Starting Over (15 page)

‘Goal!’ he said, chasing after it with his arms aloft.

Rufus came out of the back, pushing aside the big plastic
flaps and straightening his tie. He wore a suit to work now, after his promotion, but I still hadn’t got used to it. He looked as though he had stolen the clothes of some adult.

‘You can take your tea break now, Asif,’ he said.

Asif looked worried. ‘There’s some kid,’ he said, and the boy jogged back down the aisle, booting the remains of the apple before him, and took the hand of a woman who had just collected a trolley.

She was a tired looking redhead who must have been extraordinarily pretty once. She wasn’t very old now – early twenties, tops – but the prettiness looked as though it had been worn out a few years and a few men ago. A cheap floral dress, heels. The boys unloading the lorry outside turned to look at her. She looked sexy but exhausted.

‘I’ll keep an eye on them,’ Rufus said. ‘Looks like we got a grazer.’

‘A grazer?’ I said.

Rufus had his eyes on the woman. ‘They don’t come here to shop. They come here to have a munch on whatever takes their fancy. And it’s gone into their greedy mouths before they ever reach the check-out.’

I laughed. ‘The profits these places make, they can afford to hand out the odd apple.’

Rufus shot me a look. ‘It’s still stealing, Dad,’ he said.

Asif went off for his teabreak. The woman and the child began their shopping, bickering with each other as the child tore things off the shelf and threw them in the trolley before the woman snatched them up and threw them back. Rufus and I fell into step a discreet distance behind them. Her buttocks rolled and rubbed and rolled against the cotton of her cheap summer dress.

‘I’m made of bloody money, I am,’ the woman told the child, hurling a family pack of Jaffa Cakes back on the shelf. ‘Shall I go and pick some money from the money tree outside, Alfie?’

‘Good idea,’ said the child.

The woman raised her hand to give him a slap around his shaven little carrot head. But she didn’t and the pair of them laughed. They turned a corner.

‘How’s your mum?’ I asked Rufus.

‘You’re invited round for dinner,’ Rufus said, raising a hand to stop me. He peered round the corner of the aisle. The red-haired woman and her scary child had stopped at the bakery department. My son glanced quickly at me. ‘She asked me to tell you.’

I immediately forgot about the woman and her child. My thoughts were consumed by Lara’s unexpected invitation. What should I wear? What should I bring? Was sex a possibility? Should I try kissing her? How far would she let me go? It felt like a first date.

I realised I was alone. Rufus had turned the corner. The woman and the boy were some way ahead. The child was sitting in the trolley now, his fat little legs facing his mother although he was too big to be in there. He had an almond croissant in his hand and was stuffing it into his greedy little cakehole. Asif was waiting at the far end of the aisle. Rufus was walking faster now. I caught up with him just as he reached the woman, and the last of the almond croissant disappeared into the child’s mouth.

‘Madam?’ he said, and she turned and glared at him. I looked at the child and there were golden crumbs all over his rat-like little face. I looked at their trolley. It was completely empty.

‘You got to pay for that, darling,’ Asif said, nodding towards the boy.

Her green eyes flashed. ‘I’m not your bloody darling,’ she said.

‘We got CCTV,’ Asif said, with a touch of pride. ‘You can’t come in here to have your dinner.’

‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ the woman said, and it was so familiar to me, that furious outrage, those hurt feelings. I felt as though I had witnessed it ten thousand times. ‘This is a diabolical liberty,’ she said.

‘Your little boy,’ Rufus said quietly. ‘He had a gourmet almond croissant.’

‘No he didn’t,’ the woman said, and we all turned to look at the boy as he belched contentedly.

‘We got it on camera,’ Asif said, placing his long brown fingers on the trolley. He looked at Rufus. ‘Shall I get the law, boss?’

‘All right, all right,’ the woman said quickly, pulling a purse out of her bag. ‘I’ll pay you for the cake.’

Rufus smiled pleasantly. ‘Yes, that would work,’ he said, and we all waited as she searched her purse, and then her bag. She hung her head. ‘I haven’t got anything on me,’ she said. ‘I left it at home.’

‘I’m getting the law,’ Asif said, moving off.

‘Wait, wait,’ the woman said. ‘I could bring it in. I would. I mean it. I promise.’ All this to Rufus. She took a step closer to him, lowering her voice. ‘It’s just a cake.’ She placed a hand on her son’s viciously cropped head. ‘He’s just a kid. A hungry little kid.’

Rufus stared at her for a while. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the money for an almond croissant.

