Your Father Sends His Love

by Stuart Evers

  Evie’s boys are sandy haired and, despite the heat, both wearing their football scarves. Phil has a cold that won’t shift and sniffs constantly because he won’t blow his nose. Little Flip. Little Sniff. They do not have drawings; they never do. They look up and wave at their mother, run towards her.

  ‘I scored five goals,’ Chris says.

  ‘I scored three,’ Phil says.

  ‘Well done,’ she says. ‘But do you have to wear those scarves? You must be boiling.’

  She tries to take them from their necks, but the boys wriggle away. She has done the same every afternoon since they started coming here.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Evie,’ Deborah says.

  Evie nods and leads the boys to the car. Moments like this – watching Little Flip open the car door; hearing Chris buckle his seatbelt, smelling the stink from one of their behinds – come to her when Ross talks of a confetti of bombs, of a total solar occlusion.

  ‘The thing is, Ross,’ she’d said, interrupting him the first time, naked and dangling a wine glass between her fingers. ‘The thing is that the end of the world’s just a young man’s worry.’

  Ross shook his head and started to say something. She cut him off, delightedly.

  ‘Don’t shake your head’ – a mother – ‘look at you. Young, healthy, good breeding, good prospects. To you, the bomb is the only visible threat. It’s the only viable threat. You talk about blast radiuses and fallout and nuclear winters, and to you it sounds plausible. But to me . . .’ – she laughed – ‘the end of the world is a drunk driver, a kidnapper, whooping cough, leukaemia, meningitis, cot death, railway electrocution, fireworks, a fall from a tree . . .’

  Sunlight eased through the curtains’ gap, a certain decadence to its fall. The two of them shared a silence as heavy as the fabric keeping out the afternoon. She rarely mentioned the boys, even obliquely. Now, towards the end of the summer, when he talks about her and him, he sometimes mentions them and for Evie the illusion, so playfully curated, splinters like a dropped glass.

  That afternoon, she watched his penis slowly retreat until snug against his scrotum.

  ‘What about Cuba?’ he said, leaning over and picking up the packet of cigarettes.

  ‘What about Cuba?’ she said and moved onto her side, her head supported by her palm.

  The match flared, smoke pooled, was sucked in with a pop, was exhaled in two bold lines through his nose.

  ‘You hid in your room,’ he said sitting yogi-like, staring at her. He drew on the cigarette. ‘You made a shelter.’ The last syllable was smoky; she waved it away.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s what you told me.’

  He looked mischievous; all she felt was exhaustion. I could listen to you all day and all night.

  ‘No. I said Ada and I didn’t leave the house that whole week. I didn’t say anything about a shelter.’

  Ada with the gin and the cigarettes; the aftermath of the abortion. The transistor radio and cold-eaten soup. Come on the fucking bombs. Ada at the window: Drop them now! Let’s see the whites of their eyes! Come, hail them down on us!

  ‘You cocooned yourself. You and your best friend. You were afraid and you cocooned yourself. I’m interested: are you saying this was somehow childish? Now you have children you can see the error of your ways? Do I have your argument right?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘Not at all. We used the missile crisis. It was convenient. It was dramatic. Has there ever been a greater drama? A greater collective breath? And all we were talking about was a boy who’d run off because Ada got in the family way. Those were the words we used. That was what we were talking about. I don’t think we talked about Khrushchev or Kennedy. Ada was so drunk she wouldn’t have been able to pronounce their names. But when you have children—’

  ‘I told you, I could never bring children into this world,’ he said and looked down to his groin. ‘I’ve always said that.’

  ‘So you have. Okay, when you grow up, then,’ she said, her slow laugh throaty. ‘When you grow up, you’ll forget about three-minute warnings. The apocalypse will feel like a ghost story. One of those late-night campsite fables.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette. He looked pityingly at her; how little she knew. She watched him and wanted to shake him. Tell him that his certainty was both infuriating and unwarranted.

