‘No thank you,’Zoofie said, putting him down. ‘I’m going to have one. These are English apples. Always eat fruit in season. The Queen Mother only ever eats fruit in season. Organic. From her own orchards.’
Bill still hadn’t heard the car door slam. His father was still in the car, in the drive.
He looked at the clock and wondered if his father was waiting until both the red fingers, or hands, pointed straight down. As he wondered, he heard the car door close at last.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
He felt a giggle in his throat, and the kitchen door opened and there was his father coming into the house and slamming down his case on the kitchen table with a bang.
‘Hello, Bill.’
Bill braced himself, but his father just rested his hand on his head. His hand felt warm and heavy and large, like a flat cap.
‘Hi, Larry. Tea?’Zoofie asked. ‘I’ve just put the kettle on.’
Bill felt his father’s hand leave his head.
‘Something stronger,’ his father said.
‘Bad day?’
‘Bad day. The worst.’ He sounded tired.
Zoofie put the knife down. She put the plate of cut up apple on the table. The slices rocked like little green boats and Bill reached up for one. He knew his Daddy wasn’t going to throw him in the air now.
He was on the last segment when he heard his mother’s car pull up. He held the piece of apple in his hand. The gravel crunch-crunch-crunch-crunched very quickly and his mother came in all of a rush.
He could smell her perfume and he blinked as she kissed his face.
‘Ooh, yum, you taste of apples,’ she said and she picked him up, holding him tight.
He rested his head on her chest.
He liked this bit of the day. They were all together, Zoofie, Mummy, Daddy and Bill. He was so happy he couldn’t think of anything to say. He wriggled himself back to the floor.
‘What’s this about the Xylus takeover?’ his mother asked his father. ‘Is it true that Burgess McLane are letting some people go?’
His father didn’t say anything, and his mother suddenly stopped talking too.
Bill put the remains of the last piece of apple in his pocket and looked at his parents closely.
His mother was looking at his father, Larry, and it was as if they were talking to each other without using any words. Zoofie was looking at them too.
His father was nodding his head slowly.
‘What’s up?’Zoofie asked sharply.
‘I’ve been made redundant,’ his father said. ‘Got to give the car back.’ He looked at Bill. ‘Sorry, son.’
Bill didn’t know what the r-word was, but he didn’t much mind about the car. It wasn’t half as comfortable as his mother’s. When the roof was down and he and Zoofie were in the back, he could hardly breathe, the wind was so strong.
He didn’t mind about the car, although he could see his father did. ‘It’s all right, Daddy,’ he said.
His mother got off the table and put her arms around his father’s, Larry’s, neck. She rested her cheek on his father’s dark hair. He wondered if it tickled her, but she didn’t rub her face or move away.
‘Mouths of babes,’ she said. She glanced at the clock. ‘Could you run the bath, Ruth? We’ll talk about it later. Go with Ruth, Bill, I’ll be up to bath you in a minute.’
Bill hurried to his father and kissed him on his knee. His father smiled but he still looked sad.
Bill knew how hard it was to cheer up. He thought about the car. He knew how his father felt. He’d felt it himself, lots of times. He knew it from playgroup. It was a sad feeling, when you liked a thing so much and then you had to give it back.
*
By the time supper was ready, Megan had put Bill to bed and the dining room was humming with quiet. Larry looked up from the trout on his plate which Megan had just put in front of him and watched her sit down, her red linen napkin bunched in her hand. She caught his eye just for a second and he could see that she looked troubled.
In the car, before he’d come into the house, Larry had had the wild and sudden surge of an idea, that he wouldn’t tell her. He would carry on as before, leaving the house every morning — with no car...
He remembered a story from long ago, he should have forgotten it but here it was, returning to condemn him, a story — which he’d laughed at— of a man who had kept his redundancy secret and had spent his days in the public library, leaving and returning home at the usual times. And he now understood it. He understood it so wholeheartedly that he couldn’t remember why it had seemed ludicrous before.
The white noise came rushing back.
