The Last Weekend (3 page)

It was one of her old phrases. She didn’t.

I held the phone tight and possessive to my ear. Was she in bed yet? I could imagine the silk nightdress and the hair falling to her shoulders. The intimacy of her voice made me feel special. But that was a trick of hers. Whoever she talked to was, at that moment, the most important person in the world. She and I went right back. But friendships have to go forward. And ours hadn’t moved for years.

‘How’s Archie?’ I said.

‘Sixteen next month.’

‘Will we see him?’

‘I doubt it.’

When she didn’t elaborate, I asked if we could bring Rufus.

‘You know I’m fond of dogs,’ she said.

I knew she wasn’t fond of dogs — that she was allergic to certain types of dog hair and that there’d been some sort of trauma with an Alsatian when she was little. But after the earlier embarrassment, she didn’t object.

‘So are things OK with you?’ she said. ‘No news?’

When Em’s mother used to ask her ‘No news?', what she meant was ‘Aren’t you pregnant yet?’ Daisy wouldn’t be so crass. She assumed either we were ‘waiting for the right moment’ (at thirty-eight, Em still has time) or that we’d decided against kids. Both assumptions were fine by me.

‘Nothing major,’ I said.

‘Nothing major our end either. Except for Ollie losing the plot. Oh, and there is one bit of news. But we’re saving it till we see you.’

The bell of her voice rang in my ear. What would count as news, when we saw them so rarely and knew so little of how they lived? In her job as a headhunter, Daisy mixed with artists and designers as well as company execs. Had she ever fallen for one of them? She’d always said that Ollie was the love of her life. But a lifetime’s obdurate monogamy seemed too much
to expect of someone so attractive. The same went for Ollie: at university there’d always been girls eager to sleep with him. But if either of them had had affairs, it wouldn’t be news they could relay to us (or even each other). Perhaps they were buying a second home. Or retiring early. Or Ollie was becoming a High Court judge. It was bound to be something feel-good or trivial. Why the mystery?

‘You’ve got me intrigued,’ I said.

‘It’s a ruse to make you turn up.’

‘You don’t need a ruse for that.’

Light flickered on the horizon. Thunder grumbled far off. Was a storm brewing in London too? I pictured Ollie in the shower, rinsing off the humid day, while Daisy sat there in her nightdress, the sheets drawn up to her knees.

‘I’ll let you get to bed,’ she said, as if to confirm it. ‘Love to Em. Oh, hang on a sec — here’s Ollie again.’

Doubtless emerging, a white towel round his waist, from the bathroom, before kissing her bare shoulder and silently demanding the handset. She would have to slide over to make room for him, the black silk creasing and shimmying as she did.

This is weird, I thought, as she passed the phone to him: no contact for years then they call us three times in one night.

‘I meant to say earlier,’ he said. ‘Remember to bring your gear.’

‘What?’

‘Your weapons. Your clubs. Don’t forget them.’

‘If I still have them.’

‘And get some practice in — that’s if you’re serious about the bet.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry. There’ll be no rough stuff.’

I told myself it was just banter and forgot about it as soon as I’d hung up.

‘Ollie again?’ Em called from our bedroom. I could hear her drawing the curtains, the wooden rings clattering along the rail.

‘Yes,’ I said, not untruthfully.

‘The man’s possessed,’ she said.

‘Barking,’ I said.

‘Coming to bed?’

‘In a minute.’

I had a last few tests to mark. And one final splurge on the Internet to make up for my earlier disappointments.

‘Remember to turn the lights off,’ Em said, as she always does at bedtime. Not ‘Make sure the front door’s locked’ or ‘Check the catch on the living-room window’ but ‘Put out the lights'. Energy-saving has become her passion. An intruder might break in and murder us in our beds, but to Em that would be the lesser catastrophe. What price our own deaths compared with the death of the planet?

