The Other Son

by Nick Alexander

  ‘Yes,’ Natalya says. ‘I expect so. Too much for people like us, anyway.’

  ‘It’s too big as well,’ Tim says. ‘We’d get lost in it. We’d never find the kids.’

  ‘Hmm,’ says Natalya, ‘maybe not a bad idea.’

  Tim puts down his magazine, so Natalya reaches for the remote control and turns the TV sound low. She begins to flick through the channels, but it’s just a distraction, just something to do while she waits for the idea of the house to percolate through Tim’s mind. Because after nine years together, she knows the way his mind works. It’s the same as this hi-fi obsession, which she knows, despite what Tim may say, has nothing whatsoever to do with sound. Houses and speakers are just things to aspire to, they’re just things to grasp for. Grasping and aspiring are the fuel that Tim runs on, they’re why he gets up in the morning. Natalya understands this, because she too works the same way. She too has an infinite list of things they need next.

  Tim sits and stares blankly at the television.

  ‘This guy is funny, yes?’ Natalya says, nodding in the direction of Harry Hill onscreen.

  ‘Yeah,’ Tim says, then, ‘Did you notice which estate agent it was?’

  ‘Um?’ Natalya asks, feigning being distracted by Harry Hill’s bloopers.

  ‘The house in Broseley. Which estate agent was on the placard?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure,’ Natalya says, furrowing her brow, even though she knows exactly the name of the estate agent, even though she has a photo of the placard in her iPhone. ‘Right-something maybe?’

  ‘Rightchoice?’ Tim asks, reaching down the side of the sofa for the iPad.

  ‘Yes,’ Natalya says. ‘Yes, I think so. Maybe.’

  Still half asleep, Natalya rolls to the right, expecting to find the warmth of Tim’s body beside her. But the space is empty, the mattress barely warm. She can hear him moving around downstairs.

  She peers at the blurry numerals of the alarm clock. It’s barely six-thirty. She rolls on to her back and drifts back to sleep.

  When she next wakes up, she can hear him in the bathroom. She realises she’s been dreaming of a rainstorm falling into a swimming pool – no doubt caused by the sound of the shower next door.

  After another ten minutes, Tim appears, naked. She watches him from behind, checks out the cuteness of his arse, his muscular thighs. Considering all the business dinners he goes to, he remains surprisingly trim. He crosses to the chest of drawers and quietly retrieves underwear, socks and a T-shirt.

  ‘You’re early,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, I woke you.’

  ‘No,’ Natalya says. ‘I just wake myself.’

  ‘I’m in London today,’ Tim explains, glancing back at her as he sits on the bed and pulls on his socks.

  He crosses to the wardrobe and takes out his suit trousers, then a shirt – pale blue with white cuffs and collar.

  ‘You’re late tonight?’ Natalya asks.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll probably end up eating with the HSBC boys,’ Tim says. ‘I’ll text you during the day, OK?’

  Natalya watches him button his shirt, then fix his tie. He crosses to her side and holds out one wrist and proffers cufflinks with the other. Once she has attached the ends of his flapping cuffs with them, he attempts to kiss her, but she turns her head sideways. Her mouth is gunky with sleep, and she’s worried about having bad breath. She doesn’t want his wife’s bad breath to be the one memory he takes with him.

  Tim pecks her on the cheek instead, then saying briskly, ‘OK, gotta go, have a good one,’ he leaves the bedroom.

  Natalya lies, listening to the sound of his shoes on the stairs, then the click of the front door and finally the crunching gravel as his car pulls away. A metallic bang from the kitchen tells her that Vladlena has arrived. She can relax – there’s no hurry for her to get up.

  She tries to remember the dream, but it has drifted beyond reach. Only the sensation of warm, wet concrete beneath her feet remains. Perhaps she was dreaming of a pool. Perhaps she was dreaming of the long, thin lap pool beside the house in Broseley. Maybe the dream was a premonition.

  She allows herself the pleasure of luxuriating in that thought. She imagines herself on a sunlounger with Vladlena bringing her drinks. Only Vladlena would never bring her a drink. She would tell her to go and make it herself. Such are the disadvantages of hiring Russian help. All those years of Soviet propaganda about equality have left their mark. So maybe if they do move to the house, they should hire someone new.

