The Other Son (8 page)

Alice nods slowly. “Maybe,” she says. “If we have eggs. And if you’re nice to me.”

“But I’m always nice to you!” Ken says. He might be joking. And then again, he might not. He might just believe it.

That night, Alice is awoken just after two. At first she’s not sure what woke her, but then the noise comes again: two cats flighting in the back garden.

She closes her eyes and waits, but sleep does not return. Her knees and ankles ache for some reason. She wriggles in the bed, struggling to get comfortable. She rolls to the right and looks at the strip of moonlight shining through a gap in the curtains. It must be a full moon. That’s why she can’t sleep. That will be why the cats are fighting as well. A doctor once told her that the psychiatric wards all fill up on full-moon nights, that the hospitals even lay on extra staff. It’s an actual fact, one of those commonly accepted facts of life that everybody knows to be true, but that no one can explain, that science will perhaps never explain.

She rolls to the other side and looks at Ken’s shiny head. She sighs and then snorts gently in surprise at the fact that it’s there again – that thought, that forbidden idea. She’s thinking about leaving him again, actually playing the scene on the cinema screen in her head: Alice packing a suitcase, Alice walking away; Alice buying pans for her own little flat somewhere, perhaps in the same building as Dot, Ken sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich, reading and re-reading her goodbye note. She wonders if he’d cry. She reckons that he wouldn’t.

It’s all madness, though. The full moon has turned her into a lunatic. And isn’t the French word for ‘moon’ where the ‘lune’ in lunatic comes from, after all?

Where would she live? What would she live on? She doesn’t even have her own bank account. And if it’s taken Dot three years to sort it all out... well... she’s almost seventy already.

She’s not going to sleep now, she can tell. Those familiar insomnia sensations are with her – she’s thirsty, and hungry. She’s achey and fidgety. She moves towards the edge of the bed, then gently eases herself to sitting position. She doesn’t want to wake Ken up and have to share the early hours with him complaining about his lack of sleep. She really doesn’t want that. She listens to the ticking of the clock for a moment, then pulls her dressing gown on and sneaks from the room. To avoid the creaking floorboard on the landing, she edges along the wall like a cowboy in a shoot-out.

Downstairs, she makes herself a cup of tea and a slice of toast. She sits and stares out at the garden. It looks alien and unfamiliar in the moonlight, like some photograph by a modern artist, like, perhaps, a dream scene. It’s almost like daytime out there except that the colours are all wrong.

She’s still thinking about packing a suitcase. It’s more of a feeling than a thought, really – a compulsion almost. Ideas that come at nighttime are always more forceful, more obsessive, more seemingly clear-cut than the complicated real-life world of daylight. She knows this from experience.

She needs some task to distract her until daybreak. She needs something to keep her busy until the gravity of reality yanks her back to earth. She scans the room. Perhaps she’ll clean the oven. Ken will call her mad if he catches her. He’ll call her a lunatic, in fact. But she’s been meaning to do it for ages and that cake had a distinct smell of roast chicken about it. She crosses the room and pulls the oven cleaner and the rubber gloves from beneath the sink.

Yes, she’ll clean the oven, and then maybe she’ll defrost the fridge. And then, perhaps, just perhaps, she’ll pack a suitcase. She laughs at the absurdity of the idea. As she pulls on her rubber gloves she imagines Dot sleeping in her own bed in her own little flat and feels a fresh pang of jealousy.

***

“I said I wasn’t going to come here anymore,” Dot says, looking up at the Starbucks sign.

Alice, who already has one hand on the door, says, “Oh, don’t be silly. It’s just for a quick coffee.” She pushes into the cafe and Dot reluctantly follows.

Once they have joined the queue, Alice asks, “Why, anyway? What’s wrong with here?”

“I saw a thing on the telly,” Dot says. “They don’t pay their taxes, apparently.”

“I don’t think
any
of them pay their taxes,” Alice says.

