The Last Weekend

by Blake Morrison

  His shock on impact made me think of the dead tree at Badingley, limbs and tendrils arrested in all directions. Then he went down like a giant redwood, and lay there on the asphalt, felled and concussed. Ollie had smacked the ball with pace, but I did wonder, even in that instant, whether Archie would have collapsed quite so dramatically if the ball had been hit by anyone but his father. Milo, up at the net, was first to reach him. And despite my own little injury, slivers of blood seeping up through my shredded palm, I was soon there, too. Only Ollie was slow to react: he stood, mid-court, in bewilderment, as though still following the line of the ball and calculating where it would land (a perfect winner just inside the baseline had his son not interrupted its flight).

  ‘Are you OK?’ Milo asked, leaning down.

  Archie was prostrate but breathing.

  ‘My fucking head hurts,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  He was rubbing the side of his head but when he took his hand away I could see no sign of swelling. His iris and pupil looked OK.

  Milo fetched some water, sloshed it in Archie’s face and made him drink. He was shaky and in pain but — with Milo taking one arm and me the other — strong enough to stand up. Ollie had been keeping his distance but now he bent to retrieve Archie’s racket from the court.

  ‘All right?’ he said.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ Archie said.

  ‘I’ve told you before — when your partner’s behind you, you have to be ready to duck.’

  ‘So it’s my fault, Dad?’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘You’ve not said sorry, either.’

  ‘You were in the wrong position. The shot was on target.’

  ‘The shot hit me in the face. Apologise, Dad.’

  ‘People apologise when they’ve done something wrong. I’m sorry if you were hurt —’

  ‘If. Do you think I’m putting it on?’

  ‘Of course not. But you’re over the worst. And we’ve a match to finish. Thirty—all and 3—1. It’s getting interesting.’

  He put the racket in Archie’s hand.

  ‘Is that all you care about,’ Archie said, ‘finishing the match?’

  Archie wasn’t so much holding the racket as balancing it in his palm, as if the way it tipped would tell him what to do next.

  ‘Let’s sit down and rest a while,’ Milo said. ‘We could all do with a break.’

  ‘Resting’s not allowed when Dad plays,’ Archie said, ‘even when someone’s nearly been killed.’

  For a moment it seemed that might be enough for Archie — that his tantrum had passed and he would resume. But then he gripped the racket, took a step back and hurled it across the court.

  ‘Fuck your match.’ As he moved away, he turned to Milo and me. ‘No disrespect to you two, but Dad’s a prick.’

  Milo made a grab for him but he was too fast.

  ‘Leave him,’ Ollie said, a superfluous command since Archie was already through the gate in the corner of the court and striding away. A teenager in high dudgeon — what could we do? ‘Don’t worry,’ Ollie added, ‘he’ll be back.’

  ‘I hate to see him upset,’ Milo said.

  ‘Of course. But it wasn’t so bad an injury, was it, Ian?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I too hated seeing Archie upset. But I suspected him of exaggerating his injuries in order to get at his father. And though Ollie’s parenting left much to be desired, he was right not to be soft. Toughness and discipline are essential with kids. If Archie had been my son, I’d have drilled that into him earlier, when he was small.

  I can’t say I enjoyed the knock-up that followed, two onto one, with Milo and me (playing to a singles court) against Ollie (playing to the doubles). Eventually I sat it out and let the two of them play a match. If Milo’s tennis style was annoying (all fancy dinks and poofy drop shots), his brown-nosing was worse. I lost count of how many times he cried, ‘Cracking shot, Ollie.’ Not that the contest was uneven. And not that Ollie seemed to notice how desperate Milo was to ingratiate himself. On the contrary, Ollie was enjoying the match and said as much, loudly, when, with the score 4—3 in his favour, they changed ends. ‘An impressive opponent, eh, Ian?’ I did my best to smile. Tennis isn’t my strong suit, but he didn’t need to stick the knife in like that. And there was no call for him to be so fulsome when Milo levelled the set at 4—4. ‘Well played.’

