The Heart Broke In (34 page)

Bec liked having Dougie around. He was a reminder of the early months in the house when they’d lived a less encumbered life. Since he’d tried to kiss her, he’d become a quieter presence. He found a job at the local sorting office and paid Alex two hundred pounds a month in rent, which Bec thought it mean of Alex to accept. He’d go out drinking several evenings a week; he didn’t eat with them often. He took on the weeding of the garden and the skimming of the pond. At weekends he would visit one of his daughters, who lived near London, or so Bec thought, till she caught him at five one Saturday morning leaving the house with a backpack and a fishing rod. He sometimes took a bus into the country, he told her. He liked to fish.

‘My Dad used to go fishing in the stream at the bottom of our garden,’ said Bec. ‘But there was a heron that took all the fish.’

She asked Dougie whether he’d ever taken Alex fishing and he said it had never occurred to him. He hadn’t thought Alex would like roughing it overnight in a field. Bec told him to try and a few weeks later she was woken up while it was still dark by Alex, fully dressed with a small rucksack on his back, kissing her goodbye.

Alex and Dougie took a bus north into a county that Alex thought had long since been swallowed up by London but which turned out to have hedge-lined lanes, woods and streams in the spaces left between motorways and commuter bungalows. They changed buses and got out in a coldly charming village and walked for half an hour down a lane, along the edge of a field, over a fence, through nettles and hogweed to a meadow by a deep green stream. A slow current engraved an endless curl on the surface under a screen of willow branches.

Dougie asked Alex where his rod was and Alex said he didn’t have one and it put Dougie out.

‘I asked you to come fishing, not to come talking,’ he said.

‘I thought you were going to teach me.’

‘Aye, that’d be a novelty, me teaching you.’

Alex put up the tent and stowed their gear inside while Dougie boiled water from the stream on a small gas cooker and made tea. Dougie put his rod together, baited his line, cast it and took up his station on a tiny folding stool by the water’s edge.

‘What now?’ said Alex.

Dougie shook his head. Alex put his hands in his pockets. Dougie hunched on the stool, not moving. Alex went into the tent with a book and read thirty pages. He looked out of the tent. His brother was in exactly the same position.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ Alex said. Dougie looked at him and nodded. Alex walked upstream. Wind stirred the branches of the trees and the dried leaves crept round his feet like insects.

There was a splash behind him. Dougie was lifting a live thing out of the water. Alex went back and asked if he could help. The fish was about the length of his hand, thrashing like
an escapologist trying to free itself from a silver sack. Dougie reached out with his left hand, took the fish off the hook and threw it into the water. Alex asked what it was.

‘Dace,’ said Dougie. He sat down, rebaited the hook, cast it and settled again, climbing back into silence and stillness as if he were climbing back into bed.

‘I wonder if it’ll live,’ said Alex.

‘Fishing’s no really about the fish,’ said Dougie. ‘It’s about quietness and knowing how to wait.’

Alex didn’t say anything for half an hour. He sat on the grass next to Dougie, with the bait and tackle box between them, trying to be patient, trying to lose himself in the circles on the water and the bubbles in the eddies or to follow the floating leaves describing the swirl of the current beneath the willow. But his mind churned. He asked Dougie about his children and when Dougie said that they were fine Alex told him that he and Bec were trying for one and Dougie said: ‘Good for you.’

‘It’s not happening,’ said Alex.

‘Patience,’ said Dougie. ‘It hasn’t been long.’

‘I tried with Maria, and now Bec. It doesn’t look good.’

‘Patience.’

‘You’ve never had any trouble.’

‘You think two wee daughters at opposite ends of the country’s no trouble? I never even wanted kids.’

‘That doesn’t make me feel better.’

‘It was no wearing a condom that did it for me.’

‘You think I forgot to take the lens cap off?’

‘I’m saying I was
totally irresponsible
. Being that thoughtless is a knack, buddy boy. How come I slept with those women if I didn’t like them? I gave in to myself. It’s no like that with
you and Bec. You’re in love with her and she loves you. She’s one in a million. Remember, there’s options.’

Alex did think he was in love with Bec, and yet it still seemed to him that the word ‘love’ was like a flat heavy stone that people hauled over disarray to keep it hidden in the dark.

‘What options?’ he said.

‘You’re the scientists. I don’t know. IVF again. Adoption. The old turkey baster.’