He wished he hadn’t told her, because now that he had it felt bad, really bad.
People said sometimes when things were bad that they can’t get any worse, but it wasn’t true, Larry thought. Larry, his hands cold on the polished table in his carmine dining room, found things were worse because of the trout.
The dead trout’s skin was black and charred and peeling, revealing the pale pink flesh beneath. One opaque eye, appallingly dead, was nevertheless looking at him. The whole thing was lying beached on a bed of green herbs, and he was overcome by a wave of revulsion.
The nausea started up the white noise in his head again. He looked away from the fish. It was making him wish he was vegetarian.
Megan’s voice drifted lightly through his nausea, distracting him. ‘We’ll be all right, Larry,’ she said softly, brushing her fringe out of her eyes with the back of her hand.
Larry couldn’t bear to have to face the trout’s dead glare and he looked up instead at his wife’s clear, blue eyes. We’ll be all right? How could she think that? ‘You shouldn’t have cancelled Harpers & Queen,’ he said. ‘Losing your job is one of the biggest stress-factors on the Life Crises chart.’ He tried to smile. He moved a withering strand of coriander that was dangling off the edge of the plate.
‘I was thinking about our options,’ she said, staring at her plate. He wondered if she was as repulsed by it as he was but she deftly pulled her trout’s tail, backbone and ribs clean off its remaining flesh and put it on her side plate. It looked like a prop from Top Cat. She looked up at him, wiping her fingers on her napkin. ‘We can carry on for three months. Your first step is to let people know you’re available.’
He watched her put the napkin down on the table. She was silent for a moment. Thinking, he thought. She was always discreet about her job. He liked that quality in her. It meant she never brought her work home and there was no competition when he wanted to talk about his — which, he thought wearily, wasn’t going to be a problem for a while. However, there was a time and a place for discretion and just at the moment what he needed most was hope. ‘What?’ he prompted her.
‘And I’ll do what I can at work. Keep a look out. You’ll have to update your CV.’
Larry was looking at the head of Megan’s trout and swallowed the rush of saliva to his mouth as he noticed the eye had dislodged from the socket. He hated meat that bore the slightest resemblance to the creature it had once been —although he’d only just realised it. On Saturday he’d eaten quail — he quailed at the thought of all those little bones. He picked up his fork to touch the trout’s heat-blackened skin and went over Megan’s last sentence in his head.
Suddenly he heard the dining room door whispering open across the red carpet and he turned his head to see Bill coming through with his arms outstretched like a sleep-walker.
For a worrying moment he thought the tension had disturbed him but a golden glint in the boy’s hand made him realise that Bill was bringing something for him to see.
Larry tried to smile encouragingly but his face felt stiff. ‘Hello, son.’ He glanced at Megan who was looking restlessly towards the door for Ruth.
Meanwhile, Bill was standing still, hesitating between them. ‘What have you got there?’ Larry added, forcing a false heartiness into his voice. Bill, now, was wavering.
He s
ensed a distracted mother on the one hand and an oddly matey father on the other. Following his mother’s gaze he, too, looked back at the door as if it was Ruth he wanted really. He looked at his parents again and made his choice.
His outstretched arms swung towards his father and he walked up to the table and looked up at him.
Larry was reminded of Burgess in the earnestness of his expression, at the small pouches under the blue eyes.
‘What have you got there, Bill?’
‘Nobby’s sleeping,’ Bill said to him softly.
And for the first time since his son had entered the room, Larry looked properly at the object in his hands.
It was their goldfish, slim and shining, two-and-a-half inches long, lying still and damp on the small palms. For the second time that night, Larry found himself drawn to the sightless eye of a dead fish.
He managed, somehow, to avoid recoiling. Still hunched forward, he swallowed, looked at Bill and nodded briefly. ‘Yes, he’s asleep,’ he said.
Bill looked down at the fish in his hands for a moment, and then looked back at his father with infinite compassion. Nobby’s dead,’ he said gently.
