Always the Sun (10 page)

‘Oh come on,’ said Sam. ‘They’re
kids
.’

Hooper shrugged, as if to communicate the degree of his helplessness in the matter.

Sam said, ‘Come on. You’re joking. You’re just flat saying no?’

Hooper scratched his eyebrow.

Sam looked at the ground. He toed a pebble from the black, moist soil.

‘Right,’ he said.

Hooper spat on the ground, between the white shell-toes of his trainers.

Sam wanted to meet his eyes, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

Hooper stood there, arms crossed, waiting for him to leave.

‘Look,’ said Sam. ‘We’re talking about my
son
.’

‘Your son’s not my problem.’

‘Then whose problem is it?’

‘I’m going to tell you this once,’ said Dave Hooper. ‘All right? I’m not going to stand here, arguing with you.’

Sam felt very tired. He felt himself sag.

He shook his head, bewildered, and looked at Dave Hooper’s bullish intransigence.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, and waved it away like a trifle. ‘Whatever.’

Sam got in the car. His movements were awkward and self-conscious and he tried three times to engage the seat belt, and twice to start the engine. Dave Hooper waited for him to leave.

Pulling away, Sam didn’t look at him. But he watched him in the rearview mirror, as he spat again and wandered back through the gates to the slaughterhouse, pausing to exchange a joke with the security guard whose presence had not increased Sam’s sense of safety even fractionally.

Sam drove without thinking about where he was headed. He felt light, as if only his hands, locked around the steering wheel, kept him anchored to the seat. Round the first corner, out of sight of the slaughterhouse, he pulled over and lit a cigarette. He smoked it to the stub before U-turning and heading back to the Merrydown Estate. His route took him past the slaughterhouse again. He passed by at carefully measured speed, but without glancing at it, just as he had when cycling past as a child.

He was late for work.

His shift finished at 10 p.m. An hour before leaving, when it was quiet on the ward, he went to the staffroom and phoned Mel to tell her all about it.

She waited, making sure he was finished. There was a silence. She drew breath.

He imagined her closing her eyes.

She said, ‘What did you expect? Of course he was like that! You went and saw him at work. Imagine how that would make
you
feel.’

‘Where else was I supposed to see him?’

‘Christ. A hundred places. The pub?’

‘What pub? How am I supposed to know where he drinks?’

‘He drinks in the Cat and Fiddle.’

Sam frowned.

He said, ‘Mel, do you know him?’

‘Of course I know him. He’s a nice bloke, as it happens.’

‘He’s a fucking
ape
.’

‘No, he’s not. He’s a nice bloke.’

He put his forehead against the cool wall.

Mel said, ‘This is your fault, Sam.’

He sighed and mumbled something.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Come to the Cat and Fiddle on Sunday. Buy him a drink and say sorry.’

He looked at the phone as he might a spider in the bed.

‘Say sorry for
what
?
I thought he was going to kill me.’

‘Do you want to sort this out or not? If not, don’t bother phoning me to complain about the mess you’ve got yourself in. It wasn’t me who got on their high horse and drove out to the slaughterhouse demanding to speak to him. Jesus, Sam. I can’t even believe you did that.’

‘I didn’t demand anything.’

‘That’s not what it sounds like.’

‘To whom?’

He thought about it.

He said, ‘Mel—Jesus—did you already know about this?’

‘Of course I knew about it. I’ve got friends who
work
there. What did you expect? Once it got round, they couldn’t wait to get on the phone and tell me what a prick my brother had made of himself.’

He burnt with dishonour and humiliation.

He said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. This is mad. I only wanted to talk to him about his bastard
son.
Is that too much to ask?’

‘There’s asking and there’s asking. You put him on the spot. Of course he acted defensive.’

‘I couldn’t have been nicer. And he didn’t act defensive. He acted like Mike fucking Tyson.’

‘Put yourself in his place. How would you feel?’

‘That’s different.’

‘Different how?’

‘My son isn’t hurting his!’

‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love him. He wants to protect his son, the same as you want to protect yours.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘What’s
what
supposed to mean?’

‘Do you think I’m not looking after Jamie well enough? If not, just say so. I’d like to hear you say that.’

There was a much longer silence.

Mel said, ‘You’re twisting my words because you’re in the wrong. You always do that. It drives me mad.’

‘Drives
you
mad? I’m not the one who accused you of not looking after your son.’

She put down the phone.

