by Rachel Joyce
Potts laughs as if this is terribly funny. ‘He has a flight to catch at nine p.m. The TV crew will be here in an hour.’
‘The TV crew?’ Side by side with the devastating news about him leaving soon sits this other detail about the television crew. Sylvia has no idea what to say.
‘They don’t want to do anything special. They just wanna film you, like – being normal. It’ll be cute.’ Potts puckers her mouth as if that last word is spelt quewt. ‘You don’t have to dress up or anything.’
I am dressed up, thinks Sylvia.
She says, ‘Would any of you …?’ (What do you call a bodyguard? How do you address a set of them? Her sisters’ children have never had bodyguards.) ‘Would any of you fellows like to come in?’
‘Nah thanks, Mrs X,’ says one. ‘We’ll just keep an eye on things out here.’
As Sylvia turns to her son, she realizes what is different about him. It shocks her, because the thing that is different is that he is not. Different. He is not different in any way whatsoever. If anything his skin looks slightly grey and oily, a few spots on his chin. His mouth is small and chapped. His face is nothing like the one on the magazine cover. You could walk past X and not notice him.
Potts strides towards her car – it looks more like a tank with black windows – parked in the middle of the street so that nothing can pass. It is only when she is halfway down the path that she turns, apparently remembering a joke. ‘Oh, Merry Christmas, yeah?’
Something happens in the doorway between the hallway and the sitting room. X becomes the boy Sylvia has seen on the television. As she reaches for the door, as she explains that a few of the family have popped by, is that all right, and he says nothing, he only shuffles, she wonders how on earth this is all going to work. But the door swings back, the crowd cheers and suddenly X overtakes her with a fast skip, waving his arms above his head and calling, ‘Hiya.’ The assembled relatives gasp and touch his sleeve and ask, ‘How you are, X, how are you doing?’ and he gives an infectious laugh and says that he is cwool. ‘No shit,’ says Diana. (No shit? thinks Sylvia. Since when?) Pop, pop, pop, crack the party poppers, spewing multicoloured streamers. Whilst everyone else in the room is a dull monochrome, X exudes energy, as if he has been plugged into a generator. Even his hair zings. His fingernails. You can feel the heat coming off him.
And maybe a little of his shine falls over Sylvia too, because as she moves behind him, people step back and lower their heads.
I am the mother, she thinks, of the most famous boy in the world.
My sisters are not.
She takes them a bowl of oriental snacks. ‘The bodyguards are going to stay outside,’ she says.
Her sisters look eaten alive with curiosity. Linda’s eyebrows leap so far upwards they disappear in her slanting fringe. ‘Bodyguards?’
‘Yes. They need to watch out for the camera crew.’
‘Camera crew?’ In her excitement, Diane’s new jacket pops open.
Meanwhile, X signs the arm of the girl who sobbed earlier, and then another, and another, and another. He kisses his aunties Diana and Linda and compliments them on their clothes and hair. (‘Oh, this old thing!’ remonstrates Diana; ‘Oh, my awful mop!’ giggles Linda. They are reduced to girls. What about my hair? thinks Sylvia.) X poses for selfies with all the teenagers, one after another. He pulls faces, just like they do, only instead of appearing foolish, gawky, he looks even more delightful. Reaching Sylvia’s mother, he simply holds her hand.
‘Who is ready for the buffet?’ calls Sylvia, but this time no one turns.
Malcolm watches his son’s progress around the room with his arms crossed and a look of bewilderment, as if the sun is in his eyes.
It is true that something happens to X when he is put in front of a crowd, but it is also true that something happens to the crowd when it is put in front of X. It is a sort of electric combination that amounts to something bigger than its individual parts. But what Sylvia cannot work out is how it has happened. She saw him in the hallway. He was so plain he looked like blotting paper. And now he seems to mean something different to everybody. He is a cool kid to the teenagers; he is a lover to the girls; he is a nice boy to the older relatives; he is a bit of a lad with his aunties. He carries so much baggage, and none of it is his own. And suddenly she can only picture her son buried beneath so many suitcases he is lost to her, which is an irony considering that he appears to travel these days without one of his own.
