by James Meek
‘Let’s, then,’ said Alex.
‘Oh,’ said Bec, who hadn’t intended to make that case, or any case. It hadn’t occurred to her that in her musings about the irony of Batini’s situation she might be Batini as well as Batini might be Batini. In being the knowing Englishwoman in Africa, conscientiously aware of the unclosable gulf between her and the Africans, she’d accidentally identified a way to close it.
‘It’s not replacement,’ she said. ‘People can’t be replaced.’
Alex remembered how when he opened the fridge every morning he saw Bec’s bottle of anti-parasitic drugs sitting in one of the door shelves, between the mustard and the mayonnaise, the seal still not broken.
‘People find different ways of keeping the ones they loved among the living,’ he said cautiously. ‘Children. Memories. The names of things.’
‘Are you doing that on purpose?’ said Bec.
‘What?’
‘Touching that.’ She pointed, and Alex realised he was scratching the small scar left from where he’d struck his head in the accident. He blushed and denied it.
‘You and Maria gave it a good old go, didn’t you,’ said Bec.
‘IVF, you know, it’s not like going to the dentist.’
‘Why do you want to have children so much?’
‘We’re not required to have reasons.’
‘That’s true,’ said Bec. ‘I told you I’ll get rid of my haemoproteus, and I will. I’ll start tomorrow. Just understand that it’s not blocking anything. Not in a medical way. Not in any way.’
‘Good.’
‘Don’t be jealous of it.’
‘That would be stupid. Just because it was named after your father.’
‘You’re not required to have reasons for having children, you’re right, but is there a reason?’
‘I want us to belong,’ said Alex.
‘To what? Society?’
‘To time.’
45
Alex’s mother Maureen laid bricks in the garden on the morning her sons were due to arrive. She wanted a brick and turf bench, ready to plant with camomile for spring. She hurried with the trowel and the spirit level, on her knees in the balding grass, checking the sky. She’d mixed too much mortar. She hated to think of unused mortar hardening and having to be thrown away. The council didn’t recycle it, like so many things. The week before, she’d biked all over Brechin trying to find a place to recycle a single watch battery and got the unheeding politeness dealt out to the harmless old. In the end she posted the battery to the Chinese company that made it, with suggestions for a better way of doing things. The postage cost five pounds.
She was full of ideas for better ways of doing things. The organisations she belonged to, the local Green Party, the Mearns Alliance for Justice in Sri Lanka, Paint Against Poverty and Women for Fairness in Farming tried to nominate her as their leader and send her to conferences. She declined. She wanted the world to be a weaponless sea-garden without borders, criss-crossed by railways, cycle paths and sailing ships, powered by modest numbers of wind turbines and solar panels, with a global network of small communes that would farm organically, hold festivals and exchange handicrafts. But when she imagined how this world might be imposed on the real one, on the actual human beings she knew, with all the weaknesses and prejudices that were the substance of their lives, she saw that bringing her utopia about would involve the very war, cruelty and misery it was supposed to end. All her life she’d been visited by guilt, about being fed while others went hungry, having gone to university while others couldn’t go to school and indulging in travel to satisfy her curiosity. As a virtually atheist churchgoer with Gaian leanings she repented weekly of more human wickedness, itemised in The Guardian, The Observer and The New Internationalist, than a chapel full of Catholic sinners.
Lately it’d come to seem that there was something self-defeating in her guilt. She was long retired from her part-time job as a history teacher, and had hours to fill. Why not make the bench herself? But then wouldn’t she deprive skilled local labourers of work? But if she hired people to do it, wasn’t she feeding the consumerist-capitalist machine that was destroying life on earth? It was clear to Maureen that the best way to save the world’s oceans, forests and wildlife was for human beings to die out altogether, but then who would be left to make gardens? There would be more whales, but who would praise them?