‘I’ll take care of it for now,’ Rufus told Asif, and I could have sworn I saw him throw his life away.

The red-haired woman smiled happily at my kind-hearted son. When the child piped up with some high-pitched whine about going home now, the woman silenced him with a glance.

My dad came into the darkened kitchen holding a cricket bat.

‘I could hear someone making a sandwich,’ he said. ‘I thought it was burglars.’

‘What – peckish burglars?’ I said.

‘Yeah, smart arse. Peckish burglars.’ He furrowed his brow at me, tugging at the belt of his dressing gown. I could see the flash of striped pyjamas around his neck. He put down his cricket bat.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with a triple-decker sandwich in my hands. It was a bit too big for my mouth and I had to sort of tilt my head sideways to take a bite. I was ravenous. Through a mouthful of ham, cheese and Branston pickle I said, ‘Sorry if I woke you up.’

My dad said nothing as he padded across to the fridge, the belt of his dressing gown trailing like a tail. He opened the fridge door and stood there in its golden glow.

‘You didn’t wake me up,’ he said. ‘Old men don’t sleep much. And I often get up and have a bit of a wander.’ He nodded towards his back garden. It was completely black out there. They always turned off the lights in the swimming pool when they went up to bed. ‘Keep my eyes open for them. You know. These bloody kids who use my pool.’

I looked towards the darkness. Was it really true? Did yobs sneak into my dad’s back garden in the middle of the night to have a splash and a frolic? Or was that all in his
head? Did the Google earth gatecrashers really exist or were they an urban myth? Was there really such a thing as a dipping crew?

‘And I sometimes fancy a bit of ice cream,’ my dad said. ‘Your mother doesn’t like me noshing in the middle of the night. Thinks it’s bad for me.’

‘Maybe she’s right.’

‘Maybe she is.’

‘Do you ever wonder what you are here for?’

He laughed. ‘I’m just glad to be here at all, mate.’ He turned to look at me, and the light of the fridge threw a halo around his head. My dad at seventy. ‘Beats the alternative.’ He turned back to the fridge and scratched his head, the ice cream slipping his mind. ‘Now where was I?’

I didn’t say anything because I knew he would not want me to. But there was no mistaking what was troubling my dad as he peered into the fridge at three in the morning. I knew he was wondering what he was there for.

‘Not all memory loss is a sign of dementia, you know,’ my dad told me. ‘Fancy some ice cream?’

‘Cold feet?’ he said. ‘We get a lot of those in here.’

He had pushed a slim manila folder across his desk but I had not reached for it. I looked up at him. A leering red face, a broken nose, steel-grey hair cropped close enough to show the scars on his scalp. He was meant to be ex-Scotland Yard and maybe that was true.

I looked back at the folder and I could feel my scar pulsing. On a day like today when my blood was up and my nerves were all raw ends, it was as if it had a separate existence of its own, with its own furtive grievances, secrets and fears that it did not need to share. I touched it through my shirt
– that long red livid thing, the wound that would always be with me – but not too hard. As if it was a beast that I did not want to wake.

‘That’s your man,’ he said. ‘Plenty of form. A criminal record longer than a bendy bus.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Not often a character like that displays such – what’s the word I’m looking for?’

‘Altruism,’ I said. ‘A concern for the welfare of others, no matter the cost to yourself. A philosophy of selflessness and generosity.’

‘Altruism,’ he said, rolling it around his mouth like some strange new cheese that he wasn’t sure if he liked or not. ‘Good word,’ he decided.

‘Good philosophy,’ I said.

He nodded at the folder. I think he had some kind of concern about payment. ‘You going to pick it up or what?’

We eyeballed each other across the desk, two big men alone in a shabby office. He was badly out of shape but it was easy to believe that he was a former policeman who had left the Met under some sort of cloud. A copper from the old school. He reminded me a bit of Keith but even more of my dad. He had that cop thing about him. The feeling that, even when they are all smiles, they could turn in an instant.

Commercial, Private and Matrimonial Investigations, it said on the dusty glass of his one-room office. Tracing specialists. No find, no fee.

I had found him up a flight of stairs in a West End backstreet and had half-expected a world-weary redhead on the front desk, like the receptionist in a Raymond Chandler story. But there was just him. Member of the Institute of Professional Investigators, it said on a framed certificate behind him, and
it sounded ludicrously grand for this man in this place. But he had done the job that I had asked him to do.

‘Your man came from a big family,’ he said. ‘Although it’s not quite as big as it used to be.’

