The Rules of Play (3 page)

The loss-adjuster looks at me as if I’ve started speaking in Spanish. Which I do, sometimes, on occasions of high emotion, but not this time. I’m staying grounded, practical.

When he realizes I’m waiting for an answer, he says he doesn’t know. ‘The Tower of London. The local police station.’

‘Do they go back and collect his clothes before they set off? Or does he have to go in the van naked?’

‘They’ll give him a blanket, I guess.’

‘A
blanket
? Do police vans carry blankets, and duvets and pillow cases? Do they handcuff him?’

‘Why are you asking?’

‘Because that’s Selwyn!’ I’m angry not with him, but because I can’t find a shoe.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh. I don’t think so.’

‘You’ve never seen him.’ Not even a photograph. How
can
I have not shown him?

‘No, but it’s unlikely.’

‘When did unlikely stop something being true?’

‘When you’re tired. And worried.’

‘Wrong answer.’

‘That’s a common-or-garden streaker. They come from nowhere, they parade their dicks or their breasts to a national audience, they go on a couple of chat shows, they disappear. It’s a tradition.’

I sit down on the bed, still one-shoed. At least, I think, Selwyn is safe, and in a particular place. They’re probably taking his fingerprints right now: those unique whorls, no one else’s in the universe. ‘You’re telling me,’ I say calmly—but clearly I
am
angry with him, the shoe is secondary—‘that a mother doesn’t know her own son?’

‘You are not his mother.’

‘I have seen that boy naked more times than any other person on this planet.’

‘Step-mother.’

This hurts. ‘No. No and no and no. You think because I’m his step-mother I can’t know him better than his what, his
biological
mother? Love him better? Biology has nothing to do with this, it’s not even on the syllabus. If you think I’m deliberately trying to love him more precisely because I didn’t see him hauled out in a bloody bundle from between my legs—if you think I’m like those women in the City who whine that they have to work harder than the men just to stay equal, to prove themselves—or like some bloody cricketer with a limp who’s trying to disguise it so he can play with the others— if you think this is what I’ve been doing with my life then truly, you don’t understand the world. I love that boy. Full stop. And I don’t know what I’m doing here.’

I’m not going to lie down and look under the bed while he’s standing up. I set off towards the door, carrying my one shoe in my hand.

He puts a hand on my shoulder, then on my cheek. He kisses me. He tells me to wait. He tells me he’ll find out where Selwyn is.

I sit down again on the bed while he phones. On the TV the cricket has resumed. Who is he phoning? He gets stuck in a queuing system, a menu, a
following list of
options
. Press 1 for murder, 2 to report a stolen chicken. I go for a pee and find my shoe behind the bathroom door and have a sudden flashback of how it got there. I can hear his teeth grit, I can hear him saying, ‘No, I don’t want to report a crime, but I will happily commit one if it will make you listen to me.’

I put on my shoes, he puts on his. We leave the flat, get in the car, start driving towards the cricket ground to find the nearest police station. The traffic is no better than always. I think that by the time we get there the evening paper will be out on the news-stands, or tomorrow morning’s, with a photo of Selwyn naked on the front page.

There is an insect in the car, and then I realize it’s the loss-adjuster humming. Alan too does this, tunes from old musicals. He’s actually enjoying himself, having something to do, a man thing.

We find a police station, any building at all as long as it has policemen inside it. The scratched desk, glum eyes, the interruptions. Slumped on a hard bench, watching us, is a woman in a dressing gown who looks as if she’s lost not just a son but everything she ever had. It takes a hundred years, even after we’ve used the word ‘mother,’ which jumps us forward six squares, up a ladder. Mandatory orientation courses and consultation exercises have trained these men to recognize this word: it means trouble, it means deal with and get rid of as soon as possible. Phone calls, computer crashes, abort/retry/ cancel, more phone calls. It turns out that the name of the streaker on the cricket ground this afternoon is Simon. Close, but not an exact match. Age thirty-four, occupation trainee accountant, place of residence Balham. Simon someone. Someone else.

EXTRAS: THE SMALL mistakes you make, the runs that you gift to the other team, without them having to do anything to gain them. A lack of discipline. They don’t usually amount to much, not enough to affect the result.