For Maureen the arrival of so many family members at once was a holiday. Her mind would be called away to her sons’ obscure problems from the immediate issues that normally hemmed her in: the plight of the Palestinians, the suffering of women in Afghanistan, human rights in Eritrea. She’d been unable to sleep the night before, thinking about what would happen to the girl in the factory in China – she was sure it would be a girl, for some reason – when she opened the envelope with the battery and Maureen’s note of complaint in English. Unable to understand it, the girl would seek help; would be forced by her supervisor to pay for a translation out of her own wages; would have to take a second job to pay off the resulting debts; would fall behind with the rent, break up with her husband, lose her children and either become a prostitute or throw herself into the glutinous, polluted river that surely flowed through the town. All this would be Maureen’s fault.
Against this sort of everyday crisis of conscience her children’s concerns struck her as distractingly exotic, like Alex’s curious obsession with having a child, over which, it seemed, he’d broken up with the perfectly nice Maria. Bringing up Alex and Dougie had been fine, a way to be selflessly selfish; Maureen had liked having them around. But if she hadn’t had any it would have been fine too. She knew childless men and women who floated through life on a boisterous raft of friends, nephews and nieces, and bechildrened couples who ached with purposelessness after their children left home. Alex wasn’t lonely. He had friends, had sex, fell in love. Why, she wondered, did he want a baby so much? Maureen felt they should hand out medals to the childless. In the Soviet Union, she’d read, mothers who had ten or more children were given medals. Hero Mothers, they were called. What kind of a hero would Alex be? There was no word in English for a father or mother without children. They were like orphans in reverse.
Maureen didn’t like to admit that her other son had problems. If Dougie did he had so many that they were his medium, his nourishment. It was Harry who was upset about what had happened to Dougie, when to her mind nothing could really be said to have happened.
Maureen laid the last brick in place, tapped it level with the handle of the trowel and scraped off the residue. She stood up, stepped back and realised she’d made a mistake in her design. She’d found the drawings in a book about medieval gardens and as she worked out where to put it, and began building it, she imagined two people sitting talking on the finished bench on a summer’s day, like the courtly lovers depicted in the engraving in the book. One of the people was herself, her hands on the brick warmed by the sun, in the smell of flowers and the sound of bees. The other person, she realised now, was Harry, and after this week, he wouldn’t be coming to their house any more. He would never sit with her on the bench she was making out of brick and earth and camomile.
She walked quickly to the house, managed to pull her gumboots off after several shaky tries and passed through the barking without paying any attention to the dog Erasmus, without paying attention to anything. She went upstairs and mounted the retractable steel ladder that led to the attic.
Lewis, sitting in front of a box camera, turned from the lens to see his wife emerge from the centre of the floor. He gripped the remote shutter mechanism and watched warily to see what she would do.
‘They’ll be here soon,’ said Maureen. ‘You should get ready.’
‘In what does readiness consist?’ asked Lewis.
‘Your hands not smelling of chemicals.’
He saw how unpeaceful her face was, dropped the shutter cord and rolled in his chair to a workbench crowded with plastic flasks. He lifted
one up and shook it. ‘Recycled fixer,’
he said encouragingly. ‘Works as well as the old kind.’ She stared at him, blinking, and withdrew.
Lewis rolled back to the white crosses painted on the floor marking his self-portrait position and bent to pick up the dropped shutter cord. He couldn’t reach; he’d have to get out of the chair and go down on his knees to pick it up, and then how would he be able to stand?
The misery of the supermarket lay ahead. He liked peace and smallness and found it bearable to be what he’d been since his doctoring days ended, another of so terribly many white-haired old men in synthetic fleeces roaming the high street, performing archaic duties like posting letters and buying newspapers. He’d become a GP because he liked the idea of meeting patients alone, one at a time. Now he had to face the horror of his family as society. Harry would come with his noise and brightness, for the last time. His evangelical nephew Matthew would come with his wife and their army of children. His dreaming son Alex would come, bringing a new woman who sounded like some fiercely bright star. Harry’s work on cancer seemed remote and glamorous to Lewis, even though he’d seen his share of oncological horrors, even though he’d once put a patient on one of Harry’s trials, and the patient had lived long enough to get dementia. No, not that, he thought. A lifetime of general practice had shown Lewis that the true scourges of Scottish rural life were loneliness, back pain, sexual ennui, gluttony, drunkenness, sloth and infantilism.