The scar pulsed with a steady rhythm, as if trying to avoid drawing attention to itself. I still had not touched the file in front of me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Perhaps coming here had been a mistake.

‘Get a move on,’ he said, the bonhomie fading like a broken bulb.

‘You’ll get your money,’ I said, pulling out my wallet.

‘I should give you a discount,’ he said, perking up a bit. ‘Anybody can find a dead guy.’

I went to kiss Lara on the cheek and she sort of ducked, as if afraid I might try to do something stupid, like stick my tongue in her ear, or down her throat, and I ended up kissing her once on top of the head. She stayed down, waiting to see if it was over, and I kissed her again on the top of her head.

Then she straightened up and took the wine I was holding.

‘You didn’t have to,’ she said. ‘But I love wine from…’ She squinted at the label, and then held it at arm’s length. ‘Lithuania,’ she said.

‘Very underrated, Lithuanian wine,’ I said, and I followed her inside, a guest in my own home. My mouth watered at the smell of roast beef. ‘Something smells good,’ I said. ‘And it’s not me.’

‘I’ll round up the tribe,’ she said.

‘I’ll help,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said, and the formality between us made me want to cry. I didn’t want to make
small talk with her, I wanted to make wild, mad love beneath the tropical palms. ‘Just go and make yourself…’

I waited. At home? A drink? Comfortable?

Then she shrugged. ‘Come on then,’ she said, and I followed her upstairs, her little dancer’s body so close that I could have reached out and touched it. But that would have really put a crimp in the evening.

Ruby had a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle of her bedroom door, a souvenir of a school skiing trip to Austria when she was eleven. The sign had been placed there as a joke, but somewhere over the last five years it had lost every molecule of irony.

Lara knocked softly on her door. I could hear Ruby talking on the phone with one of her friends. No reply. Lara knocked again.

‘
What?
’

Where did all that anger come from? Was that my fault? Because I wasn’t under this roof? Lara knocked again and this time opened the door, ignoring the non-ironic DO NOT DISTURB sign.

‘I’ll call you back,’ Ruby said into the phone and flipped it shut. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ she said, and slipped the phone under her pillow.

‘Hello, angel,’ I said.

‘Dinner,’ Lara said, and it occurred to me that my wife and my daughter had started to communicate in sentences of one word or less. But then Ruby managed a two-word sentence.

‘Not hungry,’ she sighed, and stretched on her single bed, her arms behind her head. Her phone vibrated and she pulled it out from under the pillow, her smile lighting up as she read a text message. As if this was her real life, not the two people standing uninvited in her bedroom doorway.

‘I didn’t ask you if you were hungry,’ Lara said, and Ruby’s smile fell away. ‘Did I ask you that? I don’t think so. I didn’t ask you anything. I just told you – very politely – that dinner was ready.’

‘What’s this then?’ Ruby said. ‘Tough love?’

‘Downstairs,’ Lara said. ‘Five minutes.’

We left without closing the door.

‘Every time I see her,’ I said to Lara, ‘she gets bigger.’ ‘Really?’ Lara said. ‘Because to me she’s always the same little cow.’

She went into Rufus’ room without knocking. I hovered in the doorway. There was a musty man-smell in the room and the curtains were drawn. I could hear him snoring, but it was a different kind of snoring from what I remembered. There was real grown-up exhaustion in the sound. It was the snoring of a working man who was knackered. Lara pulled back the curtains. It was just starting to get dark outside.

‘Rufus? Time to get up. You’ve got work. And I’ve got some dinner for you. And your dad’s here. He’s brought some lovely Lithuanian wine.’

Rufus groaned, sat up in bed and collapsed again. His chest was alarmingly hairy. Why was I always so freaked out by the sight of my son’s hair? He was a man now. He groped for the cheap alarm clock by his bed and sighed. Seven o’clock, it said.

‘I was going to say hello to Dad and get something to eat on the way to work,’ he said half-heartedly, knowing full well that his mother would veto this plan.

‘No,’ Lara said. ‘Let’s all have dinner together.’

She closed his door behind us and looked at me grimly.

‘Everybody loves roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,’ she said. ‘Don’t they?’

I took her hand at the top of the stairs. ‘Lara,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s so good to see you.’

She patted my hand. And then her face fell. ‘My sprouts are burning,’ she said, and dashed downstairs.

