The Rules of Play (7 page)

My hand back on his thigh. What he’s saying is simply that he has a job, and like all jobs it’s often petty and tedious. He doesn’t, for a living, change the world. What he’s telling me, I think, is that he’s not The One, that there isn’t a
One
, that One is just a number, that he’s a man among men, innumerable men.

My forehead against his neck, my lips against his chin, awkward, reaching. I may not have had it laid out so plainly before, but it’s hardly complicated. What does he think I want? A man among men, yes. Pick a number, any number. This one.

I choose, or am chosen.
And
am chosen.

He looks at me, and puts his arm around me, and I try not to think he is assessing my value, and I notice, I can’t help it, that as he turned towards me his trouser legs have ridden up.

I wish this wasn’t so. That unwitting exposure. More crude, more revealing, for a man, than his buttons or zip undone. Far more than complete nudity, those two inches of pale taut skin between the top of his socks and the bottom of his trousers make me think of the way of all flesh, and the end of play. And how short the time for play can be. Already those men in white on the green field are younger than me. Already, indeed long ago, for them—if this was not the case they wouldn’t be on TV, they wouldn’t be representing their country—the game has ceased to be play and become work: a job (no less so than loss-adjusting), routine, day in day out, the days and months and years clocked up. They are professionals, with signed contracts. With all the single-mindedness that implies, and the consequences: stress fractures, broken metatarsals, cruciate ligaments,
groin injuries
—a phrase whose expressive generality suggests some unspecified and lingering STD. Don’t take me there.

He switches on the engine and we move back into the traffic.

But it’s different. The journey back into London seems to take longer than the journey out. (The opposite, surely, to what’s usual: the hours and hours of the drive to Cornwall, Selwyn’s ‘Are we nearly there?’ repeated at least every twenty minutes from the moment we turned right at the end of the street, the missed turn-off on the motorway, the roadworks, the stoppings to pee or to look at the map; and on the way back, the speed towards what is known, the rush to confirm that the cat hasn’t forgotten us.) And it’s even more different when we get back to the flat. We go up in the lift, standing apart, and into the flat, and there’s a new smell, somehow. Cigarettes have been smoked. The TV has been moved into the living room and the figure sitting on the sofa watching it— watching cricket—is Selwyn.

I sort of jump towards him, through the air, and stumble, and the loss-adjuster has to grip my arm.

‘Hello, mum,’ he says. Just that, neutral.

I can’t hug him because he won’t stand up, so I sit beside him. I rest my head on his shoulder, this other man’s shoulder, which yields, a bit. It feels the right thing to do, and is.

‘How long have you been here?’ I ask, quietly, in case it isn’t really him.

‘I got here last night.’

‘You stayed the night here?’

‘On the sofa.’

Something stirs within me, uncoiling—a response, a Pavlovian one—and I squash it immediately. Thank God I don’t have to ask him if he’s got his toothbrush with him, or if he’s had any breakfast. We’re in a different place, somewhere new, and it’s good. Though the old place might be easier.

‘Have you—’

He turns towards me, hugs me, to shut me up.

I LOVE HIS scrapy fingernails, and the scar behind his left ear which no hairdresser has seen for over a year. I love the way he used to walk, even when he knew I was watching him, as if no one was watching him and the world was his own, and I even love the way he walks now, which is different when he knows I am watching him. I love his eyes not being any color at all I can put a name to, so that whenever I think about what color they are I have to go and look at them. I love the fact that he breathes in and breathes out for exactly the length of his lifetime, his own and no one else’s, no more and no less.

And it turns out I couldn’t tell the difference— admittedly at some distance, and on a television screen— between the penis of my own sixteen-year-old boy and that of a thirty-four-year-old trainee accountant.

Who is this boy?

‘WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me?’ I shout at the loss-adjuster, inches from his face. We are in the kitchen. He is making tea or something equally useless and evasive.

‘He said he’d go away if I told you.’

‘But why
here
?’

‘I think he wanted you to find him here.’

‘But this morning, you knew he was here all the time and you never . . .
Why
?’

The kettle has boiled. ‘I think—I don’t know him well enough, yet—I think he tends to sleep in the mornings. He’s sixteen. I do want to, though.’