‘Will do,’ I answered, as I always do, and dutifully descended, my hand riding the banister. The lights were all off downstairs but lightning flickered on the horizon, and there were street lamps, so it didn’t feel dark. I stood by the garden window, brooding on Ollie and Daisy, and wondering about the fish. Did they hover there after darkness, asleep? Or keep on swimming all night? I was tempted to go outside and look. But the strangeness of the evening had made me weary. I crossed the dark green carpet and climbed to bed.

Friday

I’m a primary-school teacher. Did I tell you that? With most people I just say ‘teacher’, so they assume I work in a secondary school or sixth-form college. Own up to teaching young children and the reaction is suspicion (am I a paedophile?) or contempt (could I not find a proper job?). People like Ollie and Daisy are more benevolent but still bemused: they wonder how someone so ‘intelligent’ could have ended up doing what I do, as though children would be better entrusted to the stupid. I’m a little touchy on the subject, as you can see.

I have done the state some service and they know it — nearly two decades working for a local authority. In fact, since the age of five I’ve spent only six months outside an educational institution. That was the year after qualifying as a teacher when, disenchanted by my experience of teaching practice, I began making other plans — to start my own business, join the civil service, become a fitness instructor, manage a casino or make a fortune on the stock market. The plans didn’t get very far. Mostly I lay in bed, or on my parents’ sofa, reading books or watching the racing channel. I’d had glandular fever in my last year at university and my lethargy may have been related to that. Or perhaps it was ME, ‘yuppie flu’, just then being discovered and given a name. It could even have been depression. What I remember, aside from my mum being anxious ('Are you running a temperature, love?') and my dad
his usual bullying self ('There’s nowt wrong with you that a boot up your arse wouldn’t cure'), was a recurring dream from which I’d wake in a pool of sweat. In the dream I was running. Or rather, failing to run. There’d be an earthquake or erupting volcano, and I’d almost have reached safety when my legs would stop working. I’d look down, bemused, and they would be flippers. Or fishtails. Or frogspawn. In the worst and last dream I dreamt I woke and pulled back the bedcovers to find my legs had turned to water — then really woke and found I’d pissed the bed. It was that dream which finally scared me into getting off my butt. It isn’t healthy to live with parents after twenty, especially parents as wearing as mine, and I knew once I got a job — which I did, thirty applications and seven interviews later — I would stop feeling trapped. Work liberated me. But the real source of my freedom, and the reason the dream stopped recurring, was Em.

I was twenty-eight, and still feeling my way as a teacher. A boy in my class had been acting strangely, inserting pointed objects (pens, twigs, crayons, sticks of chalk) into his own and other children’s orifices. Concerned, the head contacted social services, and a senior social worker came to interview the boy, along with Em, then a student trainee on a temporary placement with the child protection team. We got talking over a cup of tea in the staffroom. Thick specs, black leather boots and gypsy blouse: I wasn’t sure what to make of her. But she was slim, and laughed a lot, and after the lies and mystifications I’d encountered in other women her straightforwardness was refreshing. As a student, she had no authority in the case, but she came to observe the boy as part of her training and sat in on some of my classes. Eventually I asked her out for a drink. Then a meal. Then back to my flat. I thought of myself as an outsider and tried to think of Em as one too. In reality she wasn’t, as I found when she introduced me to her friends.

That others liked her came as a shock to me, not because she was difficult to like, but because I thought (a lover’s delusion) that I alone had discovered her. She was puzzled by my reaction: what was wrong with having friends? Didn’t I have friends? I mentioned Ollie and Daisy. But I was in no hurry to introduce her to them — until I felt more secure, less afraid of being dumped. We were sleeping together by then, with mixed success: she was too slow, and I was too quick, the usual problem inexperienced lovers have, the problem we had anyway. In time we fixed it, and though there were things sex didn’t fix, Em gave me a confidence I’d not had before.