‘Aww, hiya,’ croons X, spotting the dog and bending down. Even the dog wags its tail and behaves like a proper TV dog. A wave of mobile phones lifts above paper-hat level and click.
Mary marches up to him. She holds out her arms stiffly. It is hard to tell if she is welcoming him or pushing him away. ‘Remember me?’ she asks in her tight, difficult way.
X looks up at her from the floor. ‘Hiya, sis.’
‘Sis?’ she barks. ‘Who are you now?’
X looks around the crowd. ‘X,’ he laughs. And everyone else laughs too. He is X. Of course he is X. What is Mary talking about? The room crackles with a new tension.
‘Do you want a beer?’ she asks.
‘That’d be nice. Cwool.’
‘So go find the fridge,’ says Mary.
X pales and gives a frightened glance around the room as if he has no idea any more how to do something so simple as finding a fridge. If he seemed before to be plugged in to an invisible source of energy, he seems now to have been disconnected.
‘Tim?’ calls Mary.
His face is grey, then ashen. He reels, losing his balance. Even his head looks too heavy. His eyelids flicker, open and shut, open and shut. His body gives a jolt.
‘Tim?’ she repeats.
He crumples, like something folding up on itself, and falls in a heap to the floor.
Sylvia fills a pan with water and sets it on the stove. Her son sleeps at the kitchen table with his head cradled in his arms.
It is Mary who has saved the day. It was Mary who cleared a space around X and called to her parents to help him to the kitchen. It was Mary who made a joke about pop stars not being like they used to be in the old days and had all the ageing relatives laughing into their napkins. It was Mary who shouted, ‘Who likes charades?’ and caused such an uproar when she acted out Carry on Camping that several of the elderly uncles had to be escorted to the bathroom. It was Mary, too, who handed round plates and Christmas napkins and galvanized her aunts into helping her dish out the buffet lunch. It was even Mary who called on her father to fetch his drum kit and found her old guitar in X’s bedroom and led a singalong of Christmas hits. The last time Sylvia popped her head around the door, even the dog was wearing a paper hat and howling in unison.
An hour and a half has passed and Sylvia has just sat with her boy in the kitchen whilst he sleeps. When the door eases open, she springs forward to block the way, but it’s only Malcolm.
‘How is he?’ he whispers.
She thinks of the way her husband gathered his son in his arms and lifted him over his shoulder, bearing him out of the sitting room like the tenderest scrap of a child.
Sylvia says, ‘OK.’ Then she asks how things are in the sitting room and he laughs.
‘Mary’s having a ball. Everyone is. Nobody seems to mind that he isn’t there.’ He collects a few more bottles from the fridge and as he reaches the door he says, ‘I think there’s a TV crew. They’re talking to your mother.’
Sylvia blows Malcolm a kiss and he slaps his cheek as if he has just caught it, and then he slips her kiss into his trouser pocket for safe-keeping.
As the water comes to the boil, Sylvia lowers an egg into the pan and sets the timer. She turns to her son, with his head on the table, his mouth a grey O.
‘Wakey, wakey,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve boiled you an egg for your Christmas dinner.’
He says sleepily, ‘I was meant to do a photo shoot. In a garden of fake snow. I flipped. I said I wouldn’t do it. It was just some photos in
a garden of paper. Why couldn’t I do that?’
‘You’re tired. You’re very tired.’
‘What am I doing, Mum?’ He doesn’t move his head. He just rolls his eyes to show that the thing he doesn’t understand is all around him. From the sitting room comes the sweet voice of Mary singing that she wishes it could be Christmas every day. Sylvia smiles.
She thinks, Thank God it isn’t. Thank God for the ordinary days.
Sylvia fetches the bread and carves off the heel. She butters two slices. ‘When I was a girl I was always following my sisters. Everywhere I went, it seemed they’d already been there. I had to find something they couldn’t do. But what? They could do everything.’
‘So what did you do, Mum?’
She pulls the egg out of the boiling water. She places it in the eggcup and cracks it open with a knife. ‘I became a singer.’
‘You?’