‘Want to what?’

‘Know him. Get to know him.’

I look at him, this man I have seen not only naked and aroused but in bright yellow boots and a builder’s hat. He is far too calm. He’s about to ask me if Selwyn takes sugar and how many.

‘No, not
why
.’ I do some re-ordering. ‘
How?
’

The loss-adjuster looks at me blankly, infuriatingly.

‘How often, for start?’

‘He came yesterday, late afternoon. The first time.’

We look at each other, and I choose to believe him. Even so, Selwyn knew where to come. He must have followed me. How many times? For days. Past the man doing the three-card trick outside the Tube station.

Would I have walked differently if I’d known I was being watched? But I’ve never believed that this thing I am doing is
wrong
. Not if no one is hurt. So why, if I can look in his math homework book, can’t he look in mine, what I do with my days?

Because it was up to me to show him, not for him to spy.

I turn towards the living room. Not once have I ever gone into Selwyn’s bedroom without knocking first. I shout, ‘Selwyn, you followed me, how could you?’

‘If you shout at him,’ the loss-adjuster tells me, ‘he won’t ever want to talk to you, call you up, confide in you.’

‘If I don’t shout at him,’ I shout back, ‘he’ll never see me as a person in my own right, not just a mother who provides and provides and provides.’

Selwyn is standing in the kitchen doorway. He has that sheepish—for want of a better word—smile on his face, the one that belongs to Alan too.

‘Three sugars, please,’ says Selwyn.

‘Oh,’ says the loss-adjuster. ‘No sugar, I’m afraid.’

‘I went out and got some. It’s in the cupboard over the fridge,’ says this boy who
never
puts things away in cupboards.

‘You have a
key
?’ I demand, or exclaim.

There’s a noise from the living room, from the TV. A noise made by several thousand people. We go to look. Pietersen is out for a duck. We watch the replay: Anil Kumble bowling, and Pietersen takes a mighty swipe and the ball flies high, high in the air, up among the seagulls, and straight down into the hands of the fielder at deep square leg. The fielder is mobbed by his gleeful teammates.

‘Idiot!’ we say, every one of us, even though Selwyn has never expressed any interest in cricket at all since he was nine years old.

THE SECOND INNINGS, this reincarnation business, is not straightforward. Firstly, you can’t wipe the slate clean: whatever mistakes you’ve made before still count and have to be made up for before you can really start again. Secondly, unless you have a good fitness coach the first innings has left you so exhausted you can hardly lift up the bat. And you become aware of how little time you have left, and the math gets more complicated.

‘DO YOU WANT anything to eat?’ I ask.

The loss-adjuster has gone out, to leave us alone. As if he were an obstacle that we’d have had to talk around or through. I’ve often wondered what heads of state talk about when they meet in private session, without all their minions and minders: the new Johnny Depp film? The servant problem? If they could only discover some passionate interest or hobby in common—butterflies come to mind—they might save the world.

Selwyn, rightly, ignores my question.

‘Why are you here, Selwyn?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘Because this is the place where a man I love is. Lives.’ But I’m not looking at him when I say this, and when I do focus on what I seem to be looking at, it turns out to be a photograph on the wall of the loss-adjuster in some group of other people. Strangers, anniversaries. I chose this man, yes, but I didn’t choose to be
here
.

‘You mean someone you fuck?’

The prudishness of the young: when Alan, coerced into this, and I took Selwyn to an exhibition at the Hayward showing how artists have portrayed bodies— anatomy, the nitty-gritty—he backed away, didn’t want to know. Or look at; or look at with Alan and me there with him.

‘It’s a part of life,’ I say weakly, and immediately I understand the loss-adjuster’s reluctance to explain things—it isn’t just laziness—and how explanations so often
get in the way
and yet also may be downright necessary: how else is anyone supposed to work out, or even take an interest in, with no help from outside except maybe a guidebook that’s written as if it’s been translated into Japanese and then back again, what’s going on in the middle of the green field, what the players are doing as they run or hit or throw or stand still or sit with their feet up in the pavilion reading the paper? And why.

‘It’s a part of
my
life. A good part. It’s what I want to do. I enjoy it.’

‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘
Your
life. And the rest of us can piss off, so you can have fun.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘What
do
you mean?’

‘I mean . . . I mean, if I didn’t love him, this wouldn’t be happening. But it is happening, and it isn’t just about me, it’s all of us. And nothing, nothing in any of this means that I love you any less than I’ve always done.’

‘So what about Alan?’

Not ‘Dad.’ We are equals, without being equal. Something has dissolved while I wasn’t looking. A family. We have nothing that links us except what we want to link us. I know that’s not true.

‘It’s not something that you seem to be getting much of at the moment,’ I say. ‘I see that.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘Enjoyment. Fun. Love.’

‘How do you know? You don’t even know who my friends are, you always get their names wrong.’

‘Because I hardly see them for long enough to—’

‘Whose fault is that?’

‘Mine, probably.’

Circles, round and round. I’m getting dizzy. He’s right, it’s true there’s a lot in his life, now, that I don’t know about but surely he doesn’t
want
me to know, or maybe he does, but in some magical way that doesn’t involve
asking
and
telling
. And now we seem to be playing roles in a Sunday-night TV play and I was never any good at watching those—after the first ten minutes, twenty at most, I’d get confused by the plot, I never knew who was having an affair with who—so how can anyone expect me to be good at being
in
one?

Then Selwyn does something astounding. From somewhere about himself, as if it’s completely habitual, he takes out a cigarette and lights it. With a lighter from his jeans pocket. For a moment, it’s like him telling me he’s gay. Or has a child. He’s sixteen.
Has
he had sex?

‘Do you want one?’ Offering me the packet.

‘No thanks.’

‘I know. You don’t smoke. But you must have done at some time?’

I nod. It’s not heroin.

‘Did you stop because of me?’

‘I can’t remember now.’ Oh but I can—the struggle to be virtuous, the feeling that if this was virtue, then let me choose hell. ‘But yes, I think partly because of you.’

‘Go on, have one.’

I take a cigarette, he lights it for me. I breathe in and almost choke but it’s a huge relief, him taking charge.

‘He’s nice,’ he says. ‘I like him.’

‘Who?’

‘The man who lives here. The man you love.’ He does that smile, that sheepish grin. ‘The man you have sex with. The man you fuck.’

He stands up. He goes to the kitchen—he
lives
here, in this functional, story-book flat, he has slept here a whole night, which I have never done,
which I have never
done
—and he brings back a saucer and places it on the table. An ashtray.

Which he uses, nonchalantly, and brings the cigarette back to his mouth, and inhales. ‘He says I can work for him. He says there’s work I can do.’

And I think: work—Selwyn in a suit? Collar and tie? A haircut.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘Selwyn, what are you telling me? Do you know what time people get up in the morning, to go to work?’

‘Yes. It’s like school. I’ve done it for years. But this is different.’

‘What would you do?’

‘I don’t know. I think I’d find things.’

‘Find things to do?’

‘No. Find things.’

Car keys—we’d be ready to go out, and Alan couldn’t find the car keys, and Selwyn would find them. In the kitchen, where I’d taken the shopping. By the kettle. The tax letter, one of many but this one was crunch, so I lost it, and a day before the deadline—panic—Selwyn walks over to Alan’s folder of holiday brochures, those islands we will never get near to, and even if we do we will be stuck in the bank at the airport arguing forever about currency conversion rates, and picks it out. The Gameboy we bought him for his birthday, two months early because of some special offer, and hid it in the drawer where Alan keeps his socks—he found it. The TV remote, almost daily. My credit card, pound coins, Agnieszka’s bus pass. He was a child, low center of gravity and close to the ground, where things tend to end up. But maybe, maybe, it was more than that. On a walk in the country he picked a twenty-pound note out of a bush. A natural talent.

‘He’s a loss-adjuster, isn’t he?’ Selwyn goes on, with a fine and undeniable logic. ‘He explained what that is. Sometimes it’s bad, when factories get burned down or cars get smashed, but sometimes he gets called in just because people have lost things. He told me about this woman who—well, I mean, if it’s just that, if it’s just losing stuff, then I could go and look for it. I’m good at that, finding things.’