by Jonathan Coe
At the root of their enmity was the hatred between Krystal and Aneeqa at school. She was not Charlie’s stepdaughter, exactly, although he sometimes referred to her as such. He had been in a relationship with Yasmin, Aneeqa’s mother, for more than six years, but Benjamin had already formed the strong impression – just from hearing Charlie’s version of things – that the affection was mainly on one side. He spent some nights at Yasmin’s house but she would not allow him to move in there, so he was also obliged to keep a flat of his own. She was a difficult woman, by the sound of it: bad-tempered and fiery, still bitter about her divorce, untrusting of other men. She had no job and depended on Charlie for financial support; this in itself being a bone of contention, because he had left his job in retail to pursue his new ambition of being a full-time children’s entertainer, and ever since, they had been living hand-to-mouth. Aneeqa, it seemed, was a promising student, now in her A-level year, with a particular talent for languages. Krystal had bullied her from the moment they met, on the very first day of Year Seven, and in all that time her father had never offered a word of criticism, or troubled to conceal his outrage that the daughter of a Muslim family might be considered brighter or more impressive than his own daughter.
Taking all this into account, and having noticed over the last few months that his old friend, despite his façade of cheerfulness, bore a permanent and more deep-seated air of anxiety and frustration, Benjamin could not quite share in Charlie’s conviction that that chance encounter in a Black Country toyshop had transformed his life for the better. But perhaps tonight would change his mind, since, for the first time, he’d been invited to come back to Yasmin’s house and have dinner with the family.
‘I’ve just got to get a bit of shopping done first,’ Charlie said now. ‘Pop down to Sainsbury’s or something.’
‘OK,’ said Benjamin, beginning to drink up. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No, no need to do that. You stay here and have another drink.’
‘Honestly, I’d rather come with you.’
‘Don’t be silly. You wait here. I’ll be twenty minutes or so.’
Charlie was so insistent – to the point of physically restraining him when he tried to rise from his seat – that Benjamin gave up and bought himself another half of Guinness that he didn’t really want. While waiting for Charlie to come back, he played a few games of Sudoku on his smartphone and half-watched the silent TV screen in the corner of the pub. A man in a suit was talking to camera while at the bottom of the screen a banner headline declared: ‘Brexit to cost families £4,300 a year, Treasury claims.’ ‘How do they know that?’ a man at the bar was saying. ‘Rubbish, isn’t it?’ his friend agreed. Benjamin went back to his puzzle. This whole referendum campaign was a big, silly waste of time as far as he could see. The result was a foregone conclusion and the sooner everything went back to normal the better.
Charlie returned with his shopping bags. They went out into the car park together and, as they loaded the bags into the car, Benjamin noticed there was a sleeping bag in the boot. But, as usual, he thought nothing of it.
It was a short drive to Yasmin’s house in Moseley: a modest mid-terrace on a side road leading off the high street, which was still busy in the sunshine of this mid-April evening. As they stood on the doorstep waiting for someone to let them in, clutching the bags of shopping, Charlie (who didn’t seem to have his own key) closed his eyes against the low sun and said: ‘We could have drinks in the garden, I reckon. It’s warm enough. What do you think?’
‘Sounds nice,’ said Benjamin.
Yasmin opened the door and gave them a friendly, welcoming smile.
‘Charlie’s told me everything about you,’ she said, leading them through the narrow hallway. ‘He never stops talking about his superstar friend. Neeqs!’ she called. ‘Neeqs, where are you? Charlie and his friend are here.’
‘I’m doing something,’ called a voice from the room next door.
‘Never mind that. Come and be polite.’
‘My hands are covered in paint.’
Yasmin turned to the two visitors. ‘You see what I have to put up with? She won’t do anything I ask her to. She answers back all the time.’