He stood there, shaking and embarrassed, wondering who might have heard. He could tell by the dryness in his throat that he’d raised his voice. He rubbed his sweating palms on the seat of his jeans and lit a cigarette. He was still shaky and distracted when he went back on the ward, ten minutes later.

Still angry, he stopped off in the pub on the way home.

It was crowded and noisy, moist with sweat and breath. He pushed himself into the mixed throng at the bar and demanded a Guinness. The harried barmaid accepted his boorishness with blank, tired censure and pulled the pint in a single draught. He didn’t mind. He dropped a sweat-damp five-pound note into her palm, then pocketed the change without bothering to count it. He carried the pint to the non-smoking corner, where it was a bit quieter, propped himself against the wall and watched the Guinness settle and separate. He took artful, sidelong looks at the other patrons. It seemed to him that each of the faces was distantly familiar. He wondered how many of them had gone to his school. How many of them had never really left home?

He thought about Lisa Kilmer and her crazy-paved face. Was she married now? Probably. She would be a mother whose scars her children never thought to question. That their mother had once been an unharmed and adored child was a concept beyond their conceptual gift. She was their mother, unguessable and infinite, a sphere without centre. Was Lisa divorced and struggling, perhaps living on the same estate, dropped from view? The old scars, grown white, would be linked by the first wrinkles of middle age, a web of ancient impact. He saw bright girl’s eyes in that busy mess, that jaggedy scribble.

He knew the truth might be different. Her potential lives were beyond number, each of them beyond his capacity to imagine.

He felt claustrophobic, angry at himself, uncomfortable in his skin and clothing. It became a sense-memory of boyhood. He remembered the low, encompassing atmosphere of Christmas Day, being surrounded by a family who (he thought) sought only to patronize and embarrass him.

He drank the Guinness. A craving swelled in him for another, but he couldn’t bear the proximity of those half-familiar strangers.

He was not this man. He was the man who spooned like a comma to the soft warmth of his sleeping wife, the man who took a picnic to the annual Fleadh in Finsbury Park, the man who bought his kitchen table at Heals.

There was an empty taxi at the lights. He jumped in the back seat and was home in fifteen minutes.

He slammed the front door behind him and stamped past the living room, where Mel and Jamie were watching
Frasier
on satellite TV. He went to the kitchen, poured a tumbler a quarter-full of whisky and emptied it in three gulps. Then he knelt at the freezer, the whisky like lava inside him, and threw aside frozen lasagnes and fish fingers and sausages until he came across a serviceable ice-tray, from which he twisted and agitated four ice cubes. These he dropped into the base of the glass before pouring himself another drink. He kicked the freezer door closed.

When he entered the living room, something went tense. He thought of birds about to take flight. Mel and Jamie ignored him. He sat in the armchair and glowered at the TV, the whisky clasped in his fist. When Mel could bear it no longer, she drained her wine glass, then stood and pulled on her coat, which had been draped across the back of the sofa.

She said, ‘Look after yourself, Jamie,’ and let herself out.

Jamie said, ‘See you,’ without taking his eyes from the screen.

His shaggy hair hung in his eyes like a pony’s mane. His arms and legs looked puny. His mother’s limbs. The graceful length of neck belonged to Justine. Watching TV, he looked girlish and petulant, with pouting, bee-stung lips. Sam wanted to slap him.

Abruptly, Sam stood. Jamie tensed and withdrew, as if from a blow. Sam paused, incredulous, then marched to the kitchen. To justify the action—he had simply wanted to move, there was an angry restlessness in his limbs—he topped up the tumbler again. The bottle of Johnnie Walker, opened this evening, was nearly half-empty.

He listened. Jamie went upstairs without saying good night.

Sam lit a contemptuous cigarette and took another mouthful of whisky. He was disgusted that Jamie could be afraid of him, he who had never raised a hand in anger.

He sat at the breakfast bar, replaying the events of the day until his shame had become a dignified victory. He told himself he’d seen the fear in Hooper’s eyes. Shortly before he passed out, face-down on the bed, he had managed to convince himself this was true.

When he woke the next morning, hungover, it wasn’t true any more.

The house was silent and empty. He could hear a lawnmower, some kids playing. On the floor next to the bed was a glass of water and two paracetamol. A thin film of dust had gathered on the surface of the water.

Disgust pressed him to the mattress and kept him trapped in the knotted, sweat-sodden bedding. It was disordered and tangled by the twisting of his forgotten, intoxicated nightmares.

9

At work that morning he was bungling and penitent.