  At 5—4 Ollie had a break point but his topspin drive landed out. Just.

  The next two games went to deuce and could have gone either way.

  At 6—6, I suggested they call it quits. Ollie was geared up for a tiebreak, naturally enough. But it was now past six, we’d had the court for over two hours, and Archie hadn’t returned.

  ‘Ian’s right,’ Milo said. ‘We ought to look for Archie.’

  ‘Good on you, Milo,’ I said. ‘Thank God one of you can see sense.’

  As Milo wandered off to gather up the balls, I raised my eyebrows at Ollie and mouthed, ‘Wuss.’ It was fine for me, as a spectator, to urge them to quit. But for Milo to capitulate was pathetic.

  We did our best to find Archie, trawling Frissingfold’s main street, bus station and cafes. We also looked in all five pubs, resisting a drink till we got to the last of them. By that point Milo was fretting about returning and putting his daughters to bed — if we were staying he would find a taxi, he said. To me that seemed a sensible suggestion: why should Ollie and I be made to rush our beers? But Ollie wouldn’t hear of it and crammed us back in the MGB. I half expected that we’d come across Archie, thumb out in search of a lift. But there was no sign.

  There were no road signs, either. Once off the main road they disappeared, as if the only people who travelled this way, on the B-nought-nought-something-or-other, were people who lived locally and didn’t need to be reminded of their bearings.

  ‘They removed all road signs during the war and never put them back,’ Ollie said. Luckily he knew the way. I wondered if Archie did.

  ‘He’s gone off like this before,’ Ollie said. ‘He always turns up.’

  I didn’t feel as sanguine as Ollie. Nor as sanguine as Daisy, who, when the three of us walked into the living room, failed to ask why Archie wasn’t with us. Strangely Em didn’t question his absence, either. It was only when Ollie finally admitted we’d mislaid him that the truth emerged.

  ‘Archie didn’t mention a row,’ Daisy said.

  ‘He’s here?’

  ‘He was here.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘On his way to some music festival at Snipham. He said he’d stopped playing tennis because he was tired. Then while he was walking round Frissingfold he ran into some people he knew from school, who were off to this gig. You just missed him: he stopped off to get his sleeping bag. He won’t be back till morning.’

  ‘Did he seem all right?’ Milo said.

  ‘Perfectly.’

  In the general relief that Archie was all right I hardly noticed the implausibility of the story. Surely the odds of him coming across school friends in Frissingfold were remote.

  Who’d be a father? Over the next hour I realised why I had chosen not to have children. Perhaps ‘chosen’ is too strong: officially it’s still open to us to have them. But lately there’s been something half-hearted about our efforts, the reluctant half, the heartless half, being me. I might have children for Em’s sake; I might have them for my own sake, insofar as their absence has begun to affect our marriage. But children per se, for themselves, I can do without. My colleagues at school make envious remarks around four o’clock as they head home to theirs: ‘It’s all right for you, Ian: you can forget about kids till tomorrow morning.’ It’s true I don’t have to deal with their mess, their demands, their unreason and self-absorption. But forgetting is another matter, since at home I still have Em: an evening when she doesn’t get onto the subject is rare. There are compensations. You can’t have kids without sex, so we have an active sex life. Actuall
y you can have kids without sex, thanks to fertility clinics. But masturbation into a sample jar isn’t my idea of fun. I once asked Em: do you see me as a breeding machine? Of course not, she said, children will be the expression of our love for each other. But suppose the children don’t happen, I said, where will that leave the love? She didn’t reply. My fear is that if we can’t have kids, Em won’t want sex any more, since it doesn’t do the job. And that if we do have kids, she won’t want sex either, since the job will have been done.

  It’s a tricky area. And a subject I don’t like to discuss. All I’m saying is that I hated having Natalie and Bethany around that evening.

