by Fiona Neill
“I reminded him that fish have a three-second memory,” shouted Foy. “He’s taking the idea to the board, you know. He’s got this big idea to bring in ballan wrasse fish to eat the fish lice instead of using chemicals, because they’re bad for the environment.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” said Bryony.
“It’s a fucking awful idea. It could turn on the salmon, like the gray squirrel did with the red. It could turn out to be an invasive species like the American signal crayfish. It could . . .”
“Look, even if they decide to run with it, you’ll be long gone, Dad,” Bryony interrupted him. She immediately regretted her mistake. “What I mean is that it will take years before the fish can be certified as organic, and by then it will probably have gone out of fashion.” But this didn’t placate Foy. Ali winced on her behalf.
“They’ll have to drown me in the fucking fish farm before I retire from fucking Freithshire Fisheries,” said Foy. “I’m not going to leave my lifetime’s work in the hands of that fucker Fenton.” Bryony held the phone away from her ear until he stopped to ask if she was still there.
“Illegitimi non carborundum,” responded Bryony, adopting one of Foy’s favorite phrases, when he finished his diatribe. There was a silence. Then Foy laughed.
“I won’t let the bastards grind me down,” he agreed, his mood lifting.
“Now, can you please stop swearing, because I’ve got the children in the back of the car and Ali sitting beside me,” said Bryony, breathing a sigh of relief as she realized his spleen was finally vented. “And her first impression of you wasn’t favorable.”
“I see, I see,” said Foy, sounding interested. “Tell me, has the Sparrow managed to get to the bottom of who defiled that image of me in your toilet? Hester is right, there’s something wrong with those twins. Too much organic food, probably. Same with that bloody dog.”
• • •
The bus turned off, leaving the road ahead worryingly free of traffic. She would have to go faster. Ali tentatively pressed the accelerator. The car lurched in protest. She cursed Foy for bringing up what happened at the weekend. Apart from a couple of jokes by Jake about “pissgate” on Sunday evening, the subject had slid down the agenda, to be replaced by more trivial concerns. Had Nick put Ali on their car insurance? Which of the children had been using Bryony’s laptop without permission? Ali had been waiting to ask Bryony for some guidelines on the best way to extract a confession from the twins for the past three days, but she hadn’t really seen her until this morning, and there had been no opportunity for small talk.
The first breakfast of the school term had been a catastrophic affair. Persuading Alfie and Hector into their uniforms proved more challenging than sliding jelly into a cashpoint machine. They insisted on getting dressed in reverse, putting socks and shoes on first and underpants and shorts last. Every pair of socks was rejected because the seams were in the wrong place and scratched their toes.
“Are you trying to wind me up?” Ali asked them.
“They’re always like this,” Izzy said from the other side of the table. She had painted her nails with black nail varnish. Ali pretended not to notice. Eventually Malea silently presented Ali with a couple of oversize pairs of seamless ankle socks. Her round, flat face was expressionless, but Ali thought she could detect pity in her dark eyes. Or it might have been suspicion.
Then they insisted they wanted to wear underpants with exactly the same characters from Thomas the Tank Engine. Ali went upstairs again and came down with at least a dozen pairs, which she spread over the kitchen table. She counted seventy-six stairs from the top of the house back down to the basement. On the way down she had tripped over Leicester, who liked to sleep on the bottom step of the staircase in the hallway. He had growled menacingly, and Ali had growled back at him, baring her teeth, because she had read somewhere that it was important to show dominant dogs who was boss.
“Snap,” she said breathlessly, picking out a couple of pairs of pants with green trains on the front. She checked the BlackBerry Bryony had given her and calculated that she had about five minutes in hand before they were late for their first day at school.
“That is Daisy and Henry,” said Alfie in disgust. “Daisy is a girl train.”
“How can you tell the difference?” asked Ali, frantically searching the underpants for clues.
“She’s wearing blue eye shadow,” said Hector.
