Your Father Sends His Love (13 page)

‘My Stephen won't stop singing that bloody song,' Deborah says under the flopping brim of a sun hat.

‘My two are the same,' Evie says. ‘They don't know what it means though. Not a clue as far as I can tell.'

‘The vicar must despair.'

Deborah is freckled and sun-blushed; fine auburn hair, thin body and perfect pregnant bump. The two could be sisters, though Evie has her Gallic nose. Deborah's second child is asleep in a pushchair, the same model Jim gave away to a neighbour
.
No: not the same model, she sees looking at it again; older, actually, bigger wheels.

‘How've you been?' Evie says. ‘Must be hard now it's warm.'

‘I get hot at night, but it's not so bad. Better than the last one anyway. Alan bought me one of those electric fans and that's lovely. Like being on holiday.'

The kids reach the end of the song – they can't call it a hymn, it's too much fun – and the parents hear the
young vicar ask for quiet and calm before prayers. All the kids know when to say Amen and all the words to the Lord's Prayer, though Chris and Phil have been arguing over exactly what constitutes daily bread: does it include the crusty loaf Jim buys only on Saturdays?

‘How is Alan?' Evie asks. Deborah's husband Alan has a tool for every job and a ready smile: the brand of man her father admired, the brand of man Ross says will be swatted by technology. Computers will come and destroy these men, he has said, and we will not mourn them as we should. When it comes, they will inherit the earth
.
As Ross said this, she'd laughed.

‘What's funny about that,' he'd said. ‘Don't you understand what I'm saying?'

‘That we're quite useless. That books will count for nothing if there's nothing to eat, no shelter, no power. That chopping wood is—'

‘You're mocking me,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Someone has to.'

Evie looks down to the baby in the pushchair.

‘He's fine. Jim?' Deborah says.

‘Fine,' Evie says and smiles at the little girl, Deidra. Huge eyes and eyelashes, thick fronds below auburn eyebrows. Crusted snot on the nose, odd numbered teeth: perfect. The cheek skin is cool, the hair thin and priceless. Evie momentarily remembers herself taking
Ross's circumcised penis in her mouth. His beard against her thighs. Sees him walk to the bathroom removing a condom. Evie is relieved to hear an emphatic Amen at the end of the Lord's Prayer.

The kids flood through the graveyard, behind them the young vicar and his volunteers. Some of them are holding drawings, oversized pieces of sugar paper. Evie scans the small crowd and can't see Phil or Chris. They are not there. They have been taken. She darts her head left and right. The boys are not there. They are under the mud and turf of the moors. She'll have to explain where she's been. That earlier today she was fucking a man five years her junior in a rented flat a few miles over the county border. That she has done so almost every day of the summer holidays. Then Chris and Phil are there, kicking a tennis ball between them, Deborah's Stephen bringing up the rear.

Evie's boys are sandy haired and, despite the heat, both wearing their football scarves. Phil has a cold that won't shift and sniffs constantly because he won't blow his nose. Little Flip. Little Sniff. They do not have drawings; they never do. They look up and wave at their mother, run towards her.

‘I scored five goals,' Chris says.

‘I scored three,' Phil says.

‘Well done,' she says. ‘But do you have to wear those scarves? You must be boiling.'

She tries to take them from their necks, but the boys wriggle away. She has done the same every afternoon since they started coming here.

‘See you tomorrow, Evie,' Deborah says.

Evie nods and leads the boys to the car. Moments like this – watching Little Flip open the car door; hearing Chris buckle his seatbelt, smelling the stink from one of their behinds – come to her when Ross talks of a
confetti
of bombs, of a total
solar occlusion
.

‘The thing is, Ross,' she'd said, interrupting him the first time, naked and dangling a wine glass between her fingers. ‘The thing is that the end of the world's just a young man's worry.'

Ross shook his head and started to say something. She cut him off, delightedly.

‘Don't shake your head' – a mother – ‘look at you. Young, healthy, good breeding, good prospects. To you, the bomb is the only visible threat. It's the only
viable
threat. You talk about blast radiuses and fallout and nuclear winters, and to you it sounds plausible. But to me . . .' – she laughed – ‘the end of the world is a drunk driver, a kidnapper, whooping cough, leukaemia, meningitis, cot death, railway electrocution, fireworks, a fall from a tree . . .'

Sunlight eased through the curtains' gap, a certain decadence to its fall. The two of them shared a silence
as heavy as the fabric keeping out the afternoon. She rarely mentioned the boys, even obliquely. Now, towards the end of the summer, when he talks about her and him, he sometimes mentions them and for Evie the illusion, so playfully curated, splinters like a dropped glass.

That afternoon, she watched his penis slowly retreat until snug against his scrotum.

‘What about Cuba?' he said, leaning over and picking up the packet of cigarettes.

‘What about Cuba?' she said and moved onto her side, her head supported by her palm.

The match flared, smoke pooled, was sucked in with a pop, was exhaled in two bold lines through his nose.

‘You hid in your room,' he said sitting yogi-like, staring at her. He drew on the cigarette. ‘You made a shelter.' The last syllable was smoky; she waved it away.

‘No,' she said. ‘No I didn't.'

‘That's what you told me.'

He looked mischievous; all she felt was exhaustion.
I could listen to you all day and all night.