Larry felt a flash of shame come over him at having been caught out in a lie. And then he realised that his not quite four-year-old son had tried to protect him from the death of the fish. He had tried to break it to him gently.
Larry stared at the fish and wondered momentarily how it was that Bill knew about death. His thoughts went to the trout — and out of the corner of his eye he could see it stretched out on the plate in front of him.
What would Bill think? He saw himself through his son’s eyes; not just a carnivore, he was far worse than that. He was a pet-eater.
He flung his napkin quickly over the corpse, knowing that if he missed he would only succeed in drawing Bill’s attention to it, but willing to take a chance. Bill was looking at the napkin with interest and the altered expression on his face showed that the plan had not come off. Larry dared to look. The edge of the napkin had fallen short of the fish’s head. On his comfortable bed of fragrant, wilted herbs he looked for all the world as if he’d just been tucked up for the night.
Larry suddenly felt himself come to life. He patted himself and found a white handkerchief and shook it out, holding each pair of corners between his thumb and forefinger so that the handkerchief was like a hammock.
‘Put Nobby in the handkerchief,’ he said.
Bill put the fish in carefully.
Larry tightened his grip on the cloth but it hardly weighed anything, this small orange carp; it hardly took the creases out of its pall.
Still holding the handkerchief up, he could look, at last, at his wife. But Megan wasn’t looking at him, she was looking at Bill. She looked as though she was going to cry.
She got up suddenly. ‘Come on,’ she said, picking him up, ‘let’s get you back to bed. Oh, your sleeves are all wet, let’s change these pyjamas while we’re at it.’ She pushed her chair away from the table and scooped Bill up into her arms. He rested his head in the hollow of her neck for a moment but then looked over her shoulder as she carried him to the door. Larry hoped his son wanted to say something more but his eyes were on the trout, still tucked up on the plate.
‘Fish sleeping?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Megan softly, ‘and so should you be.’
Larry sat down heavily and stared at the handkerchief dangling in his hand.
Wasn’t Bill lucky?
He had every Fisher-Price toy ever made.
He had two good-looking, intelligent parents to look after him; one jobless, the other a liar.
7
The merger was old news by the end of that week. ‘I hear Burgess McLane have let Larry go,’ Nigel said, sitting on the edge of Megan’s desk.
‘Yes,’ she said, pushing back her chair. ‘It came absolutely out of the blue. He’d had a drink with John King last week and got the impression he was destined for greatness.’
Nigel rubbed his beard back and forth as though he was testing bristles on a paintbrush. ‘How’s he taking it?’
‘Optimistically.’ Their eyes locked and she shrugged.
The phone began to ring. She reached out for it, and paused. ‘Hello? Yes, Ryan O’Neal speaking.’ She glanced at Nigel and saw him wince. It was someone who had changed their mind about seeing them. ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Keep in touch.’
‘Who was that, Farah Fawcett?’ Nigel asked dryly.
‘Yeah, I know. Sad, isn’t it. Association of ideas. Megan, Meg Ryan, Ryan O’Neal. If I heard someone in my office asking to speak to Ryan O’Neal, I’d immediately know they were on to a headhunter and sack them on the grounds of lack of original thinking.’
She reached for the mail and sifted out the unsolicited CVs that had come in. It wouldn’t do any harm to see what Larry was up against.
Megan then checked the computer database for Larry’s details. She’d interviewed him once, years earlier. He’d turned down the job on offer and asked her out, declaring professional ethics as his reason. The truth was, he’d leaked the meeting to his boss and had been offered an incentive to stay where he was; something that she’d guessed at and forgotten long before he’d told her.
She glanced at his details and read her own comments at the bottom of his file. ‘Relaxed good-looker, doesn’t have to work hard to get places. Lacks drive? Born salesman.’
She sat back and wondered what she’d put now if she hadn’t married him. Probably much the same. If he lacked drive it was because he’d never needed it. Larry attracted good fortune.
