Another Mother's Son (18 page)

‘Come upstairs. Why are you still standing there?'

I do not hear a reply but there are other means. We mouth and make facial expressions. I read only the other day that researchers at Ohio State University have taught computers to recognise twenty-one different human emotions from the face. Professor Martinez has more than tripled the ‘palette' by combining them. Happily disgusted. Sadly angry. We don't feel just one thing at a time, the professor says. This was news, apparently.

I turn off the tap.

‘What's the matter?' Ross's voice comes from the same place as before.

Loudly silent in the hall.

‘Let's go for a run,' Jude says.

‘You've only just arrived.'

‘So?'

‘It's dark.'

‘We can run in the dark.'

They begin to bicker over messages sent or not sent, missed calls and so on. They are like winged insects trapped in a jar. Their words beat pointlessly.

‘What's wrong with you?' Ross says.

‘Nothing. I just don't want to be indoors all the time.'

‘We're never indoors all the time. We'll go out tomorrow.'

‘You needn't come if you don't want to.'

‘You don't want me to come?'

‘I do.'

‘But you'll go anyway. Is that right?'

‘Yes.'

‘So we don't get to decide stuff together?'

‘Course we do.'

‘But not now this minute. You're going for a run and that's it.'

I hear a scuffle – and a chime, as one of them bumps into or kicks the boxes that stand in the hall. I no longer recall what is in there apart from the clock. I conclude, since time has passed, that I cannot want the contents. The front door slams and they are gone. Ross, beside Jude, or ahead. I know the quiet streets with their pattern of lighted windows, dark bushes, front paths, columnar cherry trees, parked cars on tarmacked driveways. Down one, up the next, across a main road, past the park gates. Ross has an easy style of running, stolid but relaxed. One of them might be the conductor but neither is the music. The park railings go by like notes on a stave. They go on for ever. The moon is a gauzy half-circle with an ill-defined edge above the rooftops. I see it from the kitchen window.

They return just before nine-thirty. The two of them go upstairs. I hear thuds, as of objects falling over; more arguing. They come down again and into the kitchen. Their faces glow with health. I say hello. Jude sits down. Ross bypasses the table and goes over to the back door. He stands there staring out, his hands rammed into his pockets. A neighbour's newly installed security light comes on and targets the garden with a penetrating, green-tinted glare.

‘Did you have a good run?' I ask.

‘That white cat's just come over the fence. It's gross. Like a big furry maggot,' Ross says.

The cat knows that his movements trigger the light. His method of scaling the fence has become increasingly furtive in the nights since the device was installed. He has lost his feline abandon. Instead of leaping, he tries to clamber and slither up the wooden slats, using claws as crampons, and at the top flattens himself to the maximum which is not a lot, given that he is fat and fluffy, but perhaps, from his own point of view, feels like a meaningful effort, just as when wearing a tight skirt I engage my stomach muscles without producing an elegant outline. He crouches, bathed in the interrogatory beam, having activated the sensor, then descends with disappointed caution, giving off a palpable sense of failure.

I could make these observations out loud but my comments would not be welcome. The sound of my voice, irrespective of what I say, is a wasteful use of energy.

‘Any news?' I say to Jude as I serve out reheated shepherd's pie.

‘It's lifting its tail and is about to spray. Do you want it to stink out your garden?' Ross's face is pressed against the glass.

The security light goes off.

‘We're going to eat now, Ross. It's late. Come and sit down,' I say.

He joins us at the table. Neither he nor Jude speaks. She reaches for the water jug. She drinks. Ross picks up his fork. Jude picks up her fork.

‘What's this silence about?' I say.

Ross stands up. ‘Come on, Jude, let's go upstairs.'

‘No.'

‘Please,' he says.

‘If you make me get up, I'll go home.'

‘He's having a hard time, Jude. Just be nice to him.'

‘Shut the fuck up,' Ross yells – at me.

He remains standing – stranded somehow. Jude tries a mouthful of mince.

