by Ajay Close
Was it his expression, or hers, that told me?
‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’
She met my eye. ‘Darling.’ It was a plea, and simultaneously an admission.
My voice shook. ‘Tell me they’ve done something.’
‘Later,’ she said.
Being angry with Lilias was hardly new to me, you could call it my default position, but I’d never felt anger like this before. ‘I went to the hospital with you.’
Her face became a mask.
‘How could you be so stupid?’
She turned the full power of her stage presence on me, the resonant voice, the imperious gaze. ‘I said, we’ll discuss it later.’
‘How much later? A day? A week? You’d better make it soon. Who knows how much longer you’ll be around?’
Xavier flinched.
She let the silence grow. Then, very softly, she said, ‘Has it not occurred to you I might have had all the life I want?’
My face must have reflected the absurdity of this statement.
‘I’m perfectly serious, darling.’
‘I’ve never met anyone as greedy for life as you.’
‘We’re talking about the life available to a cancer patient, which is rather different.’
‘You won’t be a patient for ever. You’ll come out the other side.’
‘If there’s anything left of me.’
I had been dealing with the fallout from Lilias’s choices all my life. The stage career she preferred to the craftless trade of television, even if it meant not seeing me for nine months of the year. The suitcases she lived out of rather than end up in some domestic trap. The string of affairs that precluded a life with the father of her child. But this time, she would be the one to suffer the consequences.
‘It’s not a battle of wills,’ I said, ‘you can’t dominate a cancer by force of personality. If you don’t get treatment, you’re going to die.’ I turned to Xavier for support but he avoided my gaze. ‘What – you think it’ll be a magnificent death, is that it? You’ll make a beautiful corpse? Nobody’s watching. In six months, a year, who’s going to remember you?’
‘I rather thought you might,’ she said.
‘I’ll remember you chose to kill yourself rather than admit you’re like everybody else.’
She was beyond embarrassment now, her only hope of saving face a show-stopping performance. Defiantly – magnificently, I suppose – she squared her shoulders.
‘Well obviously I’m not like you. I’m sure you’ll squeeze a few more years out of your body than I manage out of mine, flogging yourself on those machines at the gym, eating like a Bangladeshi peasant so your stools are up to scratch. But what are you going to do with those extra years? You’re so keen on the gift of life – what’s it for? An earthworm is alive. Is that so very marvellous? You seem to think the purpose of life is to get to the end and hand it back as clean as the day you received it, like a blank sheet of paper.’ Her voice switched from scorn to an intense vibrato. ‘I’ve lived my life. Dying isn’t a tragedy for me. It’s you I worry about, you and your clean sheet. Sometimes I think I should have brought you up a Catholic, at least then you’d have sin. What are you: just a collection of cells, a more sophisticated earthworm. My cells may be cancerous, but they’re not me. I’ve made a self out of art, and poetry, and imagination, I’ve nothing to regret. But you? When it’s your turn, what will you be, darling, apart from your dying cells?’
She was finished. She sat back in her chair.
What happens to love, where does it go? How many times had I thought we’re practically strangers, only to be astonished by everything I felt for her? I knew I’d never have exploded with such rage had I not cared, but that didn’t explain why it had to be rage I felt. Why not wordless shock, or garment-rending grief, or a hell-or-highwater resolve to change her mind? Why was I so angry with her, when all I wanted was a place in her heart?
The waiter came by and we declined a second round of coffees. Xavier was pretending to monitor what was happening in the kitchen. Outside the window, light leached from the afternoon. Table by table, our fellow customers put on their coats.
‘Have you thought about names?’ Xavier asked me.
‘Isobel. I have a feeling it’s a girl.’ I took a last sip of champagne. ‘If it turns out to be a boy, I’d like to name him for my father.’
Lilias flexed her lips in a brisk smile. ‘Freya thinks if she knew her father’s name the sun would shine every day and the world would be full of happiness.’
I could see Xavier wishing he hadn’t asked.
‘She thinks it would turn the clock back forty years and he’d be overjoyed to have a daughter.’
