by Patrick Gale
‘How about you?’ she asked.
‘Long story. But I’m working here at the moment.’
‘My turn to say “Ah”.’
They had reached the door to the car park. There was a cherry tree in blossom nearby and sugar-pink petals had blown into the doorway and been trodden into the doormat like soggy confetti.
Ben stepped to one side and smiled as she turned to look at him. ‘It took me a second or two to…’ he began. ‘I like you with shorter hair.’
‘Thanks. Paris.’
And so, with a married man’s confidence, she realized now, he had asked if they could meet again and in a rush she found they were meeting for dinner the following week, once she had got her mother home again and settled back into a routine.
She drank the last of her tea and set her mug with a clink against last night’s wineglass. She made herself sit up and start dressing. If she wasn’t careful, those few seconds, in which Ben asked her out and looked so becomingly delighted when she said yes, tended to replay themselves in her mind, useless and flattering.
Her eagerness shamed her, naturally. She was no longer a gawky student but a forty-something honorary Parisienne, a woman used to men and schooled in sangfroid. A gesture towards cool, even an initial refusal, would have set her value a little higher.
Pants, she told herself. Bra. Not long ago underwear had mattered to her and the possibility that someone else might remove it had been reason enough to spend almost as much on it as on the layers that kept it from view. Underwear still loomed large, but now it was her mother’s: five extraordinarily expensive pairs of white pants reinforced with hollow plastic hip-armour to prevent breakages. Such was the significance of these garments, so dire the warnings on every side of old women who broke their hips or pelvises and were never the same again, that Mummy grew extremely anxious if there weren’t at least one pair clean for night-time and one for emergencies. Which meant that laundry was washed and hung out every day rather than just once a week and the gentle knocking together of hip-protectors on the washing line had become as much a part of the garden’s sounds as birdsong or wind in the graveyard beeches. Amid such a routine, Laura’s handful of elegant, hand-wash-only ensembles had slipped to the back of the drawer in favour of serviceable cotton things – once schoolgirl white – that could be added to the daily washes to help make up a load.
Today’s pants, the first to come to hand, were emergency ones from Monoprix, sagging at the waist now, and had turned dispiritingly grey, but no one would know that but her. Which was, she told herself bracingly, a kind of liberation.
MUESLI AND CHOPPED BANANA
Some time in the early hours, Ben was woken by thumping from Bobby’s room – thumping, the sound of a breaking glass or mug, then Bobby’s characteristic muddle of swearing and laughter.
‘Bob?’ he called out. ‘Bobby? You okay?’ ‘I’m fine,’ Bobby called back, in their mother’s voice, and giggled; then all was quiet again.
Ben had been in the Winchester house for nearly nine weeks now and still found at such moments he was startled afresh to find he was not in bed with his wife but lying alone in another city. He rolled over onto his front, stretching out an arm to where Chloë would have been, and encircled a spare pillow in her stead. The deepest, darkest reaches of the night, when there was least risk of speech, had become the time when his marriage to her felt least insecure.
Then he fell deeply asleep again, worn out by four days of overburdened clinics, and he dreamed of Laura. They were together, back in the amazingly big room she landed in her last year at New College, on the top floor of New Building overlooking a length of the old city wall and Chapel roof and the bell tower. With his adult eyes he saw it and thought, Christ, what an incredible view! but he was blasé in the dream, as was she, taking such blessings for granted or as some kind of right won through exams and hard work. But her bed was vast and lapped in linen, like something from a good hotel, not the broken-backed single of reality, so pitiful and noisy they used to pull its mattress onto the floor or simply make love down there, furled in her duvet and getting little friction burns from the nasty nylon carpet.
So there they were, naked and together in her college room with the usual student gestures towards sophistication – a jug of real coffee under one of those horrible paper filter funnels nobody used any more, grapes, brie, a bottle of college port – yet they were their adult selves, he forty-eight to her forty-something, both a bit lived in.
She wasn’t beautiful when they were students, not like Chloë, who had notoriously or famously spent her gap year modelling for Ralph Lauren. Even at the time, or especially at the time – with the brutally calibrating eye of untried youth – he looked around and made comparisons and saw that, judged by the accepted norms, Laura was funny-looking, her face on the bony side of feline, her eyes cartoonishly large, her body so boyishly flat and slim it seemed instantly familiar when he first slept with her and lacking in the challenge or mystery he had expected.
