The Other Son (2 page)

Marrying Ken had not been Alice’s first choice. In fact, it hadn’t really felt like a choice at all. Her grandparents (who she never met – they had died by the time she was born) were Jews who had fled Russia in the late 1800s. They had arrived in Norwich and then the Midlands as penniless refugees.

Despite widespread myths about the wealthy, successful, business-like nature of the Jewish people, they had remained pretty much paupers their whole lives, right up until their premature deaths in their forties. Poverty and persecution do not a long happy life make, it would seem.

Alice’s own parents, her mother no longer officially Jewish (she had seen how dangerous
that
could be) and her father of Irish extraction, had suffered terrible deprivation during their childhoods and had barely managed to drag themselves out of the gutter by the time Alice came along. Her father was a street cleaner, so in some ways, he was still very much
in
the gutter.

Though Alice herself had never known hunger, she had grown up with the terrifying all-pervading knowledge that poverty was never far away. Her parents had lived as if destitution were imminent, hoarding tins of food in the cellar and worrying, to the point of near-insanity, about every political upheaval, every downturn, every distant conflict... It didn’t take much, they told their children, over and over, for everything good to vanish. All it took was an injury or an illness, or another economic depression – all that was needed was another Alexander the Third, or another Hitler for that matter, and they’d all be scrabbling around in the dirt all over again.

By the time Alice hit nineteen they had been pushing her to marry for a while. Marriage was about the only hope that people like her parents had for their daughters, and they were concerned, unnerved, by the lack of suitable suitors and by her ever-deepening friendship with Joe. Joe who came from the wrong side of the tracks in so many ways.

Alice wonders where Joe is now. She wonders if Joe is even still alive, wonders whether Joe went on to have the exceptional life that Alice always imagined.

And then Alice came home one night from the soap factory, the stink of fat and lye still on her clothes, and there was Ken, leaning on the mantelpiece, fiddling with a pocket-watch, looking suave. Her parents were smiling nervously up at her, being – what’s that word? – obsequious, that’s the one. Ken had seemed bright-eyed and smart in his Sunday best – he had always been a snappy dresser – and he’d been polite and generous towards her, even enabling,
insisting
, that she quit that horrible factory job. Yes, he had been nice enough, at least at the outset.

People complain about the Muslims and what-have-you, complain that they arrange their marriages, that they hang people, that they still treat homosexuals badly, that they don’t give women proper rights; but it really wasn’t that long ago that all those things happened here. People pretend to have forgotten these things because it makes them feel better, it makes them feel superior. But Alice remembers.

So yes, Ken had been polite and well dressed and, above all in her parents’ eyes,
generous
. He was to inherit his father’s business. He had good prospects. He was declared to be a “catch.” There was no reasonable opt-out clause.

Just after one, Ken pulls into the motorway services. They run through the drizzle and then stand in the midst of the food-court to survey the various offerings, blasts of freezing air chilling their backs every time the sliding doors open.

“Well what do you fancy, love?” Ken asks, as if choosing between these grubby little kiosks, between
Burger King
, or
Famous Fish
, or
Señor Taco
might actually be considered a treat.

Alice bites her lip and turns her head from side to side as she takes in the options. “Fish and chips might be the best option,” she says, thinking that at least the deep frying process will be hot enough to kill any microbes. Nothing looks very clean here.

“Yes. Fish and chips and mushy peas,” Ken says, sounding almost enthusiastic. But the girl in
Famous Fish
is already wiping down the counters with a greasy cloth, inexplicably closing up at ten past one, so they end up with Ocean Catch menus from Burger King which Ken declares are “almost the same thing.”

But an Ocean Catch menu is
not
the same as fish and chips – not by a long stretch. Alice nibbles at the bun and then samples the burnt, greasy fish-finger type thing within. She disdainfully lifts a few of the powdery fries to her lips and ponders the mysteries of British food. Because the lad in Burger King sounded a bit Italian, and the girl in Famous Fish had definitely been French. They live, after all, on an island of green fields, surrounded by seas, encircled by European countries with fabulous cuisines. Half the people in the restaurant industry are French or Spanish or Italian or Indian, and yet the entire country has ended up opting for these American food-like synthetics. Burgers and “french” fries, and tacos. It really is a terrible shame.

