by Mike Gayle
When he finally rose some time after midday he felt bad about not eating the breakfast that he had stepped over on his way out of the room and guilty that his dad had had to spend another day alone and so still only wearing his boxers he wandered into the living room for a chat.
‘Hey Dad, how’s your day been?’
‘I’ve been thinking about our arrangement here,’ said Dad, ignoring Adam’s question. ‘I must insist on paying my way.’
‘Er . . .’ Adam was confused.
‘I wouldn’t want people saying I’m freeloading.’
‘I’m not saying you’re freeloading, Dad.’
‘I know you’re not,’ snapped Dad. ‘What I’m saying is this: it doesn’t look good. I’m your dad. If anyone should be looking after anyone it should be me looking after you. Never let it be said that George Bachelor doesn’t pay his way.’
If Dad was referring to himself in the third person, there would be little point in standing in his way.
‘Of course you pay your way, Dad. That’s not an issue. Now tell me what it was exactly that you had in mind?’
‘Well I was thinking just before you came in that you and I ought to go shopping.’
‘Shopping?’
‘Yes, shopping for food. You do eat, don’t you?’
‘Not really.’
‘When do you normally do your weekly shop?’
‘I don’t really do a weekly shop, Dad. I sort of buy stuff when I need it.’
Dad shook his head in disbelief as if Adam had revealed that he liked to spend his spare time setting fire to ten-pound notes.
‘That’s no way to do shopping, son. No way at all. Next you’ll be telling me that you buy your milk from the newsagent’s round the corner.’
‘I do,’ said Adam. ‘It’s easier that way.’
‘Easier? Easier? I bet you any money that it’s at least ten to fifteen pence more expensive in there than in the supermarket! You young people, none of you have got the common sense you were born with.’ With great difficulty (given the low nature of the sofa) Dad stood up and gave Adam a look indicating that he was ready for action. ‘Come on then, get your coat.’
‘Why am I going to need my coat?’
‘Because I’m taking you shopping.’
While Adam had shopped in the big Somerfield on Wilbraham Road plenty of times before, one thing he had never done (mainly because he was usually still in bed fast asleep) was go shopping in the big Somerfield on Wilbraham Road at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. For some reason it appeared that this was the exact time when everybody from good-for-nothing students to overburdened young mums decided that they needed a couple of things to tide them over for the weekend and descended on the store en masse. Adam had never seen the store so packed. It was like being at a rock concert without any of the benefits of actually being at a rock concert. Adam suggested several times that they turn back and try shopping some other time but his dad had looked so disappointed that he felt he had no choice but to carry on.
Fifteen minutes, a frantic search for a pound coin and several dodgy trolleys later they were in the pasta and tinned vegetable aisle discussing tinned carrots.
‘Will you eat them?’ Dad asked.
Adam looked at the tin of Somerfield’s own-brand tinned carrots unable to hide his look of disgust. ‘No, Dad, I will not eat them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t eat tinned carrots.’
‘But you said that about the tinned mushrooms and the tinned new potatoes.’
‘That’s because I don’t eat tinned mushrooms or tinned potatoes either.’
Dad peered into Adam’s side of the trolley. ‘And yet you’ll eat tinned kidney beans? Where’s the logic in that?’
Adam joined his father in peering at the tinned kidney beans in the trolley. Did he have a point? Was there really no difference between tinned kidney beans and tinned carrots? Adam was pretty sure that there was but he wasn’t sure what. Other than the fact that in this day and age people like him didn’t – with the exception of tinned pulses – eat any kind of tinned vegetables. Tinned vegetables were the territory of a different generation altogether,
‘And what about tinned tomatoes?’ added Dad as if reading his son’s mind. ‘They’re in your trolley.’
‘Everybody eats tinned tomatoes,’ protested Adam. ‘And anyway, tomatoes are a fruit not a vegetable.’
Dad shrugged and dropped the tin of carrots into the trolley while Adam wondered what he had done to deserve this: not only sharing his home with his dad but arguing with him about tinned vegetables. One way or another, he thought, as he trailed after his dad like a schoolboy, he was going to have to get his parents back together and he was going to have to make it happen now. He typed out a message to both Luke and Russell: ‘Emergency pow-wow re: Mum and Dad. Tonight in the Beech, 7.30 p.m. NO EXCUSES!!!’
‘I’ve just got stuff on my mind that’s all.’
It was twenty minutes past seven as Adam walked into the front bar of the Beech and spotted Luke. He waved in Luke’s direction to see if he was all right for a drink but he seemed to be lost in a world of his own so he ordered himself a solitary pint and made his way over to Luke’s table.
‘All right?’ asked Adam, taking a seat opposite his brother.
‘Yeah, fine,’ replied Luke, who patently wasn’t. ‘You?’
Adam laughed. ‘As good as I can be with a sixty-eight-year-old man as a housemate. Do you know what he said before I went out tonight? He asked me to spare a couple of hours next week to offer some input on a cooking rota and two-week meal planner that he had drawn up. I tell you Luke, I feel like he’s made up his mind that he might as well put his roots down with me!’ Adam expected a laugh or at the very least a grin but there was nothing. It was as if Luke hadn’t heard a single thing that Adam had said.