‘No,’ said Alex.

‘How d’you mean, no?’

Alex stared into the opaque water. ‘I think it’s me,’ he said. ‘Maria and Bec, it’s too much of a coincidence.’

‘Patience.’

‘I don’t want somebody else to father my children, I don’t want to adopt somebody else’s children, I don’t want Bec to have her eggs harvested and frozen and be fertilised in a dish. I want to know that me and her belong in nature.’

Dougie looked him up and down. ‘Nature?’ he said. ‘You?’

‘The chain of time reaching back to the first things,’ said Alex doggedly.

‘Too late for nature, buddy boy,’ said Dougie. ‘Where would you start? Give up your clothes and shoes, your house, your books, the shops, then you can start talking about the natural way. Making sick people better, or making people, what’s the difference? What’s natural in medicine? What’s natural in science? What’s natural in anything you do? You can’t even catch a fish.’

‘What I do in science is try to understand,’ said Alex. ‘If other people want to use that for medicine, it’s up to them.’

‘You gave Harry a dose before he went.’

‘Oh well, that was Harry,’ muttered Alex.

‘I don’t get you, brother.’

‘It’s not about fairness. It’s the way the universe is set up. Every generation there’s a sorting out, and there are those who get picked to go forward, and those who don’t get picked. And if I’m not picked, fine. I accept it. The universe can go on without me.’

Dougie bent forward on the stool. For a moment Alex thought he was going to topple into the water. He looked at Alex, blinded by tears of laughter. ‘Aha. Ahahaha. I get it now. There was me thinking I had a chip on my shoulder, and it turns out it’s just a bit of fluff compared to yours. Pride!’

He moved his fishing rod gently from side to side. In the water the line hardly stirred, as if it had caught on something. ‘If you sit around all day waiting for evolution to make you a bicycle, you’ll end up walking. It’s no just you now. You haven’t said to Bec what you’ve just said to me?’

Alex shook his head.

‘That’s good. Don’t. Less thinking and more making love to your beautiful girlfriend. Why not marry her?’

Alex bent his head quickly, frowned and tightened his mouth. ‘I’d stay with her whatever happens,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t stand in
her
way if she wanted children I couldn’t give her.’

‘I shouldn’t be giving you advice,’ said Dougie. ‘Don’t pay attention to anything I say. Look how far you’ve got and look at me.’

‘That’s not the way it is. You have a few setbacks and you make a fake failure personality for yourself.’

‘The personality came before the failure. It goes way back. You know what happened when Harry tried to help about that cunt Bridgeman giving me a hard time at school.’

‘Bridgie?’

‘Aye, Bridgie.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘You were off on that school trip to Paris. Bridgie was getting money off us and if I didn’t cough up he’d twist my arm behind my back and it hurt like fuck. Harry finds out about it and the next thing is I come home and there’s Bridgie sitting at the kitchen table, our kitchen table, trying not to laugh. Harry’s set up a peace conference for us. He’s made flags for us, cards with our names on, and he gives us this talk about conflict resolution, and starts quoting Noam Chomsky.’

‘And you were how old?’

‘Eleven. So there’s Uncle Harry, he’s done all this, he’s set up a peace conference, all the trimmings, little flasks of water on the table, gives us an agenda, and we have to go through it, make an agreement, then make a joint statement and shake hands while he takes a picture of us. He was making this huge effort and trying to do the right thing for me and stick to his ideals about humanity, and all I knew was my own uncle had brought my worst enemy into my own house. I threw a glass of water in Bridgie’s face and went and hid in my room. I wouldn’t come out till he’d gone.’

Dougie’s rod bent. An underwater force was pulling on the line and Dougie pulled sideways. The line quivered. Dougie fought, tried to play it, stood up, lifted the rod sharply and turned the reel. The line snapped and rippled free in the air. Alex thought of one of Bec’s long hairs that he’d found on his jacket when he was walking through a faraway town and how he’d lifted it off and held it up and watched it drift in the wind, caught in the sun, then let it go.

‘There’s something big there,’ said Dougie. He fixed a new hook to the line, baited it and cast.

He said: ‘What do I still owe you?’

‘A hundred and nineteen thousand pounds.’