And Dougie would come; but Dougie was all right, whatever Harry said.
For a long time everyone thought it was part of the game, for a bright, happy, lovable middle-class boy to go to university and do the opposite of what he was supposed to do. Everyone knew ‘supposed to’ wasn’t really ‘supposed to’. You pretended to believe you were supposed to study hard, be thrifty and plan for the future; you pretended to break those fictitious rules by missing classes, handing in essays late, going out on the lash, getting into debt and giving the impression that you only lived for the moment. A show of rebelliousness was expected before you quietly acknowledged that you were, after all, supposed to do the things you’d pretended to believe you were supposed to do. Two terms passed before anyone realised that Dougie’s rebelliousness was genuine. He really was doing no work, even though he was consuming crime thrillers at the rate of five a week, when he was supposed to be studying philosophy. He really had spent all his money, and borrowed heavily. He was an actual outsider; not an outsider who has a tight, loyal group of outsider friends but an outsider who has no friends at all. No friends, that is, at Edinburgh university. Only after he dropped out, got a girl pregnant – she had an abortion – moved to Glasgow, got a job as a postman, had a child, had another child by another woman, married her and separated did he acquire friends who would stand by him and swear he was a good lad.
For Harry, this meant that something had happened. Something had gone wrong. He was an Enlightenment man, a believer in equality and meritocracy. He wanted to see the clever poor get a leg-up into university and the brightest of the middle classes barge aside the dullard children of the rich. It had never occurred to him that equality and meritocracy might mean his own nephew becoming a postman.
‘I believe in social mobility,’ he said. ‘But only up, not down.’
Maureen said Dougie was still the same man. The world needed letters to be delivered, and there was no shame in being a postman. It was a useful job. If the world really was going to be a more equal place finishing university wouldn’t be a heritable thing. Dougie, Maureen said, might not have made it as a husband, but he was a success as a father. He loved his daughters.
But Dougie undermined her. He was so sure that everyone in the family thought he was a failure that it made him confident. His certainty that nobody cared what he said or did meant he felt free to say and do what he liked, not thinking anyone could be hurt by it.
46
It was drizzling when Alex, Bec and Harry arrived at Lewis and Maureen’s place, in a rented car from Aberdeen airport. The fine drops settled on them like an aerosol and Bec’s shoes sank into the luxuriously large gravel chips of the drive, shining like beach pebbles. The old house sat at the top of a lawn sloping down to the road, surrounded by rhododendrons and Scots pines. It was made of blocks of grey stone and the window glass was black and lifeless. Alex opened the front door and they went into the tiled porch, where there were lines of boots and coats, a sack of potatoes, a portable generator, a reproduction of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, chilliness and silence. The inner door opened and warmth, sounds and smells came to meet them: Alex’s parents, the bark of a red setter, its paws on the guests’ bellies, swishing its tail, clacking its claws on the tiles and panting round their ankles.
There was a smell of chicken stock and resiny smoke and from a doorway off the hall Bec heard the snap of pine logs burning. She kneeled down and plunged her hands into the lush hair around the dog’s neck.
‘Harry’s asleep in the car,’ said Alex. ‘He started pointing out the places we used to go for walks and it tired him out, I think.’
‘Oh!’ said Maureen, trotting away to see to him.
Harry was put to bed and Alex set off for Montrose to pick up Dougie, who was coming from Glasgow, and Rose, who was coming ahead of the rest of her family. Lewis and Maureen went for groceries. Bec found herself alone in the room she would be sharing with Alex.