Ross jabs a finger at me. ‘A drop-in death clinic wouldn't be good enough for you,' he shouts – but the high moment has passed. He sits down again. He grabs the ketchup and shakes it. With a flick of his wrist, the bottle hits the rim of his plate. It tilts, cracks and a chip of china whizzes past Jude's ear and flies across the room. She flinches but the response is purely physical. Her eyes stay the same. Her mind is elsewhere. The last tomatoey clot comes out with a glug.

IN THE MIDDLE
of the night, a noise or a danger that at first seems part of a dream breaks through the barrier of sleep. I sit up. There are the shadows on the bedroom walls. The outline of the chair, its struts delineated but skewed. The two candlesticks on the chest of drawers, also distorted by the angle of dusky orange street light that comes through the curtains. I register nothing unfamiliar. A siren in the distance starts up, grows louder and fades away. The house is quiet. I slide down under the covers again.

Unable to sleep, I get up and go along to the bathroom. When I come out I hear low voices in Ross's room. There is a line of light under the door. I walk on by and return to bed. I lie there. A few minutes later, I hear footsteps and the click of Oliver's bedroom door.

Months ago, soon after Jude started to come to the house, I was woken by a deep, low groan. Another groan followed; it began quietly and expanded into a long, sensuous foghorn of sound. What the …? I listened. The next noise, an intemperate, military-sounding fart, disclosed, unmistakably, Ross's saxophone. I was relieved, that night, for Ewan's sake as much as my own, that we were spared audible cries of love. Now they sleep in separate rooms.

Jude told me – when she got to know me – that Crews Hill is full of garden centres. You can buy anything. Reptiles. Birds. Fake grass. No mowing, no watering, no mud, no maintenance. Child safe, pet friendly. The Windsor, the Cotswold, the Norfolk. The fake grass has names? I warmed to the girl who offered information in a sullen, slightly breathless voice. Yes. I don't know which is which. I think one is maybe a bit greener, or a bit thicker, or something. Gosh. Life is full of surprises, I said. I must make a trip to one of these garden centres. I need tulips for the tubs. What colour shall I get? Red, pink? My mother liked pink, but not any old pink. Angelique was her favourite. Jude leant forward, her expression serious. No, don't go there. The owners are evil. They won't let you go out the way you came in. Even if you see straight away that they don't have what you want, they make you go for this massive long walk, up and down the aisles and through the tills. I promise you, even if you were ill, they wouldn't let you out.
Les fleurs du mal
, I said. Thanks for the tip. So what else happens in Crews Hill? Say, round the back of the garden centres, in the off streets? Houses and bungalows, Jude said. It's very quiet. My parents like it. They prefer it to being in town. We can see fields and woods from the back windows. My mum rides. There are stables at the end of our lane. In the daytime, you might get an engineer in a white van come to mend someone's boiler, or something. In the night-time, nothing. Eerie, but maybe rather beautiful, I said.

I want to blame her but, as the unstable source of all chaos, she keeps slipping away. The other girls, she confided on another occasion – I don't think they like me. They have this false way of laughing. She imitated the laugh. A weak, spooky snigger. They're probably jealous, I said. Natalie Green's lipo hasn't turned out as she hoped, Jude said. She sobs in the girls' toilets about her elastic stocking. Jude's disclosures came, vivid and separate. In an instant she could put on a teacher. It was like watching a clip from a film. The performance was brief, effective and over.