  At first they were upstairs, having a bath, which wasn’t so bad. Indeed, with Milo supervising, Em assisting and Daisy busy in the kitchen, it gave me the opportunity for a tête-à-tête with Ollie. We had not been alone all day. And I had promised Em that I would tackle him.

  We sat on the terrace watching the sun descend.

  ‘What do you make of Milo?’ I said, approaching the subject in a roundabout way.

  ‘Yes, nice chap,’ he said.

  ‘Nice-ish anyway.’

  ‘Why the ish?’

  ‘Ignore it. I’m a cynic.’

  ‘Come on, Ian, spit it out.’

  ‘When people are nice, I always wonder how deep it goes.’

  ‘He seems honest enough.’

  ‘Yes. Apart from that dodgy call.’

  ‘Was there a dodgy call?’

  ‘At 5—4, remember. You had match point. And he called your shot out.’

  ‘I thought it was out.’

  ‘I thought it clipped the line. If it had been me, I’d have given you the point or played it again.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter — we had a good knock.’

  ‘Of course. And I dare say he genuinely thought it long even if it wasn’t. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.’

  I was on the brink of changing tack, the words ready in my head: You have to tell Daisy about the tumour. But then Bethany and Natalie ran past in their pyjamas, and the moment was gone. Milo soon caught them, and carried them in, one under each arm, their squeals of protest and pleasure piercing the dusk. But he didn’t succeed in removing them upstairs. I could hear them in the kitchen, demanding that Milo make them a snack, though they’d been fed only an hour ago. Some snack: butterfly pasta, garlic-free bolognese sauce, grated mild Cheddar, longways-sliced cucumber and organic baby plum tomatoes with two-thirds diluted apple juice to drink — nothing less specific would do, though most of the meal was left untouched, needless to say. Then they claimed they’d been promised a game before bed, and having quickly tired of playing tennis with each other (using two ancient wooden rackets they’d found in the barn), they rowdily played snap with Milo and Em. Finally, under duress, they went upstairs. That might have been the moment to tackle Ollie but the noise from above — the trampolining on mattresses and squabbling over who had which bed — was too distracting. I blame Milo as much as the girls: he’d shown what a soft touch he was earlier, on the tennis court with Archie, and the girls exploited it to the full. But Em also played a part in hyping them up. Why they needed to come down again to have stories read to them, and why she succumbed to this demand, I couldn’t see. ‘Time for sleepies,’ Milo said at last and, after gentle persuasion failed to work, carried them screaming to bed. Naturally they demanded another story, as a penalty. And naturally they crept downstairs again when Milo attempted to rejoin us. Whenever he attempted to rejoin us, that is, since they crept down several more times, giggling at first but later complaining that they found their bedroom ‘scary'. Finally Em offered to go up and sit with them. Some half an hour later, she came down, and peace prevailed above. It was ten o’clock by then, and we were all starving.

  Boys are more of a handful than girls, people say (I’ve said it myself), and a screaming baby is harder to deal with than a screaming toddler. But I can’t imagine being more irritated than Natalie and Bethany made me that evening. If I’d not been so anaesthetised by drink, I would have slapped them.

  My memory’s pretty good on the whole. My first polio injection, Uncle Jimmy’s brown-stained fingers, the fish on its side in the canal, the rickety school desk with my initials (carved by penknife) on its lid, black ants gutting a pop-eyed frog, the yellow stain on page 412 of the library copy of Sons and Lovers, the rib of beef we ate for Sunday dinner the week my dad won two hundred quid on the pools: it’s all there, indelibly. And yet Badingley, which ought to be etched on my soul, slips away at times — or refuses to come into focus, like something wrapped in tissue and shut away in a drawer. Did Ollie really say this or Daisy that? I remember a mass of things but nothing distinctly.

  Still, I don’t forget the source of my being there at all — a certain day at university.