Twenty years on she still wasn’t exactly beautiful. She had still barely acquired curves but, with maturity, her features were revealed as extraordinary in the way that some actors’ were – almost better in close-up, at kissing distance, than when viewed across a room. She had learnt somewhere to present herself differently, so that abrupt verbal shyness was turned to sexy reticence. She had acquired an allure.
But that new, shorter hair she had probably had for years but which still surprised him with the glimpses it gave of her neck was catching the sun and he was hard as anything and just wanted to keep her there or rather to eat her out and fuck her and keep her there because, this being a dream, he was quite without inhibition and they were both so much better in bed than they ever were as students. But she kept pulling away and saying she had to go, she really had to go. That yes, yes, she loved him back and wanted him too, so, so badly and right now but that she really had to go.
Then the alarm went and she said, ‘There. You see? The alarm. Now you’ve made us both late and your wife’ll kill us.’ Whereupon the alarm went and he woke up with a throbbing groin and a sharp sense of regret.
This was not his room, although he had been sleeping in it for two months. It was his mother’s room. He had made changes, done his best to defeminize it with white paint and a purge of her unapologetically trashy taste in fiction. The floral bedspread and cushions had gone to Oxfam. As had the make-up mirror and the lace curtains. But it was still her room, even with a pile of BMJs and Lancets on the bedside table and his shaving things and toothbrush at the grimy edge of the sink.
His own, his old, room, tiny by comparison, had been turned long ago into a sort of snug with the stereo system in it so that their mother could have somewhere to retreat from Bobby when she needed a little peace.
The house had never seemed so small when he was growing up and Bobby was a child, although even then Bobby’s clamorous personality had seemed to fill the place. But after his and Chloë’s flat on Battersea Park, it felt astonishingly cramped and he appreciated for the first time their mother’s sacrifices.
Before Bobby arrived, an unexpected late baby and just possibly a misguided attempt to revive a flagging marriage, she had taught in a good little primary school out in St Cross and their father was a partner in a busy dental practice on St Giles Hill. With Bobby’s diagnosis everything changed. She threw in her job to become his full-time speech therapist and carer, saying it was important and they’d cope. Perhaps Father had been leaving her anyway? Perhaps he’d found his second son too overwhelming a disappointment? Perhaps it was just lust? When Ben was twelve to Bob’s two, their father announced he was in love with a temporary dental nurse and moving to live with her and her family in Durban. It was, he said, entirely beyond his control.
Ben recalled no fights, no screaming rows, only the sudden disappearance, his mother’s explanation and a great, exhausted sorrow. As part of the divorce settlement, their father paid Ben’s remaining fees at Pilgr
ims’, the little prep school in the shadow of the cathedral, but he had been living beyond his means and, to avoid picking up a huge mortgage, they were obliged to leave their old house in Edgar Road and move to a gardenless back street in a sad area called Fulflood, on the wrong side of Oram’s Arbour, near the station.
Fulflood wasn’t a sad area any more. Every house for streets around had been lovingly renovated beyond its original status, every poky yard given a brave Mediterranean makeover. But the house remained small, and back then it must have seemed pretty miserable.
His Friday shirt, the slightly dashing violet one with white stripes, was waiting on its hanger. It wasn’t that he had a specific shirt for every day of the week, which would have been really sad, but he always washed his work shirts on a Saturday and ironed them on a Sunday so he was never short of a shirt on a weekday. Which was only slightly sad.
Time to be up. He pulled on his dressing gown and crossed the landing to the bathroom. Bobby was in there, showering, however, which was odd because he always let Ben go in first – it was their established routine as Ben was quicker – and because he hadn’t bolted the bathroom door, which was completely out of character.
‘Sorry,’ Ben called, shutting the door in a hurry. He was sure he had heard him moving around in his room still. But perhaps that was just the radio or noise from the street through an open window. He returned to his room to wait.
He lay down again at first but then worried he might drift back to sleep so he sat on the edge of the bed, put on his reading glasses and caught up with an article on syphilis figures in the under-twenty-fives he had been meaning to read for weeks. He was barely past the opening digest, which was so poorly punctuated he had to read it twice to wring the sense from it, when he heard doors open and close again and hurried out to claim his turn in the shower. His dressing gown fell open disobligingly as he shaved and he felt afresh the unfairness that one’s body in dreams seemed to stop ageing at around its twenty-five-year perfection.