She laughs. ‘Yes. Me.’ She cuts the bread into soldiers and arranges them in a fan-shape on the plate.
‘I never heard you sing.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I was rubbish at that as well.’
They laugh.
Then, ‘I don’t mind what you do,’ she says. ‘I’m still proud.’
Sylvia thinks of the roomful of relatives in their party hats. She thinks of the bodyguards outside and Potts in her armoured vehicle and the young girls in their red fleeces. She thinks of all those suitcases she imagined earlier, piled on top of her son, and in her mind she lifts them up, one by one, and returns them to their rightful owners. And there is one that belongs to no one but herself – a suitcase containing all that desire to be bigger and better than her sisters. In her mind, she picks it up. She unpacks it and puts it away.
Sylvia pictures her sisters – Diane in her new suit, Linda with her lopsided hair – and she feels a surge of such love, such tenderness that her throat tightens. She places the egg in front of her son and passes him salt and a teaspoon.
Sylvia’s heart beats very slowly, very calmly, like a regular plain old heart, as her son eats his boiled egg, like any regular, plain old son.
Trees
On New Year’s Eve, Oliver’s father phoned and asked an unlikely question. ‘Do you know what I regret about my life?’
Oliver said, ‘I’ve no idea, Dad. Never doing anything?’ He was trying to make light of the question because the last thing he needed was a full-blown conversation. Oliver’s girlfriend was feeling sick again. He’d opened the windows in the flat but the air felt thick. There just didn’t seem to be enough of it. Maybe it was because he and Sal were living all the way up on the fifteenth floor.
Oliver’s father gave a soft laugh and changed the subject. So how was the weather?
‘Well …’ said Oliver, staring at the window. The sky was low and heavy and the grey of soft ash. ‘It’s the same as yesterday. And the day before that.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said his father, turning serious again.
‘How is it with you?’
‘Yes, it’s the same with me.’
‘Right,’ said Oliver.
‘Yes,’ said his dad.
Oliver had always felt let down by his father. He still had a clear memory of asking him to make sandcastles as a little boy and his father failing to move from his deck chair. That was his father, all over. He never moved if he could help it. They had spent a fortnight every summer at the same holiday camp and it wasn’t even in the next county, it was half an hour’s drive away. As Oliver got older, he had clashed with his father over everything. Television, politics, music, clothes, language – you name it. When Oliver told his father he’d been offered a place at drama school, his father had carried on reading the paper. Didn’t he know all actors were gay? his father said later. And Oliver, whose eighteen-year-old mind was constantly on women, who couldn’t get enough of them, said, ‘Great. I’ll get out my leathers.’ His mother acted as a bridge between Oliver and his father, and after her death, Oliver rarely went home. He rang every Sunday and they stuck to traffic news or the weather. With those two subjects they seemed safe. Oliver’s previous girlfriend had said he should visit his father more often. ‘I like him,’ she’d said. ‘He’s just a lonely old man.’ But it was all right for her. She’d only met him a few times.
‘Actually I was wondering if you might come over,’ said his father.
‘Now, Dad? It’s New Year’s Eve.’
‘Yes, I know.’ His father said nothing after that. It was as if he were simply waiting for Oliver to change his mind. From the silence, it seemed he was prepared to wait a long time.
Oliver began to feel cold. He’d avoided visiting his father over Christmas by pretending that he was filming. The truth was, he was out of work; there’d been nothing since he’d been employed to leap about as a giant bran flake for a breakfast-cereal commercial. He had no idea how he was going to look after Sal and their baby. Christmas dinner had been beans on toast in front of the TV; afterwards, Sal had gone clubbing. A girl needed a break from being pregnant, she’d said. Along with, ‘I don’t know why I let you talk me into keeping this thing.’
So what was it that his father regretted so much that he needed to see Oliver on New Year’s Eve? Was he wishing he had read a book, perhaps, or gone to see a film, or travelled abroad, or done anything that might have challenged him to think a little more deeply? No, apparently his father regretted none of those things. Instead he said, ‘I wish I’d planted more trees.’
Oliver dug his fingers through his hair. It was what he did when he was confused. ‘Trees?’
