Like a House on Fire (23 page)

The cherry stones drop onto the saucer, and the repetition of the task lulls Anthony into a light trance. The cherries are huge, bigger than any he remembers from his childhood. He and his sister Margaret used to sit on the back step and eat them, collecting the stones for that rhyming game about who you'd marry, and Margaret would always eat the exact number required to get her past
tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor
, all the way to
rich man
. He remembers spiking her pile with an extra stone, just to bump it up to
poor man
and drive her crazy.

It's worked too, that trick. She and Ian are in some dire financial straits. He's under oath to say nothing to their parents, but it makes him feel uncomfortable, having the big new house, and that's what made him overcompensate, probably, with the presents. Thunk, thunk, go the cherry stones, sliding obediently from the dripping flesh. Slippery as hard little rocks you'd remove from someone's gall bladder. In fact, one time he'd had his ears syringed after they'd blocked up during a bad cold, and he was astonished to hear a thunk into the kidney dish the doctor had instructed him to hold beside his head. Looking down as the warm solution sloshed around inside his ear, he saw a hard ball of wax just the size and shape of one of these cherry stones lying there. Anthony couldn't believe something like that had been wedged in his ear all along, slowly building up like a small, solid boulder. And what amazed him even more was the sudden clearing of sound as the water drained from his ear canal. It was like finding the treble knob on your sound system at last and hearing, really hearing, everything that had been dulled and muted before.

‘I hope you don't mind our funny little present to you, Marie,' says his mother. ‘It's just that you're so hard to buy for, the two of you — I mean, my goodness, there's really absolutely nothing else you need, is there?'

‘No,' says Marie, smiling that gracious close-lipped smile. ‘We've both worked hard to get the house the way we want it, haven't we, Anthony?'

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor
, he counts before he answers. ‘Yep, but it's been worth it,' he says.
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.
You couldn't have that rhyme now — kids wouldn't get it. You'd have to update it.
IT, banker, accountant, defence-force personnel
…
human-resources manager
…

She used to call him Ant. He can't put his finger on when it started being Anthony. It was like his attention had waned momentarily, and then there it was, a new name and a new smile, to go with the new granite-topped Italianate kitchen bench and the whole brand spanking new house. He'd closed his eyes signing the mortgage on the house, suffering a brief swooping dizzy spell of nauseated disbelief, and he thinks of that title document now stacked away in some bank vault somewhere, his signature slumping below the dotted line like a failing ECG.

The front doorbell rings its two-gong Tibetan chime, and he jumps up.

‘That'll be Margaret and Ian!' he cries, making for the door just as his mother rests her hand thoughtfully on the upholstered lounge chair, readying herself for the next bout, and says, ‘What colour do you call this, Marie?'

At the table Anthony stands hunched, looking through the viewfinder of his digital camera. He's starting to breathe a bit easier now, with lunch almost finished. He looks at the group of them reproduced in pixels, their movements at the table making the image shift and shimmer like a 3-D postcard.

‘Oh, good, get some photos,' calls his mother, a little loud now after three white wines. ‘Get one of all of us, Anthony. There's so few occasions we're all together like this.' She waves her hand extravagantly to bring Tom and Hannah over beside her and gestures again at Anthony. ‘Put it on the timer thing and be in the photo too; get a record of all of us before we all change forever.' She's gone a bit slurred and maudlin, he sees with alarm — blinking hard and giving her eyes a surreptitious blot on one of Marie's linen napkins. ‘Time goes so fast,' she says to nobody in particular.

Anthony stands tilting the camera a few millimetres back and forth, mesmerised, as the group arranges itself before him. The pixellated image oscillates, scanning and reading the shifts of light and shade. One moment he sees his sister, overweight and worn and dowdy in her Target outfit, frumpy beside the immaculate blonde Marie, who outshines them all. The next he sees Margaret, kind and comfortable, touching Ian's arm and smiling warmly, with Marie pale and cold and stick-thin, face grimaced into a close-mouthed rictus. Back and forth the shimmering image goes; how she sees them and how they see her, this life and that life, with Anthony in the middle, trying to hold the camera steady and depress the button for auto-focus at the same moment. He's looking at the faces of his niece and nephew as he takes the picture, the way they're holding their smiles frozen, crouched compliant beside his mother, waiting for it to be over. Where do we learn those smiles from, Anthony is thinking as he preserves it all, megabyte by megabyte.

‘Now, Tom,' he says to his nephew as they're clearing away after lunch. ‘I really hope you enjoy your presents and everything, but I just need to have a quiet word with you, man to man.'

‘OK,' Tom says. He's trying hard to behave himself today, dressed up in new shirt and jeans. Brand-new, like he got them that morning, and it makes Anthony's heart contract in small, constricting aches to think the kids have got good clothes this year for their Christmas presents.

‘I've bought you a present I reckon you'll love, and I think you'll really want to play with it, but the thing is, Grandma's also got you a present she'd like you to play with, and I think it would be nice if just for today you played with hers. OK?'

‘Why?'

Why indeed? Why is he pandering to the domineering old harridan? She's just spent Christmas lunch behaving as if it's a cardinal sin not to serve roast parsnips. Asking for a cup of tea, of all things, instead of dessert, sending Marie back out to the kitchen to make it specially. Why is he trying to embroil Tom in this too?

‘Well, she's tried hard to get you something she thinks you'll like, you see. The thing I've got you' — he gives Tom a big indulgent-uncle grin — ‘let's say you need a TV for it, but we can play it anytime, my place or your place.'

‘I don't think we have the right attachment thing for it,' says his nephew, his face beginning to fall. ‘Our TV's too old. If it's a Wii, I mean.'

