Starting Over (20 page)

I saw that we can only do it when we think we have all the time in the world. But now I saw time running out on me, time having enough of me, and I knew I would never sleep like that again. It was lost to me, the blissful oblivion of youth, and I would never get it back.

So I rose from my bed and began pulling on yesterday’s clothes, and in the room next door I heard the slow, unsteady footsteps of my father.

There were kids playing football in the park.

Mostly boys, but there was a girl in an England shirt on one team. Skinny, tall, brown hair tied back. She was nobody’s kid sister, and just as good as the lads, stiff-arming a tackler away as she turned from facing her own goal and hoofed the ball upfield.

I watched them for a bit, amazed as always that among that riot of replica shirts, they still knew which side they were on. Then there was an overstruck cross and suddenly the ball was coming out of the sun, flying towards me.

I fixed my eyes on it, steadying myself, and when I swung my right foot, the ball connecting sweetly with my instep, I felt a pop of sudden pain in my knee. The ball flew back to them but the pain stayed behind, hissing beneath my kneecap, and I hopped with alarm, afraid to put my right foot back on the ground.

They stood watching me. Their game had stopped. The girl in the England shirt was holding the ball.

‘You all right, mister?’ she said.

I nodded and smiled and gave them a cheery thumbs up. They went back to their game, their shouts and cries following me as I hobbled from the park, trying to walk it off.

At first I thought it was a dipping crew.

I heard footsteps on the grass and then in the gravel that bordered the pool, footsteps treading softly, trying not to wake the house. I lay in my bed not breathing, staring at the ceiling and waiting for the splash of bodies slipping quietly into the water.

Instead something hit my bedroom window.

It was small and hard, like the first hailstone of a summer storm. Then it happened again, and I leapt from my bed and moved quickly to the window.

I pulled back the blackout curtains just in time to see Lara throw another stone at my window. This one missed. She had a handful of gravel, scooped up from the side of the pool, and she stood on tiptoes every time she lobbed another one. I lifted my window and a small stone immediately hit me in the eye.

‘Fuck,’ I said, staggering backwards, my palm slapped against my wounded eye. A few more tiny rocks landed in my bedroom as I grovelled on the carpet. Then they stopped. When I went back to the window she was looking up at me. My eye was already getting better. I could almost see out of it. Lara put a finger to her lips, and glanced at the window next to mine, where my parents were sleeping.

‘What time is it?’ I said, a hoarse stage whisper.

‘Time to come home,’ she said. A more natural voice than my own, but very quiet, and meant just for me. Then she smiled, and let the gravel slip through her fingers. ‘Our kid is going to have a kid,’ she said, and laughed, as though it
was a miracle. And it was – one of those everyday kind of miracles that are the most impossible of all.

‘Does that mean we’re getting old?’ I said.

‘It means we’re alive,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know the secret of life yet? With all your books and your thinking and your staring at the stars? Don’t you know the secret of life yet?’

I looked up at the sky. The stars were not out. There was just the orange glow that hung over the city at night like a dome. Then I looked back at Lara and waited.

‘The secret of life,’ she said, ‘is more life. Are you coming or what?’

‘What about that guy? Did you have sex with that guy?’

What I was hoping for was the news that my unexpected visit had interrupted the bastard’s coitus. What I was hoping for was the breaking news that no man had touched her. But she did not have the time for any post-match analysis of the past. And, if you want to know what I think, I don’t believe they did anything. She was here, wasn’t she? She wasn’t with him. She was in the garden.

‘I’m lonely,’ she said. ‘I miss you. Come home.’

‘I’ll get my things.’

She bridled with the first flash of irritation, and I saw that you can love someone, truly love them, and they can still get on your nerves. And I saw it cut both ways. The petty chores of daily life were still out there. I hadn’t escaped them. They hadn’t gone away. If I went back, the broken boiler would be waiting in ambush for me, somewhere down the road.

‘Don’t worry about your bloody things,’ Lara said impatiently. ‘Don’t you know how late it is?’

Then I thought I saw something stir in the shadows behind her. Was this the dipping crew at last? Lara looked over her shoulder and stared into the trees at the end of the garden.

‘What is it?’ she said.

I watched the dancing shadows. But I couldn’t see anything. It was probably just the wind, and my imagination, and my torn retina.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Don’t move.’

