Back Trouble

by Matt Kinnaird

  Mine. ‘It’s ok.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘It’s always been ok about the car.’

  There’s a lecture to endure; I can feel it coming as if I have telepathically replied, ‘What wasn’t it ok about?’ It’s the inevitable consequence. People can’t just accept an apology, they have to spend forty-five valuable minutes (and we don’t know how many we’ve got in the long run; that’s why I never watch soaps) explaining to you (again) why they were disappointed in the first place. I know why you were disappointed in the first place! I just didn’t want to apologise. But at least I’ve finally learned that the right response to ‘It’s ok,’ is ‘Good. Drink?’

  Julia breathes, transfers her weight from her hands to her buttocks, folds her arms, demonstratively if you ask me, and begins.

  ‘It’s just … You could have killed yourself.’ Devious cow, playing the worry card early. ‘Anything could have happened. Or you could have lost your licence, and then we had to lie – you made me lie! – to the police, and your complete lack of humility! I know you were embarrassed and I know what you’re like, but …’ You get the picture: negotiating the fine tightrope between getting your point across and still getting a shag at the end of it, or one of you sleeping on the sofa again because you couldn’t help your big mouth. But there’s no risk tonight, because I have resolved to take everything she throws at me and admit I was in the wrong. I think I might have been this time, too. She pulls out the stops in any case, with a theatrical cuddle and reprise of the worry theme, before cuddle turns to kiss and kiss turns to nuzzle and nuzzle turns to ‘Oh, you’re cold,’ and ‘Oh you’re cold’ turns to ‘And you’ve got very cold hands’ and you know the rest.

  Actually, you don’t. For some unknown reason, and for the first time in my life, I pull out at the last minute and come on my wife’s breasts. She laughs and rubs it in. I wonder how well I know my wife.

  I can’t sleep.

  I really can’t sleep. My motor’s running. There’s been too much to think about today. Foremost in my mind, due to proximity, is the fact that tonight was the first time I’ve slept with my wife since I cheated on her with Emily. I approached it in a different way, which confused me. I was more direct, less inhibited and I felt more selfish, but I don’t think it’s keeping me awake. The park, even though I convinced myself I’d feel no regret, compassion or remorse, has left me shaky and confused, but also exhausted. I can picture the entire scene with clarity, and now find myself doing so, but that’s not it either. No, the park was more of a catalyst, I realise; it’s awoken something else that’s been skulking around the perimeter of my consciousness for years like a hungry cat that will only approach you when your back is turned; a familiar feeling, but one I’ve been happy to let lurk, with no intention either of inviting it in or telling it to clear off. It feels like guilt, so I try to remember all the things I’ve done I might feel guilty about in case I discover it. I find myself trawling the quagmire of my childhood memories, being pricked by shards of regret over the most insignificant events, like when I didn’t smile and say thank you when my parents bought me the wrong toy at Christmas, even though the one I wanted was out of stock and they did the best they could; or when I made friends with Nathan Jarvis, the new boy at school, but then got fed up with him within a couple of weeks and called him a horrible name so he’d leave me alone; then there was Tamsin Lovell, whose doll I hid when I was eight years old, and even though I gave it back it never made up for the sight and sound of her crying and the fact that I’d been the one who caused it; and then there are all the spiteful things I used to do to … to my brother – and now it comes, the biggest thing of all, the implications of which have bothered me all this time, like a bright light in the corner of my eye that’s too painful to look at directly, although the facts of the matter are plain enough.

  It’s simple. And the epiphany, the blinding truth which has me sitting upright in bed in excitement and awe, is this: I’ve been a murderer for more than five years. I just never faced it before.

  Our father’s father had died of a stroke. He’d lived alone since our grandmother passed away three years before, in a squat pink bungalow fronted by a low stone wall and clumps of rhododendrons, with a long back garden containing two greenhouses filled with melons and tomatoes, in Bordeaux harbour on Guernsey. The fruit had long since lain neglected, as had the rest of the garden, as weeds had crept in and strangled the nasturtiums and roses, and the lilies had smothered the pond. The house smelt thick and the scratchy brown carpet was stale. The only pride he had left had been in his dinghy, a barnacled, seaweed-slimed, wooden, ten-foot dinghy with rusty rowlocks – but solid, with a homely feel. We’d loved it as children, my brother Peter and I, and we’d loved him, too, with his cries of ‘Ahoy there!’, his powerful arms and his put-on gruffness.