“You can only see that if you look really closely,” said Ali, “and I’m sure no one else will notice.”
“But we know,” they both said simultaneously. They sounded almost apologetic.
“They’re on the spectrum,” Izzy chipped in, as she wolfed down two pieces of toast coated with a thick slick of chocolate spread before Bryony came down. Izzy looked up over the book she was reading at the breakfast table. Twilight, it said on the front. Definitely not To Kill a Mockingbird. Her schoolbag sat on the table beside her. It was a large pink leather bag with lots of buckles. Chloé, said the label on the side.
“What exactly do you mean?” asked Ali.
“Autistic children love Thomas the Tank Engine,” Jake shouted from the other end of the kitchen. It was the first time he had spoken since he appeared downstairs.
“Is it an official diagnosis?” asked Ali, annoyed that Bryony had mentioned nothing to her. She carefully flattened another pair of pants with a green train on the front on the kitchen table.
“That’s Edward,” said Alfie and Hector in unison, sorrowfully shaking their heads as they fondly stroked the pair of pants.
“It’s what our aunt says about them,” explained Izzy, “when she’s trying to wind up Mum. Aunt Hester always knows exactly which buttons to press. That’s what Granny says.”
“They’re just control freaks,” said Jake, pointing his phone at them. “It’s in the genes. Look at Mum.”
Jake stood up. He left a plate of half-eaten toast on the table and asked Malea to fetch a pair of white cricket trousers.
“Why don’t you get them yourself?” Ali suggested.
“Is fine, Ali,” said Malea, who was already heading downstairs to the laundry room. It was practically the longest sentence she had ever addressed to Ali. Malea knew where everything was kept. She spent her days fetching and carrying objects from one room to another, magically transforming tiny scenes of chaos into perfect order.
“I don’t know where Malea keeps them.” Jake shrugged.
Fully unfurled, he was several inches taller than Ali, but he had the hunched insecurity of someone who hadn’t yet grown into his body. He was still sprouting. His hands were so big that the breakfast bowl he was holding looked like a small cup. He put it down on the table and sauntered toward the stairs, carefully untucking his shirt from his trousers.
“Could you ask her to bring them upstairs to the front door, Ali?” he asked. Ali stared at him, wondering if he was trying to provoke her. Then he said “Please” in a way that implied Ali was being pedantic. “I’ve got to find my Oyster card.”
Jake got the Tube to school. It seemed an incredibly sophisticated mode of transport to Ali, who had ended up at the wrong end of the District Line with the twins the previous Friday. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned around and then almost as an afterthought came back over to Hector and Alfie, and bent down until his face was at their level. He ran his fingers through his hair until it stood on end.
“On the island of Sodor, the trains are never late,” he said sternly to Alfie and Hector. He picked out a couple of pairs of pants from the table and gave each one a pair. “Donald and Douglas,” he said seriously to them, pointing at the trains. “They are twins, like you, and they want to go to school with you. They don’t want to be late.” Alfie and Hector compliantly put on the underpants, staring at Jake in wonder through their long brown eyelashes.
/> “What’s the island of Sodor?” Ali asked.
“It’s where Thomas the Tank Engine lives,” chorused Hector and Alfie.
“Thanks, Jake,” said Ali, but he had already left the room. Then Bryony came in, noted the time, and insisted that she accompany Ali to school in order to show her the fastest route.
• • •
Noticing the queue of traffic behind her, Ali tentatively pressed the accelerator until it could go no further. The car growled in protest as the rev counter hit five. The engine pleaded for mercy. It couldn’t be so difficult to get from first to second, Ali told herself. She looked at the gear stick to get her bearings. First to second was no more than a single downward motion, a simple flick of the wrist. Surely it couldn’t be so difficult to execute? Second to third was the nightmare. Up to the no-man’s-land that lay in the middle and then across and up again. Fourth to fifth was unknown territory. Not something Ali had ever experienced. But first to second was surely within her grasp.
