Life (48 page)

“I’ve left Chip with my mother,” she whispered. Children filed onto the stage, touching in their naive individuality of gait and expression, not yet lost to the conformity of adulthood. “I hope to God she stays off the sherry until I get home.”

Meret’s mother’s drinking problem and her father’s “eccentricities” seemed sometimes to be a joke, sometimes deadly serious. He gave her a rueful, knowing smile that covered both eventualities.

A little girl with frizzy tan bunches of hair, angled roughly at 120 degrees from the top of her head, read a drastically simplified plot summary of the “Ramayana” at a flat gallop. The finale, an energetic raid on the demon stronghold of Lanka, was an indiscriminate melee of monkey warriors and palm trees, in which a couple of monkeys (or possibly palm trees) came flying through the air and joined the audience. Obsessed Dads crawled around looking for camcorder angles… Tomkin Craft got thrown out (Tomkin invariably got thrown out, whatever the occasion) and had to stand in the corridor with a teacher on guard. Florrie took part in a dance routine about Christmas shopping. There was something deeply Midwestern about it all. It took Spence back to grade school and his Mom’s moon face, proudly beaming up at him from the front row in the gym. More carols, more routines. At last, six little children in red cassocks, white cottas, and white card ruffs trooped out, holding cardboard candles. They sang a verse of “Once In Royal David’s City,” and a small boy with brown skin and dark curls stood in front of them to read the opening passage of the gospel of St John.

He did okay. He remembered to SLOW IT DOWN, and once or twice—wildly daring—actually raised his eyes from the scroll. Spence blew his nose and wished he was wearing dark glasses. Finally, everyone loudly sang “So Here It Is, Merry Christmas,” and the show was over. He’d forgotten to bring a camera; he’d have to share Meret’s photos. They left together, after the photocall: out into a raw, grey afternoon. She walked along with him, grumbling—with a touch of sexual pride—about Tomkin’s awful behavior.

“Why did you choke,” she asked. “At the end. Did Jake get his words wrong?”

“Did I choke?” The degree of close attention he got from Meret sometimes tired him. “Nah, he did fine. I suppose I was thinking that the opening of John must have puzzled the punters, given the average level of Christianity around here. Most of the audience was probably wondering what the fuck, is this the Hanukkah bit?”

“You and Anna, you’re sort of Catholics, aren’t you. Do you believe in all that?”

They’d reached her car and they must part, unless she was going to come in for coffee and there was no excuse for that, no Shere Khan business. She stood dangling her keys, looking up. On a whim, he took her question seriously.

“We had Jake baptized. We go to Mass, sometimes.” How could he put it into words, this
uncertain
truth, that would be shameful and useless if it gave you certainty: this insubstantial, golden film over the surface of things, that makes life bearable? She probably thought life was fine… (he knew she didn’t). “I don’t believe in a God, ‘out there,’ at all. But I believe we are born to suffer and die, and that we are mysteriously redeemed; and I believe that we should love one another. That seems to cover the bases.”

They were both much moved. She touched the sleeve of his jacket, almost with reverence. “I’d better get back.”

Spence was working, alone in his room, late at night. Anna was in bed, the house was very quiet. Whatever she was doing with Transferred Y on this new burn, it was draining her. She would come home from the lab, take over Jake until bedtime, slog through a couple of hours on her departmental workload, crawl off to sleep. He didn’t know what was going on. It had been a long time since they’d had one of those fascinating, crazy conversations: Boolean Algebra, strange attractors, the nature of reality.

He was restless. Recently, he’d been to visit Mr Frank N Furter, to purchase fresh supplies of contraband raw hashish—the pungent, sticky real thing, by far superior to legal stuff, cannabis-laced cancer sticks. How times change. Frank had been with the current beautiful girlfriend for several years: they had a mortgage. Recreational drugs were no longer his main business. He had property in the town and was negotiating positively with the IRS over certain discrepancies in years gone by.

Spence had almost broached his big problem, sitting in Frank’s kitchen—a kitchen more spotless than ever, still occupied by the menagerie—a rat (though not Keefer), cockatiels swooping, cats underfoot, Betty the iguana, and Jade the parrot—same as ever. But Frank was not the same. He spoke of leaving all this, waving a hand to indicate not his pets but the raffish, heaving coastal conurbation. Angela was looking at early retirement. They were thinking of Scotland, on a grouse moor. Early retirement, my God.

Ah well, too bad. Spence was getting too old to have a guru.

…“It was a hot, still day, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The sea and sky were so drunk with sunshine they could do nothing but lie there helpless. The pirates had brought a tank of baby eels to the heart of the Sargasso Sea, for as you know, eels are born in that strange, weedy patch of calm in the middle of the ocean. These particular baby eels were a pharming venture, whereby the pirates hoped to make their fortune. It is well known that hardly anybody eats eels by choice, people will even prefer the
andouillette,
but this was going to change when Shere Khan’s transgenic eels hit the market, tasting of blueberry ice cream and crème de menthe liqueur. Rafe Rackstraw, from the crow’s nest, yelled “Ship Ahoy!” And Fiona McLeod, the pirate with a rude tattoo of Sean Connery that she was always wanting to show you, yelled out “That’s confirmed on the scanner, Ma’am.” Shere Khan was not averse to the distraction, as NASDAQ figures on the recent performance of biotechs were poor. The ship was a strange one, a three-masted schooner, bare of sail, her sides crusted with barnacles. She was so old a ship, so old, that you would think to see her mainmast turn into a tree again, and blossom like the rose. Her name, as far as they could read it among the shellfish, seemed to be
The Pride of Whitby.
And her crew was a crew of dead men…”