  Natalya has always been in two minds about having Vladlena around. On the one hand, their private language – Russian – makes her specifically Natalya’s maid rather than Tim’s. And she enjoys the not inconsiderable sense of power and status that this brings. Everything else in their lives is so very clearly Tim’s, after all.

  On the other hand, the fact that Vladlena can tell – must be able to tell – that Natalya is from the same humble origins as herself always feels like a risk. Any time Natalya criticises her about the state of the windows or the laundry lingering in the washing machine, she imagines Vladlena sneaking off to tell Tim the truth. ‘Your wife is a tramp,’ she might say.

  Then again, the fact of their shared origin also makes Natalya feel better. It’s as if Vladlena is a fixed point in space and time from which Natalya can measure her own progress. They may have started in the same place . . . Vladlena may even be fifteen years her senior . . . But it’s Natalya handing over the cash now. It’s Natalya giving the orders.

  She thinks again of the pool. Maybe if Tim’s business goes well enough, they can keep Vladlena and get someone new in, too. A butler maybe.

  She smiles at the thought, imagining Boris’s friends telling their parents that the Hodgetts have a butler, that the Hodgetts have a pool. Then she would feel like she had arrived. Then she would feel like she had truly escaped and the nightmares would end and she would have dreams of plenty instead – dreams of tables laden with exotic foods instead of that recurring horror of trading favours for chocolate. She can remember the taste of that cheap chocolate even now. She can remember the other taste, too.

  She sighs and forces the memory from her mind. Instead, she imagines the butler, dressed in a dinner jacket, bringing her a vodka and tonic on a tray. She closes her eyes and makes him dark, muscular and bearded. She slides one hand between her legs, then opens one eye and checks the door. Yes, he would have white gloves as well. She closes both eyes and imagines him sliding a smooth, gloved hand up the inside of her thigh.

  It’s the following evening before the house gets mentioned again. Natalya loads then switches on the dishwasher. She dumps the big frying pan in the sink – Vladlena can deal with that tomorrow. Because today has been Vladlena’s day off, Natalya is exhausted.

  As she crosses the hallway, she hears the boys still talking upstairs. It’s almost ten, but they’ve been running riot all day and she’s too tired to care – she leaves them to it. They’re just talking, after all.

  In the lounge, Tim is surfing the Internet. She slides in beside him and he moves his knees so that he can rest the iPad on them and continue to look at the screen while sliding his free arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Ah,’ she says, glancing at the screen. ‘You find it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tim says. ‘Two point eight mill. Bloody nice though.’

  ‘Show,’ Natalya says, and Tim starts to swipe his way through the photos.

  ‘Big pool,’ Natalya comments.

  ‘Yes, and look at the . . . Hang on . . . There! Look at that window,’ Tim says.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yes, wow,’ Tim agrees. ‘Very James Bond.’

  Onscreen in the photo, beyond a vast three-by-five-metre picture window, an empty sunbed has been placed next to the turquoise pool. Beside it, on a small table, is a bottle of wine and a bowl of fruit.

  Natalya imagines herself on the sunbed reaching for the glass of wine. She pictures Tim inside, looking out at her.

  Unbeknown
to Natalya, Tim is imagining exactly the same scene: himself, inside the house, looking out at Natalya on the sunlounger. The only difference in his version is that music is blaring from his new speakers and Natalya is not drinking, but eating grapes.

  The photo reminds him of a Renault advert from a few years back. What had the tag line been? Something about space. ‘What if space was the real luxury?’ perhaps. And suddenly, in his mind’s eye, he’s the guy in the advert, he’s the impeccably dressed man – not suited, just an Egyptian cotton shirt and jeans – reclining on that absurdly long sofa, looking out at his beautiful wife lounging by the pool.

  He glances down at Natalya now, and seeing the tops of her breasts peeping through her low-cut T-shirt, he changes the image in his mind’s eye so that she’s topless on that sunlounger. Topless and rubbing in suntan lotion.

  Natalya is tiny and skinny – has even managed, after many hours at the gym, to lose her baby fat since the kids’ births. She still looks, even at thirty-five, like a top model, albeit a miniature one. She’d look even more like a top model next to that pool.

