The Other Son (3 page)

“Yep. It’s basically the same car as a VW
Touareg
,” Ken informs, as if that’s supposed to mean something to her. “They’re made in the same factory.”

“Right,” Alice says. “Well, it’s very big. It’s like a lorry almost.”

“Awful in an accident,” Ken says. “It would flatten that little Panda in a pile-up.”

From the corner of his eye, Ken sees Alice gripping the handle. “Just relax will you?” he says. “You’re making
me
nervous.”

“You’re just a bit close, that’s all.”

“It’s not my fault if that idiot’s inserted himself bang in the middle of my braking distance.”

“No. But you can still slow down. That is allowed, I believe. Even when it’s not your fault.”

Just as Alice says this, the Porsche lurches back out into the fast lane and accelerates away. “There,” Ken says. “Better?”

“Yes,” Alice says, forcing herself to breathe. She looks at the little boxy car in front. It’s the same type of car that she and Dot had rented in Spain six years ago. It had been such fun driving that little car around those winding Spanish roads. She’d been nervous at first, of course – driving on the wrong side of the road and everything. And she had kept searching for the gearstick and the handbrake in the door-pocket – that had been embarrassing. But once she had got used to it, it had been lovely. The car had a leaky exhaust pipe too, she remembers now. It had made it sound like a sports car.

They’d had
too
much fun on that holiday, really. Dot had had a fling with... Alice can’t remember his name now... anyway, he had been the father of the young man who ran the hotel bar. Now
there’s
a story never to be told! Imagine if Dot’s husband ever found out about that! And while Dot had been otherwise occupied with Jorge – that was his name, pronounced
hor-hey
– Alice had been wined and dined by Jorge’s best friend Esteban. Esteban had not been Alice’s type at all, thank god. He had been way too hairy, way too... what’s that word? Ugh! It’s so annoying the way, when you get older, the words start to hide from you. Sometimes, as she tries to explain one word, she can’t think of the other similar word either. It happens more and more with people and places too. “She looks like that actress,” Alice will tell Ken. “You know... the one who’s in that film. The film made by... oh, gosh... by that actor who’s also a film director. The one who made...” And of course, she can’t remember the film that he made either. Sometimes she has to dig down three or four levels before she can start digging her way back out again.

Anyway, Esteban had been too
hirsute
, that’s the term. No one says hirsute anymore. It’s strange the way words go out of fashion. Alice always preferred clean-shaven men. And the mere thought of a hairy back has always been enough to make her shudder. Beards and moustaches look a bit sinister, don’t they? But the attention – Esteban’s attention – had been lovely. So she had let him believe. She had led him on a little. She had allowed poor Esteban to take her to dinner. And then she’d pretended, once she got home, that the holiday had been uneventful, boring even. In fact she’d so overcompensated the misery side of things that it became impossible for her to justify going with Dot again the following year.

Dot’s going again next summer, but to southern Spain this time, to Alicante. It’s even hotter down there, she reckons, and Alice would love to go with her. She thinks a proper holiday in the sun would do her the world of good, reckons it would ease her aches and pains, too. But how to approach it? It’s a bit like Christmas at Tim’s. She can’t work out how to organise it, how to mention it even without sounding like she’s asking Ken for his approval. Because what if Ken says ‘no’? And he’s pretty likely to say that. He’s bound to say that they can’t afford it, or that she didn’t even enjoy it last time or something like that. Even worse would be if he decided he wanted to come along. But that’s unlikely. Ken’s not keen on foreigners.

“Where’s Matt at the moment?” Alice asks, trying to forge a bridge she can use to move the conversation towards where she’s hoping to go. “Is he in France or Spain?”

“France,” Ken says. “As far as I know.”

“He
was
in Spain though, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Ken says. “He was in Madrid. But now he’s in France, down south somewhere. He’s been in France for a while.”

“Dot’s off to Spain next summer.”

“Dot’s off to Spain
every
summer.”

“Maybe I’ll go with her and meet up with Matt somewhere.”

“Matt’s in
France,”
Ken says again, starting to sound exasperated.

“They do share a border, you know: France and Spain.”