In a bid to reserve all parent-related conversation until Russell decided to turn up, Adam tried to make conversation but Luke was so unresponsive that in the end Adam concluded he’d better ask the one question he was pretty sure Luke didn’t want him to ask.
‘How’s Cassie?’
‘She’s fine.’
Now that he had got his brother speaking in whole (if brief) sentences Adam kept up the momentum. ‘How’s she getting on at work? I remember she had a big presentation coming up. How did it go?’
‘OK, I think,’ said Luke. ‘To be truthful I don’t really remember.’
Adam opened his mouth, about to ask further follow-up questions concerning Cassie’s sister and family, but he was tired of being the only person at the table making an effort. Luke and Cassie, he concluded, must have had some sort of tiff, that much was obvious. He wished he had the guts to tell his brother to grow up. Luke had it all: a great job, a nice home and above all a proper, fully functioning relationship with an amazing girl. What could he possibly have to be down about?
‘Look,’ said Adam, aware that they were entering uncharted conversational waters, ‘by all means tell me to mind my own business if I’m overstepping the mark here but is everything OK with you and Cassie? It’s just that—’
‘She’s moved out,’ said Luke. His eyes briefly flitted up to Adam’s for a response and then back down to the table. ‘It’s only temporary. A few weeks. It’ll all be sorted soon. We both need a little time, a little space to sort ourselves out. It’s just . . . I don’t know, we’re in a tricky position. She wants to have kids.’
‘And you don’t?’
Luke nodded.
‘Because of what happened with you and Jayne or is there something else?’
‘It’s Megan,’ confessed Luke. ‘I know it’s going to sound mad but it just feels wrong to even consider starting another family let alone going ahead and doing it.’
Adam nodded. He had never imagined that Luke’s problem might be this serious. ‘It doesn’t sound mad at all, mate,’ he said, recalling how messed up his brother had been after he had stopped seeing Meg
an. It had been awful. The worst thing he had ever seen happen to his brother. Even though the whole family had pulled together to support him there had been moments when Adam had felt as though Luke might never recover. ‘Megan is your kid. She’s your family. I can understand why the idea of moving on like that would make you feel like you were giving up on her.’
‘You know, Ad,’ he began, ‘there are times when it’s all I can do to get through the day, I miss her so much. But I just hold on to the thought that one day she’ll be old enough to come and find me. And she will, I know she will. And I’ll be able to tell her my side of the story and we can reset the clock and start from scratch and we’ll never have to worry about the past again.’
There was a long silence. Adam wasn’t quite sure what a moment like this called for. ‘We all miss her you know,’ said Adam, choosing not to refer to Megan by name. ‘I’ve got a picture of her on my bedside table. You know the one, it was taken that summer when she must have been about two and she’s sitting on the picnic bench at Mum and Dad’s and she’s got that huge Bachelor cheeky grin stuck right on her face. She looks gorgeous.’
‘I know the one,’ Luke said quietly. ‘And you’re right about the cheeky grin too. It’s trademark Bachelor through and through.’
Luke was clearly glad to have got all his thoughts about Cassie and Megan out of his system because they now fell into the kind of light and easy conversation that was their norm.
Russell texted to say he was running late so Adam got a pair of fresh pints and fixed his brother with a firm stare.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ asked Luke.
‘Because I’m about to tell you something that’s going to make you think a lot less of me,’ said Adam, shaking his head in mock shame. ‘It’s a big brother thing, you see. I know you look up to me . . . some might even say idolise me, and what I’m about to say might leave you feeling let down.’
Luke clapped his hands in glee. ‘Come on then, mate. Show me those feet of clay.’
‘Well,’ began Adam, ‘before this whole thing with Mum and Dad kicked off I went out on a date.’
‘In what way is that supposed to be news? It would be more likely to be a front-page splash if you went out and didn’t go on a date.’
‘Very funny,’ chided Adam. ‘But what I’m about to tell you is quite a big thing for me, OK? So just shut up and listen: a little while ago some of the boys made a comment about me always going out with the wrong kind of girls and so basically I instituted a new policy on women.’
‘This is brilliant,’ spluttered Luke into his pint glass. ‘The perfect antidote to all my woes! My brother has a new policy on women! What, pray tell, does this new policy state?’
‘That I’m only allowed to go out with the right kind of girl.’
‘Which means what exactly? You’ve stopped dating girls like that Scouser Paris Hilton lookalike who paraded around the launch party in little more than her underwear and a pair of kitten heels and are only dating librarians?’
‘Sort of,’ sighed Adam.
‘So what happened? I take it you failed in your mission and are now back in the land of fake tans and long legs?’
Adam leaned in towards his brother in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘What I’m about to tell you goes no further, agreed?’
Barely able to contain his mirth Luke nodded frantically.
‘OK, so I went out on a couple of dates with a number of, you know, ordinary girls and they were lovely and all that but there was no spark.’