‘No. I said Ada and I didn't leave the house that whole week. I didn't say anything about a shelter.'

Ada with the gin and the cigarettes; the aftermath of the abortion. The transistor radio and cold-eaten soup. Come on the fucking bombs. Ada at the window: Drop
them now! Let's see the whites of their eyes! Come, hail them down on us!

‘You cocooned yourself. You and your best friend. You were afraid and you cocooned yourself. I'm interested: are you saying this was somehow childish? Now you have children you can see the error of your ways? Do I have your argument right?'

‘That's not what I meant,' she said. ‘Not at all. We
used
the missile crisis. It was convenient. It was dramatic. Has there ever been a greater drama? A greater collective breath? And all we were talking about was a boy who'd run off because Ada got
in the family way
. Those were the words we used. That was what we were talking about. I don't think we talked about Khrushchev or Kennedy. Ada was so drunk she wouldn't have been able to pronounce their names. But when you have children—'

‘I told you, I could never bring children into this world,' he said and looked down to his groin. ‘I've always said that.'

‘So you have. Okay, when you grow up, then,' she said, her slow laugh throaty. ‘When you grow up, you'll forget about three-minute warnings. The apocalypse will feel like a ghost story. One of those late-night campsite fables.'

He stubbed out his cigarette. He looked pityingly at her; how little she knew. She watched him and wanted to
shake him. Tell him that his certainty was both infuriating and unwarranted.

‘That morning,' he said eventually, ‘that first morning, they took us to the gym after morning prayers,' he said, looking away from Evie and over to the window. ‘And gave us the instructions. Duck and cover, you remember, right? It was the first time I noticed the teachers were afraid too. Young and afraid. And so we make our way back from the gym and soon it's all over the sixth form. Joy Andrews has set up a raffle. All those without a boyfriend or girlfriend, which was most of us, would be entered. Everyone should have someone to love at the end of the world, she said. She bought raffle tickets and each girl was given a number, the boys left to draw their partner for the last day of being alive. I'd been in love with Ruth Calendar for two years and her number was twenty-three. The things you remember!'

He roughed his hand through his hair.

‘Joy came to me in the science block and handed me the straw hat. I put my hand in and visualized twenty-three. I searched it out and opened the piece of paper. She'd folded it five, six times. It said twenty-two. I couldn't believe it. So close! Joy smiled and told me that my wife for the end of the world was Alice Bergman. Alice fucking Bergman.

‘She was as fat as me, fatter even. I saw her across the
playground and the look between us was about as close to hatred as I've ever known. But it was inevitable: the two fatties together. I could have picked a billion times and it would always have been her. Alice fucking Bergman.'

He expected Evie to be looking at him, but her eyes were on the window, on the curtains.

‘Who would you fuck now if the bombs were coming?' he said. ‘Your last fuck on earth.'

She sat up.

‘What kind of a question is that?' she said.

‘A straight one.' He shifted up in the bed.

‘That's a straight question?'

A sudden gust blew the curtains, bright-lit the room, then dimmed.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘No.' He smiled and kissed her.

‘Ignore me,' he said. ‘I don't know what I'm talking about.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No you don't.'

Holding a mug of tea, Evie opens the back door and sits on one of the two folding chairs set out on the flagged side-return. She blows on the tea and watches her two boys taking it in turns to fire the football at the makeshift goal. Despite their round little faces and bowl haircuts, they swear like navvies when they think she's not around.

Both she and Jim find their children's accents strange. You wait for your children to talk, but there's no control over how their words will sound. Voiceprints are unique, like dabs. She feels sure she would be able to pick their voices out from a line up. She sips her tea and listens to them, their tongues unguarded now, both believing she's inside.

‘. . . You dick . . .'

‘. . . Fuck off, dick . . .'

‘. . . Fucking dick . . .'

‘. . . No, you fucking dick . . .'

‘. . . Fucking dickhead . . .'

She's still smiling as she closes the door. The clock on the wall says one minute after six and she watches the second hand, red and thin, stutter round the face. She guesses it will be seven minutes past when the front door opens, when Jim's arms are around her, when he asks her what she's done with her day. Time for a sundowner? he'll say. And they'll share first a kiss, and then a bottle of beer before dinner.

In the small kitchen she begins to prepare the plates of salad. The boys will complain, so she puts on potatoes for mash. The radio news is all about the latest in Northern Ireland. The violence is more distant in her kitchen; at
Ross's he beckons it into the room. He admires the struggle, admires any kind of struggle, even though they are all doomed, all fucked, he says.

Jim takes the beef joint from the fridge and begins to sharpen the carving knife. She looks out the window to the small garden. There is only a finite number of musical notes, yet we have not run out of music. Conversation is the same. There is always something to say, always something to fill the silence. We will fill the world with things, Ross says, just so we can talk about them. Clever boy.

‘We're hungry,' the boys say.

‘That's funny, we're Poland,' Jim used to reply. He doesn't any longer.

‘Tea'll be ready in ten minutes,' Evie says. ‘Can you lay the table?'

They take the placemats from the sideboard and throw them down. She passes them knives and forks, mustard and salad cream. Jim slices the beef thinly and adds it to the salad. She checks on the potatoes, drains them and begins to mash.