Ali thought of things she had done that required far more courage than a gear change. She had pulled the emergency cord on the Norwich-to-Cromer train when her sister, tripping on magic mushrooms, had tried to climb out of the door to get onto the roof; she had swum out of a riptide on the beach at Cley; she had slept with a married man. She had moved in with a family she didn’t know, to take a job for which she was completely unqualified, in a city where she knew no one. Bryony was on the phone again. This time it was her work line that had rung.
“You’re the journalist, Felix, just do your job. All I can tell you is that you’re asking the wrong person the right questions.” Bryony laughed. “There’s going to be an announcement tomorrow, so you’ve got about six hours to get ahead of the crowd.”
“Can’t you give me a bit more than that?” Felix asked. The volume of Bryony’s phone was switched so high that Ali could hear every word.
“No,” said Bryony firmly. There was a long pause.
“Come out for a drink with me tonight.”
Sometimes the simplest requests concealed the most complicated motives, thought Ali.
“I can’t do that. I’m going to a closing dinner,” Bryony said, her tone softening. “You know how busy I am. We’ll invite you to dinner instead. We’re always looking for stray men to make up the numbers.”
The phone call finished, Bryony immediately dialed a number from her address book.
“The Financial Times is onto it,” she said, “I know where the leak came from. It’s one of the analysts at Merrill. Brian Budd is toast. We need to get on to it now, before it becomes the main angle.” She put down the phone.
“Whatever happens to you in life,” Bryony said, staring straight out the windshield, “make sure that you always get out your side of the story first, Ali.”
Buoyed by Bryony’s apparent imperviousness to her situation, Ali put out her left hand to reach for the gear stick, hoping to impose her authority. With the other hand she intensified her grip on the steering wheel. Instead of gaining stability, however, the car veered toward the middle of the road. For a moment it crossed into the opposite lane. She could see people on the sidewalk looking at her disdainfully, no doubt muttering about mothers in Chelsea tractors they couldn’t control. Ali swiftly pulled her hand away from the gear stick, back toward the steering wheel, somehow switching on the windshield wipers in the process. They angrily squeaked back and forth across the dry windshield at maximum speed.
“Shit,” said Ali.
“Shit,” repeated the twins excitedly from the back of the car.
“Put your hand on top of mine, and when I give the command, use the clutch,” Bryony said calmly.
Ali nodded compliantly, relieved that someone else was going to take control. She was too young for this job. It was all too much responsibility. She had left Hector in the bath the evening after pissgate and had gone back in to find him sound asleep, his head almost submerged underwater. When she pulled him out of the water in panic that he had drowned, she banged his head so hard against the tap that a small trickle of blood flowed from his nose.
She knew that whatever Izzy was doing in her bedroom in the evening, it wasn’t her homework, because twice this week she had rushed through logarithms and Latin verbs over breakfast. And although Bryony insisted she monitor where Jake was going and who he was with, she felt too embarrassed to ask him, even though she lay in bed worrying until she heard him come home. And she’d forgotten to feed the guinea pigs, Laurel and Hardy, for three days.
How could they expect a twenty-one-year-old to monitor a seventeen year old? Jake understood this. And he took advantage. The truth was that despite Bryony’s insistence that Ali would simply be plugging the gaps that she couldn’t fill, she was actually running the show. Bryony and Nick were hardly ever at home because they worked all the time. In fact, the only day she had seen Nick at home was the Sunday when Foy and Tita had come to lunch. And there was no one to share this with. When she called her friends, they had laughed.
“Take the money and run,” advised Rosa. “Stay six months and then come back here for the summer term. You can share my room.”
“What about your new boyfriend?”
“He doesn’t really come here unless the house is empty. Too complicated.”
“God, he’s not one of those married guys from that website, is he?” asked Ali.
“No,” Rosa said, and laughed. “I’ve given up on them already. Their egos are even bigger than their bank balance. In fact, there’s probably a correlation between the two.”