His constant apologies carried little weight. He got the feeling his colleagues were talking about him. Conversations stopped when he drew near, and started again when he moved on.

During his lunch-break, he went to the car park and called Mel to apologize.

She claimed to accept it readily enough, but he was long-familiar with the quality of Mel’s mercy. Often, it was contingent and partial, sometimes mulishly so. Mel was capable of maintaining a coating of frost, a reserve no stranger could have detected, that was yet imperishable and permanent, a distance never to be crossed.

Sam knew it hurt her to maintain this distance. Sometimes he could
see
it hurting her. But that didn’t stop her.

The following Sunday was his day off. He went to Mel’s via the petrol station and knocked on her door, clutching a wilting fistful of daffodils.

Mel was blue round the eyes. She wore a white dressing-gown and enormous, fluffy-bunny slippers. She looked haggard, much older than he imagined her. The thought was painful and he cut it short.

He handed her the flowers. She took them in her hand and shook them, like a child with a new rattle. Their yellow heads shivered, as if on broken necks, and one or two buttery petals fell on the sparkling concrete of the garden path. They stood and watched them fall.

‘Come in, then,’ she said. The undercurrent of resignation jabbed at his guts.

He followed her into the front room. Shoes, jackets, trousers, skirts, tights, ashtrays, paperbacks, magazines, newspapers, make-up, small mirrors, lighters and matches lay on every available surface. Framed photographs were ranked on the mantelpiece and low bookshelf: Mel and Sam as fat-kneed toddlers, looking serious with bucket and spades on the beach at Dawlish Warren. Mel and Unka Frank’s wedding day. A portrait of Mel taken by Frank during their much-celebrated cross-Europe motorcycle trip—Mel’s hair, longer, blows in the breeze as she gazes across the Danube.

Sam cleared a space on the sofa and sat down. Mel went to the kitchen. He heard her rattling about, the clink of teaspoon on mug, her loose, phlegmy morning cough that lasted these days until early afternoon. She came in with mugs of tea and half a pack of plain chocolate HobNobs. She sat and crossed her legs. On the blade of her shin was a faint purple scar, about an inch long.

He asked where she’d been to give her such a hangover. She told him that a workmate of Janet’s had thrown a hen-party last night. They stayed in some restaurant drinking Tequila slammers until they got thrown out (it didn’t sound like any restaurant Sam had ever been to). Then they went to a Seventies night at a nightclub whose name he didn’t recognize.

Mel fixed him with a bloodshot eye.

‘It used to be the Studio.’

He remembered the Studio.

Feeling oddly priggish, he said, ‘Did you have a good time?’

She stared at him half a second too long.

‘It was all right,’ she said. ‘Nothing special.’

‘Right,’ he said.

He picked up and began to read the previous Monday’s
Sun.

Mel smoked a cigarette, then took her tea upstairs. He heard the shower running. She was gone a long time. Sam kicked back and fell into a doze from which he was awoken by the climactic drumroll of the
EastEnders
omnibus. This was followed by a Technicolor Western he didn’t have to the energy to turn over. He dozed off again.

He woke to find Mel rooting round in her handbag, searching out her keys. She was showered and dressed. The water had blasted the hangover away like soot from an old building. She smelt of shampoo and perfume and the cigarette she was smoking. She found her keys, replaced them immediately in the handbag, then went and fiddled with her hair in the hallway mirror.

She said, ‘Are you coming or what?’

He stood and followed her out of the house. His mouth was gummy with sleep and he wished he could clean his teeth. Four houses down, they knocked on Janet’s door. Nothing had blasted away Janet’s hangover. Her pie-face was doughy and mottled. She wore a long, shapeless cardigan and a pair of purple leggings that were baggy at the knees and taut across the vast half-globe of her arse.

Sam was possessed of a transitory but childish and cruel anxiety. He didn’t want people to link him romantically to Janet.

‘Oh Jan,’ said Mel. ‘You look rough, love.’

Janet tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and smiled, bravely.

‘Fucking hell,’ she said. She looked at Sam. ‘You should have seen your sister last night. What a piece of baggage.’

‘All right, Jan,’ said Mel. ‘That’s enough.’

Janet winked at him, and smiled and waggled her head. Then she went inside to get her keys and handbag.

Mel crossed her arms.

‘She’s exaggerating.’

‘I’m sure she is.’

‘Yes,’ said Mel. ‘Well. Whatever.’