So we stood by our old familiar places at the dining-room table. Lara at one end, me at the other, Rufus and Ruby facing each other across the middle. Ruby flopped down, staring at the screen of her phone, her thumb flashing across the keyboard. After my offers of help were declined, I took my place at what I once ludicrously thought of as the head of the table. Lara and Rufus went off to the kitchen.

‘Hey,’ I said, and Ruby looked up at me. I once loved that face more than anything in the world. And I still did. I leaned forward. ‘Be nice to your mum,’ I said. ‘Please.’

Ruby raised her plucked eyebrows, the injured party, sorely misunderstood. ‘Daddy, I would be, if she just – you know.’

‘What?’

She pouted. ‘Let me do what I want. Instead of always expecting me to do what
she
wants. How can that possibly be fair?’ Then she got up and came over and embraced me. ‘I didn’t give you a hug, did I?’ she laughed, and I felt my heart fill and then overflow with love. She could always do that to me, from the day she was born. My daughter would glance my way for a moment and it would make everything all right. Then she went back to her seat, looking at her phone. ‘You should keep your hair like that,’ she said as an afterthought. ‘Don’t cut it.’

I pushed my fringe out of my eyes and tucked a few tangled strands behind my ear. ‘Do you think so?’ I said.

‘Definitely,’ she said, not looking up.

Lara and Rufus came back with dinner. A joint of roast beef, steaming bowls of vegetables, a plate of giant Yorkshire puddings. Rufus picked up a carving knife the size of a samurai sword.

‘Let your dad do it,’ Lara said, and she smiled at me as she went to put on some music. I carved the roast beef. Rufus dealt out the vegetables. The music began to play.

I recognised it immediately. The CD was
City to City
by Gerry Rafferty. The track was, ‘Baker Street’. Lara joined us at the table as Ruby looked up from her mobile with theatrical shock.

‘Oh great,’ she said. ‘My favourite. Dad rock.’

‘Do you like it?’ Lara said, sawing a carrot in half. The carrots were a bit hard and the Brussels sprouts were a bit on the soft side. Lara had been distracted from cooking by rounding up our family. Or what was left of it.

‘Oh
yes
,’ Ruby said. ‘
Love
it, Mum. It’s just my sort of thing.’

‘That’s good,’ Lara said.

We were all silent for a bit. The only sound was the chewing and cutting, Gerry Rafferty and the bip-bip-bip of the text message Ruby was writing. I looked at Rufus. He looked at me. Then we both looked at our dinners. Rufus tore into his food. I couldn’t tell if he was famished or anxious to get away from us all.

Lara nodded at Ruby. ‘Can you put your phone away, please,’ she said. Then she glared at me, just this fleeting look of suppressed rage, and I thought – What the hell have I done? Nothing. And as Lara turned back to our girl, I saw that maybe that was the problem. But I couldn’t be the glowering big man at the head of the table. That wasn’t me any more. And so my family swirled around me, cut from their moorings.

Ruby had not looked up. In front of her the plate was untouched. Roast beef and Yorkshire pud. The vivid orange and green of the veggies. My daughter was thin and pale. It looked exactly what she needed. But her eyes were on her phone.

‘Just let me finish…’

Lara’s cutlery slammed against her plate.
‘Now.’

Ruby glared at her. ‘Aren’t you going to call me
young lady?
’ she said. ‘I love it when you call me that.’

‘Not if I can possibly restrain myself,’ Lara said.

She stared at Ruby until she placed her phone on the table with an elaborate sigh.

‘Ah, it’s really great, Mum,’ Rufus said.

‘It is,’ I quickly agreed, thinking I should have spoken up sooner. ‘Really great.’

Rufus had cleared his plate and reached across the table to get some more of everything. Then he went off to the kitchen to forage for more Yorkshire puddings. Ruby was frowning at her untouched meal as if she had only just realised that she had been presented with fried stoat.

‘Sorry?’ she said, all innocent enquiry. ‘But what is this exactly?’

‘Roast beef,’ Lara said. ‘Didn’t I tell you that we were having roast beef?’

‘Possibly,’ Ruby said. ‘But I think I may have been
attempting
to have a conversation with
my friend.’

Rufus returned from the kitchen. ‘No more Yorkshire puddings,’ he said, as though it was the news the world was waiting for, bless him.

‘Didn’t you know?’ Ruby said, giving her plate a little shove. She picked up her phone but didn’t flip it open. ‘I thought you knew.’

Lara shook her head. ‘Know what?’

Ruby gave a nod. ‘I’m a veggie.’

Lara smiled. ‘Since when? When did you become a vegetarian, Ruby?’