‘No spark?’ chuckled Luke. ‘Oh, mate, this is pure comedy gold! My lady-killer brother on spark-free dates with a long line of librarians! What I would have given to have been a fly on the wall!’
‘Look, you can mock me all you like, but this is my love life we’re talking about which some of my followers would consider sacrosanct. So be more respectful before I slap you!’
‘Fine,’ said Luke. ‘No more jokes.’
‘So as I was saying I had these dates and there was no spark and I was on the edge of giving up when I met this girl . . . well actually you might even remember her as she was in my year at school, Stephanie Holmes?’
Luke shrugged. ‘Name rings a bell.’
‘Anyway, she was lovely in a cute kind of way but definitely not my usual type and so I decided to give her a chance and took her out for a coffee and well . . . she pretty much blew me away. She was smart, funny, intelligent and really good to talk to.’
‘And what happened?’
Adam shrugged. ‘I called her up for a date and she turned me down because – get this – apparently I wasn’t her type! Now that’s weird, right? How could she not like me?’
‘Are you joking?’
‘What? Are you going to give me some line about women all being different and how they’re not all into good looks and charm?’
‘Can you even hear yourself? You’re like an ego on legs!’
‘That would be the case if it wasn’t true but I’m afraid it is. I’m like a bloke version of Kate Moss and what bloke would turn down Kate Moss?’
‘Me for starters,’ laughed Luke. ‘She’s definitely not my type. Way too skinny.’
‘You’re telling me that if you weren’t with Cassie, and you were single and you hadn’t had a date with a girl in like . . . six months and then one day you open the front door and Kate Moss is standing there with that face, and those eyes of hers, and she says: “Luke, how about it?” you’d turn her down on the grounds that she’s “not your type”?’
‘Well put like that . . .’
‘Exactly,’ replied Adam. ‘I am putting it like that because it’s an undisputed fact that Kate Moss is every bloke’s type. Now given that in the original scenario we were discussing I was a bloke version of Kate Moss why would any woman in her right mind turn me down?’
‘But women are different,’ sighed Luke. ‘It’s not always about looks with them. Some of them are a bit deeper. Some of them go for the stuff that you can’t see and might actually be put off by the stuff that you can.’
‘So what can I do about it?’
‘Nothing. She’s blown you out, mate. That ship has sailed.’
‘You think I ought to forget about her?’
‘Mate, all this is weirding me out so much it’s untrue. But if you really want my advice – and why you’d want it I have no idea – I’d say forget all this right kind of women stuff and go back to doing what you do best.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Being a bachelor. Believe me, bruv, nobody does it better than you.’
‘It’s about you and mum.’
‘So where is it we’re going again?’
It was the following day, just after eleven on a Sunday morning, and Adam was sitting in his car about to respond to his father’s question.
‘We’re going to the Trafford Centre.’
‘And why is it we’re going?’
‘Because I’m buying a cabinet from Habitat and I’ll need some help getting it back to the car.’
Dad shook his head in disbelief. ‘Once upon a time if you were buying something like that you didn’t have to struggle getting it in and out of the back of a car. You just had it delivered.’
‘I know, Dad, but times change, don’t they?’
Dad didn’t say anything but Adam could tell that he was still ranting internally about ‘modern ways’.
In truth Adam wasn’t actually taking his dad to Habitat but rather using it as an excuse to get his father into the car and take him back home.
When Russell had finally turned up at the pub the night before, Adam made it as clear as he could manage without the aid of diagrams that he had had more than enough of his dad as a house guest and it was time that one of his brothers took over the reins. Visibly baulking at the idea the moment it was aired, both Luke and Russell countered that the answer to their problem lay in getting their parents to talk to each other. ‘It’s like this,’ Russell had said. ‘Dad
hasn’t got any real mates to speak of, has he? And neither has Mum. All they’ve got each is other so why could they possibly want to live apart? Which is why we’ve got to get them in the same room to talk things out. I’m sure if we can do that we’ll be able to make this whole thing go away.’ And that’s how the plan (hailed by Adam as ‘bloody genius’) was born. Adam would convince Dad that he was taking him on a shopping trip but would in fact take him back home. Meanwhile Russ and Luke would tell Mum that they would be dropping round for an afternoon visit. Once at the house Adam (with the help of Russ and Luke) would persuade Dad to go inside and talk to Mum, and when that was all sorted the boys would leave their parents to it and head over to BlueBar for a celebratory pint.
Adam was relieved that there was a fair bit of traffic on the High Street because he was afraid that the five-minute journey to his mum and dad’s house would be over all too soon. He hadn’t given any consideration to what he was going to say to his dad, which made Adam panic slightly and the more he panicked the more he saw flaws in the genius plan. What if they made matters worse? What if their mum lost the plot and started talking about divorce? What if their actions forced Dad to reveal why Mum had kicked him out thereby resulting in Adam never being able to look at his father in the same way again? For a few jaw-clenching moments Adam seriously considered turning the car round, taking his dad to Habitat and actually buying a cabinet. The thought of spending good money on furniture he didn’t want seemed a lot more appealing than being the catalyst for this potential disaster.