  ‘That morning,’ he said eventually, ‘that first morning, they took us to the gym after morning prayers,’ he said, looking away from Evie and over to the window. ‘And gave us the instructions. Duck and cover, you remember, right? It was the first time I noticed the teachers were afraid too. Young and afraid. And so we make our way back from the gym and soon it’s all over the sixth form. Joy Andrews has set up a raffle. All those without a boyfriend or girlfriend, which was most of us, would be entered. Everyone should have someone to love at the end of the world, she said. She bought raffle tickets and each girl was given a number, the boys left to draw their partner for the last day of being alive. I’d been in love with Ruth Calendar for two years and her number was twenty-three. The things you remember!’

  He roughed his hand through his hair.

  ‘Joy came to me in the science block and handed me the straw hat. I put my hand in and visualized twenty-three. I searched it out and opened the piece of paper. She’d folded it five, six times. It said twenty-two. I couldn’t believe it. So close! Joy smiled and told me that my wife for the end of the world was Alice Bergman. Alice fucking Bergman.

  ‘She was as fat as me, fatter even. I saw her across the playground and the look between us was about as close to hatred as I’ve ever known. But it was inevitable: the two fatties together. I could have picked a billion times and it would always have been her. Alice fucking Bergman.’

  He expected Evie to be looking at him, but her eyes were on the window, on the curtains.

  ‘Who would you fuck now if the bombs were coming?’ he said. ‘Your last fuck on earth.’

  She sat up.

  ‘What kind of a question is that?’ she said.

  ‘A straight one.’ He shifted up in the bed.

  ‘That’s a straight question?’

  A sudden gust blew the curtains, bright-lit the room, then dimmed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘No.’ He smiled and kissed her.

  ‘Ignore me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No you don’t.’

  Holding a mug of tea, Evie opens the back door and sits on one of the two folding chairs set out on the flagged side-return. She blows on the tea and watches her two boys taking it in turns to fire the football at the makeshift goal. Despite their round little faces and bowl haircuts, they swear like navvies when they think she’s not around.

  Both she and Jim find their children’s accents strange. You wait for your children to talk, but there’s no control over how their words will sound. Voiceprints are unique, like dabs. She feels sure she would be able to pick their voices out from a line up. She sips her tea and listens to them, their tongues unguarded now, both believing she’s inside.

  ‘. . . You dick . . .’

  ‘. . . Fuck off, dick . . .’

  ‘. . . Fucking dick . . .’

  ‘. . . No, you fucking dick . . .’

  ‘. . . Fucking dickhead . . .’

  She’s still smiling as she closes the door. The clock on the wall says one minute after six and she watches the second hand, red and thin, stutter round the face. She guesses it will be seven minutes past when the front door opens, when Jim’s arms are around her, when he asks her what she’s done with her day. Time for a sundowner? he’ll say. And they’ll share first a kiss, and then a bottle of beer before dinner.

  In the small kitchen she begins to prepare the plates of salad. The boys will complain, so she puts on potatoes for mash. The radio news is all about the latest in Northern Ireland. The violence is more distant in her kitchen; at Ross’s he be
ckons it into the room. He admires the struggle, admires any kind of struggle, even though they are all doomed, all fucked, he says.

  Jim takes the beef joint from the fridge and begins to sharpen the carving knife. She looks out the window to the small garden. There is only a finite number of musical notes, yet we have not run out of music. Conversation is the same. There is always something to say, always something to fill the silence. We will fill the world with things, Ross says, just so we can talk about them. Clever boy.

  ‘We’re hungry,’ the boys say.

  ‘That’s funny, we’re Poland,’ Jim used to reply. He doesn’t any longer.

  ‘Tea’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ Evie says. ‘Can you lay the table?’

  They take the placemats from the sideboard and throw them down. She passes them knives and forks, mustard and salad cream. Jim slices the beef thinly and adds it to the salad. She checks on the potatoes, drains them and begins to mash.