  We’d been in the house for twenty-four hours when Pete asked about the boat. We were loading china from a glass-fronted cabinet into boxes while Dad went through his father’s papers in the room that used to be his but was converted into a study after he was married. He hadn’t spoken much to me since we got there, although I had been aware of some whispered conversations and consolatory words exchanged between him and Peter in that room, more of those confidences that scraped at my insides with blunt talons. I didn’t feel I could intrude on Dad’s private grief the way Peter could; I’d wait for him to come out of his room and sicken myself by hanging around him and panting like a puppy for a titbit of approval, and the more I yapped at him the more distant he seemed to become and as much as I detested myself I’d try to rectify every conversational blunder by saying something else even more vacuous and futile then something else again when he turned back to what he was doing or just plain walked away so I’d catch up again and so on and so on ad infinitum; or so it seemed when I reviewed it in my head later, basking in the still, deep, cold pool of self-loathing I felt whenever the pair of them were ganging up on me by getting on so well.

  The boat was moored in the next bay south, St Sampson’s, and we’d already decided we were going to sell it, but Peter in his sentimental way suggested that the two of us say goodbye to it together by reliving an adventure we’d had when we were both students, and rowing it ourselves round the promontory back to Bordeaux.

  Much as I detest blisters, I approved of the idea. The bungalow smelled of the dead to me and I could feel it in my lungs and seeping from my armpits in no time at all. Besides, the business of filling rubbish sacks and packing cases was unutterably tedious, and the weather was glorious. So the next morning Dad drove us in our hire car round to St Sampson’s, with its deep rectangular harbour, shipyard, power station and rickety church. It’s a tiny town by English standards, and at a first glance the epitome of what our transatlantic cousins might call quaint. The sea-front is picture-postcard stuff, with a row of squat, whitewashed, two-storey shop fronts peering out to sea between the tangle of masts that fill the marina and sway on the waves like drunken reeds. Of course, seaside towns all have their dark side, and there are enough tattooed, hard-as-a-barnacled-trawler-bottom, jewel-eyed, weather-beaten, salt-whipped sailor types around to make a sheltered fellow like myself nervous of walking down the wrong alley, and there were drugs, of course, because it was easy to get them there, but to find all that you have to climb through the tourist-board curtain into the back streets, and any sensible person knows better.

  We were dropped off by Le Crocq Pier, on the south side of the marina, at about ten, and as Dad drove away I felt a swell of relief: there was one less person now to make me feel inadequate. Having walked east along the South Quay to the smaller marina on the far side of the jetty, we came to the beach and saw the boat, perched on sand the colour of a dead tree, stained by diesel and seaweed and algae. As Pete glanced at his watch, I switched my gaze from the dinghy to a distant red lorry trundling west along North Side and disappearing behind the shipyard.

  ‘When’s the tide coming in?’ I said, my eyes unfoc
used.

  Pete regarded me with mock surprise. ‘It speaks!’

  Ha ha. I’d let them get on with it in the car, and I avoid conversations while I’m walking if I can help it. ‘Well, we’re nearly there. Half an hour I’d say until we can shift the boat. What do you want to do? Simon? Are you ok?’

