate,” Bruno explains.
“Okay…” Alice says. “And?”
Bruno, now crouching down in front of the upside-down dog, glances back up at her. “It’s poison for dogs,” he explains. “Dogs can’t eat chocolate.”
“Oh,” Alice says. “Are you sure?”
“Totally.”
“Can’t you just stick your fingers down his throat?” Joe, who has now joined them, offers.
“Matt tried that, but Jarvis bit him,” Bruno says.
“He didn’t bite me,” Matt protests. “He just… I was ramming my fingers into his mouth, that’s all.”
“I don’t think the upside-down thing is helping much.”
“No, Mum,” Matt agrees, righting the dog and putting him down. “That was Bruno’s idea. But it’s not working.”
Jarvis, still salivating madly, wags his tail and runs into the lounge where he begins to snuffle through the presents below the tree.
“He’s still looking for the chocolate,” Bruno says.
“Maybe it’s not so bad after all,” Alice says. “Maybe it depends what kind of…”
“Mum, it’s bad,” Matt interrupts. “So, just don’t, OK?” He then turns to Bruno and says sharply, “Can you at least go keep an eye on him while I call the vet?”
Bruno turns, and, winking at Alice and Joe as he passes, follows the dog into the other room.
Joe and Alice remain in the doorway listening to Matt’s half English, half French conversation with the vet on one side, and Bruno playing with Jarvis on the other.
“He’s lucky the vet even answers the phone on Christmas Eve,” Joe says.
“She’s a friend of Ma’s, so…” Bruno calls back.
“Yes…” Matt is saying. “Oui. ... Non. ... Chocolate noir. And the wrappers, too. Yes. Um, le chien? About thirteen kilos. Treize, oui. No. I’m not sure, maybe une demi-boite. I don’t know. Mum, can you see what the box weighs? It’s in the bin.”
Alice crosses to the dustbin and pulls the mauled box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates from the bin.
“Oh, what a shame,” Joe says. “I rather like those.”
Alice mockingly offers her the mangled box and Joe wrinkles her nose.
“It’s, um, three-hundred grams,” Alice says. “But he hasn’t eaten half. He’s eaten, I don’t know. Maybe four or five? Out of twenty-four. Nowhere near half, anyway.”
“So how many grams is that?” Matt asks, sounding exasperated by Alice’s lack of precision on the matter.
“Four would be fifty and five would be sixty,” Alice says, information which Matt immediately relays to the vet.
“Wow,” Joe says, impressed. “I hadn’t even started to work that out.”
“I was always good with numbers.”
“OK, right, yes,” Matt is saying. “Oui.”
Alice turns back towards the lounge where Bruno is taunting Jarvis with a squeaky toy. “He doesn’t look like he’s dying, does he?” she says.
Joe just shrugs in reply.
“Right,” Matt says, having placed his mobile on the kitchen table. “We need to get him to vomit. And then if he has any symptoms, we have to take him to the vet on Boxing Day. I need to see if we have any hydrogen peroxide. It makes them throw up, apparently. She said to mix it with ice-cream if he won’t drink it.”
“We don’t have any,” Bruno calls out. To Joe he adds as an aside, “I gave up on the anal bleaching a while back.”
“Anal bleaching?” Joe giggles. “Is that a thing?”
“Apparently so. Big in California. But then, what isn’t big in California, eh?”
“What about in Virginie’s place?” Matt asks. “Do you think she might have some?”
“Is Virginie the anal bleaching type?” Joe asks Bruno.
“Stop it you two,” Alice says. “You’re terrible.�
�
“Oh!” Bruno exclaims. “I think we’re OK, hon!” he calls out.
Matt squeezes past Alice and Joe just in time to see Jarvis’ second bout of projectile vomiting.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Bruno. Why did you let him vomit on my shoes?”
Bruno shrugs sheepishly. “I didn’t want to interrupt him,” he says. “I didn’t want him to lose his train of thought.”
Once the mess has been cleaned up, and once Matt’s trainers are tumbling over each other in the washing machine, they clip the lead on Jarvis’ harness and head across the garden and on into the forest. It’s no longer snowing, but the sky is still a deep, menacing grey colour, the sign, no doubt, of things to come.
Though there is at most an inch of snow on the ground, it sticks to Jarvis’ paws giving him comedy white feet that seem to just get bigger and bigger the more he runs about. The tips of his ears, too, are soon laden with snow.
“Gosh, how stunning!” Joe exclaims when the lake comes into view.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Alice says.
“Like a postcard! Especially with the snow on the trees.”
Bruno, who has given Matt his trainers, is slipping and sliding around in an old pair of cowboy boots. “I don’t think my footwear is best adapted to the meteorological conditions,” he says, reaching for Alice’s arm to steady himself.
“Men,” Alice mutters. “We women spend most of our lives slithering around in silly heels. And you never hear us complain.”
“Speak for yourself,” Joe says.
“What, you do complain, or you don’t wear heels?” Matt asks.
“I haven’t worn a pair of heels in my life,” Joe says. “I never could see the point in them. They’re like that Japanese foot-binding torture thing.”
When they reach the lake, Matt and Joe stride off towards the dam. “I wanted to ask you,” Alice says to Bruno, once they are out of earshot. “Do you think I could buy one of your pots as a Christmas present for Joe? Only I haven’t got her anything. If you have any spare ones, that is?”
“I’ve got nothing but spare ones,” Bruno says. “But I thought you didn’t like them.”
“I don’t, much,” Alice admits. “But I think Joe will. I suspect they’ll be right up her street.”
The Other Son (Christmas Bonus): A short-story length sequel for The Other Son Page 3
