by Tim Pears
Sheena and Blaise looked to be involved in a game, which for the moment was played in silence: Blaise jigged backwards in loops and spirals and figures-of-eight around and between sofas and coffee table. Sheena pursued her, making periodic lunges for an object Blaise held in her fist and kept managing to flick away from her mother’s grasp. It looked like a relay race, with strange new rules: each time, retreating further, Blaise taunted Sheena with the object. So that Sheena was lured into coming forward and making another angry lunge, and Blaise again flicked the baton away.
Hector watched from a windowsill. Louie stood on a kitchen chair in his pyjamas, clutching a banana.
Then the sound, the voices, erupted again. Though it was possible that Ezra had cut them out in order to make sense of the scene in silence.
‘Give me that thing.’
‘No.’
‘I’m ordering you.’
‘But why should I?’ Blaise hissed. ‘Why?’
‘Because I’m your mother,’ Sheena yelled. ‘That’s why.’
Then Blaise noticed her father standing in the doorway. ‘Daddy! You tell her!’
‘What is going on?’ Ezra asked. He could hear his own voice sag with disappointment at what he was seeing, after weeks of harmony between them that he’d allowed himself to hope was the eternal future. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I want,’ Sheena said, enunciating each livid syllable, ‘to … see … the … news.’ She ceased the pursuit of her daughter.
‘Daddy!’ Blaise said, coming to a stop. ‘Tell her!’
‘It’s seven o’clock,’ Sheena said. ‘It’s time for the news.’
‘Tell her, Daddy,’ Blaise pleaded.
‘What, Blaise?’ Ezra asked. ‘Tell her what?’
‘Tell her The Simpsons is better than the news.’
Ezra swallowed a laugh. He shook his head. ‘Of course The Simpsons is better than the news,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows that. But it’s not the point. The point is Mum wants to see the news. Why don’t you record The Simpsons, Blaise?’
‘She can video the news!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Sheena spat.
‘Then it won’t be news,’ Ezra explained. ‘But The Simpsons will still be itself in an hour’s time.’
‘But it’s not fair,’ Blaise complained. ‘“The human rights of children are respected in this house,”
‘ she announced, in parody of one or other, or maybe both, of her parents. ‘But it’s not even about this. She doesn’t even like watching the news. Mum’s annoyed because Akhmed’s dad only wanted to talk to you.’
‘Don’t be so bloody rude,’ Sheena said. ‘You’re not too old to be grounded. I had a phone call from school today. “Is Blaise all right? Why didn’t she come in for her geography exam?” ’
‘Exam?’ Ezra asked. ‘You didn’t sit one of your exams?’
Blaise shook her head as if to deter an irritating fly from her cheek. ‘It’s geography, Dad. I was going to fail. It’ll have nothing to do with my GCSE options.’
‘But Blaise,’ he responded, ‘this is not the sort of decision you make alone. You have to discuss it with us. Your parents. You have to consult us.’
With her daughter’s attention diverted towards her father, Sheena made a sudden lunge for the remote and plucked it from Blaise’s surprised grasp.
‘Hey! That’s not fair,’ Blaise cried. ‘We were talking.’
Ezra had to admit that he agreed with Blaise: that really wasn’t fair. Sheena had broken an informal truce. So what should he say or do now? He was flummoxed; he couldn’t cope. Blaise stood frozen with indignation, surely primed to burst into tears. Sheena stepped towards the television, deftly summoning Channel Four. A solemnly excited voice spoke, followed seconds later by images of carnage under a hot sun.
‘You see?’ Blaise yelled, pointing at the screen. ‘You see?’
Sheena ignored Blaise and everyone else, focusing her attention on the television. She perched herself on the arm of one of the sofas.
How could she have done that? Ezra was still asking himself. Surely she wasn’t allowed to. He glanced at Hector, then at Louie, staring at their mother and sister, waiting for the next move.