Xavier looked startled. ‘Doesn’t she…?’
‘No,’ she snapped, perhaps startling herself, for she added sweetly, ‘whatever you were going to say.’
I had never competed with Lilias for male attention, but then I’d never had such pressing cause. I made my voice low and intimate. ‘Did you ever meet my father, Xavier?’
The question seemed to alarm him. ‘No, I met Lilias after…’ He broke off. ‘No.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘His name, no.’
‘Is there something else you know about him?’
He looked from me to Lilias, his fleshy, handsome face raddled with anxiety. ‘I think you should trust your mother.’
Lilias’s coffee cup clinked as she replaced it in the saucer. ‘For heaven’s sake, is that the time? I have to be at Andrea’s in ten minutes. We should get the bill.’ She treated Xavier to her most winning smile. ‘Unless it’s on the house?’
As if things weren’t bad enough, I bumped into Scott on my way home.
‘The big man not with you today?’
‘No, I’ve only just…’ Got back, I had been about to say, but what sort of husband wasn’t glued to his wife’s side the instant she returned from months away? The sort whose wife hadn’t told him what time she would arrive. ‘I was having lunch with my mother.’
‘Where’s Frankie-boy, then?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Getting his beard trimmed? Buying more of those funky duds?’
‘The thing about Frankie is he’s forgotten more about football than you’ll ever know. He could present that show in a pink tutu and still pull in a million viewers.’
‘Two million in a pink tutu,’ Scott said, but the smirk was gone. ‘Have you got time for a quick coffee?’
‘Sorry, no.’
Our eyes met in a moment of candid dislike.
In a new voice, he said, ‘See this heartbreak-hotel number? You need to tell him, it’s freaking people out.’
I tried to look as if I knew what he was talking about.
‘He needs to put a lid on it, or he can kiss his career ta-ta.’
‘That must be keeping you awake at night.’
An old man was coming down the street. Something about us made him cross the road. Scott waited until he was on the other side.
‘See Frankie and me, it’s like a heavyweight title fight. No one wants to watch the champ take a dive in the first round. You need to give people their money’s worth.’
‘You want him standing up so you can knock him down?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Tell him to keep it in his keks on air. The mid-life crisis threads – aye, OK, if he has to. But this is too much information.’
‘I don’t really think it’s any of your business.’
He let his mouth fall open, revealing his (I now realised) professionally whitened teeth. ‘It’s everybody’s business, man. Frankie’s seen to that.’
I met his glance, which was a mistake. He looked at me as if I’d just handed him the most marvellous present.
‘You’ve not been watching.’
‘I saw it last week.’
‘Right to the end?’
‘It’s nice to see you again, Scott,’ I said, ‘but I’m running late.’
&nb
sp; He stared at me. ‘I told you. Jeez. You don’t know when somebody’s doing you a favour.’
I flagged down a cab.
Soup
The MacKewons were Sligo Irish transplanted to a council house on Glasgow’s south side, a systems-built semi littered with half-drunk mugs of tea and squeezed-out tubes of Deep Heat muscle rub. Mr MacKewon worked on the buildings, a balding man whose looks I found unremarkable until the night I saw him without a shirt. Six of us had trailed back to the house after an evening’s under-age drinking and were sprawled around the lounge, the couples sharing armchairs, Frankie and I on the pouffes, the other four MacKewon boys on the three-seater sofa. We were watching On the Waterfront with the sound turned down. Paul MacKewon had a record on repeat on the stereo. I wasn’t paying much attention until Kevin MacKewon dragged the needle across the vinyl, and Mickey MacKewon knocked him to the floor. The next I knew, coffee cups were smashing and table lamps were flying and Mrs MacKewon was in the doorway in her quilted dressing gown wailing about the shame of it all with guests in the house. Her husband thundered downstairs in his striped pyjama bottoms, calling on Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He was well into his fifties then, but his back was still a solid slab of muscle. My teenage years were crowded with epiphanies, and this was one: the father as Yahweh, forcing himself between the fists and feet of his strapping sons.