  Being here was starting to freak me out. It had already been difficult getting used to the barrage of memory cues – like the salty, fresh smell of the air and the screeching of the gulls, at once so mournful and aggressive – which had provoked a torrent of memories of startling clarity, all from my childhood, which hadn’t troubled my waking life in years: walking the old dog at Bordeaux with Grandma, along sandy paths peppered with grassy needles that spiked my feet through the sides of my shoes; climbing the rocks and peering into worlds of rockpool life with Pete, feeling the sticky tendrils of anemones on our fingertips and collecting the best pebbles and cowrie shells in my bucket; the two-hundred and seventy-two steps (I counted them every time, just in case) down the cliff to the beach at Petit Port, because the best waves were often there, even worth the punishing walk back up when exhausted from swimming; pebbly Moulin Huet, its steep descent into the sea and occasional topless sunbathers; sandcastles and rocket-shaped lollies and that seaweed that pops when you squeeze it … But here, standing by the marina, the sight of my Granddad’s dinghy had been overwhelming. The blood was rising in my ears, and my vision tuned out. Then, as I turned my eyes back towards the beach, I could almost see myself as a boy, no, I could see myself, running with my arms out, on the edge of balance, towards the water, after my father had pointed out Grandpa rowing towards us. But why wasn’t this memory in the first person?

  ‘Ahoy there!’ I was shouting, ‘Ahoy there!’ and then I was on the beach and jumping up and down and waving and Dad was worried so he swept me up and dumped me on his shoulders, and one more time, ‘Ahoy there!’ and finally, because he always made me wait – because he always heard me first time – Granddad put down his oars, lifted up his blue peaked fisherman’s cap with his right hand and waved it in the air as if he was being rescued, and–

  ‘Simon?’ I looked at him, whoever he was. It was still Peter, and I was still in my body.

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said. ‘I need to sort out my hangover.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan. Your eyes look sore.’

  ‘Salt on the breeze. Bloody Mary’ll sort that out.’

  Pete dumped my drink and a pint of lager onto our table and squeezed his muscular frame along the seat in front of me. We were in the Crab and Lobster, a fisherman’s pub for tourists with all the usual paraphernalia dangling from the ceiling: stuffed fish and crustacean shells; oars; rods and tackle; there was a ship’s wheel jammed between the rafters above our heads. The clientele consisted of one gnarly old salt with a face like a desiccated walnut, smoking rollups and hacking up lung tissue between sips of unctuous brown liquid. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d had a wooden leg, intermittently bellowed ‘Oo-ar, me hearties!’ at the walls, and was on the pub’s payroll on the grounds of supposed authenticity. The barmaid, in contrast, was almost beautiful, which explained Pete’s eagerness to buy the first round.

  We sat and exchanged sips of our drinks, followed by expressions of appreciation, before the inevitable, ‘So …’

  ‘So we haven’t had a chance to properly catch up yet, what with everything,’ Peter said (‘everything’ being, of course, our recruitment to hard-labour detail on the occasion of our grandfather’s demise). I’ll hand it to him, though, for the unfettered banality of his attempts to open a conversation, along with his gainful employment of another redundant ‘so’:

  ‘So how’s work?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent.’ We lifted our drinks in unison. ‘Aah; that’s good. And Julia? Hasn’t left you yet?’ He lifted his drink to his lips again.

  ‘Actually, she did. About a fortnight ago. I didn’t think it was the right time to tell you.’

  Pete’s pint struck the table with a thud and a globule of lager-foam leaped for freedom. ‘What? You’re kidding!’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Oh. You– that’s not funny, you know. You had me going.’ Good. Although I had been aiming for one of those sputters you see in lame British comedies.

  ‘Sorry. She’s fine really.’

  ‘I saw her on TV the other day. Why didn’t you tell me she was going to be on?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It was no big deal.’

  ‘No big deal? She was practically the main person, apart from that little fellow who used to be, you know, cunning plans and all that.’

  He was right, of course. It was Julia’s first televised dig and she suited the camera so well she got loads of air time. She’s even gathered a nuclear following of internet perverts since then, who fill their blogs with speculation about what she’d look like wearing nothing but wellies and a hard hat. See for yourself; just type her name into a search engine. But remember to use her maiden name. That’s Tucker. I’m good enough for her driving licence, but not good enough for Channel 4.

  I don’t like discussing my life with my brother. Every aspect of it pales in comparison to his stellar achievements. And I dislike most the sickening awfulness of his attempts to remain optimistic about both my existence and my prospects; his staunch insistence that what I do is interesting and important, when we both know it isn’t; and I hate his face, with it’s benign, quasi-empathetic, damp-eyed faux-sincerity and his fucking puppy-dog eyebrows. So (there we go again: what a multipurpose little word!), I clammed up with him aged about twenty-three. Good thing it’s easy to change the subject.