Blaise made it. She looked like she was going for the remote, which Sheena had buried beneath her crossed arms. Instead she gave her mother a good push. Sheena tumbled backwards, head over heels, on to the sofa.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Ezra shouted. ‘You two sort it out,’ he managed, before slamming the door behind him and running to the stairs. He was confounded, annoyed and deeply saddened. Dismayed by his wife and his daughter’s behaviour. But he also knew that he had to get out of there, immediately, because what Blaise had just done was very funny – and if they heard him laugh, Ezra suspected that he would suddenly become the one in trouble.
He bounded up the stairs with giggles bouncing in his throat. He leapt into the spare room, closed the door and let it go: a painful paroxysm, snorts of helpless mirth. Pockets of guff found urgent release from his lungs. Bubbling laughter.
The hilarity evaporated. And what he’d witnessed was no longer funny. It just meant that Blaise and Sheena were at loggerheads again, unable to cope with each other’s such similar behaviour. To bend a little. As if they were under some fateful obligation to express, to punish, their DNA, their common make-up, in a double helix of inevitable argument.
He’d have to return to Blaise skipping this exam. What did she mean it had no bearing on her GCSEs? She wasn’t doing GCSEs; maybe it would have a bearing on her baccalaureate. What else was she not telling them?
And it sounded like he’d have to pay with Sheena for that man-to-man session – as if it was anything he’d asked for or wanted! Although, come to think of it, if he were honest, there was a moment in the pantomime when it had struck Ezra that he could have been talking with a fellow patriarch about matters that men dealt with.
But wait a second: why did Blaise make a point of Sheena, her mother, being pissed off about Abdul Azam’s visit? Surely Blaise was the one to be most troubled by its implications? Why call attention to it? And wasn’t she interested in what was said?
Still, Ezra thought, it was good to get out of there. Let those two work it out between them; let them grant each other some respect or be condemned to endlessly renegotiate their positions. He was not obliged to intervene. Except that an awful sound reached Ezra’s ears, and he thrust open the spare-room door. A banshee shriek. He pell-melled down the stairs and reentered the sitting-room, to be greeted by the sight of his wife and his daughter wrestling on the sofa and off it to the coffee table, scattering books and magazines. They were well matched. Sheena was heavier, but Blaise was supple and springy. Ezra watched for a moment. Summoning resolve. Hoping one of them would submit and walk away. Or that their combat would melt into an embrace. For how could he, wretched man, help but see a single ugly eight-limbed organism fighting with itself?
Ezra Pepin walked over and, squeezing his eyes and flinching in a vain attempt to protect himself, pushed himself between them. He was temperamentally as well as physically unsuited to violence; a coward and over six feet tall and thin, ungainly: handicapped by a high centre of gravity and a low resistance to pain. Women’s bodies were unpredictable. Flailing knuckles, kneebones; razorlike fingernails came out of nowhere. Random collateral damage. Flinching, Ezra clutched a wrist, put his arm around a torso, and began pulling them apart.
Sheena pulled on her Speedo swimsuit. Once the bottom was up over her groin and around her waist, she paused to remove her bra, before lifting the straps up over her shoulders. The swimsuit stretched and moulded itself to her torso, a polyester elastane corset, which modified the female swellings of her body to an aquadynamic androgyny. She restrained her hair in a blue cap, tied the locker key around her left wrist by its rubber strap, showered, splashed through the footbath, soon pushed off into the cold, chlorinated water.
Monday evenings after seven were for le
ngths. There were signs that indicated that swimmers were expected to turn at each end in a clockwise direction; to their right. A woman just ahead of Sheena reached the end and turned to her left. Sheena turned the correct way, and kicked off from the wall underwater. She soon overtook the woman. There were maybe a dozen people in the pool. Sheena paid them little attention, but as she accumulated her lengths so she passed them, and made her customary assessment. There were wanderers, incapable of swimming in a straight line, inept front crawlers mostly, frantically gulping air and veering when they should have been checking a marker towards which to aim, or following one of the lines below them, painted on the bottom of the pool. You had to watch out for them: they might as well have been blind, swimming without a guide dog, they’d crash into you with a flurry of splashing limbs.