  He’d be inside, looking out, music playing, something modern, something angular, Apparat perhaps, or if he was feeling good, if things were going well, maybe something bouncy, something fun, something like Metronomy.

  Alice would say it’s crazy to have so much space. She’d say the speakers are too loud, too big as well. He can hear her exact words in his head now, like a guaranteed prediction of the future. But she’ll be proud all the same, he knows she will. She’ll tell her neighbours, her friends, his brother, what an amazing house Tim and Natalya have. She’ll tell them all how well he’s done. She just won’t let Tim ever have the pleasure of hearing her praise, but he’ll know how proud she is all the same, because how could she not be proud? It’s a fucking palace.

  Natalya, without realising it, sighs.

  ‘What’s up?’ Tim asks.

  ‘It’s maybe not so good to look at houses we can’t afford,’ she says. ‘This one we have is good house. This is very good house.’

  She alternates hourly between trying to manipulate Tim into wanting the new house as much as she does, and wanting instead for him to be happy, to stop striving, to be contented with what they have. And right now in this instant, she realises that the vast, crazy, three-million-pound house is out of reach, and just for a moment she’s able to access a bigger truth – the truth that it really doesn’t matter. They have already come so far; they have already come far enough. And what really matters is this – being alive, being (still) in love, being in good health, being happy, having the two boys upstairs and a refrigerator full of food and a reassuring arm around your shoulders.

  ‘Anyway,’ Tim says, ‘who says we can’t afford it?’

  Natalya frowns and looks up at him. ‘Really, Timski?’ she asks, genuinely surprised.

  Tim shrugs. ‘If the Greek deal all goes to plan, then maybe,’ he says. ‘I’m not guaranteeing anything, but, yeah . . . we might just manage it.’

  5

  NOVEMBER

  It’s Guy Fawkes Night, and a gentle drizzle is falling as they park the car in the stadium car park.

  Despite Tim’s best efforts to keep everyone happy, precisely nobody is happy this evening – it happens that way sometimes. Tim is praying that the rain stopping (as predicted by the icons on his phone) combined with a spectacular firework display will have the power to turn things around, leaving him a family hero after all.

  Boris, who has spent half the day in a temper tantrum (Natalya tried to warn him that the fireworks might be cancelled due to rain – a psychological miscalculation of massive proportions), seems no happier now they’re actually here. He’s hungry, he says. He’s cold.

  Alex, holding Natalya’s hand, is watching him closely. Alex looks to Boris for guidance; he watches his older brother constantly in order to know how to react to events. If Boris doesn’t cheer up soon then Alex will start to cry, and if that happens then Tim might just cry himself.

  As for Natalya, she has the hump with Tim on multiple counts. Firstly, she’s furious that he agreed to visit his parents after the fireworks. It’s too late, she says, for the boys. Of course, it’s only too late because it’s Tim’s parents they’re visiting. She never has any objections to their staying up for anything else. But beyond her fury at having to spend an hour with his parents (and how could he come here – less than two miles from their house – without visiting them?) she has a more deeply held grudge that has been undermining their relationship for days. In short, she thinks that the offer he has put on the house in Broseley is too low. She’s convinced that they’re going to lose it, just as Tim is convinced that they won’t.

  She’s been bitching about it for three days now, mainly in a low-level way, but with spikes of actual Russian feistiness. And all of this from a woman who only a week ago was insisting that they didn’t need to move at all, that their current house was perfectly fine.

  Tim gave up trying to understand his wife’s logic circuits many years ago, and knows with certainty that there’s absolutely no point in trying to decode her moods at this particular time of the month. You have to grin and bear it. You have to just wait for the weather to improve.

  ‘Look at queue,’ Natalya is saying. ‘We will be soak before we get in.’ To Alex, who is dragging on her arm, she mutters, ‘Walk properly.’

  ‘That’s the queue for tickets, Nat,’ Tim says. ‘We’ve already got ours. We go in the other door.’ He nods at the shorter queue for the turnstile. ‘But first, we’re going to the funfair round the other side, aren’t we, boys?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Natalya says. ‘Funfair in rain. So nice!’

  ‘I’m cold,’ Boris says. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘This is not cold,’ Natalya tells him. ‘This is like five degrees or something. Cold is minus twenty, like where I grow up.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Boris says. ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything to him,’ Tim points out, trying to defuse Natalya’s anger before it gets started. ‘He’s never experienced minus twenty.’