“No one rich seems to, that’s for sure,” Dot agrees, eying up the cakes behind the counter. “Though they said the other one – Costa, I think – they do.”

“Well, we’ll go to Costa next time,” Alice says. “But today I’m in a hurry. Tim’s coming around, so I need to get home with the shopping and cook lunch.”

“Is he bringing the little ones?”

“No, just Tim today. He’s got a meeting nearby. A work thing.”

“Still, that’ll be nice.”

“Yes.”

“Can I help you, ladies?” the barista asks.

Once they have their drinks and are seated, Alice says, “He forbade me to see you anymore. Did I tell you that?”

“Tim?” Dot asks. “Oh, Ken, you mean.”

“Yes. Ken.”

“He
forbade
you?”

“I know!” Alice laughs. She sips her cappuccino, and then wipes the froth from her top lip. “Men, huh?”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, you know what it’s like with Ken. I stood up to him at first, and then decided it was easier just to lie. You can never win an argument with Ken. I agreed I wouldn’t, but here I am.”

“I don’t know how you put up with him,” Dot says.

“You put up with Martin for long enough. That should give you some idea.”

“Yes. I suppose I did.”

“It’s just habit, I think.”

“Go on, have half of this,” Dot says, prodding her slice of brownie with the knife. “It’s delicious.” For someone who’s in the middle of a boycott, she’s unexpectedly enthusiastic about Starbuck’s brownies.

“No, not half. Just... a little... yes. Like that,” Alice says.

“Did you never even
nearly
do it?” Dot asks, slicing the cake. “Leave Ken, I mean.”

“Oh, of course I did. Lots of times.”

“When he used to hit you?”

“Oh, he never really
hit
me,” Alice says. “We just, you know, used to scuffle.”

“
Scuffle
...” Dot repeats doubtfully, through a mouthful of cake.

“Yes.”

“If you say so.”

“If I’d ever had, you know, a proper plan... an escape plan, like you did... I might have done it, I suppose. There were certainly times... But we can’t all be as organised as you.”

“Maybe you need to
make
an escape plan.”

“Oh, I’m not going to leave Ken now,” Alice laughs. “I’m too old to go wandering off into the sunset.”

But as she says it, she realises that it’s true but also untrue. She realises that whatever part of her brain is speaking is having to choose from a swirl of different, conflicting Alices. And one of these
knows
that she’ll never leave Ken. And the other Alice could walk out tomorrow, could almost be persuaded to simply not go home today. “So you’ve got no regrets then?” she asks, trying to move the focus away from her own marriage and onto Dot’s.

Dot laughs. “You’ve got to be joking. Martin was worse than Ken.”

“Well, Ken’s not
that
bad,” Alice says. And again, the Alice that said it believes it to be true. It’s just that there’s another Alice that knows she’s talking complete nonsense, knows, in fact, that she’s lying.

“I don’t even have a bank account,” Alice says. She frowns as she says it, because she realises that she has briefly channeled the
other
Alice, she has let a slither of that other version of the truth slip out.

Dot has picked up on it. She puts down her fork and reaches across the table for Alice’s hand. “If you need help organising things, you know I’m here for you,” she says earnestly.

Alice pulls a face. “Organising what?”

“We can go and see my young man at the Nationwide. He was ever so nice with me. Tom, his name is. Ever so helpful. He looks a bit like that guy from the telly. Alan Carr. Talks a bit like him too.”

“No,” Alice says, firmly. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“You just think everyone should be like you, that everyone should do whatever you’ve just done,” Alice says. “You always did.”

“But even if you’re not going to leave Ken,” Dot says, ignoring the barb, “you should still have your own bank account. I bet you still have that five hundred pounds stuffed away under a mattress somewhere, don’t you?”

Alice looks surprised. She doesn’t remember telling Dot about the five hundred pounds.

“Think how much interest you would have earned if it had been in a building society all these years. It would have been worth thousands by now.”