The MacKewons were famous pub brawlers. Picking a fight with one meant taking on all five, but there was always someone spilling a MacKewon pint or eyeing a MacKewon girlfriend or doing nothing very much in a way a MacKewon could take exception to. Frankie explained that these rammies were recreational, all parties rose from their beds next morning none the worse for wear, but I was glad when he outgrew them. They were a likeable family: quick to throw a punch and as quick to throw their arms around you, downing a skinful Saturday night but always scrubbed and sober for Mass on Sunday. Ravenously hungry, even by the standards of teenage boys. Always a couple of them in the kitchen frying gipsy toast or slathering golden syrup over slices of pan bread. There was something about them that was not quite of the late-twentieth century. They had their Celtic season tickets, their muddy trainers, their second-hand electric guitars, the old banger that spent more time in bits in the front garden than it did on the road, but not one of them was going to complain that his childhood fucked him up. You could smell the love on them, even when they were throwing table lamps at each other. Why else, at an age when our classmates skulked alone in their bedrooms, were the MacKewon boys still crammed into that three-seater settee?
‘He does what?’ Lilias said, when I told her Frankie’s father was a steel erector. She couldn’t quite believe a television journalist with a degree from Glasgow University could come from the same stock as an electrician, a plumber, a plasterer, a carpenter, and a scaffolder with what she termed a ‘bog-trotter accent’. Never mind the seventeen uncles and aunts and the sixty-eight cousins. But even she succumbed to the MacKewon charm in the end. For me, the MacKewons were one of my husband’s great attractions: an off-the-shelf family, gloriously ordinary, the least neurotic people I knew. Of course Frankie wasn’t quite the same as his brothers, and even as I was marrying into his family he was marrying out of it, but when I pictured the child I would deliver to the world – her freckled nose, her clear green stare – it was MacKewon genes I gave her, even when I’d believed the seed was Kit’s.
I rang the bell to see his face light up when he realised it was me, but he wasn’t in, so I took out my keys.
The door slammed shut behind me. Too late, I remembered the fragility of the stained glass, closing my eyes for a second before turning around to check. It had survived. The newel post caught my shoulder as I walked past. The kitchen was spotless. No crumbs on the countertops, no dishes by the sink. Had he finally learned to clean up after himself?
There was a note on the table:
Ruth in labour! gone to watch the kids till K gets back
Soup in the pan
I lit the gas and went upstairs to unpack.
The broth steamed like molten lava, more solid than liquid. I bent over the bowl and felt its fierce heat on my face. Leeks, peas, lentils, pearl barley, carrots sliced fine as two-pence pieces, dissolving cubes of potato. I disturbed the smoking surface with a spoon, wondering if the metal would bend, if a fingertip dipped for a second would blister. I wanted punishment, tissue damage to the roof of my mouth, the secondary burn of the pepper. What I got was the comfort of starch, a lump in my throat as if an arm had been wrapped around my shoulders, or a tartan blanket on a chilly day. As if someone I had done an immeasurable wrong were saying there there, never mind, have a good cry.
Ruth’s baby was a girl, ejected into the world around the time Frankie was scribbling his note to me. They called her Mhairi, pronounced the Gaelic way. Kenny floated home a few hours later, clutching a bottle of Laphroaig and the obligatory cigars. By the time Frankie rolled in I was asleep. We drove to the hospital next morning, and he gave the new arrival his pinkie to hold while Ruth and I dusted off the old jokes. (‘I always knew you had it in you.’) We didn’t feel properly alone until we left the car park.
‘Can I drop you somewhere?’
He was driving.
‘I thought we could have lunch.’
‘I told Stevie I’d go in to the studios.’
‘On your day off?’
‘It’s a heavy week.’
So began the civil period of our marriage. The bathroom floor had never been so clean, the dishwasher so promptly stacked. The chores were a blessing, keeping us busy: the drone of the washing machine, the Dyson, the fan oven, a welcome cover for our lack of talk. It was palpable, his longing to be out of my sight, to escape the enervating stasis of our hours together. After a day or two, I was just as eager to have him gone.