At work she kept her surname, because she thought that more professional. Emily Grace Barber she was, until I lopped her. I knew the word ‘em’ from my Uncle Jimmy, a compositor at a printworks in Salford for thirty years until new technology arrived. I used to hear him with my dad, talking printers’ lingo in his wheezy voice — picas and leading, cross heads and Elrods, widows and ems. He suffered from emphysema, which as a kid I thought was an industrial disease caused by working with ems. By the time I married, Uncle Jimmy was long dead, reduced to ash, like all those fags he’d smoked at the stone. But I’d felt closer to him than to his brother, my bastard dad, and abbreviating my wife was a memorial to him. It sat better on her, too. She might be Emily to her parents (who’d chosen a name that would raise her from the backstreets) but to me she would always be Em: the inverse of Me and the least egotistical person you’ll ever meet.

Two weeks after Ollie’s phone call, we celebrated our thirteenth wedding anniversary. Apart from some field trips I’d been on with the school, and a couple of residential training courses for Em, we had barely spent a night apart in all that time. There’s no easy way to measure the success of a marriage but ours seemed to work. And though Em had been under
stress and my summer wasn’t the break it should have been, both of us felt good the day we set off to Badingley, hoping for a simple weekend with old friends.

To judge by the caravans and people carriers, the entire country had taken Friday off. We had barely left town, past the chained-up schools and sapless parks, when we hit our first queue. We crawled, we stalled, we stewed in exhaust fumes, as the temperature gauge rose towards red. At every junction and slip road, more cars joined the race to freedom, only to find it a cortège. White smoke sailed serenely from the vast industrial vases of the Midlands. But for us, grounded and gridlocked, there was no escape.

We don’t have Satnav in the Fiesta, but the route seemed an obvious one: from Ilkeston, follow the ring road round Nottingham, keep on the A52 till it hits the A1 (M) at Grantham, then south as far as the A14, which takes you east again, after which you continue eastwards or drop down to exit 8 on the M11 — either way, you end up on minor roads for the last thirty miles, which I imagined would be the torturous part of the journey, not guessing it would be torture from the start. We kept the sun visors down and the air conditioning on MAX, but nothing could repel the heat. Every few minutes a blue siren pulsed past, away to a pile-up or gorse fire. Blue was the colour — of the sirens, the sky, the fields of lavender and linseed. I wanted England back, grey, drab, dark clouds squatting like toads.

Near Peterborough, the tarmac melting around us, Em suggested we re-route and head across the Fens. She was the map reader, and I knew it made sense. But seeing the tailback for the next exit, I kept on south, unaware of the roadworks up ahead. Em was furious. In an hour we moved four hundred yards. The air was tarred and sulphurous, its furnace vapour clogging our throats.

‘I thought we were sharing the driving,’ Em said.

‘We need to put some miles on the clock,’ I said. ‘You’re slower.’

‘If I’m slow I should be driving now — we’re barely moving.’

‘We’ll swap at the next exit.’

‘Why not here?’

‘We’re in the middle lane of a motorway.’

‘So? I’ve seen other people get out of their cars. How long would it take? Ten seconds?’

I eyed the cigarette lighter in its ring of fire on the dashboard, and wondered how it would feel to plunge it in Em’s arm.

‘You’re a control freak, Ian. And a sexist. Anyone ever told you that?’

‘You have. Often.’

‘Not often enough, obviously.’

Had the cars around us not been stationary, our row might have passed unnoticed. But their occupants had a grandstand view. Not that most of them weren’t rowing, too, every car crammed with kids whose thirst, hunger, boredom, need to pee or lack of battery life for whichever game they’d brought had now reached crisis point. By the time we got off the motorway, Em and I weren’t speaking. Any solicitude was reserved for Rufus, who lay panting in the back.

Somewhere east of Thetford we finally swapped, and Em, behind the wheel, cheered up. She liked the landscape, I could tell: wheat fields, windmills, water towers, pantiled farms with weatherboard outbuildings. I tried phoning ahead, to warn Ollie and Daisy we would be late. But neither of their mobiles seemed to be working. Sweat ran down my back. Em’s sunglasses kept misting up. Slow driver though she is, she was flashed by a speed camera in a deserted village. It was one of those days when nothing goes right.