“What, you’re hoping to wave to Matt from over the border?”

“No... it’s got nothing to do with Matt really, I just...”

“I’m not the one who brought Matt up.”

“No. I was just thinking it would be nice to go to Spain again.”

Ken shoots Alice one of his looks – a mixture of confusion and disdain.

“So what do you think?” Alice asks. “About Spain?”

“You
know
what I think about Spain,” Ken says. “Sweaty Spics and girls with moustaches and greasy food and tap water that gives you the squits. That’s what
I
think of Spain.”

“That’s verging on racist,” Alice says.

“It’s the truth,” Ken says. “And the last time I looked,
Spain
wasn’t a race. It’s a nationality.”

“It’s a country, actually. Spain is a country, and Span-
ish
is the nationality of those who live there.”

Ken blows out through pursed lips and shakes his head. “I can’t win with you, can I? I don’t know why I still try.”

Alice doesn’t risk replying. She laughs lightly to defuse the tension.

She thinks about Matt in France. She wonders what he’s doing. She wonders if he’s OK. She wonders if he’ll ever come home again.

He’ll be working some dead-end job, cleaning or packaging sausages or waiting in a restaurant – he has done all of these things. It’s such a waste, that’s the thing. Because, like herself, he could have done so much more.

“Dot says Matt’s just trying to find himself,” Alice says, unsure even as she says it why she has chosen this particular phrase to say out loud. “But I think it’s the opposite. I think he’s trying to lose himself.”

“Dot should mind her own onions,” Ken replies, misunderstanding entirely the context of Dot’s remark. And that’s Alice’s fault far more than it is Ken’s. She hadn’t, after all, provided any context.

But Ken doesn’t like Dot much, that’s for sure. Dot is a busy-body. She’s pernickety and sarcastic. She has an over-active thyroid which she claims explains much of her nervous disposition. But whatever the cause, she rubs Ken up the wrong way. Not that he has ever really approved of any of Alice’s friends. Even Lisa, her best friend all those years ago, he hated with a passion. Though that was probably Lisa’s fault, too. Lisa certainly hated Ken first. But what with Lisa moving to New Zealand, and Jenny Mayer dying; what with Jenny Parson now a full-blown alcoholic, that only leaves Dot. So no matter what Ken thinks, Alice isn’t going to give Dot up.

Lisa has been gone over twenty years now and still Alice misses her. She was the friend Alice felt closest to, the only one who ever really laughed at her jokes. It was a shock when Lisa and Jim moved away, a shock to have to realise that your biggest, most important friendship just didn’t weigh that much in the grand scheme of things, not when balanced against a better lifestyle, a bigger house with a pool and a major promotion for Jim. It’s normal to lose friends over the course of a lifetime: you fall out with some, you grow apart from others. A few die too. But to have someone just move to the other side of the world, well, that’s tough. And one thing’s for sure – it’s less and less easy to make new friends as you get older, there are so few opportunities for it.

Still, she has Dot, thank God. Dot gets on with her own husband Martin about as well as Alice gets on with Ken, so it’s a relationship based largely on bitching. But bitching, it turns out, is a surprisingly solid basis for a friendship. At the thought of the things they say, at the conversations they have about their respective husbands, Alice snorts almost undetectably. Ken, usually so slow to pick up any kind of subtlety, catches this one immediately.

“What?” he asks.

“Oh nothing,” Alice says. “I was just thinking about those Christmas decorations in Tesco.” When you have a tetchy husband, you develop coping mechanisms, such as always having an alibi at the ready.

One time, a couple of years back, Alice had been telling Dot what a relief it was that Ken no longer wanted to have sex. Dot had been laughing, lapping it up, goading Alice to go further, to be funnier and ruder. Alice had said something about Ken’s wrinkly wiener – a phrase she had heard on an American sitcom – and Dot had spat her wine all over the dining-table. But then they had heard a tiny voice coming seemingly from nowhere. “Hello, hello?” it said. Alice finally traced the little voice to her new mobile phone in her handbag. It had somehow dialled home, had mysteriously and, under the circumstances,
dangerously
, called Ken.