I quickly pulled on some clothes and headed for the door, and then stopped and looked back at my bedroom. The scattered clothes. The CDs left out of their jewel boxes, abandoned like yesterday’s toys. The books with their passages dramatically underlined. The curling remains of my takeaway pizza. A half-drunk bottle of cider.

And the weird thing is, I don’t even like cider.

Then I turned my back on all these things and I ran to my wife.

‘There are your default dreams and then there are your other dreams,’ she said, just as I was sleeping. ‘The default dreams are what everyone wants – your children to be with someone who will make them happy. Your parents to stay healthy. The money worries to go away.’

I struggled above the surface of sleep, more conscious of her physical presence than her words. It was strange and right to share a bed with Lara again. There was a dislocated normality about being by her side – like the way you feel when you awake from a bad dream, or when you get out of hospital. It’s as though your life can begin again, and something that was lost has been restored.

I was more than ready for my sleep. That happy exhaustion was upon me, the kind you only get after sex with someone who you have loved for a lifetime. But she kept talking, and I could tell that it was one of the things I was going to have to get used to now I no longer slept alone. I had forgotten Lara did that – liked to talk after sex, liked to talk when I was aching for my kip. But it
wasn’t like before, and it wasn’t as I thought it would be. She didn’t want to talk about proper jobs and pension plans. All that had slipped her mind. Her head was somewhere else now.

‘You don’t have to think about the default dreams,’ she said. ‘They take care of themselves. Or they don’t. But you have to think about the other ones. The dreams beyond the default dreams.’ Then she paused. ‘Can you hear that?’

In the city silence of our room we could hear the boiler wheezing and spluttering in the bathroom next door.

‘It’s going to blow,’ I said, and I thought – plumbers. Money. The hell of Yellow Pages.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It will wait until it gets a lot colder before it goes. That’s what it does.’

We listened to it gasping and clicking for a while. And we laughed in the darkness. The decrepit boiler would not be amusing on the bleak winter day it decided to pack up. But it was funny now.

‘I am never going back,’ I said. ‘To my old job.’

‘I guessed that,’ she said, and I saw her smile. ‘We’ll be fine. We can sell the house. Downsize. Now there’s only three of us.’

‘I never wanted us to have to sell the house,’ I said.

‘There are more important things,’ she said.

We lay there for a while, listening to the boiler.

‘It’s called a bucket list,’ I said. ‘The things you want to do before – you know.’

‘Before you fall off your perch,’ Lara said.

‘Before you kick the bucket,’ I said. ‘It’s called your bucket list.’

‘Drive through Paris in an open-top sports car,’ Lara said. ‘Dance again on a West End stage and get paid for it.
Go to the slums of Buenos Aires and see where the tango began.’

I thought that maybe you could drive through Paris in an open-top sports car and just get stuck in the traffic on the Champs Élysées. Or you could be in a musical on Shaftesbury Avenue and the people wouldn’t come and the critics would be cruel. But I knew she would go to Buenos Aires one day. Lara had been dreaming of that for twenty years, long before either of us had ever heard of a bucket list, or ever thought we might need one.

I could hear it when she slept.

It was there in a catch of her breath, a shift in her body weight, a sigh that came from somewhere deep in her sleep. The sound of the pain.

It had been there for almost as long as I had known her, as inseparable from Lara as the colour of her eyes. The old injuries, the aches and pains that she carried with her like a birthmark, the wounds that had been left after the wounds were healed. Those souvenirs of her dancing days.

Some of the pain was as specific as a page torn from an ancient diary – the cruciate ligament repaired at the Wellington Hospital, the torn cartilages that accounted for the bumps of scar tissue she carried on both her knees – but some of it was wrapped in mystery, and put down to wear and tear, and never even thought about.

She didn’t complain. She wasn’t the type. And I had grown accustomed to the sight of her massaging herself, her fingers digging into the area behind her knee, or the spot where her rib cage met her hip, as she drank her morning coffee or watched TV or got undressed for bed. In a marriage you learn to look straight at things – and never see them.

It was different at night, as she slept by my side, and I felt her shift or stir with some nameless hurt. The pain never seemed to wake her. But it woke me, and on that first night home I lay next to my wife for hours, my eyes wide open in the darkness, the way we only do with our newly born and beloved.