It crossed my mind that he was having an affair. Tell him to keep it in his keks, Scott had said. Plus his lack of interest in meeting up at weekends, all those nights his phone had been switched off, the ‘something’ he’d been about to tell me in the fruit shop that I’d never followed up. I remembered his hand on Christina Agostino’s waist. There was a type of woman who loved the idea of hanging out with the guys in the locker room. Half pin-up, half tomboy: the sort who always knew a filthier joke, who bought her round and didn’t switch to mineral water halfway through the night, who could take a man to ecstasy and understand the offside rule. There were a dozen Christinas in his office, he could have been sleeping with any of them. But I knew he wasn’t.
On Wednesday I stayed up to watch Midweek Round-Up. It was his turn to chair the ex-players’ panel, paraphrasing their wittering into semi-coherent analysis. His shirt was too tight, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen him wear on screen. He made a joke about Jan Rensburg’s match fitness and the latest red-top kiss-and-tell, scored a couple of good-natured hits against Scott, and the final credits rolled over a collage of the week’s best goals. A typical show. I was about to switch off when I realised that, instead of the usual trailer for some soap opera or comedy-drama, Frankie was still on camera. Despite the semi-darkened set, I knew it was no technical hitch.
He leaned in to the lens, his face filling the screen. ‘You still here? Good stuff, I was wanting a wee word.’
I had a bad feeling about this.
‘Now maybe you’re thinking it’s going to be a word like “rat”, or “skunk”, or maybe a bigger word like “betrayal”. I’m hearing those words in one or two bars on London Road, after a wee refreshment, but let’s keep the heid and talk about loyalty. Fidelity. I know, I know: it’s the twenty-first century, the world’s moved on. Everybody wants to do that wee bit better for themselves. More money. Bigger league. Aye, there’s better squads than Celtic if you go looking, but the magic combo, that chemistry together: that’s something else.’
It didn’t take long to find out what he was talking about, the story was all over the net. Liam McVay had fined Jojo Damer two months’ wages for a n
ightclub brawl. Damer had got himself signed off sick. Ajax and Bayern Munich were sniffing around. There were grown men and women in the west of Scotland weeping actual tears, but everything there was to say had already been said twenty times over, so Frankie had come up with this.
‘I’m not going to try and tell you what to do. It’s your call. There’s not a team in Europe’s going to turn you down. Spain, Italy, France. Great food, decent weather. There’s a cost, but. I’m not talking about eleven million, I mean the human cost, people’s feelings. People who’ve stuck by you for years. Fidelity. And aye, OK, maybe it wasnae always perfect, but it was good.’
No, I thought, he wouldn’t do that, but it wasn’t just the words. There was the green of his eyes like lasers in the gloom, the intimate business of muttering in the dark.
‘You fancied something different. Who doesnae? Same old same old, week in, week out. I’ve been tempted, I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t. But I never did anything about it, and I had plenty chances. Loyalty. I wouldnae put a dog through what I’m going through the now. Not sleeping. Nae appetite. I get up, go to work,’ he shook his head, ‘cannae concentrate. I’ve got this pain, here,’ he clapped his chest, ‘I thought it was just something they put in songs – aye, I know: you heard it last week, I’m like a cracked record,’ his voice was barely a whisper, ‘you’ve broken my heart.’
I remembered sitting in Margo’s kitchen with the phone to my ear the night I told him I was pregnant, listening to him sobbing. I’d thought it was relief after wanting a child for so long. I had to admit Scott was right: it was everybody’s business now.
Fungus
The meals we had eaten with Kenny and Ruth spanned two decades of culinary fashion. The false dawn of fresh pasta, the stir-fry years, warm salads, seared tuna, sashimi, polenta. The miraculous discovery that any old muck tasted better with enough olive oil. Ten years ago we had sat into the small hours of the morning talking politics or music or films. Now we did lunch at ours, or early supper at Kenny and Ruth’s. She’d be up with Mhairi half the night, and the other two woke at six.