A black and white photograph of nineteenth-century ancestors hung on one wall. A yielding lilac carpet absorbed her footsteps and muffled the creaks of the floorboards underneath. There was a smell of burnt dust and potpourri. Stuck to the back of the door was a hand-drawn evacuation plan with instructions to BANG GONG IN EMERGENCY. Bec looked round and saw a dinner gong on the chest of drawers. She tapped it with her fingernail and the sound shimmered out across the room and lingered. On one side of the bed, next to the lamp, was a candle in a holder and a box of matches. On the other side, resting by an alarm clock, was an old-fashioned policeman’s truncheon with a leather wrist strap. Bec picked it up. Her fingers fitted into the grooves on the grip and she felt its weight. She looked over her shoulder. The door was half open. Harry was sleeping on the other side of the house. She’d heard the cars leaving with Alex, Maureen and Lewis in them. The last time she’d seen the dog Erasmus he was settling down on a blanket by the fire.
Bec went over to the gong, drew back her hand and whacked it with the truncheon, so hard that it fell off the chest of drawers. From out in the hallway, she heard a series of thumps and somebody swearing. She went into the hall and reached the top of the stairs to see a man in a shiny suit getting up from where he’d fallen on the landing. He looked up at her. He had piles of long, slightly greasy blond hair coming down over his collar. The colour in his eyes was a startlingly opaque turquoise.
‘Amazons with clubs,’ he said. ‘This is too much for the folks to have organised.’
Bec realised that she had the truncheon held above her shoulder. She lowered it. ‘Are you OK?’ she said. ‘I felt like banging the gong.’
‘You banged it, love. You banged that gong. I’m Dougie, by the way. The folks probably haven’t mentioned us. I’m their son, the unsuccessful one. Who are you?’
The way he looked directly into her eyes made her uncomfortable and she looked away. Dougie’s suit was made of synthetic, slightly reflective silver-grey material. The edges of the lapels were frayed. His yellow shirt had the top two buttons undone and the points of the collar disappeared into his blond locks.
‘Alex went to pick you up,’ she said. ‘I should tell him you’re here.’ She went to the bedroom to fetch her phone and Dougie followed her in and sat on the bed while she made the call.
‘I wasn’t expecting to get picked up,’ said Dougie. There was something about the way he widened his eyes as he said it that reminded Bec of certain boys in her primary school when they were explaining to the teacher that they hadn’t done anything wrong.
‘He’s on his way,�
�� she said.
‘I’m gasping for a fag,’ said Dougie. ‘So’re you a doctor, like?’
‘I’m a medical researcher.’
‘One of the brainy ones.’
‘Didn’t Alex tell you we were going out? We’ve been living together for two months.’
‘I thought he was seeing some lassie in Africa. Oh, that’s you? Oh!’ Dougie laughed. It was an involving sound and Bec laughed with him. ‘Could’ve put my foot in it there, eh? I tell you what, the two of you, you’re like some crimefighting couple out the comics, out of Hollywood. Only with germs instead of criminals. Good on you. I could never …’ Dougie shook his head and slapped his forehead. He took a pack of Silk Cut out of his pocket and offered one to Bec, who refused.
‘Don’t they mind you smoking in the house?’ said Bec.
‘Aye, you’re right.’ He looked down at the cigarette turning between his fingers, sullen for a moment, then brightened. ‘D’you fancy a pint in town? There’s a no bad wee place.’
‘I’d better not,’ said Bec.
Dougie stood up and went on talking with the unlit cigarette in his mouth, gesturing with a plastic lighter. ‘I’ll bet they never offered you a drink, eh? They’re decent people, the folks, but they’ve got an English sense of hospitality.’
He led Bec to the sitting room and spent time with her choosing a bottle from the drinks cupboard. Each time she told him that it didn’t matter, or said yes, that a bottle would be perfect, he’d suggest a different combination. They went outside in the end with a carton of orange juice, two tumblers, a bottle of vodka, a spoon and a bowl of ice and laid them on a garden bench.
The brothers were tall, the same height; Dougie had more brawn, more shoulder. The nose looked as if it had been broken. When he spoke, he flicked his hair back and shifted his weight from foot to foot. When it was Bec’s turn he became still. It was hard to believe Dougie and Alex were related, and hard to understand how two brothers who’d been born a few years apart and gone to the same local schools ended up with such different accents. Alex’s had a slight lilt, and he rolled his r’s, but otherwise there wasn’t much to distinguish it from her own southern English accent. With Dougie, Bec had to concentrate to understand him.