Just listening to the sound of her breathing.

There is only one house in the world where you can walk in and go straight to the fridge, and that is the place you grew up in.

We didn’t ask Rufus what was wrong. Suddenly he was there in the hallway, grunting a sheepish greeting, and we followed him into the kitchen. He took a carton of full-fat out of the fridge and chugged it down, standing there with the door open, his tie dangling around his neck like a wonky hangman’s noose. Lara stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, livid with shaving rash, and she gently closed the fridge door. I hugged him and it was still like embracing a bag of bones, despite the business suit from Next.

‘So how are you?’ he said, and I laughed, because I always found it funny when my children attempted to make small talk.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘How you doing?’

‘I’m all right,’ he said, scowling. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘No reason,’ I said mildly, not rising to the bait. I worked it out in my head. There was less than a month till his wedding. His mother offered to make him something, grabbing his belt and shaking it, indicating that he was too thin. He laughed and moved away from her, clutching his carton of full-fat, telling her he wasn’t hungry. He was an assistant manager now, and almost a married man, and he wasn’t
used to having someone grab his belt and shake it. I felt like doing something to him too – maybe ruffling his hair, or slapping him on the back, or lightly punching his arm. Anything for some physical contact with my son. But he was an assistant manager now, and almost a married man, and there were black rings under his eyes. So I didn’t touch him. I didn’t want to violate the terms of our awkward hugging convention.

The three of us went into the living room. The TV was on. We fell into our historic armchairs and corners of the sofa and Rufus reached for the remote, flicking through the channels until he saw Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor tapdancing and playing the violin at the same time.

‘
Singin’ in the Rain
,’ Lara said, touching Rufus on the arm. ‘Don’t turn it off.’

He reluctantly put down the remote and leaned back, staring at the ceiling with a slow exhalation of breath. It was like hearing someone let go of their youth. Lara looked at me without expression and then she turned back to the film.

Debbie Reynolds was jumping out of a cake at a Hollywood party. She looked shocked when she saw Gene Kelly. She had told him she worked in the theatre, and here she was jumping out of a cake in her underwear, the little liar. Lara laughed and Rufus looked at the screen and I saw a flicker of recognition on his face. ‘How many times have we seen this?’

His mother didn’t look at him. ‘You can never see
Singin’ in the Rain
too many times,’ she said. I tried to work out what was so different about him. His hair was cut so short. He looked as though he was in the army or something. We did not say anything for a while. When Donald O’Connor
was doing, ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ – dancing on his knees, defying gravity, walking into walls – I looked at my boy’s face. He was almost smiling. That scene used to make him fall off the sofa. I suppose he was a lot younger then.

‘How do you even know if you are with the right person?’ he said, not looking at us. I thought about it. You just knew, didn’t you? If you had doubts, then you were not with the right person. But I did not want to tell him that.

‘It’s like believing in anything else,’ Lara said. ‘It’s an act of faith.’

‘But do you think people can stay together these days?’ he said, still watching the screen as Gene Kelly tried to win back Debbie Reynolds. ‘Not just – you know. Go their own way after a few years. Do you think that two people can stay together forever these days?’

‘I think it gets harder,’ Lara said. ‘But I still believe.’

We watched the film for a while. There were footsteps on the stairs and Ruby came into the room and said, ‘Hey you,’ to her brother. She sat on the arm of the sofa next to him. I went off to make four mugs of builder’s tea and when I came back Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds were singing, with Gene dressed as a thirties tennis player and Debbie standing on an inexplicable ladder.

Ruby laughed shortly. ‘Is your ladder really necessary?’ she said. But she flopped down next to her brother and he put his arm around her.

And Gene Kelly fell in love with Debbie Reynolds. Kelly sang and danced in the rain. In a dream he met Cyd Charisse, a gangster’s moll in a green dress who in the end leaves him for a silver dollar, and nobody ever danced like that before or since.

‘Cyd Charisse,’ Ruby said. ‘Your favourite.’

‘That’s right,’ Lara said. ‘My all-time favourite.’ ‘I might stay overnight, Mum,’ Rufus said. ‘Is that all right?’