‘Right,' says Anthony, owner of three plasma wide-screens, possessor of a seven-figure debt, master juggler of every line of credit. He's smiling hard again now, his face feeling numbed with it. ‘Right, well. I'll have a talk to your mum about maybe … um …'

How to broach it with Margaret, how to offer? Tell her he never uses the one in the bedroom? Yeah, tell her it's been sitting in the guest bedroom gathering dust, be great if she could take it off his hands. A loan. As long as they'd like it. His fault for buying the gadget. Anthony has to squeeze his hands together between his knees to stop himself grabbing Tom and hugging him as hard as he can. A thin boy. Too troubled for a ten-year-old. Reading out those stupid knock-knock jokes at the table, trying his best to do just what's expected of him, to decipher all those signals and stand in the firing line of all those deadly rays.

Later, when they're assembled in the lounge opening the presents, he winks lightning fast at Tom as he eases the sticky tape away from the walkie-talkie box.

‘Thanks, Grandma!' the boy says, getting up to give her a dutiful kiss, and Anthony's praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can't, of course, she has to start in on how he's got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can't take it to school, it's just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom's muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they're babies, by the time they're Tom's and Hannah's age they've learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?

Anthony squeezes his hands between his knees again and looks over at Marie clasping her gift basket of toiletries. He thinks of the kilometres she tries to cover each night on that stationary bike, the endless net surfing she's done on sperm motility and ovarian cysts, like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win. Does she love him? She lets him see her in the morning without make-up, does that count?

‘Batteries,' he hears himself saying as Tom takes out the two handsets from their foam boxing. ‘I've got just the thing over here, wait a sec,' and he's tearing a corner off the wrapping on the Wii to dig inside for the pack of AAs he's tucked in there for the remote control.

‘Do you want to have a go with Tom?' Margaret asks Hannah, who screws up her nose and shakes her head with the exquisite disdain of a twelve-year-old girl.

‘Me!' Anthony says, leaping up. ‘Let's check out the range on these things!'

Once he leaves, he knows the conversation could go two ways: his loyal sister, God bless her, keeping the peace and staunchly championing him as being great with kids; or his mother, voice flat with disparagement, claiming that he'll never grow up, no matter what sort of high-powered job he seems to find for himself. And what would Marie say about him? Which side would she take?

‘Outside!' he calls to Tom as he sprints down the hall. He's suddenly desperate for fresh air. ‘Switch yours on, see the rocker switch?'

‘Yeah, I'm on to it,' Tom replies, disappearing into the laundry.

Anthony hears him stop and begin to negotiate the squadron of deadlocks on the door that leads outside. He does the same with the sliding doors onto the patio and jogs down the steps to the house's north side.

They'd paid a landscaper to do the garden, and he'd dug up the grass along this whole stretch and laid down a bed of stones. Anthony's feet crunch on it now, making him stagger slightly. The stones are too big, really, to be called pebbles. It's like wading across a big, empty, bone-dry riverbed. ‘Absolutely zero care,' the landscaper had said, and he'd been right. Anthony flicks on his walkie-talkie, holds it to his mouth.

‘Securing the zone,' he deadpans into the mouthpiece, stifling a grin. ‘Agent Two, do you copy?'

He flicks the switch and hears a snow of static, moves his arm in an arc to clear it. Rays, he thinks vaguely, are holding them together. Currents zapping between the aerials. He flicks the switch back once the static clears and tries again.

‘Commando Two,' he barks. ‘Do you read me?'

He hears a gurgle on the other end. His nephew, laughing. Anthony sinks to a crouch, raises the walkie-talkie to his ear, and listens. Tom's voice, when it starts through the chuckling, is so loud and tinny he almost jumps.

‘Reading you, Uncle Ant,' he says, and starts laughing again.

‘Commando Two, request information — who is Uncle Ant? Please repeat code name,' he rasps. He lowers his head in the shade of the pergola, his ear pressed to the handset to hear the smile again in his nephew's voice. Instead the voice he hears is Marie's, her tone hard and skating on pain like it was ice,
Well, Anthony, tonight's the night, this is the window, do you want to have a child or don't you?
and his chest tightening as he tried to think of what to answer her. Then her voice again, rising bitterly from her side of the bed,
Just say, just tell me, so I'm not wasting my time anymore
, and then Tom is giggling again, saying, ‘Commando Two here, sir, reading you loud and clear,' and Anthony — gazing at the stones at his feet, then up at the glazed pots full of massed blue-grey succulents on the patio with its two canvas chairs arranged just so — finds his voice has deserted him. His throat has closed up.

Static and space wash over the line, a sound like the inside of a shell. He can see into the kitchen from here: Marie at the granite bench, straightening mince pies on a platter. She's using tongs to lift them from the cardboard box, like the woman at the ludicrously expensive bakery did, placing them reverently down in a line.

He watches his wife's face pinched with grim concentration, remembers her voice at the end of its tether in the darkness. But tethered by what? He hears a sharp catch of breath — his own, coming through the headset.
For fuck's sake
, he tells himself,
pull yourself together.
He watches as Marie takes the sifter and starts dusting the pies with icing sugar and something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in.

He watches her wrists flex, the air going out of him, certain, all of a sudden, that nothing of him will ever take root inside that thin, tightly wound body, nothing. Tom's voice comes through the handset again. Clear as a bell now, the clearest thing he's ever heard.

‘Agent One?' it says, tentative. Like he thinks Anthony's given up on him already and tired of the game.

‘Copy,' rasps Anthony, flipping the switch. ‘Ambushed here, Commando.'

Marie turns and turns the sifter's handle, the muscle twitching in her face, resolutely dousing the pastries that nobody will want to eat with a deluge of white, a blanketing snowfall of sweetness, covering every track.