  Late October in my second year, and I’m walking to the library one morning when I see a girl coming towards me, with a beret at a jaunty angle, and a denim skirt, a waist-hugging jacket and brown knee-length boots. Though on the small side, she’s otherwise so perfect that I do what I always do at the approach of a beautiful woman, avert my eyes in case the sight of me should cause her to frown, weep, vomit or in some other way express revulsion and thereby (because of me) make herself look less lovely than she is. But I also sneak a look as we pass each other, and this time, instead of discovering a contemptuous stare or a silent mocking laugh or a scornful toss of the hair, I see the girl is smiling at me. I hesitate, thinking she wants to speak, but she’s already walking away, hair falling down her back and a bell going off (a fire alarm in the Science Block) where her voice might have been.

  I tell myself she mistook me for someone else, yet I’m so uplifted by the experience that after leaving the library that evening I return to the student bar for the first time since Ollie cold-shouldered me there with his rugby team, and who do I see the moment I walk in? It seems such an unlikely coincidence that I look away, fearing a mirage, but when I turn back she is still there, in a red dress this time, and strappy shoes, and with a black-bead necklace, but unmistakably the same person with the same long hair and, incredibly, smiling at me again.

  Daisy. Though I don’t know that yet.

  She is sitting with another girl. Lacking the bottle to go over to them, I stand at the bar, knocking pints back and nerving myself to make a move. I dare say I would still have been there past closing time had she not come up to the bar.

  ‘Hey there …’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Can I squeeze through?’

  ‘No problem,’ I say, and prepare to step aside, but then add, in the voice of someone more confident than I am: ‘Better still, let me buy you a drink.’

  Daisy has always denied that she noticed me that morning or recognised me that night. She says she was simply going to the bar and that I happened to be standing in her way. (I don’t believe her: I think women like Daisy hate to acknowledge taking the initiative.) She also claims that when I offered to buy her a drink, she refused, pointing out that she had a friend with her, but that I wouldn’t take no for an answer. All I remember is walking back to the table, sitting down and trying to make conversation, notionally with both of them but really with Daisy. Which may be why, after ten minutes or so, the friend got up, apologising for being a party-pooper, and said goodnight. ‘She was bored,’ Daisy said later, ‘and you’d been drinking a lot.’ That may be true but it doesn’t explain why Daisy failed to leave with her. ('You insisted on buying me a last drink,’ she claims, but that doesn’t quite hang together, either: she could have said no.) Whatever the case, the fact is that she let me walk her home to her hall of residence. She didn’t ask me in. Nor did I have the gall to attempt to kiss her goodnight. ('Liar,’ she said later, ‘you lunged at me but I pushed you away.') But I asked if I could see her again, and she said yes, and that’s something even she doesn’t now dispute.

  (When I say now, I don’t mean ten o’clock on a late-August night in Badingley but the last
time we talked about this. I can’t remember when exactly that was. But over the years a received — or disputed — version of events has evolved between us.)

  So, to recap: on a late-October night in my second year at uni I meet Daisy and ask her out. But she’s probably right about me being slightly tipsy on that occasion because I fail to write down her telephone or room number and realise that I don’t know her surname. And it takes a week of increasingly desperate hanging about in the vicinity of her hall before I ‘accidentally’ bump into her one morning as she is leaving for a lecture — an art history lecture in the Humanities Block, which I pretend is en route to my own destination, the Law Block, despite them lying on opposite sides of the campus (a fact she would know if she weren’t a fresher in her first weeks).

  ‘So are you doing anything tomorrow night?’ I ask.

  ‘Mmm, not sure yet.’

  ‘How about a film? Platoon is on.’

  ‘I don’t like violence.’

  ‘The Pogues are playing in town.’

  ‘It’s sold out.’

  ‘Or we could go for a Chinese.’

  ‘I hate Chinese.’

  ‘Or Indian. Or Thai. Or Greek. Or …’

  A clock is striking the hour behind us.

  ‘I’m late,’ she says, looking flustered under her beret. ('I’m late,’ she would say, for different reasons, six months later.)