ON THE WAY back from the police station the loss-adjuster drops me at the Tube station. The gypsy is there, the one who does the three-card tick, round the corner from the entrance. He’s short, black-haired, and has oddly large hands. He nods at me as if in recognition. Surprised, I look away, pretending I haven’t been staring at him.

And then I’m staring at someone else: on the pavement outside a kebab shop I see a boy—youth, man— wearing Selwyn’s tee-shirt, the one with the words that would make me want to hit him if I was gay, the one we talked about but which he carries on wearing. I look back to the card-man, who shakes his head.

Alan and Agnieszka are at home. But we are not going out to Jamal and what’s-her-name’s for dinner tonight. Jamal phoned Alan this morning to say he was in the middle, or perhaps only at the beginning, of a row with his girlfriend and couldn’t see that dinner tonight would be possible, unless we wanted to come and cook it ourselves while the cutlery flew through the air around us. Then the girlfriend phoned to say come. Then Jamal phoned again to say don’t come.

‘We should go,’ I say.

‘But Jamal—’

‘Long day’s journey into night. It’ll be fun.’

‘But Jamal—’

‘Alan, they’re obviously on a day-trip to hell and at least we’d provide some distraction. Slow down the descent.’

Agnieszka looks at her watch, a black and clunky new one. ‘So they can come up for air, a bit?’ she says.

‘But Jamal doesn’t
want
us to come,’ says Alan. ‘And he’s the one we know, it’s him I’m listening to.’

‘He’s embarrassed,’ I say. ‘He wanted to show off his new teenage girlfriend and now it’s all gone wrong and her make-up’s all streaky and her hair’s in a mess and he doesn’t want us to see her.’

‘Right. So we don’t go.’

‘Ask him to come here. He’s probably just realized that his girlfriend is turning into his wife and he’s desperate to get out. He’s your friend, call him. It’s what men do for each other, isn’t it?’

‘But he can’t come here because of the cat. He gets his asthma, he can’t breathe, you know that.’

We glare at each other. Whatever I say next, he will have an answer to. He has, the commentator would say, worked me out.

Then Alan’s mobile rings. Jamal.

‘Oh, good,’ Alan says on the phone. ‘Fine . . . No, really, that’s fine. And you know, thank you for calling, I mean it . . . Well, we
were
a bit worried, but—. . . So you’re okay? You don’t need—. . . Yes, good . . . Yes, of course I will . . . Bye.’

He puts his phone down on the table.

‘So?’

‘That was Selwyn,’ he says. ‘He’s with Rashid.’

I stare, dumbfounded. Knocked not sideways but inwards, so I have to wait before I can speak until my body has regained its functioning shape. Why didn’t he pass the phone to me? Why can’t
I
speak to my son?

Agnieszka vanishes. I think she’s said something about going to get a takeaway.

Then worse. I can’t call Selwyn because his phone’s upstairs. He was phoning from his friend’s mobile, the friend he’s staying with. But the number must now be on Alan’s mobile? We retrieve it. I call. The phone has been switched off.

He’s all right, Alan assures me. Selwyn is sixteen and staying with a friend we know and has phoned home—we should be grateful, not worried. And Alan is clearly more interested in talking about the cricket than about Selwyn. England were 243 for 4 at the close, pretty slow progress, but they lost a lot of time because of interruptions. They had to stop early because the light was bad, and it rained for some time in the early afternoon, and then there was a streaker, this naked man running across the pitch. Agnieszka, apparently, thoroughly enjoyed it. She thought the streaker was all part of the game, a ploy by the bowling side to distract the batsmen and stop them getting runs.

‘Actually,’ I tell Alan, ‘right now I don’t want to hear about the cricket.’

Agnieszka arrives with takeaway Indian food: rice, chapatis, chickpeas, something muddy and greenish for herself and two charred, cold and vividly red chicken breasts for Alan and me.

While we are eating Agnieszka tells us that she has lost her shiny gold pen, which is not as important as losing a son but it matters to her. On the other hand, she has obviously gained this black and complicated object on her wrist. I can guess from looking at it where it comes from, but I think she would like to tell me herself so I ask if it’s the kind of watch that can tell you what time it is in different places.

‘Why do I want to know so many times?’ she replies. ‘One is enough. This watch is for diving in the sea.’

I nod. This will be more fun than crosswords, surely.