‘Yes, trees.’
‘You didn’t plant any trees, Dad.’
His father groaned as if he’d been punched. He gave a series of tiny clicks.
‘Dad?’ said Oliver, beginning to worry.
His father blew his nose. When he spoke, his voice was a broken thing, a querulous whisper. ‘Nobody has planted enough trees. I need twenty of them, Oliver. I need to put things straight.’
Oliver’s father had never mentioned the need to plant a tree. He hadn’t even mentioned growing a flower. He still lived in the house where Oliver had grown up and the back garden was a mix of crazy paving and buddleia, both of which appeared to look after themselves. Once Oliver’s mother had asked for pots to be put in front of the house, because they were nice, they showed a person had style, and his father had filled the narrow strip in front of the window with cement. ‘I thought you wanted it clean,’ his father said, when his mother saw what he had done and shrieked like a fox. ‘I wanted it pretty,’ she said. And his father had scratched his head as if he couldn’t understand how ‘clean’ and ‘pretty’ weren’t the same. He was not the gardening type. If a plant had a blossom he called it a flower and if it just had some leaves he called it a weed.
By the time Oliver arrived at his father’s house, it was early evening and already dark. His father stood waiting at the bay window. He wasn’t even hidden to one side like Oliver’s mother used to be, as if she just happened to be there in the front room inspecting the curtains for small signs of wear and tear and Oliver’s arrival was the last thing on her mind. His father had lifted the nets and parked himself in full view like a human Christmas tree, only a brown-pullovery one and without any lights.
As Oliver opened the gate (hanging on one hinge) on to the small patch of cement (cracked now) and the latch gave the metallic clunk it had always made, he remembered being a child in that house, waiting for something to happen, for life to get bigger; now it was as if everything had tumbled the other way round and he was the father and his father was the boy. He stooped to pass beneath the doorframe, not because he’d ever bumped his head but because he suddenly felt as if he might.
‘Have you got the trees?’ his father called from the front room.
The hall smelt of chicken soup. It always did. The smell was a sort of thick, cloudy presence you began to forget once you’d spent time with it but which always came as a shock after you’d been away. When Oliv
er’s mother was alive the house had also smelt of her, a sweet, busy scent, and now that she was gone the chicken-soup smell all on its own was a forlorn thing, as if it too had been widowed.
Oliver said he had. Got the trees.
‘Are they good ones?’
‘They’re trees, Dad. They all look the same. They’re in the van.’
His father’s socks were drying on the radiator. On the shelf above were several bills and three unopened envelopes from the hospital. TWO DEEP PAN PIZZAS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE (offer does not include stuffed crust). A Christmas card had been propped open with the picture of a girl in snow that had been everywhere since November. Oliver was about to steal a look at the message inside when his father appeared.
‘I was hoping for apple trees,’ his father said. ‘Or silver birch.’ He wore a checked shirt and pullover but he must have done up the buttons wrong because the left side of the collar had got swallowed in his pullover and the lower right corner of the shirt hung down like a flag. His neck was as scrawny as a little bird’s. Had he lost weight? His face certainly had a more solemn look and he had very carefully combed his hair like threads across his scalp. But since when had he become so knowledgeable about trees?
Oliver had already had quite a time of it, with the trees. He’d told Sal about the problem. He’d explained that his father had never mentioned trees before or a need to plant them and that there was something in his voice that had struck Oliver as alarming. She had said, ‘What the fuck? It’s New Year’s Eve. I’m pregnant.’ ‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘I know. But he’s an old man and you’re not due until June.’ It was possibly not a kind thing to say and it had not gone down well. Sal had grabbed her parka and stormed out. ‘Don’t even bother following me,’ she’d hissed. After that Oliver had rung a local garden centre because recently he seemed to have got so many things wrong, he felt the need to do just one thing right. He’d asked the man on the phone all about trees and the man had said he could rustle up twenty if Oliver really wanted them. He seemed eager to talk about trees and promised to stay open for another half-hour, even though it was New Year’s Eve, until Oliver arrived with the van. Great, said Oliver. Perfect. He hung up.