“We’ve managed just fine as we are,” Alice says. “And I have my own debit card and everything. I don’t
need
a separate account.” Dot pulls a face, so Alice insists, “I really don’t.”

“Sometimes just feeling that you
can
do something takes the pressure out of needing to actually do it,” Dot says. “Sometimes–”

“Look, I know what you’re saying,” Alice interrupts. “But I think you’re projecting your life onto mine. You left Martin and that’s great. But I’m not going to leave Ken. We all know that.”

“OK,” Dot says, raising her hands in surrender at Alice’s suddenly strident tone of voice. “OK. You know best.”

Alice glances at her watch. “I really do need to get a move on though,” she says. “I’ve only got two hours before Tim arrives. I wanted to make a quiche. He loves my quiche.”

“Yes,” Dot says. “Plus you don’t want your husband realising you’ve been visiting forbidden friends, do you?”

“It’s not that,” Alice says. “You know it’s not that.”

MAY

Alice hands over the wad of cash. The notes are secured by two faded elastic bands. They once, Alice remembers, held two bunches of asparagus together. She had used the tips to make risotto and the stalks had gone into soup. And how can she possibly remember that now?

As Tom starts to count the banknotes, Alice feels a little sad at the loss. Though Dot’s logic is unarguably correct (at least this way her cash will keep up with inflation), she’s already missing the concrete reassurance of their existence. Though she hadn’t known this until now, she has liked knowing that the cash was there, waiting, should she need it.

But Dot is right. It’s safer this way. And Tom, who is indeed a great deal like Alan Carr, has been very pleasant about it all.

“And the cash card definitely won’t be sent to her house?” Dot is asking.

“No, as I said,” Tom replies, “we’ll call your mobile once it’s ready and you can come here and collect it.”

Outside in the street, Dot claps her hands together. “There!” she says, triumphantly. “Done!” It has taken her the best part of a month to convince Alice to open her own account. “And don’t look so forlorn. The money’s still there. It’s just in a safer place.”

“I know,” Alice says. “It just feels funny, sneaking around like this.”

“It’s no more sneaky than keeping it hidden in a tin for twenty years.”

“Forty,” Alice says. “
More
than forty years.”

“Coffee?” Dot asks. “There’s a Costa up there, and it’s my turn.”

“No thanks. I really need to get home. I’ll drop you off on the way.”

“Oh, go on. I’ll treat you.”

“No, really. I have to get home. Plus it looks like it’s going to tip it down at any moment.”

In truth, there isn’t any particular reason why Alice can’t stay out a little longer. But despite what Dot says, the opening of the bank account
does
feel sneaky, and a little monumental, too. Alice wants to go home to the quiet of the house so that she can sit and think about it all.

The rain starts almost as soon as they reach the car, first spitting on the windscreen as Alice pulls away, then lashing at the streets until all the cars have to slow down. It’s only a short-lived spring shower, but they would have been drenched had they been caught in it.

“You see?” Alice says, vindicated. “Rain!”

“Yes,” Dot agrees. “You should work for the BBC. Do the weather, like.”

Back at the house, Alice makes lunch for Ken – she’s not hungry herself.

Once Ken has headed off for his afternoon kip and the kitchen is clean – when the only sound in the house is the rhythmic chug of the dishwasher – she pulls the old flour tin from the cupboard. She sits and stares at it on the kitchen table, then prises open the lid and peers inside as if to prove to herself that she really has done this, that it wasn’t a dream.

It’s pure stupidity, to have kept the money in cash for so long.

The money had been a Premium Bond win, and the true significance of the event had been that it was the first time she ever kept anything from Ken.

Her “aunt” Beryl (who was no aunt, but her mother’s best friend, in fact) had bought her the tickets. She had given five to Alice and five to Robert. And when Robert had died, she had somehow transferred Robert’s numbers to Alice’s name as well.