‘It tells you how deep you are and makes alarm if no more air. Also the time, of course.’ She holds it to her ear, as if to check whether the alarm is sounding and she’s running out of oxygen. ‘From Harvey,’ she adds.

‘Tell me, Agnieszka, does Harvey teach a course in deep-sea diving?’ It seems unlikely, but he doesn’t look like my idea of a teacher of childcare either. Agnieszka wants to be a paediatric nurse.

‘No, Harvey is not a teacher.’

‘But you met him at the college?’

‘He comes there every day now.’

‘So he’s a student?’

‘No, not a student. He sits in the bar, but it’s not a real bar.’

‘You mean, this college isn’t really a college at all?’ says Alan, confused.

‘It doesn’t sell beer, just coffee and drinks from a machine. The coffee is horrible but cheap, very cheap.’ Agnieszka has always been economical. She makes egg sandwiches to take to college. Her mother has a good job and she doesn’t send money home so perhaps she is saving, I think, to get married. This is something both admirable and deeply sad, and it makes me shiver. It reminds me of when, a year ago, I looked in Selwyn’s math homework book—pages and pages of neatly ranged sums, some of the figures crossed out and redone, which after the exam would be thrown away, and probably the knowledge too, forgotten, never to be used again—and I cried.

‘And Harvey sits in this bar all day?’

‘He does crosswords.’

‘Of course.’

Alan tries a forkful of Agnieszka’s greenish curry. He seems worried, and only in part because he can’t identify what vegetables he’s eating. ‘Doesn’t he have anything else to do, Agnieszka? Doesn’t he have a job?’

‘He’s very good at crosswords. He goes to some other places too, like art galleries and hotels. And the park in summertime.’

Ah. He picks up girls. He offers private lessons.

‘Two weeks ago,’ Agnieszka adds, ‘he went to Heathrow.’

‘To wait for someone?’

‘No.’

This isn’t enough for Alan. ‘Agnieszka,’ he says, ‘we’re very glad you’re going to the college. Because it will help you get a job, a good job.’

‘I hope so.’

‘And a job’s important, don’t you think? Everyone needs a job. This vegetable thing, by the way, is very good.’

‘But Harvey—’

‘Crosswords are a hobby, Agnieszka. They’re not a job, not real work. They’re what you do when you come home from work, to relax. They’re like stamp-collecting, or golf, or hang-gliding.’

Hang-gliding?
Has he mentioned this before?

‘Without work,’ Alan continues, ‘proper work, you’re wasting your life a bit, don’t you think? And someone who doesn’t have a job—well, I mean, it’s something you need to do, to establish yourself, it’s all to do with who you are . . . ’

He’s struggling here. He looks to me for support.

MY OTHER SMALL job is teaching the history of science in an art college. Like teaching atheism in a seminary, or pot-holing to airline pilots, and at first that was the point of it: fun, and perversity, besides all the stuff I filled in on the forms like introducing the students to alternative ways of making sense of the world, blah. But now the job is small not just because art-college terms are short but because I, or the students, or all of us, have lost interest. It’s an option or module or something, and because it’s a module that very few of the students now bother to choose I have only two regulars: a mature student called Richard, an ex-policeman, who has no artistic talent at all and why he’s at the college anyway I don’t know, and Helga, who is eighteen and speaks hardly any English and is in love with me. There’s nothing I can do about this.

All of the students know far more about science and technology than I do. They cut films, operate sound systems, create special effects, find ways of talking for hours on the phone with their gap-year lovers in Australia and Argentina without having to pay a penny. I can cut and paste in Word, change a light bulb and adjust the timer on the central heating. But I do have a lingering and admittedly barely professional interest in the history of technology, or more specifically, how things came into being. If I’m passing a second-hand book stall, I still stop if I see something big and brightly colored and called
A Hundred Great
Inventions
.

The wheel, for example. It serves a purpose and is a completely obvious and necessary thing to have. Why the Incas, who built roads aplenty, somehow missed out on inventing the wheel remains a mystery to me, though I do know it’s a mystery that somehow concerns the llama. And roast pork, which according to Charles Lamb, who himself had the tale from Confucius, was invented in China by Bobo. This boy, bored witless at home while his father was out herding swine, started playing with matches and managed to set the whole house on fire with nine pigs still inside it, and the smell of roasting meat had the neighbors salivating.