The new adventure, which as anyone ought to know from that last line and a half, was Spence’s homage to Bram Stoker and had to feature Gil Bates, dastardly cybervillian. (His editor had loved Gil Bates in
The Eighth Sea
and demanded more.) He fancied pinning the plot to something about shifting ocean currents, adult jokes go down so well…

If only Spence could be at the start of a new adventure, but he was trapped in dark December, no respite from the muddy, lowering skies—

In all his years of monogamy he’d never tried to amputate his sexual imagination. That Filipina maid, Josie, of Number 3 on the poolside terrace at Nasser, whose sexy smile and lovely round butt had brightened his days… When he’d seen Meret with Charles and realized, o-oh, the kid’s unhappy at home and I am playing with fire, he’d still carried on undressing her, handling in his imagination the sugary little peeled-almond body: slightly hostile fantasies, lust mingled with resentment. It was an addiction. And yet alongside this she’d genuinely become a friend, a great collaborator: she was such a sweet kid. Meret’s admiration and respect—completely unexpected, a gift from heaven—had jumped him out of the dire malaise he’d been suffering the summer Jake started school. She had made him realize that he loved the Shere Khan stories, that this was his dream niche, the work that was play. She had been more of a companion than Anna, fuck it, over the past two years. He couldn’t
drop
her: even if it were professionally feasible.

So much testosterone in distress about these days, gangs of angry young men roaming the seafront; you had to pity them, but there were other male role-models, even more annoying. He was continually irritated by seeing
his own life
featured on lifestyle pages, what happened to being ahead of the game, what happened to being like nobody else? It made him want to commit a regression. It made him feel that his slow, timid, undercover lust was ridiculous. Who would cure him of Meret? Shit, why did he need to be cured? A little harmless flirtation, what the fuck is all this fuss about? Better get back to the pirates. Ah, the days that were caught in the pages of these picture books: the taste of rain on wild raspberries, the hot dust of the roadside, the times when thinking up more Shere Khan for a fretty brat had been as much fun as having someone reduce a compound fracture without anesthetic… Every moment so precious, washed and shining in memory. He just wished he could make up his mind. Anything would be better than this pointless…

He decided to send Mer an email. Something anyone could read.

Christmas was horrible for Meret. Misery settled in on Christmas Eve, when they were dressing for Julie’s party. Charles gave her, in his off-hand way, a jeweler’s box.

“You might as well have them now,” he said, “since we’re going out.”

He knew she’d have preferred to open her present on Christmas day. It was typical of Charles. He would ruin something for her, pretending he was being sensible: but she would see that sly smile in the back of his eyes, and
she knew he was doing it on purpose.
In the box was a pair of earrings, set with large diamonds and emeralds, ostentatious and dull, the kind of trophies his middle-aged friends’ wives wore: nothing to do with Meret or who Meret was. What cut her to the heart was that
she
had made a big effort, as she always did, to get him things she knew he’d like (an expensive science book with beautiful photographs, a snakeskin belt, a heavy silk shirt in his best color). She threw the earrings across the room and shouted and sobbed. They had to go to the party anyway, Meret with pink eyes, Charles in a sulk. Christmas has a terrible power: nobody dares to break the rules and stop pretending.

The disappointments continued the next day, as she sat with her mother and father and Charles and the children, and they opened their presents over Bucks Fizz and a breakfast of fresh muffins and scrambled eggs with slivers of truffles and organic smoked salmon. Dad didn’t look at his presents, just grunted and sat there shoveling food into his face. Florrie and Tomkin started squabbling. Charlie wailed because nobody was paying him enough attention. Mum was the only one who was happy, having license to drink at breakfast time. Meret opened her presents with hope, though she knew this was fated, because nothing you hope for ever comes true, the only joys are unexpected. Not one of them was anything she liked. Charles had already left the table and settled in his armchair in front of the business results, as if neither his family nor Christmas existed: first switching off the Christmas tree lights so they didn’t interfere with the picture on the screen. It was such a beautiful tree. There had been a moment—yesterday, some fleeting moment when she was hanging up her favorite crystal star and Charlie was sitting on the floor being sweet—when she had been truly happy… She stared at the oblivious top of her husband’s head with hatred.

“I think we should subscribe to many-To-many. It’s the best supplier; they have the radical quality channels and unbiased news coverage.”

“It’s too expensive. They don’t get the advertising; what can you expect?”

“Spence and Anna have mTm.”

Charles made a derisive noise.

In the darkening afternoon she wandered despondently around the house. Her brother Blondel and his wife were here with their children, and Mummy’s sister Madeleine with her grown up sons. Meret had cooked herself to death while her mother and her aunt infested the kitchen, sniping at each other. She had laid the table beautifully, with ivy and Christmas roses and tinsel ribbons. What was the use? As soon as everyone sat down Charles started trying to force Tomkin to eat things he didn’t like, which was STUPID and IMPOSSIBLE. Then Blondie started a fight with Dad over nothing, and the rest of them quickly pitched in to make things worse. Now the children were running up and down the stairs shrieking, and as far as Meret was concerned the pudding, for which she had carefully simmered the brandy sauce and saved a perfect holly sprig, could stay in the microwave until it was concrete.