The Cat and Fiddle wasn’t far away, just the other side of the Dolphin Centre, but Janet wasn’t a fast walker, so they ambled at a leisurely, Sunday pace that belonged to better weather. Mel and Janet were discussing something very, very funny in a language that only superficially resembled English; it was composed of hurried, low murmurs, punctuated by horsey snorts and sudden bursts of laughter. He envied the easy way they linked arms and bent double with laughter, without even breaking pace. He felt excluded and prissy, too cumbersomely male, and he hung back slightly, smoking and making no attempt to join in the conversation.

They stopped off in the NSS to stock up on cigarettes. Round the corner, at the junction of Lacey Road and Robinwood Road, he saw the Cat and Fiddle. He thought it might be the ugliest pub in Britain: low-rise and brick-built like an open prison, it sat centrally in a concrete car park and backed on to a pitiful strip of green upon which had been erected a rusty yellow climbing frame, which Sam would have feared to go near, let alone permit a child to play on. A few kids sat on the low wall, kicking their heels and gobbing on the pavement. They might have been there for twenty-five years.

The sight of them made Sam want to go home. He longed for the shifting, alienating kaleidoscope of London; ever-changing and never-changing: all those millions of people glimpsed briefly and never seen again. The Cat and Fiddle was the acme of changelessness. All that he had once sought to escape.

He looked at his admired sister, who’d been coming here for a drink every Sunday afternoon since they were children, and who was happy, and he didn’t know what to think. In unlit shop windows he saw his flitting shape: a grotesque version of the boy he had been, half-glimpsed and ugly, like a gargoyle hanging behind these happy women.

His heart began to flutter too rapidly.

He stopped in the street.

He said, ‘I can’t do this.’

They didn’t hear him—he had spoken so quietly—so he said it again.

Unconcerned, Mel looked over her shoulder.

‘Course you can.’

‘Mel,’ he said.

She drew to a halt, her arm still linked with Janet.

‘Sam,’ she said, ‘he won’t hurt you. Not in broad daylight, not in front of witnesses, not when you haven’t
really done
anything. It would make him look bad. Just do what we agreed, OK? You go in, you say sorry, you tell him you were out of order and you buy him a pint. Bob’s your uncle.’

He swallowed. The world was bending in and out of focus, like a mask being inhaled and exhaled.

‘Christ,’ he said, and put a hand to his sternum.

He sat down on a low garden wall. Behind him, he sensed movement: the house’s occupant moving to the window to see what was going on. Janet waved over his shoulder and mouthed the word
sorry.
He sensed the occupant retreat, satisfied. Somehow, that made the gathering rush of panic worse. It was about to erupt in his chest, massive as an orgasm.

He squeezed his knees and tried to breathe.

He was homesick. He yearned to be in bed next to his wife (his Justine), whom he loved and who loved and understood him. Sunday mornings had been wonderful. He pale pink, she butterscotch, his knees tucked behind hers, her arse nuzzling warmly into his belly, the sleep-musk like perfume on her skin, while their tiny son hummed and purred and cooed and clattered and played with oversized Lego bricks on the carpet next to the bed. The gentle murmur of the radio and the summer outside.

He wanted Justine so much he feared his heart might actually break, crushed like a cider apple. He looked again at the kids kicking their heels on the pub wall. It seemed that he had yearned for the past so powerfully that, by some terrible cosmic over-compensation, he’d gone back too far. He’d gone back twenty-five years, or thirty. He’d seen himself, a child, kicking his bored heels on the low wall outside the Cat and Fiddle, waiting for something to happen that never did.

Mel and Janet waited there, worried. Eventually he looked up and smiled, feebly.

‘Sorry, girls.’

Janet said, ‘Are you all right?’

He nodded. It made him dizzy and he corrected his balance.

‘It’s just …’ he accepted and lit a cigarette. The blue smoke blossomed and rolled and faded, deep down inside him. ‘It just happens,’ he said. ‘You know. Sometimes.’

Janet’s compassion was tender and undisguised, edged with habitual curiosity.

‘Poor love,’ she said.

She extended her hand and rubbed the crown of his head, like he was a sick old dog.

He thought himself contemptible: the worst kind of snob, a secret snob, and he could see that Mel knew it too. He avoided her narrow gaze.

Mel said, ‘Jan, why don’t you go ahead and get us a table? Get a round in, while you’re at it. I’ll have an Archers and he’ll have—’

‘A Guinness.’

‘A Guinness. Pint. Go on ahead. We’ll be five minutes.’