  Was. I sometimes forget he’s dead.

  ‘But what about you, Pete? How’s life?’

  I’d heard some of this over dinner the first night we spent in Guernsey. It was easy to predict, give or take the odd detail: with success came a promotion, and he was now directing bids in the immigration sector of his company, providing removal centres as stepping-stones before his charges were hoofed out of the country; he’d recently come back from Langkawi, an island off Malaysia, where he and Sarah had decided it was time for them to begin a family and had spent the rest of their time there practising; he drove a Porsche (a Cayman, though, not a 911; a minor victory I thought, and he was going to have to trade it in for a people carrier if he was as fertile as everyone assumed he’d be) and had a new personalised number plate: E D A 1V1, which he thought represented him as the kind of guy who smiled in the face of enemy gunfire. Think about it. Their kitchen extension was finished so he was learning to cook and had started to wear aprons, he’d been on a foraging course so he could source his own produce and Sarah had just won them a luxury tour of Champagne houses and gourmet restaurants by sending a fictitious account of his proposal to a glossy magazine. Each detail was a sledgehammer to the exposed ribs of my self-esteem, so I drank more than I should have done to compensate. So did he, because we were in the pub for an hour in the end – he’d been wrong about the tide, although we couldn’t have been dropped off any later because Dad was tooling over to the other side of the island to catch up with some friends from his youth. The tide was finally high enough at noon, and I felt light-headed when we stepped into the sunshine.

  Back on the beach I followed the mooring line – with its tight wrapping of green algae baked hard by the sun – down to the old dinghy, whose stern was being coaxed into buoyancy by the nudges of the most eager waves, my feet kicking up the brown-grey sand. Peter gathered the line and followed, cutting a purposeful figure, while I had progressed more cautiously, arms out for balance.

  ‘Go on Simon, get in; I’ll push us out.’

  ‘On my way.’ I reached the boat and clambered in on all fours before crawling to the far end and hauling myself around. Pete held it steady until he was certain I was secure and threw the coiled line in after me. After a grin and a wink (‘Let’s go!’), he spat on both palms, pressed them into
the bow and pumped his thick legs. With a grating protest the dinghy lurched into the sea, lifted, scraped the sand again and bounced into buoyancy: a sudden and surprising instant of calm, like the first moments of weightlessness in space, before my lummox of a brother crashed in and the boat started rocking.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, red-faced from exertion. ‘I only meant to push it part way and shove us out with the oars. Jesus, I’m soaked. Who’s rowing first?’

  The rocking became a swaying. ‘Thank fuck for that.’ I said, looking around. ‘Well you’re there already. You might as well.’ And I had no confidence in my ability to negotiate the harbour mouth. The biggest boats were moored on the other side of the jetty, but we still had to cross their path to get to Bordeaux, and even the smaller trawlers seemed like looming leviathans from our low perspective.

  ‘Righto. Amazing, isn’t it,’ he said as he leaned forward to gather the oars, ‘that nobody nicks these things.’

  ‘I guess everyone with a rowing boat has got some already.’

  He missed my sarcasm. ‘I guess so. Here, give me a hand, would you, these are heavy.’ A moment later the left oar slotted into place with a wet, hollow clunk, and Pete fastened the rowlock. The right was next and we were away, Pete first applying well-judged strokes to turn us about before heaving on both oars in unison with his bullish shoulders to get us clear of the harbour and out to sea. Despite myself, I found myself impressed by his strength and his comfort with physical challenges. They came so easily to him. But it wasn’t fair, you see. It was ordained before birth. If studying Psychology did one thing for me it was to give me an excuse for being rubbish at sports. He was the one with the male hand: blessed with a greater endowment of prenatal testosterone, he achieved the proper masculine configuration of ring finger extending beyond index finger, leading to more accomplished motor skills and better visual-spatial awareness. Me, I got the girly hand. Ergo, I can’t catch. And I’m no expert at rowing.