Life Begins (11 page)

Like he was a special case. Like he was a special sad little runt who needed protecting. At after-school club on Friday she had even put her arm round him – in front of everyone – leaving it there for so long he had wanted to punch her.
Was he looking forward to the weekend? Was he enjoying the Tudors? Any problems and he was to come straight to her.
It was positively pervy, and Sam had wanted to shout as much to everyone else sitting at the library tables, smirking at his expense. But talking wasn’t allowed and by the time his mum arrived they
had all gone except Rose, who had kept her head bent over work as usual, writing and writing, like the words just streamed out of her pen along with the ink, no crossings-out or the desire to
die
of boredom that so often afflicted him.

‘Sam, sweetheart, I thought we’d go out for tea for a change – have a pizza or something. Would you like that?’

His dad had driven off in a noisy blast of exhaust fumes that Sam knew was connected to the finger-drumming and hair-pulling on the journey. He and Cindy were going to
sing
together and Cindy didn’t want to be late. She had said so several times during the last-minute hassle of packing his stuff. He was messy, just like his dad, she had teased; his dad had made a face to show he didn’t find the comment funny. Like her clothes always made it into the laundry basket, he had replied, prompting a blatantly unteasing remark from Cindy about wet towels and washing-up, after which she had left the room closing the door really quietly, which Sam had felt was worse than a good slam. The next thing his dad had left the room, too, and the house went totally silent and Sam had put the telly on so he wouldn’t have to notice it or think too much about the fact that it was him leaving his socks next to the sofa that had set the whole thing off. A few minutes later they had come back into the sitting room holding hands. But Cindy’s eyes were puffy and red, and saying goodbye at the door she had kept a hold of his dad’s fingers till the very last second and said again about how important it was not to be late getting back.

Sam shook his head solemnly at his mother, explaining that they had eaten pizza the night before, choosing their own toppings as usual, and he had had pineapple and peppers and ham.

‘Peppers?’ she exclaimed, like it was something not allowed. ‘Since when have you liked peppers?’

‘Since whenever.’ Sam shrugged. They were sitting in the kitchen. She had poured him an apple juice even though he hadn’t asked for it and made herself a cup of tea, which she was holding in both hands and pressing close to her chest, like she needed the heat of it to warm her up.

‘How about a burger, then? A burger and chips?’

Sam eyed her suspiciously, shaking his head again. He had only just got home and the thought of trekking off somewhere else, even for the rare treat of junk food, held little appeal.
‘We
could have pasta,’ he said at length, having given the matter some thought, aware that she was trying to be nice. ‘With that sauce, I like,’ he prompted. ‘The one without the lumps.’

‘With that sauce – of course we can. In fact, that is
exactly
what we shall have.’ She leapt into action, opening cupboards and banging around with packets and saucepans and tins.

‘But I’m not really hungry yet,’ he admitted. ‘Cindy made a chocolate cake.’

‘Did she? How
lovely
that she’s such a good cook.’

‘I like your cooking,’ ventured Sam, in a small voice.

‘Oh, sweetheart…’ Charlotte put down the saucepans, crossed the room and kissed the top of his head, then returned to her tea, beaming now and clearing her throat. ‘I’ve got something really exciting to tell you. I wanted to wait until I was sure it was possible – but I’ve found a lovely house right next to the park and much closer to St Leonard’s –’

‘Why do we have to move? I don’t want to move.’

‘Well, of course you feel like that right now, but wait till you see –’

‘I don’t want to see it.’ Sam watched as she put down her mug slowly, returning it exactly into the middle of the wet ring its base had made on the table.

‘I would like to show it to you,’ she said firmly. ‘Maybe after school one day this week. Having a look won’t do any harm at all. It has a loft – a really huge one, with its own ladder. And we could… that is, I was thinking, with the park so close, we might even get a… dog. Would you like that, Sam? Maybe not until Christmas, but – but a puppy of your own?’

Sam twirled his apple juice, not catching her eye. He knew that she wanted him to leap out of his chair and punch the air. A part of him wanted to. A
dog
of his own! At long last! But another part of him felt cross and cornered.

‘It’s called bribery,’ she said, smiling. ‘A dog for a house. Not too bad a trade-off, is it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, you think about it,’ she said, brisk and cheerful, like she thought the battle had been won.