Charlie led Benjamin through the doorway and they both peeped into a small, dark dining room, looking out over a patio garden and dominated by a drop-leaf table which was currently covered with small paint pots and a sheet of artist’s paper. Bent over the paper was Aneeqa: a diminutive figure doing her best to focus on her work, despite the long trail of thick black hair falling over her face and obscuring most of it apart from her frown of concentration.
‘Hi love,’ said Charlie. ‘This is Benjamin.’
‘Hi,’ Aneeqa said, not looking up. She was working on a line drawing of a woman breastfeeding; above it she had painted the word ‘Beloved’ in elaborate multicoloured lettering. The drawing itself was strong, simple and confident, but it was the calligraphy that really drew the eye, being executed with amazing flair and attention to detail.
‘I gave you his book, remember? He signed it for you.’
Aneeqa looked up. She had warm brown eyes and a full, expressive mouth.
‘Oh yeah. That Benjamin. Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘I started your book. I haven’t finished it yet.’
‘Is this part of your coursework?’ Charlie asked.
‘Mm-hm,’ she said, returning to her work, which involved adding some sort of ochre colouring to the bottom of the letter ‘V’.
‘Looks great.’
‘It’s meant to be a book cover.’
‘Well, there you go,’ said Charlie. ‘You should design his next one.’ Then, when it became clear that no more conversation was forthcoming, he said: ‘We’ll leave you to it, then.’
‘OK. Nearly done anyway.’
‘Come and have a drink with us out in the garden.’
‘In a minute.’
They took the shopping bags into the kitchen and put them down on the table. Yasmin was washing glasses at the sink.
‘I thought we’d have drinks in the garden maybe,’ said Charlie.
She turned around. ‘The garden? Why the garden?’
‘Because it’s such a nice evening.’
‘I just cleaned up the front room. Took me almost half an hour. The patio furniture is filthy. It hasn’t been used since last year.’
‘Then give me a cloth and I’ll wipe it down. Simples.’
He took a cloth from one of the kitchen drawers and walked out into the garden, whistling a cheery tune as he did so. Benjamin could see him at work through the window, repositioning the plastic furniture. The garden was only a few yards square and was entirely paved over. Left alone with Yasmin, who was also looking out of the window, Benjamin was still trying to think of something to say to her when she clicked her tongue with annoyance and threw down her dishcloth.
‘That’s not how you do it,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t have a clue.’
She marched outside and soon Benjamin could hear the sounds of an argument. Then he heard someone come into the kitchen and he turned. It was Aneeqa.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, referring to the quarrelsome voices outside. ‘This is just normality. Our normality.’
She rinsed her paint-covered hands in the washing-up water, dried them with paper towel, then wandered over to the bags of food on the kitchen table.
‘I suppose someone had better put this lot away.’
‘I’ll unpack,’ Benjamin suggested. ‘You shelve.’
‘Why not.’
As he removed the tins and packets and handed them to Aneeqa, he noticed something strange. Charlie had said that he would be shopping at Sainsbury’s but this food was from many different shops. There were tins of Tesco soup, Sainsbury’s tomatoes, beans and canned meat from Morrisons and Lidl. Aneeqa could see that he was puzzled but she said nothing at first: not until she had put a few more items away in the cupboards.
�
��I suppose he told you he was going to the supermarket, did he?’ she said finally.
‘Yes. Why, where did he go?’
Again, Aneeqa said nothing. Slowly, the truth dawned on him.
‘You don’t use a food bank?’
She opened a pack of rice and began to pour the contents into a jar. ‘Mum won’t go. She finds it too embarrassing. So Charlie normally does it for her.’ In response to the look on Benjamin’s face, she added: ‘Don’t look so shocked. We’ve been using it for a couple of years, on and off. You get used to it.’
‘But …’
‘I don’t enquire much into the family finances but they’re pretty terrible. Mum isn’t very good at holding down jobs and, let’s face it, no one ever got rich by juggling Rubik’s cubes at children’s parties.’ The argument out in the garden was still in full swing. ‘Hence the fact that they’re always at each other’s throats these days. When money gets tight, tempers fray.’