“Is the father attractive?” asked Maia, just after Ali had described Hector’s near-death experience.
“Have you been clubbing?” asked Tom.
“I saw your sister in the city center,” said Rosa. “She didn’t know you had gone.”
“Too much, too much, too much,” the windshield wipers seemed to be saying as they hurtled back and forth. Bryony reached out to turn them off, leaving her right hand hovering over the gear stick.
Ali glanced at Bryony’s hand to get her bearings. It was pale and infused with tiny blue veins like an underripe Stilton. She reached out for the gear stick again and felt Bryony’s small bony hand atop her own. It was warmer than she’d expected. Her graceful fingers were intertwined with Ali’s. Her nails were painted the same color as her shirt.
“Clutch,” said Bryony, digging her nails into Ali’s hand to reinforce the command. Ali pressed down hard.
“And down,” said Bryony. Together they pulled down the gear stick.
“Driving is like life,” Bryony said, as they successfully executed the maneuver. “It’s a combination of bluff and skill. I can help you with the skill, but you need to develop the bluff. London is full of bluffers.” She pointed out a mother driving past them.
“She drives with a sense of entitlement,” Bryony pointed out. “You, too, can drive like that. You just need to develop the right attitude.”
Ali felt a small drop of sweat trickle down the side of her face. She stuck out her tongue to catch it. But she was too late, and it dripped down onto her blue T-shirt. Another drop fell onto her T-shirt, joining the two sweaty stains together. Bryony pretended not to notice. Instead she instructed her to turn the next left and park on a single yellow line.
They all got out of the car in silence. On the sidewalk, the twins held on to Bryony. One of them, perhaps Hector, held out a hand to Ali. She took it in her own. It felt like a piece of warm fudge, soft and sticky. He looked up at Ali benevolently, knowing that the power to bestow favor was in his behest. The twins would always need each other more than they needed anyone else, Bryony had explained, in one of her chats about how to loosen the knots that bound them together.
“We’ll walk the last hundred yards,” Bryony said. “Then you can meet their teacher.”
Bryo
ny suggested that it might be sensible for Ali to get the Tube home, and she would take the car to work. Ali nodded gratefully, unsure what to say. She was too embarrassed to admit that she had no idea how to get back to Holland Park Crescent on the Underground.
• • •
Another mother came up to Bryony and asked questions about the school holidays. She was a large woman, the sort who wears unflattering circular skirts in loud prints and lipstick with too much pink, as if to underline her lack of vanity. Was Nick able to take time off work? Did they manage a week in Corfu? How were her parents?
“It was wonderful, Sophia,” said Bryony. “We were back and forth a couple of times, but we managed two weeks there.”
Sophia Wilbraham fired questions at Bryony, laughing heartily at all her responses, even though they contained only just enough information to be polite. Behind Sophia, two paces behind and two to the side, Ali noticed another woman, closer to her in age. Ali stood beside Bryony, waiting to be introduced to them all. Bryony said nothing. For a moment the four of them stood in uncomfortable silence while Sophia waited for Bryony to reciprocate.
When she didn’t, Sophia proceeded to tell Bryony about their own family holiday spent in Costa Rica, where they managed to visit volcanoes, rainforests, and cloud forests, and spend a week on the Caribbean coast, all in just under two weeks. She then contrasted this with their previous holiday in Jordan, where they had trekked into the desert on camels and visited some fantastic archaeological sites.
“Less culture, but the children learned a huge amount about the environment,” Sophia said. Not enough to point out the environmental cost of all their long-haul flights, thought Ali, recalling the utter boredom of her own school holidays, spent for the most part in Cromer, although there had been a couple of trips to Portugal before Jo’s decline. It struck Ali that these children were already better traveled than she would ever be.
“The tour company managed to get hold of a couple of Garifuna Indians from Nicaragua so that the children could learn about indigenous culture, and they had someone to teach them Spanish for an hour each day.”