Sam pushed back his chair and stood up, but she reached across the table and motioned him back down. ‘Hang on, young man, I haven’t seen you for two days. I think I deserve another couple of minutes at least.’ Sam leant against the chair, not going, but wanting to show that he had no desire to carry on talking either. The lack of desire shrivelled still more when she went on to announce, as if it was some huge cause for celebration, that they were to have lunch with George’s family the following weekend. ‘And Theresa has said we can use their Suffolk cottage during the Easter holidays,’ she continued gaily. ‘Won’t that be great? I thought you might like to take a friend. It doesn’t have to be George – it could be
anyone.’
She made a grand sweep of her arms, as if he had the whole world to choose from.

Sam tried to make a smile come but it wouldn’t. He hated how, like all adults these days, she seemed constantly to be
trying
so hard to get stuff out of him, trying to get him to say – to
feel–
the right things.

‘Sam… darling…’ She was speaking really softly now and gazing at him with her green, unblinking eyes. ‘Are you all right?
Really
all right? I mean, there’s nothing going on that I should know about, is there?’

Sam pushed the chair, so roughly that it rocked forwards, slamming against the table before settling back on to all four legs. Needing something else to do, something that wouldn’t involve having to look at her, he swiped an apple out of the fruit bowl and took a large bite.

‘Sam, darling,’ Charlotte urged gently, ‘it’s a perfectly simple question and I only ask it because I’m a little worried –’

‘Yeah, but you – everyone –
always
ask it,’ he spluttered, through the apple, which was soft and tasteless. ‘And I’m fed up,
fucking
fed up –’

She was on her feet in a second, as if an electric bolt had shot up through the seat of her chair. ‘Don’t you dare use such language.’

‘I
dare
,’ he shouted,
‘I fucking dare,’
and then, because he was crying and because he could see no way forward through the dark, terrible sight of her face and the even darker more terrible sound of the words he had uttered, he flung the apple back into the fruit bowl and ran from the kitchen. He tore up the stairs, taking three at a time all the way, using the banisters, his thighs burning. On the top floor he barged at his bedroom door and flung himself on to his bed, pulling his duvet over his head so that there was nothing for company but darkness and the thump of his heart.

Time seemed to stop and then drag. It was hot under the covers and hard to breathe. Sam strained his ears for the sound of footsteps, but none came. He would die of lack of oxygen, he decided, gripping the cotton of the duvet in his fists, thinking with a surge of joy how bad it would make
them feel. All of them. For ever and ever. He’d show them. He imagined his mother finding his lifeless body under the covers, wailing and beating her chest like women in long black dresses he had seen in films. He imagined her telling his teachers, telling George and Rose – all that sick guilt they would feel – and how dumb his dad would look for having said no to the iPod. It would be brilliant, except that, of course, Sam realized, sitting up and shaking off the duvet, as a corpse he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the show.

Outside, what had begun as a spray of rain had quickly thickened to fat sheets of water. Soon a powerful wind was driving it against the window next to his bed, making splatting noises and causing the glass to shake in its fittings. It was so loud that Sam wasn’t aware Charlotte had even come upstairs until she switched on the light. He blinked in the glare, pulling the duvet back across his shoulders. Here we go, he thought, here we bloody well go. ‘Sorry.’ He tried to spit the word out, but it seemed to trickle from his lips in a whisper, barely audible against the drumming of the rain.

‘I took the giraffe down, did you see?’ She crossed to the blank space that had once housed the childish tape-measure of a wall hanging and ran her fingers across the wall, very gently, as if she was stroking it.
‘Someone
had been firing missiles at it. Look, they’ve left three holes, here and here and here. Poor giraffe, he needed rescuing,’ she murmured, half turning so that he could see the smile on her face. ‘I thought we could put that clock you like here instead – the one in the spare room that shows its insides. You’ve always liked it, haven’t you?’

Sam nodded once, very slowly.

‘Sometimes it’s okay to swear, Sam. Sometimes it isn’t. “Fuck” is a powerful word and you should use it sparingly.’

Sam could feel his whole body burning. The word sounded terrible on her lips. He wished she hadn’t said it.

‘I’m going to start cooking supper now. Come down when you’re ready.’