Terrified that he had overheard part of their conversation, and wracked with guilt, Alice had literally been trembling by the time she opened the front door that evening. But she had found Ken sober, calmly watching television. He had complained about the phone bill, of course. He had reminded her “for the thousandth time” to lock the keyboard – whatever that means. But that was it. She had got away with it. She was always very careful with her mobile after that.

“Chinese tyres,” Ken says prompting Alice to look out of the side window at the lorry they are overtaking. It says “Imperial Tyres” on the side.

“Imperial doesn’t sound very Chinese,” Alice comments.

“Well it’s not meant to, is it? That’s the point. That’s why they do it,” Ken says. “So you think they’re English.”

“I suppose they did have an empire once.”

“The Chinese?”

“I think so.”

“Well, empire or not, their tyres are rubbish. Dangerous rubbish, at that.”

“You just don’t like the fact that they’re cheaper than remoulds,” Alice says. She has heard Ken say this enough times to know that it is true.

“You’re right. I don’t,” Ken says. “But they’re still rubbish. That
Which
magazine tested them all and the braking distances on the Chinky ones were terrible.”

Alice watches as the tyre truck indicates, then veers away from them, apparently taking its slippery Chinese tyres to rainy Blackburn. It’s funny, because she thinks that she can smell the load it’s carrying from here but it’s probably just her memory, it’s probably just because of the conversation and the fact that the odour of tyre rubber has permeated their entire lives.

Even when Ken had a whole chain of
Re-Tyre
stores, even when he was spending all day in the offices towards the end, he still came home smelling of rubber, still sat down of an evening emanating that bitter, metallic smell of recycled tyre rubber. No, her first choice would not have been to marry a tyre re-moulder even if they are still here, fifty years later. Who would ever have guessed that they would turn out to be quite so tenacious?

It’s not that she
hates
Ken,
per-se
. She’s so used to him that it’s hard to define quite where Ken ends and Alice begins these days. He just...
irritates
her really. He irritates her the way certain aspects of herself irritate her. He annoys her the way that her own brain annoys her when she can’t remember a word, the way her own hand annoys her when she discovers that it has put the tea bags in the freezer or her glasses in the fridge for no reason that she can identify.

If she hates anything, she hates her marriage to Ken rather than Ken himself. She hates the opportunities, the life which marrying Ken precluded. She should have had a career, that’s the thing – that’s the
real
disappointment, her
real
mistake. She was clever; she knows that she was. She was good with numbers and good with words. Her parents used to get her to do all of the adding up in her head. She was the one who had to help Robert with his schoolwork. Yes, like Matt, she could have done so much more. That’s why his lack of ambition upsets her so much.

Alice remembers their father drilling them at the kitchen table. “Alice!” he would shout, “What’s seven plus nine plus twenty three? Robert! What’s eleven plus nine take thirteen?” And even as Alice was adding up her own numbers, she would be bracing herself for the slap, either across Robert’s hands should he dare to start counting on his fingers, or across the back of his head if (as usual) he gave the wrong answer. “Tuppence short of a shilling,” that’s what people used to say about Robert, “A sandwich short of a picnic.”

If they had known how long he was going to be around, how transient his passage on the planet would be, then they might, just
might
, have been nicer to him. But they
didn’t
know, and the truth was that their parents’ generation had no idea whatsoever how to bring up a child with what these days they’d call
special needs
. Other than drilling him to be better and beating him when he failed, they were at a loss when faced with Robert’s unique brand of stupidity. Sometimes Alice managed to add up her own numbers
and
Robert’s numbers at the same time. On such occasions, she would announce her own answer whilst simultaneously indicating Robert’s answer discreetly on her fingers. But though she had explained the system often enough to him, he was rarely sharp enough, when placed under duress, to notice the unnatural splay of her hands.

Poor Robert, he had never known when to shut up, never known how to avoid their father’s wrath. One time, he had been supposed to make a toolbox in woodwork lessons. He had gone with their father to the ironmongers for wood, and Dad had been so proud, so hopeful that for once here was something his son could actually succeed at, that he had purchased not the cheap pine specified by the school, but expensive sheets of sheer, beautiful mahogany. And that was always going to be a bad move.