Alice watches Ken wolfing down his burger. He has never cared much about food which is also a shame because once upon a time she had pretensions to being a good cook. Her pies had been to die-for – everyone said so. These days, after fifty years of indifference, of hearing Ken proudly tell people that he “eats to live, not the opposite,” she has abandoned any culinary aspirations. Nowadays they mostly eat ready-meals. An occasional homemade cauliflower cheese or an actual cooked breakfast is about as adventurous as it gets in the Hodgetts household.

A child on the far side of the hall starts to scream and Alice glances over and briefly remembers Matt shrieking in a shop somewhere. She scans the food-hall again, taking in the true horror of its dilapidation: the chipped, grubby Formica tables, the economy lightbulbs sprouting from fittings designed to take pretty spotlights that once must have cast a warm glow on fresh, shiny tables. She feels a bit like the food hall – tired and worn out and a bit depressed. The food-hall suddenly seems like a metaphor for her life. Something that should be, that
could
be, that once
was
sparkly and appealing, but which is now chilly, grubby and worn out, lit with flickering, yellowish, cheap-to-run lighting. The whole place is beyond repair, really. It needs to be pulled down and rebuilt from scratch.

The door opens behind her again, and she pulls her scarf more tightly around her already stiff neck. Alice isn’t getting any younger, either. She’s getting older and achier. She remembers her parents complaining about their aches and pains, remembers thinking that they exaggerated it all. But youngsters, learn this: your body really does get older. Joints actually do creak when you get up in the morning, really do seize up when you sit in a car for two hours. She knows what’s at the end of that particular tunnel. By the time you get to seventy, by the time you’ve been to as many funerals as they have, you have got used to that idea – you’ve had time to grasp the concept of your own mortality. But that doesn’t make it seem fair. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily feel as if you have lived everything that you were supposed to live.

“You all right?” Ken asks.

“Fine,” Alice says. “Just thinking about poor Jean, really.”

Ken nods. “Yeah. She’ll be in a right state,” he says, then, pointing, “Are you eating those, or... ?”

Alice shakes her head, smiles weakly and pushes the package of fries across the table.

Yes, it feels like a small life looking back on things. Even smaller these days as the high points – the summer holidays, the days on beaches with the kids and the dances of her youth – shrink and fade in the rear-view mirror. It’s not that she aimed high and failed, she never expected much. She didn’t come from the kind of people who hoped for much more than enough to eat and a dry, warmish house. To her parents, even these things were incredible, unexpected achievements. So no, she had never hoped for miracles, never expected a vast Premium Bond win. But she did think that at some stage she would have a sense that there had been some point to it all. She thought that at some point she would be overcome by a sense of contentment, like a cat on an armchair, perhaps, in the sun. She had expected to be able to stretch and yawn and look back on it all and think,
“There, I did it! Now I can relax!”

Perhaps her problem is that she never took the time to define what “it” was. If only she had defined some goals for herself, then maybe she would feel like she had achieved them.

Ken is clapping his hands and standing, so she wrests herself from her sombre revery and pulls her attention back to the here and now of this day, of this journey. They’re on their way to a funeral. Of course she’s feeling a bit down. Who wouldn’t?

“Well,” Ken is saying, “that’s put some fuel in the old furnace. Shall we make a move?”

It is still raining as they merge back onto the motorway. Alice thinks that she hates winter, that she truly, honestly
hates
it. She has always felt as if she isn’t genetically adapted to survive an English winter. Perhaps her great, great grandparents weren’t from Russia, but the Middle East. Seeing as they were Jewish, it’s surely not impossible, is it? She wrinkles her nose at her own shocking lack of grasp of Jewish history. Their Jewishness wasn’t something her mother ever wanted to discuss.