  ‘Did you . . .’ she says as she watches the white mush smooth through the holes of the masher. ‘Did you have a Mars Bar the other day?’

  He takes a chunk of cucumber and pops it in his mouth, his face as guilty as an apple scrumper’s.

  ‘A Mars Bar?’

  ‘Yep, you know, work rest and play.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t remember having one.’

  ‘There was a wrapper in the car this afternoon.’

  She doesn’t look up at him, but down at the mash, trying to get out all the lumps.

  ‘Actually, yes. I remember now. I had one the other morning. I felt a bit light-headed, so I bought one at the newsagent’s. Why do you ask?’

  Evie hooks a shank of hair behind her ear, her face pink from the exertion of mashing.

  ‘I couldn’t remember you ever eating one that’s all.’

  ‘When I was a child a friend of my dad’s gave me some chocolate-covered Turkish delight and I was sick all night. But I was in the newsagent’s and I thought the sugar would do me good.’

  Evie looks at him as she spoons mash onto the plates. When she is full she cannot imagine ever eating again, cannot bear the sight of other people tucking into big dinners. No, not Jim. Never Jim.

  The boys leave most of their salad and the usual bargaining ensues. They are good kids; she says this to herself and means it, but teatime is trying. She lets Jim be the bad guy this time, as cucumber and beetroot are counted into mouths, quarters of boiled egg passed between plates. Eventually she calls time and they are allowed to choose a yoghurt each from the fridge. Jim stacks the plates and puts them by the sink.

  ‘Who’d like a walk after dinner?’ Jim says. ‘We could go up to Bluebell Wood.’

  ‘Dad,’ Chris says.

  ‘Will you go in goal for us when we get back?’ Phil says. Little Flip.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he says. Always, we’ll see.

  ‘Just for half an hour?’ Chris says.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  The small back garden looks out over a series of fields leading to a farm at the crest of a hill. They duck under the barbed wire at the back of the garden and walk along the path beside their neighbours’ houses. The boys kick the football Keegan/Toshack/Keegan/Toshack as they pass it between them. Sun fades over the hill. Evie holds Jim’s hand as they walk, having slipped it into his when offered. We are all detectives.

  Jim stops by the stile on the way into Bluebell Wood. The boys are running ahead, hoofing the ball high into the air and trying to head it on its descent.

  ‘In the paper today,’ Jim says. ‘There was an interview with a woman who should have been on that plane that crashed in June. You remember? She’s been in hospital for months, can’t cope with it, mentally I mean. She saw the plane come down, she said. Before the flight. She saw it and refused to get on. Imagine that.’

  ‘Amazing,’ she says, looking up ahead to the boys.

  ‘People who see things,’ he says. ‘Get premonitions. You never hear about those that got it wrong, do you? Only those that got it right. Every time there’s a plane crash there’s always someone who “saw” it, who got the feeling the plane would go down.’ He steps down the stile. ‘And cancelled their ticket. How many people do that a day, I wonder? How many seats go empty because some passenger has a feeling?’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘It can’t be insignificant.’

  ‘Someone I met once was convinced there’d be a nuclear war by 1980,’ she says. Ross. After the CND March, around a small table in a Manchester pub, after the biting March cold, and him leaning into her saying: ‘I would like to see you again. Soon. There is no time to be wasted.’

  Jim stops.

  ‘Just because a button’s there doesn’t mean it’ll be pressed.’

  ‘He thought the opposite.’

  Jim shakes his head.

  ‘Well, I feel sorry for him, then. To live every day as if it could end before sun-up or sun-down. Imagine that.’ He smiles at that. She puts her hand in the back pocket of his jeans.

  The bluebells were startling in the late spring, but now are dead-headed and a drained shade of purple. There is a rope swing over a small gulch that the boys have been scared off using with a cautionary tale about the kid who is now pushed around town in a wheelchair. They walk along the narrow pathway; there are cigarette ends and cans of beer and she hopes they will not stumble upon a condom.