Charlotte folded her arms as she left the room, glad he couldn’t see the white of her fingers where they gripped her elbows, glad he could not know how long she had rehearsed what to say, how desperate she was not to foster even an echo of the sense of maternal alienation that she had endured not just as a child but that very lunchtime, aged thirty-nine and three-quarters, seated at her mother’s kitchen table.

Leaving the door ajar, she made her way downstairs, wishing she had something – someone – to retreat to other than the empty ground floor of the house. She cooked the pasta and the jar of inoffensively smooth sauce like an automaton, lost in contemplation of life’s repeating patterns and the vigilance it took to resist them.

Lying among the mountainous peaks of her most scented, favourite bath foam, with her hair clipped off her neck and the radio humming from its hook above her head, Theresa contemplated the lovely calm of a late – but not too late – Sunday evening. The first half of the day had been fraught, trying to fit church and George’s out-of-school rugby round a roast, with Henry on call, the younger boys needing dropping and collecting from two different birthday parties and Matilda throwing up without having coughed herself into it. But then the afternoon had slowed and unfurled into something wondrously peaceful, like a veil lifted on a parallel world, in which children sprawled elbow to elbow doing jigsaw puzzles and reading books while one’s spouse insisted
on washing up, releasing her to the unlooked-for treat of sipping coffee and browsing through the Sunday papers. Even when George put the television on for the PlayStation he kept the volume so low and was so generous in offering his brothers a turn that none of the usual mayhem broke out. Matilda had dozed on the sofa for a couple of hours and then, instead of waking and grizzling, had set up a hospital for her dolls in the corner of the sitting room, requiring no attention beyond a box of plasters and the occasional cooing exclamation of sympathy for the sickest of her plastic patients.

By eight o’clock she and Henry were alone eating beef and pickle sandwiches and watching a detective solve a spate of grisly murders in a country village. It was what one worked for, Theresa mused, sinking deeper into her bubbles, one of those passages of calm that made the storms worthwhile. But Henry wasn’t quite right, she reminded herself, watching him carefully as he came into the bathroom and began to perform his own ablutions at the basin. A little quiet, not quite
there.

‘I’ve been thinking – maybe we did give poor Charlotte a bug after all, though she seems better now.’ She had to raise her voice over the spurt of the taps, which Henry was running too hard as usual, splashing the front of his pyjamas.

‘Who? Charlotte?’

‘No, Matty. She’s seems better, but maybe she gave whatever she’s had to Charlotte. Remember I told you Charlotte thought she might have been ill instead of just hung-over? And Matty’s not been herself for days.’

‘Ah. Yes.’ Henry balanced his glasses across the soapdish and laid a flannel across his face, tipping his head back so that it sank round the contours of his nose and eye sockets.

‘Henry? Are you all right under there?’

He peeled off the flannel and looked at her. ‘Of course. Perfectly. Why?’

‘Because you washed up lunch without banging the pans or shouting at the children to help,’ said Theresa, drily.
‘Most
unusual.’

‘Remind me not to do it again.’

‘Hey, don’t be like that.’ Theresa reached for a towel and clambered out of the water. Stepping across the bathmat, she stood behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder. ‘I put in too much hot and now I’m puce and sweaty.’ She made a face at her reflection, her cheeks scarlet next to her husband’s pale skin, strands of damp hair sticking across her forehead. ‘Still love me?’

‘Of course.’ Henry smiled, turned his head and planted a kiss on her nose before reaching for his toothbrush. He worked the bristles thoroughly and hard, covering the corners the hygienist had warned him about. Theresa stepped back on to the bathmat and scissored the towel across her back and down her legs before perching on the lavatory seat to dry between her toes. There were pink blotches on her skin from the heat of her bath. Her arms and legs were shapely still and firm, but her belly, since Matilda, the heaviest of their four at birth, was pitted with silvery stretchmarks and hung in a heavy extra fold under her tummy button. A late-night bath, Henry knew, was a sign that she was very relaxed, very happy, that lovemaking was on the cards should he choose to take her up on it. After so many years such knowledge was like a silent language. He knew she was in the mood for sex, just as she knew he wasn’t quite ‘right’. And that was something to rejoice in, Henry reminded himself, patting his mouth dry and retreating to the bedroom: communication, understanding, such elements were the cornerstone of long-term love. He
propped his book against his knees – a hardback biography of a politician that made his arms ache if he attempted to hold it – and began to read. A couple of minutes later Theresa climbed in next to him and slipped her arms round his waist.