I see my young self in Jude though I can't connect her relationship with my son to my first boyfriend – Ben Allardyce with the hairless legs and strawberry-blond ringlets. No doubt there is a protective taboo mechanism at work that keeps memory and the next generation from cross-contamination. Youth in a parent-proof bottle. I am dressed up in my old school uniform and chewing gum, only the clothes do not quite fit and the face on top of the pale blue shirt and wonky tie is no longer fresh and has a misleading air of sophistication that I never possessed. I come from an earlier, freer generation; some kind of hey-nonny-no time when young people were unbridled and their university fees paid for. There are photos from this era that are indeed risible. Four inches square and bathed in a Lucozade glow of sunset light caused by the fading of the print colour. The pair of us, Ben Allardyce and I, hand in hand, peer out through hair and smoke, looking either sullen or manic and dressed in outrageous garments. We met in Tottenham Court Road – an app-free, Internet-free pick-up. Ben was on his way from HMV in Oxford Street, I from Middlesex Hospital where I had been visiting a friend who was recovering from peritonitis. Both establishments – the hospital and the biggest music shop in Britain – are now closed; the hospital razed to the ground and replaced by luxury apartments. I saw Ben before he saw me. He was silently arguing with himself or some invisible person as he walked along. His hands chopped the air in school debating society gestures. I smiled. Dressed in a black leather fedora with brass studs round the hatband, a man's striped jacket and an ultra-short, tiered denim skirt, I was highly visible. Nothing less than a bed sheet descending and draping itself over my head would have concealed me. After a short and enigmatic conversation of the do-I-know-you type, he marched me along in the direction I was going; punishment, I think, for catching him out and smirking. We went to the nearest pub for a drink. It was an unattractive barn of a place with a clientele of silent alcoholics and tourists who had strayed from theatre land. We sat in a corner under a pair of tarnished brass sconces topped by red-fringed shades. Dingy wallpaper, on the tobacco-brown spectrum, deepened in colour nearer the ceiling. I was beguiled by my boldness in allowing the encounter while knowing that the boy and I shared the tame protection of parents, school and broad daylight. A different set of rules has to be broken to meet a stranger, I thought. After a few sips of beer and a drag on Ben's cigarette, I dropped the supercilious smile.

I lean over and feel for the glass of water that is by the bed. I take a few gulps, put the glass back and curl on my side. I close my right nostril with my ring finger and breathe through the left. A practice that is supposed to stop the mind forming words.

THEY ARRIVE JUST
before twelve-thirty on Sunday, William and Jane. He is wearing his brown corduroy suit, and she, having taken off a light but warm Puffa coat, reveals calf-length culottes and a fur-trimmed cardigan to which is pinned an astonishingly large, flat brooch in a dull metal that at first glance I take to be something medical.

William is full of good cheer and Jane Brims quietly polite and pleased to be here. So much so, that, as I take her coat from her and let it hang almost weightless over my arm, I jump to the conclusion that they are here to announce their engagement. I put my money on William taking the lead and Jane Brims coyly shimmering with happiness. A quick check of the woman's hands, as she expresses her appreciation of the smells coming from the kitchen, shows a piece of rose quartz set in silver and a spirally ring like a snake, both of which she was wearing when we first met. This proves nothing though since, while the news is fresh, a ring might remain in the shop being made larger or smaller, or, given Jane Brims's taste for contemporary jewellery, designed from scratch as a special commission. As the parties concerned are of a certain age, both ring and engagement might be dispensed with but I suspect that Jane Brims will milk the occasion for all it is worth. The question is when the announcement will be made.

I settle my father and Jane Brims in the living room, pour them each a large glass of wine and place a bowl of olives in front of them. From the kitchen I hear the pair of them talking. Jane's fluty voice dominates my father's lower notes. I move around, uncoordinated, in an atmosphere hazy with steam. I crush pistachio nuts with a rolling pin and forget the oil that heats to smoking point while my back is turned. I have a coughing fit. I slam the frying pan into the sink and turn on the tap. The fat hisses and spurts as the pan overflows with copious cold water.

At one-thirty, the food is ready to dish up. I go into the living room and immediately notice Jane's socks. They are the same, or similar, floral-patterned socks, that she wore when I first encountered her. This time, I see them in their entirety, heels, toes, the lot, because Jane Brims has discarded her shoes. These are not in evidence and I wonder whether she left them neatly by the front door though I have no recall of that, nor is our house the type to inspire meticulousness. I was so preoccupied with looking at Jane's fingers that I missed what was going on at floor level. I take the shoelessness as a bad sign. My father has his stout brown lace-ups on and the contrast between him sitting squarely on the sofa, properly shod, and Jane Brims at ease next to him in the culottes, one foot tucked under her, the other seductively nudged up against one of William's ankles, evokes, grotesquely, Manet's painting,
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
. I have the role of the unseen person who causes the naked woman and the clothed man on the left to turn and look out of the picture with expressions of charming receptiveness. I hasten down the garden to the wooded grove out of sight of the house to announce that the meal is ready. Like rabbits, Liz said. Surely not … they are in the front room … Jane is wearing culottes.