Then there were idlers, like those two over there, fat women who always seemed to come in pairs, swam two or three sluggish lengths, then floated by the side, wobbly arms spread along the tiles, gasbags self-satisfied with their exercise.
The blurry clock on the wall at the shallow end told Sheena it had taken her fifteen minutes to complete the first twenty lengths. She was on target, as long as she didn’t slacken her pace. She derived pleasure from making every stroke exemplary: arms conducting graceful displacement of water; streamlined body in smooth motion; muscled legs amphibian. Swimming was Sheena’s refuge. An anonymity where she answered to no one. Where she tried not to think of work or family although, strangely enough, it was precisely here that doubt, when it wanted, came for her. Maybe it was her fault. Maybe she was the unreasonable one, after all, and not her adolescent daughter. Maybe strength, consistency, purpose, did, as she believed, give some children – like Hector – security, but others, who were already strong themselves, needed something else. Something she was incapable of giving.
It was necessary, sometimes, to concentrate on your stroke, in order to lose yourself once again within it. A man came slowly up from behind her, into the compass of her vision. He pulled gradually ahead of her. He’d only just arrived: it was unlikely he’d keep up that pace. She hoped that she’d have time to prove this before she completed her schedule, and begin slowly to overtake him.
Another man was sitting on the side and lowering himself in at the shallow end, up ahead: right in front of her. Was he oblivious?
He had on long, baggy, apologetic shorts, like the ones Ezra wore. He couldn’t be serious, that much was certain. If a man wore anything other than a pair of tight trunks, with its jumble of genitalia, you could be sure he only came to flounder around. Sheena couldn’t see the point of that. She would swim forty lengths, she always did, and then she’d get out, and for the next two or three days her body would belong to her. She would inhabit it; it would fit her.
The next day, the house seemed empty when Hector came home from school. He went to the bathroom. The smell of pear drops hung in the steamy atmosphere. Torso wrapped in a blue towel, Blaise sat on the edge of the bath, painting her toenails a bright red.
‘Hey!’ she objected. ‘Anyone ever teach you respect for people’s privacy?’ She stood up.
‘The door was unlocked,’ Hector pointed out. ‘It wasn’t even closed.’
‘I left and came back. And now, see? I’m leaving again.’
‘Stop looking in the mirror then.’
Blaise gathered together items of her toilette. A make-up bag. Nail clippers. ‘I’m not.’
‘I’ve seen you,’ Hector said. ‘Looking at those lumps.’
‘Rubbish.’ She lifted the floormat and draped it over the side of the bath.
Hector began stepping agitatedly from one foot to the other.
‘There is a loo downstairs, you know,’ Blaise told him. ‘Anyway, you can go ahead and use this one. I don’t care.’
Hector narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re always looking in the mirror.’
‘I hate looking in the mirror.’
‘Don’t blame you. It’s not a pretty sight.’
Blaise passed Hector in the doorway. She stopped and stared at him. ‘Look. Who’s. Talking.’
‘Well, I don’t, see, Blaise, and that’s the difference.’
Blaise groaned. ‘Oh, shut it, Hec, you little spod. Out of the way.’
‘Where are you going, anyway?’
‘None of your business.’
‘I was only asking.’ Hector trailed along the corridor after his sister. ‘I’m just a bit bored, that’s all.’
Blaise stopped outside her room, and turned. ‘Actually, I’ll let you come with me if you like.’
Hector frowned.
‘If you promise not to tell Mum or Dad.’
‘Promise what?’
Blaise sighed impatiently. ‘Do you or not?’
Hector thought about it a moment. ‘Promise.’
‘If you break your promise what happens?’
‘I’ll rot in hell.’
They walked up Churchill Drive towards Woodstock Road.
‘What are we doing?’ Hector asked.
‘We’re meeting someone,’ Blaise told him.
‘Who?’
‘Shush and you might find out.’
They crossed Woodstock Road at the lights, and walked up to Oakthorpe Road.
‘Blaise?’
‘Hec, I said you’ll find out.’
‘No, this is about something else,’ Hector claimed.
Blaise looked at Hector as they strolled. ‘Well, what?’ she said.