Alice has never been sure whose actual tickets had won the prize. She purposely never checked the numbers. Knowing that the prize had been destined for her deceased brother would have been too hard to bear. And it would have taken all of the pleasure out of the win.

She had taken Tim, still less than a year old, to visit her mother. She was still, after two years, grieving her husband’s death, and the only thing that seemed to cheer her up back then was to see little Timothy.

Her mother had handed her the letter and once she had ripped it open, they had struggled to believe their eyes. They had gone to the post office to claim the cash together. “Safety in numbers,” her mother had said.

Five hundred pounds, well, five hundred and sixty, to be precise. She had given fifty to her mother (she wouldn’t take a penny more) and had stopped on the way home to buy a bonnet for Tim. It had been January and a cold January at that, and Tim’s bonnet was insufficient to the task at hand.

She had been so excited at the prospect of telling Ken the news, had suffered no qualms at the idea of handing over the money.

They had just bought their first house, and though they have never really struggled – Ken always earned a good living – money had been tighter than usual. Four thousand six hundred pounds the house had cost, she remembers. She wonders now if that’s really possible. Perhaps she has got that wrong. But five hundred pounds was a lot of money, of that she’s sure. It had been more than most people earned in a couple of months.

When she got home, she had found Ken drunk and angry. It happened a lot in those days. He had been too angry for her to want to tell him about the money, and too drunk to take any pleasure from it anyway, so she had tucked the money in the food cupboard. She would tell him, she thought, in the morning.

But when Ken had got up the next day, he had been no longer drunk and angry, but hung-over and angry instead. And that was almost as bad. He had shouted at her about wasting money on the bonnet, too. Did she have any idea how much this house had cost? he asked. Did she really think they were rich enough to waste money on silly, pretty baby clothes?

So she had moved the money to the flour tin. She would wait for a more propitious moment to break her good news. And with each day that passed, it got harder to tell him. And with each day that passed, her desire to tell him faded.

The tin, eventually, had rusted, so she had bought a new one to replace it. And she had had to change the banknotes twice, once in the seventies – that must have been when decimalisation happened – and once because the banknotes simply changed for no apparent reason, in the nineties, perhaps?

And yes, Dot was right. If the money had been invested, it would have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled by now. But in the sixties, it would have been no easy matter to open a bank account without your husband knowing. And by the eighties, when such things were conceivable, she had all but forgotten about the money in the tin. The galloping inflation of the seventies had made it worth much, much less. And the truth was that they weren’t hard up, not by any means. They didn’t need her cash anyway.

Ken may have spent his life smelling of rubber, but his business had done well. He has almost one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in his savings account these days. She knows, because she has caught glimpses of bank statements from time to time over the years. She remembers checking the meaning of commas and points in large numbers the first time she had seen it. She had been unable to believe that they had tens of thousands of pounds, so frugal was their lifestyle.

Though she has never alluded to her knowledge of the extent of Ken’s savings, she has dared, once or twice, to ask him why they have to be so thrifty. Ken’s answer has always been, “for retirement,” but now they’ve retired, he still won’t spend a penny. And even retired, he still seems to save more than he spends – those numbers on the bank statements are still creeping up.

Still, having grown up in fear of poverty, it’s reassuring for Alice to know that the money’s there. Something could happen, or one of the kids might suddenly need helping. And it certainly puts her sneaky five hundred pounds in perspective.

It’s like the tins her mother kept in the cellar, really. Once you’ve experienced real hunger, once you’ve truly been down on your uppers, having a safety net, no matter how insignificant, takes on unreasonable importance.

But they’re getting old now. Alice wishes that they could use some of the money to make life a little easier for themselves, to even, dare she say it, have a little fun. A cruise, for example, would be nice. She laughs at herself. A cruise! Ken would go crazy if she even suggested it.

She fingers the blue flour tin and remembers the yellow of the previous tin, and then thinks again of the reserves her mother kept in the cellar.