  She’d asked Ross to leave it off just once. He had refused. It would be wrong, he said, even to countenance the creation of a new life in this dying world. All she wanted, she said, was to feel him inside her properly, just once; was that so wrong?

  Evie still has her hand in Jim’s back pocket. Chris is holding the football and Little Flip is trying to get at it.

  ‘Stop that,’ Jim says. ‘And watch out for stinging nettles.’

  They circle the wood and the gulch stinks, spindly creatures on its scummy top, the rope swing idling in the breeze. Jim leans down to kiss her neck. He will want sex tonight. The thought is not unpleasant.

  When she dreams of her unborn child, which is too often and not enough, she is sometimes able to take the dream in hand and keep it reeling. It is precarious, but she can hold the baby for longer, concentrating on her as the fantasy fades. She is then awake and alone. She goes to the bathroom to piss and knows that the seat will be down because Jim understands that this is one of those things. Good boy, he is.

  Philip and Chris are in bed and the front room is messy with toys. She puts them in the big wooden box Jim made. He is in the kitchen, the kettle whistling, the paper spread out on the table open at the crossword. He puts two cups of tea next to the paper and sits down. She sits beside him and takes in the half-complete crossword. He reads out clues he has not yet solved. She always holds out a faint hope that a clue might be repeated, that he will read it out and she will be able to say ‘we’ve had this one before’, but the clues are always new and always unguessable. Perhaps Ross is wrong about technology defeating boredom: Jim is never bored by the crossword.

  The phone rings as they fill out the penultimate clue. The sound is still a surprise. Neither of them saw the point, save for emergencies, and there’s a phone box at the end of the road. But in the end, they got one anyway.

  ‘What the devil?’ Jim says. What he always says when it rings.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Evie says and goes into the hallway. She picks up the receiver and answers with a curt hello. Jim always reels off their telephone number, posed as a question. There is silence on the other end of the line and then pips.

  ‘Evelyn, I need to see you,’ Ross says. ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Oh, hello, love,’ she says. ‘Kids down, are they?’

  ‘Tonight,’ he says. ‘Meet me tonight?’

  ‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Mine are down. Though the little horrors are probably reading comics by torchlight.’

  ‘I’m not fucking about, Evelyn. I need to see you. I need to see you tonight.’

&nbs
p; ‘No, I’m not sure I can do that; we’re off to bed soon.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t of the utmost importance.’

  ‘Well, I’ll talk to Jim and see what he says. Can’t promise anything, though.’

  ‘Meet me at the Swettenham Arms at nine.’

  ‘Well, I’ll ask and I’ll see what I can do.’

  The phone goes dead. She replaces the receiver and smears her thumb across its top as though removing fingerprints. She goes to the bathroom and locks the door, sits down on the closed toilet seat.

  The weakness, the self-delusion of men. She has been fortunate, though. He has been a distraction and nothing more, the kind of affair that you read about in magazines at the hair salon. Over now. Before anything goes awry. She flushes the toilet and eyes the telephone as she passes, daring it to ring again.

  Jim is writing letters in a circle, trying to unpick an anagram. He looks up and she sees the man she loved and the man she loves. He takes off his spectacles.

  ‘Was that Kath?’ he asks.

  She sits down at the table and picks up her tea, blows on it.

  ‘She wants me to meet her at the Swettenham Arms. Another crisis, I suspect.’

  He kneads his eyes, looks at his watch.

  ‘It’s coming up to nine o’clock,’ he says. ‘Can’t she wait until tomorrow?’

  ‘It’ll only be for an hour or so.’

  ‘That woman lives in perpetual crisis. She’s like the Middle East. Like the bloody Lebanon.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But you know what Jeff’s like.’

  ‘You go,’ he says, his eyes back on the wheel of letters. ‘Counsel your flock.’