Janet lingered.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sam. He waved his hand decliningly. ‘Thanks, Jan. But I’m all right. Honestly.’

‘Go on,’ said Mel. ‘Get us a drink in.’

Janet didn’t want to go. She was anxious for his well-being. And she wanted to see what happened next, too.

With an air of reluctance, stoicism and deep concern, she sighed, ‘OK,’ and waddled slowly down the road.

Mel squatted, hands on knees.

She said, ‘Christ. Should I call a doctor or something?’

He laughed, then saw her face and wished he hadn’t.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Honestly. I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s just an anxiety attack.’

‘That Caroline down the road used to have them,’ said Mel. ‘The one who had her house repossessed. The one with the husband. She had pills.’

He said, ‘I’m fine. Honestly. Honest to God. It happens every now and again. Since Justine.’

Mel unclasped her handbag and removed her cigarettes.

She said, ‘You don’t have to go through with this.’

‘Through with what?’

‘Seeing Dave Hooper. It’s not worth it, if it’s just going to make you ill.’

He counted down from ten, gave up at four.

‘It’s got nothing to
do
with Dave Hooper,’ he said. ‘I’m not worried about Dave Hooper. If Dave Hooper touches me, I’ll break his fucking neck. All right? It’s about
Justine.
It’s been happening ever since Justine died.’

‘I know,’ said Mel,

‘That’s
right,’
he said, with emphasis.

‘You don’t have to prove anything,’ said Mel. ‘I’m your sister. I don’t want you to put yourself through a situation you can’t handle, on my behalf.’

‘What do you mean, can’t handle? Do you think I can’t handle Dave Hooper?’

She paused; not for long, but long enough.

He shook his head in disgust.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, then.’

He stood, puffing out his chest.

He said, ‘Come on.’

‘Come on where?’

‘The pub.’

She tugged at his sleeve.

‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Why bother?’

‘Why not? You told me there’d be no trouble.’

‘You nearly passed out. You might be having a heart attack or something.’

‘I’m fine.’

He promenaded off.

At the car-park entrance, he already regretted his petulance. But it was too late. Mel took his elbow and escorted him through the car park (his legs weak beneath him), her heels clicking purposefully on the concrete, and then she was ushering him through heavy, double doors and into the Cat and Fiddle.

The doors were varnished black and soundproof. As they entered, he was taken aback. The bar was almost full. All the tables and chairs seemed to be taken, and everybody was shouting. At one end of the long bar, a widescreen television had been erected, showing a European soccer match. A group of young men had gathered before it and were half-watching the game, half-engaged in mutual, possibly friendly ridicule. The air rolled at him in buffeting waves that crashed and split over his head. There was a micro-climate of cigarette smoke and human effluvium.

He was relieved not to recognize the bar staff—a middle-aged husband and wife and a young barmaid, pretty, chubby, probably their daughter—which was enough to relieve him of the notion that nothing had changed. Little else had. The fruit machines, close to the toilets, were modern, computerized and louder; there was no longer a ball-tipped arm to yank down. The cigarette machine was newer and sleeker. It was positioned at the far side of the bar, next to a bright yellow payphone, surely itself redundant: a large number of people were jabbering into mobile telephones, or composing or reading text messages, or showing text messages to laughing friends.

The bar itself had been replaced; it was longer, extending into what had once been a separate poolroom, and had a brushed aluminium surface. At least once in the last ten years, the interior had been cosmetically redecorated; in places the carpet was sticky underfoot and fag-burnt, but it wasn’t the same carpet. One Oasis song on the jukebox segued into another. Sam didn’t know the name of either. Even that, even Oasis, seemed trapped in time, something that happened a million years ago.

He paused in the doorway, aware of the evaluating eyes. Possibly some of them recognized him. He set this possibility aside and scanned the room, as neutrally as he might scan the horizon from a high and lonely cliff. Eventually, he saw Janet in the corner by the blue-baized pool table. She sat behind her handbag, a black pint and two long glasses on a round table close to the window. She half-waved and patted the stool next to her. Sam was relieved to see her. He waved back, and weaved through the crowd at the bar, casting his eyes as low and unspecific as he was able. He sat and said hello. Janet asked if he was all right. He gave her his saddest eyes and said, ‘I’m fine,’ and smiled sadly, bravely. Mel was a few seconds behind him. She told them to budge up and put a stool down next to his. He sat with his thigh pressed into Janet’s.