I thought, Stay for the next ten years if you like. Stay forever. But I knew he wouldn’t – I knew that he couldn’t – not with a baby on the way. Our son wasn’t that type, the type who stays away when there is a baby, and that was one of the reasons I loved him.

‘Stay as long as you like,’ Lara said.

He didn’t even stay for the night.

Autumn had blown in now and many pools were being closed down for the winter months. I had thought that September would mean less work for Winston and me, but our workload actually increased as the days got shorter.

‘You can’t just cover them up,’ he told me, as we pulled into the crunchy gravel driveway of a big house in Richmond. There had been a BMW X5 parked outside for weeks. ‘The end of summer is the hardest time of all.’

Winston produced his huge gaoler’s bunch of keys, and let us into the garden by the side gate. There was a scattering of leaves over the pool. It still looked impossibly blue, even in the tired sunlight. From a house nearby I could hear a Beach Boys’ song, but it seemed all wrong, like a Christmas tree on New Year’s Day.

Winston fished the leaves out as I super-chlorinated the water – Winston favoured a triple dose – because any dirt or debris would leave stains and be much harder to remove when spring came around. We coated the metal ladders with petroleum jelly to stop corrosion and covered the diving board. I watched Winston use the garden hose to squirt a little water into a dozen plastic milk bottles.
He tossed them on to the surface of the water. I hadn’t seen that before.

‘That way if the water freezes the ice will crush the milk cartons,’ he said, ‘and not the walls of the pool.’ A gap-toothed smile. ‘You want to cover the pool?’

I nodded and walked across to the small shed in the corner of the garden. Inside were the gas-fuelled heater and the pool’s control panel.

I hit the button for the cover and stepped outside to watch it slowly unfurl from the deep end. The Pacific Ocean blue began to disappear under a white metallic cover etched with rust. In less than a minute the water was gone, and it was as if it had never been there at all.

As we were leaving, the family arrived home in a black cab, a man and a woman and a teenage boy, and we helped them get their suitcases out of the cab and into the house. Up in his room, the kid put on some music and the silence of the house was broken. The man wanted to give us money but Winston wouldn’t take it, and the woman wanted to give us tea but there was no milk in the house.

So we said goodbye and left them, tanned and shivering in their summer clothes, dressed all wrong for London at this time of year, but happy to be home.

The queue started at the stage door and ran a hundred metres down Shaftesbury Avenue. Tourists and office workers gawped at the long line of men and women, most of them very young, some of them alarmingly attractive, but the dancers did not seem to notice.

I realised with a jolt that this was probably the exact spot where we had met, and I was smiling and just about to mention it to Lara when word came down the line.

‘They’re looking for six and six,’ said the young woman in front of us, and Lara told me that meant they were going to hire six male dancers and six female dancers. ‘Six boys and six girls,’ Lara said. There were no men and women in the chorus line. Only boys and girls.

‘What are they looking for?’ said the boy behind us, and he really was a boy, a few years younger than Rufus. Lara said, ‘Six and six,’ and he excitedly passed it on.

Lara clutched my arm and smiled. ‘It all comes back to me now,’ she said, and we turned and looked at the queue, which was growing by the minute: that long line of lean, aching, pain-racked bodies now stretched halfway down Shaftesbury Avenue. Her eyes were shining with it all.

The anticipation of a job, the raw excitement of standing in the street with a hundred other dancers, but also the hedging of bets, the preparation for rejection, the expectation of failure – just to draw some of its sting. The girl in front of us began stretching.

‘What is it anyway?’ she sniffed. ‘Yet another Sherlock Holmes musical. Not the one that closed after a few months. The other one. The one that closed after a week. The one with the exclamation mark.’

‘That’s right,’ Lara said. ‘I was in it.’

The girl looked blank. Then she looked at Lara more closely and perhaps believed her. What’s twenty years when you’re still a teenager? A lifetime.

When we were inside I hung at the back of the auditorium. The place seemed to be made of worn red velvet. There was one man sitting alone at the front of the stalls. He was a well-preserved old gentleman in dark glasses, like a rock star at sixty. When Lara came on to the stage with fifty other dancers I felt a shiver of fear and pride. A woman was on
stage with them. Thin as a whippet, bossy as a prison guard. Clapping her hands, getting them into line, giving them impatient instructions. The music started.