Nigel was putting down the phone. ‘Guess what? That was Xylus and they’re looking for a new TV group head. Seems to me they shouldn’t have got rid of our boy Larry.’
Megan frowned and looked at the screen.
Larry wasn’t looking quite so fortunate now.
*
By Friday, the atmosphere at Burgess McLane had turned nasty, bad with ill-feeling. To an outsider it would seem as industrious a place as ever but Larry, sitting at his desk, knew that the industriousness was totally self-centred.
He got up and went to the kitchen to get himself a coffee.
He hadn’t slept well. He’d had a bad dream. He couldn’t remember it but it was hovering in the background, slipping in and out of his mind.
Larry switched the kettle on and stared at his reflection which looked grotesque in the chrome. Suddenly he remembered his dream.
Bad? It was the worst. It was a relief, in a way, to remember, because that morning, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t wanted to look in the mirror and he hadn’t at the time been able to work out why. He’d dreamed that he was bald.
It all came back to him now. He’d dreamed that he was in the supermarket, standing by the fruit display. He remembered that in the dream he’d picked up a lemon and as he’d glanced upwards at the angled mirror to check his reflection he’d noticed for the first time that he had a bald patch on the crown of his head. Not just thinning, which would have been bad enough, but properly bald, a circle so hairless that it was hard for him to believe it belonged to him. He could see the hair lifting up around the pink skin. Newly uncovered, it was as bright as scar tissue.
In the dream he had realised that that pink and hairless patch was not something recent. He’d realised that unbeknownst to him he had been going bald for months and hadn’t noticed. Other people would have seen it, though; he knew that. His colleagues. Marcia. Burgess. He knew now that all those days that he’d been driving to and from work, smiling at himself in admiration in shop windows, his body had been betraying him behind his back and had begun the process of withholding the hairs on his head. It was getting old and shutting down. His body, like his boss, had started laying off.
In the dream he knew that he was squeezing the lemon very lightly. He could smell its oils seeping through the pores in the waxed skin. And he understood, too, that Megan had known; that Megan had known but hadn’t tol
d him — instead she had slowly accepted that he was no longer a man, no longer young... she was kind, and pitying, and hadn’t told him. He didn’t like the way that made him feel.
It wasn’t true, of course. He only had to lift his hand to feel his hair was evenly distributed, but the dream felt true. And he did feel old.
The kettle switched itself off again. He made his coffee and went back to his office to listen to the intimate, furtive mumble of telephone conversations.
They were all doing the same kind of thing; they were all trying to find a way out of the pit.
Being in the pit together should have, he’d thought, made for some solidarity between him and his colleagues. Wrong. In the pit they were alone, frantic, fighting for themselves.
He gave a shudder behind his grey desk and raised his hands and looked at his nails, expecting to see new moons of earth clogging them.
‘I’m taking my plants,’ Deborah said, walking into the office briskly without looking at him.
Larry stared at her. Even Debbie had gone sullen on him. Collecting her pot plants from his window — her own small office was windowless — she kept her back to him, paddling in the bomb curtains which were still up and not his concern now.
‘Debbie,’ he said, lifting himself out of his seat, ‘what have I done?’
She glanced at him over her shoulder and didn’t answer.
Larry picked up his pen and circled a name on his pad. Reeve. Reeve was a chap he’d worked with a couple of years previously at Redson Mather. Reeve was going to let him use his office, his fax and his secretary for a couple of weeks or as long as it took to get something else.
He felt better because of Reeve. He felt he’d had a bit of a leg up, managed to peer out of the pit, get a glimpse of what was out there. Maybe it didn’t look so bad.
He looked up at Debbie’s stiff back. ‘What have I said?’ he asked her plaintively.
‘It’s all right for you,’ she said.
He saw it was time to pay attention. Hell, he wasn’t used to people disliking him. It didn’t happen often, and when it did it always surprised him. ‘What’s up? What have I done?’ he asked, palms open, innocent. ‘I’m in the same boat as you are,’ he said. ‘I’m sinking at the same rate.’
Striking a Balance Page 4