‘Pounds, eh,’ said Dougie. The rod bent again and Dougie braced his heels against the bank. ‘Here,’ he said, and passed the rod to Alex. Alex could feel a powerful living energy yanking at the line. He could feel the anger and fear in the muscles of the creature in the stream.

‘What should I do?’ he said.

‘Just hang on,’ said Dougie. He took a net and stood over the water.

‘How can a fish in a little English stream be this strong?’ said Alex.

‘It’s throwing its weight like punches. It’s fighting for its life. Pull, rest, pull. After the next pull start reeling it in.’ The line slackened, Dougie leaned over to flip the catch on the reel and Alex began turning it.

‘Turn and pull. Fast! That’s it! Now pull it out!’ Alex swept the line up and across and the fish, so much smaller and brighter than he’d imagined, flew out of the water.

Maria sent Alex the documents from their conception files without a covering note and with the papers about herself weeded out. Bec read through them; it was as she’d been told. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong and Bec saw the years change in the dates on the documents and understood how long Alex and Maria had been trying. There were places where the dry language of the doctors softened.
However … unfortunately … always possible …

Bec said they should be tested again together and Alex said it had only been a few years since he’d sat in the bathroom of Maria’s house, trying to produce a sperm sample into a tiny plastic cup with a sharp, abrasive rim while their elderly Polish cleaner was vacuuming the hall outside. So Bec went to the fertility clinic alone. They measured her hormones, scanned her womb and told her that for a woman of thirty-four she was in fine reproductive shape. She waited for Alex to ask how the tests had gone, but he didn’t; he told her with strained cheer
We need to be patient
.

One night in February, when she came home from work, Alex was waiting for her in the hall with a pair of African drums. Beating a complex rhythm with his hands, he announced a special dinner on the occasion of the first
anniversary of their Tanzanian betrothal. Dougie was out and Alex had cooked ugali and stew with some kind of meat; London bush meat, he swore, a little bit of rat, fox, pigeon.
Look in the bin, the bones are there
. Afterwards they watched a
Daktari
DVD and drank the best part of two bottles of wine before they went to bed and made love in a warm, drunken way. In the small hours of the morning Bec woke up thirsty. She’d gone to sleep glad, and now was full of anxiety that they’d been rehearsing to be a lifelong binary, affectionate, amiable.

It seemed to her that Alex’s yearning for children had been the cause of the precious hard-edgedness of their lovemaking, the shadow that had moved between them when Alex was inside her, when she enclosed him, the savage ghost that stripped their tenderness of all that was cloying, when they’d bare and clench their teeth as if possessed by the beast they were fighting to break.

A couple of weeks later, when Alex went to America with a film crew, Bec was strangely joyful, and he noticed this. He asked
why she was in such a good mood
and she didn’t tell him she was several days late. She wanted to surprise him with a phone call, perhaps the same day, when he got off the plane in Los Angeles. It would still be Saturday in California, and Bec anticipated she would be in bed, after midnight, telling him everything. Pregnant! Why not? When Alex had gone she went to the chemist’s and bought a testing kit. She’d supposed the sales assistant would smile at her or wish her good luck but the young girl scanned the packet and took the money without her expression changing as if Bec were buying a toothbrush.

Bec remembered that the last time she’d bought a test it’d
been more in fear of pregnancy than in hope of it. At home she came out of the bathroom, sat on the bed and watched the display flash. Words appeared.
NOT PREGNANT
, it said. Her heart jumped. She stared at the tester and shook it and wondered if she’d done it wrong.

She looked towards the open doorway. Dougie was there, tapping the door with a single knuckle. She hid the tester in her fist, got up and slammed the door in his face. She shouted at him to leave her alone and mind his own business. She walked trembling around the room. Outside she heard Dougie talking and what sounded like a little girl’s voice. She came out and saw Dougie leading one of his daughters downstairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ she called, and Dougie looked round.

‘Come and have lunch with us,’ he said.

They went to a pizza restaurant on Upper Street. Kirsty, who was seven, was quiet and shy and wary of Bec, who told her she was sorry for shouting at them. She’d been cross about something, she told Kirsty. She wondered if Dougie had seen what she’d been holding. The deceptive candour of his eyes, which looked so frankly into hers but gave no indication of what they saw, gave their table of three an intimacy and a unity, drawing her closer to Dougie and Kirsty and pushing everyone else in the restaurant further out. She felt she was always looking away from him; each time it was as if at the very moment of her looking away a delicate change came across his face that made her curious, so she looked back.