Ken swings out to overtake a petrol tanker and has to drive through an opaque wall of spray from the tanker’s vast wheels. Alice winces until they come out the other side and vision is restored.

She wonders how Mike felt on the night of his death. She wonders if his life flashed before his eyes as it always does in films. And if it did flash before him, she wonders if Ken featured even briefly, if it contained glimpses of their shared fifty-year careers in the tyre remould business. She wonders what his happiest memories were. His kids, perhaps. His daughter has always seemed nice enough.

Alice has had moments of contentment too. Dozing off in a deck chair on a beach when the kids were younger, swimming in the sea with little Tim clamped to her back shrieking in her ear with excitement... They went to Cornwall for a few years in a row when Matt was a toddler. Ken had found a bargain cottage to rent, and they had gone back every year until the owner sold it. It had felt quite traumatic
not
being able to go there once the cheap deal ended.

“How many years did we go to Durgan?” she asks.

Ken looks at her and frowns. “Four? Five?” he says.

“That’s what I thought. Four.”

“Why?”

“No reason. I was just remembering.”

“You remember when Matt fell down those stairs?”

Alice is surprised that Ken dares mention that day. To stop Ken looking at her, she glances out of the side window. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I do.”

It had been a beautiful summer’s day, and Matt had been, what? Five? Six? Something like that. They had meandered through the higgledy piggledy Cornish town, bought dribbling ice creams, had Coca-Colas on the seafront... And then they had wandered along the pier. Alice had wanted a photo, so she had asked Ken to pose with the kids, but they were on a sugar rush and had run off. And while she was looking through the viewfinder framing the stunning coastline in the background, there had come a shriek from behind her. Matt, it transpired, had run straight over the edge of a flight of stairs, had somehow failed to see them, had quite simply not stopped. He had cut his forehead, grazed his knees, split his lip and chipped a tooth.

Secretly, because she would never dare say such a thing, Alice held Ken responsible. He had, after all, been staring straight at Matt. “What happened?” she had asked him. “Did you see? How did he fall?” The sun had been in his eyes, Ken said. And she was their god-damned mother, not him.

They had held onto their anger long enough to assure themselves that no bones were broken, long enough to buy sticking plasters, and long enough to drive the crying children (Tim had joined in by that point) back to the cottage.

And then Ken had started drinking. Matt had “ruined” the day, he kept telling him. It was a waste of time trying do anything nice for any of them.

By the time he had downed his third beer, the focus of his fury had turned to Alice.

Those moments of contentment, those moments of relief, were so often fleeting, so often terminated by one of Ken’s thoroughly unreasonable temper tantrums. If her life flashed before her, Alice thinks that the happy snapshots would be as rare and fleeting as the English sun that shone upon them.

Perhaps that’s the real truth – that she just needed to live somewhere warmer. Because she has always been something of a sun-lizard, has never missed a single opportunity to turn her face to the sky and close her eyes. And
all
of her good memories were moments that were lit by sunshine, moments eased by warmth. She remembers herself at eighteen, lying in Canon Hill park with her head on Joe’s stomach. Some kids had been playing with a football and it had whacked Joe on the shoulder. Joe, always energetic, always full of beans, had jumped up and kicked it back across the green with surprising expertise.

She tries to push the image from her mind. It’s amazing how tenacious lost dreams can be. Incredible really, that such a simple memory like that, a simple memory of a sensation of uncomplicated happiness, can still feel haunting fifty years later.

“Look at that idiot,” Ken says as one of those new over-sized cars squeezes itself into the tiny gap between themselves and the car in front.

“Everyone is driving too fast anyway,” Alice says, pointedly.

“Bloody wankers in their Porsches,” Ken says.

And it’s true, Alice thinks, that the people in the big expensive cars are always a bit worse than everyone else. They’re always a little more pushy. They probably consider themselves invincible in their big steel boxes.

“Is that really a Porsche?” Alice asks. She always thought Porsche’s were little sports cars designed for insecure, middle-aged men with shrivelled up todgers.