Ruby shook her head, as if the event was so far back in history that the exact date was lost in the mists of time. ‘Tuesday,’ she said.

‘Then eat your vegetables,’ Lara said. ‘Eat your Yorkshire pudding.’

‘It’s great, Rube,’ said her brother, and my heart went out to him. Rufus was the one who should have done the carving. He was the one attempting to hold it all together, to soothe the troubled waters between mother and daughter, while I just sat there in embarrassed silence sipping my Lithuanian wine.

But Ruby looked as though she had been asked to levitate.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Eat vegetables and so-called Yorkshire
pudding
when I am staring at a slaughtered animal?’ She looked at her plate and quickly looked away, holding her stomach. ‘What am I meant to do with the
meat
, Mother? Meat is murder.’

Lara nodded. ‘And so is living with you.’

Then Rufus was on his feet, his empty plate in his hands. ‘Can’t you two please stop bitching at each other for five seconds? Can’t you stop while Dad’s here?’

‘Apparently not,’ Lara said, miserably spearing a Brussels sprout.

‘Haven’t you got some shelves to stack?’ Ruby asked her brother. He stared at her, his face burning, and I thought for a moment that he might start crying. But he slammed out of the room and I could hear him in the kitchen, rinsing his plate before he put it in the dishwasher.

‘What’s eating Gilbert Grape?’ Ruby laughed, and she gasped and so did I as Lara reached across the table, picked up Ruby’s plate and hurled it across the room. Sprouts flying like shrapnel. Carrots like arrows. The Yorkshire pudding bouncing off the music centre, and giving Gerry Rafferty a jolt. And the beef and gravy making a hell of a mess on the curtains.

‘Whooh!’ said Ruby, raising her hands in surrender as she stood up. ‘Not completely mental or anything. Not remotely mental at all.’

Then Lara and I were alone.

She stared at her plate.

‘I thought that went rather well,’ I said.

She laughed briefly. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘Not your fault,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about that. But it’s not just me, is it? You used to be able to control her with a look. Remember that?’

I remembered. But it felt like some other life.

‘I don’t want her to be scared of me,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to control her with a look.’

‘But she’s not your friend. She’s your daughter. And if there’s no control, then you end up with Yorkshire pudding on the curtains. Do you prefer that?’

She wearily got up from the table, her right hand absent-mindedly massaging the unhealed spot behind her right knee, and then drifting up to that nameless area between the top of her hip and the bottom of her rib cage, those endlessly painful places where she felt her old dancing injuries the most.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘She’s not going out with that bloody guy tonight.’

That guy? That bloody guy? What bloody guy?

I followed Lara upstairs. Ruby’s door was open. We watched her touching up her make-up – when did the make-up start? We watched her consulting her phone – what bloody guy? We watched her getting ready to leave.

‘Excuse me, folks,’ she said, heading towards us.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Lara told her.

‘Watch me,’ Ruby said.

Lara grabbed her arm as she tried to brush past us. I could see it in her eyes – Lara had never come this close to hitting her. But I knew that she wouldn’t. Because she couldn’t. Not if Ruby set fire to the curtains, not in a hundred years. Lara could never hit her and Ruby would always have that over her. But Lara would not let go of her arm. And I just stood there, not really a father at all, just my daughter’s useless friend.

‘Ouch,’ Ruby said, squirming dramatically in her mother’s hand.
‘Ouch!
’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Lara said, getting right down to it.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Ruby said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me, Mummy dearest.’ The tears came to her eyes. ‘It’s too late to start playing happy families.’

Lara let her go. And seconds later I could hear her feet on the stairs, moving fast, desperate to get away before anyone had the chance to grab her again.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said.

‘You can’t talk to her,’ Lara said. ‘Not any more.’

I went down the stairs after her. The front door was open. I didn’t want her to go out. I called her name and somehow I thought that would be enough.

‘Ruby.’

‘Oh, leave me
alone.
’

Then she was out on the street and I saw a car parked outside with a man inside, a man I didn’t recognise, and it took a long, clogged-up moment for me to realise that he was waiting for Ruby. He was big and he had a few days’ worth of stubble on his face, but you couldn’t tell if it was because of fashion or sloth.

He reached across, pulled a handle and kicked open the passenger door. He was a man and not a boy and my daughter was sixteen years old. And I didn’t know where they were going, and I didn’t know who he was, this bloody guy, and it felt like there was so much that I didn’t know. In fact I felt as though I knew nothing of the world, apart from the fact that my daughter found it unbearable to be in the house that she grew up in.