A woman in her sixties at the next table kept turning to look at Kirsty, smiling and trying to catch the eye of Bec, who smiled back and wished Alex was there. When they
brought Kirsty’s ham and pineapple pizza the woman said to her that goodness, it was a large pizza, was she really going to eat all of it? And Kirsty said yes, she was, and the woman laughed hard and looked at Bec and Dougie and tried to hook them into joining in, and Bec laughed a little. Kirsty didn’t finish the pizza, but she had chocolate cake afterwards, and the woman leaned over and said to Kirsty that the chocolate cake looked absolutely fantastic! She said to Bec: ‘Their eyes are so much bigger than their stomachs at that age, aren’t they!’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bec. ‘I’m not her mother.’

She didn’t think she’d been rude, but the woman’s face lost its jollity and she turned away and didn’t speak to them again.

Later, alone at home, Bec loaded the washing machine in the scullery at the back of the kitchen. In theory there was a common basket for dirty clothes and it was a general chore to do the washing. It seemed to Bec that she did it more often than the brothers. She’d noticed that Dougie scrupulously kept his underwear out of the basket. She imagined him sneaking downstairs in the small hours to perform his secret laundry of intimate things. His shirts and jeans and t-shirts were in with the rest. Their colours and fabrics and patterns were as familiar to Bec as her own and Alex’s. The sleeves of Dougie’s rose-coloured denim shirt were twisted in a braid with the sleeves of Alex’s sky-blue dress shirt and a white blouse of hers. She lifted the tangle out of the basket and carefully unpicked the garments from each other. She put her blouse and Alex’s shirt in the machine and put Dougie’s on the floor. She went through the basket separating Dougie’s clothes from theirs. The closer she got to the
bottom of the basket the angrier she became.
I’m not Alex’s brother’s skivvy
, she thought. When she had the basket empty and Dougie’s clothes lay in their heap apart at her feet, older and more worn than Alex’s or hers and of strange old fashions, she saw in them only evidence of her own madness. She picked the clothes up and crammed them into the machine with the others and swirled them round with her hands till she was up to her elbows in tangled cotton and polyester and her eyes were hot and wet. She tore her limbs free, went to the kitchen, grabbed a half-full bottle of wine and poured a glass and sat at the table trying to tilt the tears back into her head. According to the kitchen clock Alex’s plane would land in LA in an hour.

Dougie came in. Bec stood up and he hesitated on the threshold, each tensed to take steps back as if each had caught the other doing something they shouldn’t.

‘I was going to get a bit of supper,’ said Dougie.

‘Have some wine.’

‘Not for me. Are you OK?’

‘Why?’

‘No reason.’

Bec smiled and fetched kitchen paper to blow her nose. Dougie approached and she let him put his arms around her and hold her. She pushed gently on his chest and he released her and stood back.

‘I miss Alex,’ she said.

‘Place feels empty with just the two of us.’

‘It was nice to meet your daughter.’

‘Aye she liked you.’

‘I never asked about your fishing trip.’

‘It was fine. We had a rare time. Did he not tell you?’

Dougie stopped to clamber up a small step of courage. ‘I’m thinking of leaving, going back up to Scotland.’

‘Oh.’

‘I shouldn’t have stayed so long. I’ve been imposing.’

‘We like having you.’

‘Is that right?’

‘I like having you around.’

‘It’s getting hard for me, Bec.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ah, you know what.’

‘I don’t know. What’s getting too hard?’

‘You know.’

‘You keep saying that. Maybe you should leave.’

‘Aye, maybe I should.’

‘Do you want to?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘I can’t. Not like this.’

They stared at each other.

‘I don’t know what you’re offering,’ she said.

‘What makes you think I’m offering anything?’ said Dougie.

‘I’d like you to stay for as long as you want and for you not to get crazy ideas about me. And I’d like to be sure, absolutely sure, that the day I tell you to go, you will go, and not come back.’

‘Not come back? Why would I not come back? What am I going to do?’

Bec blushed. She left Dougie and went to her room and called Alex and on the twentieth try he answered and said he’d just landed. Speaking to him took the weight out of the
day and she only told him that she’d spent time with Dougie’s daughter. She went to bed calmer and happier. The next morning her body confirmed what the tester had told her, that she was not pregnant.