‘But Charlie still manages to pay for another flat,’ Benjamin said, and then remembered the sleeping bag in the boot of the car and wondered if everything his friend had told him was true.
‘I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is that when Mum met him he had a steady job. Then Baron Brainbox came into our lives and Mum may have tolerated him at first, but there’s no love lost between her and the Baron at the moment. Sadly –’ she took a can of pears from Benjamin’s hand ‘– that’s how she operates. Charlie’s a lovely man. I think he really loves her, however badly she treats him, but what she’s always wanted is a Sugar Daddy. It’s kind of heartbreaking to see.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Benjamin. ‘Really sad. There’s much more to life than money.’
‘Says the man who’s never had to use a food bank.’ She stood on tiptoe to put the can of fruit on to a top shelf; then turned and looked at him. ‘You’re not actually rich, are you?’
Benjamin wavered. ‘These things are relative.’
‘Well, just watch out for her, that’s all. She’ll take aim at you and it won’t be subtle. Right under Charlie’s nose she’ll be all, “Ooh, I’ve always wanted to meet an author, why don’t we go out for a drink some time?” ’
Benjamin, who had already been wondering what ‘drinks’ in the garden were going to consist of, said: ‘You do drink, then?’
‘Me? Alcohol?’ It seemed a bizarrely personal question, until Aneeqa understood that Benjamin was making a general cultural enquiry.
‘Oh, you mean my … people.’ Her eyes shone at him with gentle mockery. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize.’
‘I didn’t mean to –’
‘Some do, some don’t.’ She smiled brightly. ‘I know – complicated, isn’t it? Life must have been much more simple in this country before the brown people arrived.’
Annoyed with himself, Benjamin thought that a swift change of subject was called for. ‘I liked your illustration. Is it for the Toni Morrison book?’
‘Yes. I don’t know how appropriate the image is. I suppose I should read the book some time.’
‘Maybe. You’re very talented. And good at languages, as well, Charlie told me. French and Spanish.’
‘Yes. That’s what I want to do at uni. Which, hopefully, is where I’ll be in about five months’ time …’
Later, as they were drinking beer in the garden while Yasmin and her daughter started to prepare dinner, Benjamin repeated this last part of the conversation to Charlie. And Charlie (who was forever surprising him by revealing hitherto unsuspected depths of feeling) stared into the distance (or as far into the distance as the three brick walls surrounding them would allow) and said: ‘I’d do anything, you know, to make that girl’s dreams happen. Absolutely anything.’
Benjamin glanced across at him and saw that his eyes had misted over. He was about to answer when his phone rang.
‘Better take this,’ he said. ‘Sophie, my niece. She’s over at Dad’s tonight.’
Sophie was calling to tell Benjamin to come over to Rednal as quickly as possible. His father appeared to have had a stroke, and an ambulance was on its way.
31
The last five months had been quiet for Sophie. She had received no official word from her department saying whether or not the complaint against her had been upheld, but in the meantime they seemed to be operating a policy of guilty until proven innocent. She had been taken off departmental mailing lists and put on indefinite ‘gardening leave’. A tribunal hearing had been promised, but so far had been cancelled twice: once because of a strike on the London Underground, once because Sophie’s union rep had fallen ill.
She did her best to keep busy, but it wasn’t easy. She was working on a book – an adaptation of her thesis – and tried to spend a few hours every day at her desk (the kitchen table) at home. She was also writing a new series of lectures, although she did not know if she would ever get to deliver them. But the time weighed heavily upon her and, simply as a means of filling it, she was not unwilling to help her mother and uncle by visiting Colin as often as possible. The previous evening she had offered to come round at six o’clock and cook his dinner. After ten or fifteen minutes’ effortful conversation, she had gone into the kitchen to peel the potatoes and put the meat in the oven. When she returned and asked Colin whether he wanted a sherry, she couldn’t understand his answer. ‘Sorry, Grandpa?’ she said, coming a little closer, and then she noticed that his face appeared to have fallen on one side, and then he attempted to speak to her again, and this time what issued from his mouth was a stream of arbitrary sounds, unrecognizable as any form of meaningful expression except that he seemed to be speaking in a tone of panic and anguish. She called 999 and had to wait twenty minutes for an ambulance and in that time she also called Benjamin, who drove straight over from his friend’s house in Moseley. Benjamin and the ambulance arrived within a few seconds of each other.