  ‘If he doesn’t stop to complain, maybe I send him to Russia,’ Natalya says. ‘Maybe he needs to find out what cold means.’

  Tim wipes a drip from his nose, pulls his hood further down and tugs Boris to the right. The funfair should come into sight soon. Perhaps then everyone will stop complaining. ‘We’ll get you a nice warm drink in a bit,’ Tim tells the boy. ‘Hot chocolate maybe. How does that sound?’

  ‘I don’t want hot chocolate,’ Boris says. ‘I don’t like hot chocolate.’

  ‘This is such lies!’ Natalya says. ‘I remember this the next time you ask me to make you chocolate!’

  ‘And you really don’t want to go home, Boris,’ Tim says. ‘You love fireworks. Do you remember last year, how excited you got?’

  Boris doesn’t answer, he simply trips along miserably, doing his best to scuff his new shoes.

  Family life! Tim thinks. Maybe I could send them all to bloody Russia.

  ‘Timmy?’ Natalya whines. It’s her special miserable voice, both nasal and plaintive. ‘What time do these firework start anyway?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘But is only seven.’

  ‘I know, darling,’ Tim says, barely keeping his voice under control. ‘That’s why we’re going to the bloody funfair first.’

  When they reach the house, it’s Alice who opens the front door. ‘Hello boys! Come in! You must be freezing!’ she says, ruffling their hair as they squeeze past her legs. ‘Hello, Natalya . . . Tim.’

  The boys run straight to the lounge. They have an unexpected and, as far as Tim’s concerned, inexplicable preference for Grandpa.

  ‘Gosh, we thought you weren’t coming,’ Alice says. ‘It’s so late!’

  ‘I know,’ Tim says. ‘Getting out of the car park was a nightmare.’

  ‘Yes, very late,’ Natalya confirms, ‘so we won’t be stay too long. It’s past bed
time for the boys.’

  ‘Huh! Hardly here and she’s leaving already!’ mocks Alice. It’s her way of powering through Natalya’s quasi-constant state of reluctance. She turns and heads through to the kitchen. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she shouts back. ‘I made sandwiches too.’

  ‘We’ve eaten, Mum,’ Tim says, hanging his parka on the coat-rack, then taking Natalya’s and hanging that up too. She catches his eye, prompting him to ask, ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing!’ she says.

  ‘We had fish and chips, and the kids had hot dogs,’ Tim says as he starts to follow Alice to the kitchen.

  ‘Hot dogs?’ Alice says. ‘You don’t know what rubbish they put in those. You can’t bring children up on hot dogs.’

  ‘We don’t bring them up on hot dogs,’ Tim says, changing his mind and lingering at the doorway to the lounge. ‘It was just one night.’

  ‘Well,’ Alice says. ‘I’ve made some nice cheese sandwiches with Branston. They like Branston.’

  ‘They won’t eat them, Mum,’ Tim calls back as he enters the lounge. ‘They’re stuffed full of hot dogs and candy floss and chocolate.’

  In the lounge, he finds the boys sitting together on Ken’s lap. It’s an image of family unity, which strikes him as a little out of place, slightly absurd. The boys are eating fun-size Milky Ways from Ken’s secret chocolate tin. The secret chocolate tin is probably, on reflection, the reason they like him so much.

  ‘So how was it?’ Ken asks. ‘The boys seem to have had a good time.’

  ‘Dad kept making silly noises,’ Alex says.

  ‘Yes, he went “oooh” and “ahh” every time a firework went bang,’ Boris explains.

  ‘That’s something he got from me,’ Ken says. ‘I always got them to make silly noises when they were little. Timmy always loved shouting out the “oohs” and the “ahhs”, didn’t you?’

  Tim clears his throat and licks his lips, then, muttering, ‘I’ll, um, help Mum with the drinks,’ he heads back through to the kitchen. Ken’s fathering stories always make him feel uniquely uncomfortable. It’s as if he’d rather just pretend that none of it ever happened. He doesn’t know quite why he’s so allergic to these memories, particularly the positive ones – perhaps it’s because it always feels like Ken’s using them to erase all the rest.