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Did what?’
‘When you hit him. That man. Were you scared? I was just wondering, that’s all.’
Blaise looked away. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Did you want to hurt him? Was that part of it?’
Blaise stopped walking. She stared at the ground. Then she turned to her brother. ‘You’re just like Dad sometimes, you know that? I said I don’t want to talk about it. Now stop talking. You’re no use to me if you can’t keep quiet.’
They crossed Banbury Road at the pedestrian lights. Blaise approached a tall, thin man who was leaning against the brick flowerbeds outside the Co-op. He smiled when he saw her.
‘Who’s this?’ Zack asked. ‘Is this your brother? Yes, I can see the resemblance.’
Blaise grimaced. ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she told Hector. She turned to Zack and said, ‘I thought he could watch.’
Zack took a sheet of paper from a shopping bag, and handed it to Blaise, who looked at it and frowned.
‘Only twenty?’ she asked.
‘We’ve got someone else coming after you, and then there’s me,’ he explained. ‘We want to get them all on without being stopped.’
‘No scenes,’ Blaise said.
‘Not today. That’s the plan.’
Hector noticed a badge on the man’s lapel, with the letters PSC, and he leaned nearer to see the small words underneath. Zack noticed Hector’s movement, looked down, and removed the badge.
‘Well spotted,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to give the game away, do we?’
Hector accompanied Blaise along the grey precinct set back from the road, and into Marks & Spencer. ‘We’re buying fruit,’ she told him. ‘Get a trolley.’
‘Who’s that man?’ Hector asked.
‘Get the trolley.’
Hector caught up with his sister. ‘What are we after?’
‘Here,’ she said. ‘I got a list off Mum. Fruit and veg first. Have a look. You can choose what sorts.’
Hector pushed the empty trolley slowly along the stall, studying the apples and pears, peaches and grapes, bananas and kiwi fruit. He tried to work out why every loose apple in one box had a sticker on it that read, Braeburn. It didn’t make any sense. Did some adults follow strict diets that ordered them not only to eat an apple, but a particular variety? There was a box of Pink Lady apples with the same identification. Hector couldn’t fathom it. It would be like every chocolate button in a bag having a sticker on it,
saying, Milk Chocolate: you’d have to remove the sticker from each button before you could eat it.
Hector couldn’t decide what he wanted. He was ambling back towards Blaise when he saw that she was peeling stickers off the sheet of paper the man had given her and attaching them to transparent plastic boxes. Inside each box nestled four large, identical nectarines. On each sticker were the words, BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS.
11
Tennis in Summertown
Friday 11 July
From below the horizon the sun had breathed pink and turquoise into a vaulting sky, and now was rising. It poked its light between the spires and towers of town, sending fingery shadows across the grass of the fourteen Alexandra Tennis Courts. There was a tang of moisture in the air, left over from the night’s thirsty dreams, an aftertaste of dew on the surface of the earth: the weather remained dry and hot during this, the first summer of the twenty-first century that dazzling days duplicated themselves for week after week, until England appeared to be creaking.
Four middle-aged men in scruffy shorts and loose tops strode past the chestnut trees. Simon Carlyle let his bike fall against the fence, then he and Dan and Ian tossed their padded racket holders and tubes of fluoro balls over the wire fence around the council courts.
Another night without rain, another bright lifeless morning, and it was fine, Ezra Pepin reckoned, it was splendid, to be up before the day showed its hand. He was the youngest of the four, his companions already into their mid and late forties: he rolled plastic bottles of Isis Water under the fence while the others launched themselves at it. They grabbed the stanchions around the padlocked gate and hooked their fingers in the grey diamond mesh, glancing down for footholds. As if they could scale the fence like nimble scrumping lads. Could overcome gravity. Not this time, though, and no more. They were men of authority, in their prime, risen as far as they were likely to. Inelastic limbs, obdurate joints betrayed them; their girth weighed them down; so that as they scrambled up they found they had to use all the brute, inelegant male force with which they’d been endowed to heave their loosening bulk up and over the top of the fence.