Colin was taken to a specialist stroke unit and was diagnosed with a transient ischaemic attack or mini-stroke. He stayed in overnight. In the morning, Benjamin telephoned Sophie to announce, in a tone of great, if temporary, relief, that his father’s symptoms were gone and he already seemed to be on the way to making a recovery.
‘I’m so glad,’ said Helena, later that evening, as they sat at a table for three, waiting for their first course to arrive. ‘I do worry about your grandfather sometimes, you know. Of course one always wants to live in one’s own home for as long as possible, but I wonder if it’s getting to the point now where your mother should consider moving him to …’
‘She knows that something needs to change,’ said Sophie. ‘She and Benjamin are going to talk about it.’
‘Very traumatic for you, as well, of course. I hope you’ve had a chance to rest today.’
A waiter arrived, bearing two glasses of champagne on a silver tray. He offered a glass to Helena first, and she was about to take it, but then said:
‘Oh – but we asked for red wine. At least I did.’
‘These are on the house,’ said the waiter. ‘Compliments of the manager.’
‘Goodness!’ Flustered, as she always was when something unexpected happened, Helena took a glass and turned to her son for an explanation: ‘Did you have anything to do with this?’
‘I told you,’ said Ian. ‘This is the place Lukas manages.’
‘Lukas?’
‘Grete’s husband. The woman who used to clean for you? I told him it was your birthday when I made the booking.’
‘Well … How very kind of him.’
‘Happy birthday, Helena,’ said Sophie, raising her glass. ‘Seventy-six years young today. Unbelievable.’
She and Helena took sips of their champagne. Ian drank from his water glass. He’d already told them that his day had been dreadful, and he looked very much like a man who needed a drink, but he never touched alcohol when driving.
‘Do they still live in the village?’ Sophie asked.
‘Who, dear?’
‘Grete and Lukas.’
Sophie shook her head. ‘Not lately.’
‘The great irony is,’ said Ian, ‘that now would actually have been the perfect time for us to have one. With Sophie being off work for so long.’
‘Oh, great,’ she said, her voice loaded with sarcasm. ‘Who needs maternity leave, when you can get suspended on full pay, totally unexpectedly and for absolutely no reason?’
‘I just meant –’
‘Is that really what you think? That now would have been a good time to slip a baby in, while the university makes up its mind whether I’ll ever be allowed to teach again?’
She glared at him until he was obliged to look away. Just before taking a sip of water, he said: ‘Something good might as well come out of this fiasco.’
There was a long silence, until Helena said, gently:
‘Maybe you won’t.’
Sophie looked up.
‘Maybe I won’t what?’
‘Ever be allowed to teach again.’ In response to Sophie’s disbelieving look, Helena added: ‘Well, it has been almost six months. What makes you think that –’
‘Things are moving slowly, that’s all. That’s how it is, in the academic world.’
‘Have you considered …?’ Helena began.
Sophie looked at her enquiringly.
‘We wondered if you had considered trying something else. Another line of work.’
‘We?’
‘Ian and I were talking about it earlier.’
Sophie fell silent. She was too angry to speak.
‘You might as well drop it, Mum,’ Ian said. ‘I’ve tried all this before.’
It was a timely moment for the starters to arrive. They were placed wordlessly in front of them. The waiter, who was used to such things, could sense the chill between the three diners immediately.