She treated them like a talisman, rotating them religiously, so that the oldest ones got consumed and replaced, so that they were never out of date. She remembers her mother telling her something about people dying from rusty tins of tuna – the rotational thing was important.

Robert, God rest his soul, opened one of their mother’s tins once, and they had shared the contents, tinned peaches, slippery and sugary and forbidden. He had done it not because they were hungry, nor even because he particularly liked tinned peaches (though Alice did). No, he had simply done it because he could, because it was exciting, because, with the feisty mother they had, it was risky, a brave thing for a boy to do.

They had filled the tin with stones afterwards and replaced it in the middle of the stack. And their mother had never noticed.

But they had lived in terror of her rotational system reaching that tin, or even worse, of something happening and her suddenly ploughing into the reserves. She was always complaining about how tight things were and every time she mentioned money, Alice and Robert glanced at each other. They were both always thinking about the stone-filled tin.

Eventually Robert shoplifted a tin of the same Del Monte tinned peaches, but the label was shiny and new compared with the other tins – the colours overly vibrant. So they had steamed off the old label, and sellotaped it onto the new can. Robert had even rolled it around in the coal dust in a vain attempt at dulling the tell-tale shine of the tin.

Within hours, not even days, but
hours,
their mother had spotted it. “Do you know anything about this?” she had asked, brandishing the can, running a fingernail along the Sellotape ridge. Alice had shaken her head. Let Robert take the can for it, she had thought. It had been his idea after all.

But that was the day that Robert ran out into the road. He had been buzzing around like a wasp in a box all morning because he had been invited to a children’s birthday party. He wasn’t the most popular child around, so such invitations, when they came, sent him into a frenzy of excitement, and in his excitement he had failed to look both ways. To everyone’s surprise, that was all it took to end a life.

Her parents were devastated. The house was silent and as dark as the cellar for months. It’s an overused cliché perhaps, but it truly was as if the sun had gone out. The trafficked tin was never mentioned again.

To listen to her parents, it was as if Robert was no longer the “stupid one” they had spent their time whacking around the head, but the best son any parent ever had. He was her “angel” her mother kept saying, over and over. Her “poor little angel”.

Alice had cried too. She had cried for days. And Robert’s disappearance left a hole in her childhood, a hole in her life, in fact, that never got filled.

But she had felt something else too, an emotion so shameful that she never mentioned it to anyone. She had felt
relieved
, as well.

Because the truth was that Robert drove her father insane, and once he was gone, things were sadder, they were far less exciting. But they were also so much calmer.

She forces herself to return to the here and now of the kitchen. She looks at the flour tin again, no longer a hiding place or a secret or a symbol. Just a flour tin for the first time in years. She reminds herself that even though it doesn’t feel like it she still has the five hundred pounds.

As emergency funds go, it’s not much these days. She supposes that she could, like Dot, syphon off a little extra if she wanted to. She could even use Dot’s cash-back system. Ken rarely helps with the shopping, after all. He almost certainly wouldn’t notice. But she would feel as if she were stealing. She has never earned a penny, after all. Not since she married Ken, anyway.

“Consider it pay for all that childcare and housekeeping,” Dot said, ever the devil on her shoulder. “Count the hours you used to put in and multiply it by the minimum wage. And if you do decide to leave him one day, just write yourself a big check on the joint account before you tell him. You earned it. Do the maths.”

Alice fingers the tin one last time and then stands and returns it to the food cupboard.

It
would
be stealing, though, wouldn’t it? And she’s not really going to leave him anyway. She’s still not sure why she keeps thinking about it. It’s not like Ken’s even being particularly difficult these days. It’s because of Dot, no doubt. It’s because of Dot and her flat and her sofa in the sunshine.

“Alice?” Ken’s voice, coming from the lounge. “ALICE?”

“Yes?” she calls back. “I’m here.”

“Alice!” Ken shouts again.

She rolls her eyes. She knows he can hear her. She heads down the hallway towards him.