The smell of toast and coffee wound up the narrow stairs to greet him. Halfway down he called out, ‘You’re up bright and early.’
Only it wasn’t Bobby at the kitchen table but a stranger about his own age with very black hair, a tattoo and a boxer’s nose. He seemed as startled as Ben and slopped his coffee on yesterday’s paper. He was what Chloë, with her fearless snobbery, would have called a Lock-Up-Your-Silver but there was nothing worth stealing except Ben’s car and Bobby’s racing bike and Ben saw at a glance that the keys to both house and car were still on their hook and the precious bike was still visible outside the window in their (unimproved) backyard.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Ben asked without thinking. ‘Sorry. I…You startled me. I thought you were Bobby.’
‘Mikey,’ said the man. ‘Mate of Bobby’s. Are you Bobby’s…?’
‘Brother.’
‘Brother. Oh. That’s okay, then.’ He was Irish. He shook Ben’s proffered hand uncertainly. Upstairs, doors opened and closed, the lavatory was vigorously used then they heard Bobby’s usual tuneless singing from the shower.
‘Somebody’s happy,’ Ben said, pouring himself coffee. ‘Have you known Bob long?’
‘Yeah,’ Mikey said, adding after a pause, ‘no. No, actually. He was a Gaydar thing. Look, I’ve gotta go. Can you tell him I said bye?’
‘Sure.’
Mikey stood, tipped the last of his coffee into the sink. ‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’ he said. ‘See you.’
‘Yeah. Bye.’
He was plainly left nervous by the encounter as he had trouble opening the front door.
‘Press the bottom with your foot as you pull,’ Ben called out. ‘It’s a bit warped.’
The man was released and let himself out with panicky thanks.
Ben fixed himself a bowl of muesli, chopped a banana into it and pondered, as his work constantly invited him to, the vagaries of human innocence. It was a recurrent weakness in the relatives of adults with Down’s Syndrome that they preferred not to credit their loved one with a sex drive and were quite capable of treating them as a kind of galumphing child, brimming with love, yes, but only of the nice, innocent kind, like a puppy’s, not a man’s. Only three weeks ago he had been obliged to explain to a family at his clinic that their little girl, a twenty-five-year-old who had Down’s Syndrome, collected biker jackets and was a big fan of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, was not only HIV positive but had become so through gleeful and repeated unprotected sexual contact.
Bobby didn’t have the form of Down’s Syndrome everyone thought they knew about. He was one of the rare, arguably luckier ones with the Mosaic variant. In this, through some glitch, not every cell line in his developing zygote had acquired the extra, twenty-first chromosome. (Aged twelve or so, his already biology-mad big brother had made himself an expert in the subject and submitted a project on DNA as part of his scholarship application to Winchester.) Bobby had faced developmental setbacks. He proved slow to walk and was extremely slow to speak. His speech now was mumbling, especially so with strangers. With people he liked, confidence made him positively chatty if not always intelligible. He was shorter than average, had stumpy fingers, was prone to weight gain and had a weak heart. He was more likely to develop leukaemia and had an above-average chance of developing early-onset Alzheimer’s. But his looks were unusual rather than characteristic; his tongue was not overly large, his nose and ears not overly small. He had only very slight epicanthic folds to his eyes and from some distant relation he had a shock of white-blonde hair and eyes that really were the colour of cornflowers. As a toddler he had pulled people up short in the street. As an adult, he resembled a young, Chinese-influenced Truman Capote.
And now, at thirty-eight, he finally had a sex life.
For all her furious drive to see that he caught up with his peers as best he could and received a ‘normal’ education in a city state school, with all the rough and tumble that entailed, their mother had fought shy of making Bobby independent. She loved him too much to let him go and convinced herself he had a better chance of a dignified life at home with her than by taking up the offer of a flat in a purpose-built complex with a warden. And, in truth, Bobby loved her too much to leave even had she encouraged him. They had an intense, battling intimacy – a kind of marriage – that precluded the need for any relationship beyond the home. She returned to teaching, he found the first of a series of undemanding jobs and they continued to be all-in-all to one another until she died. Her death plunged Bobby into such a deep depression that he needed full-time care for a month or two. But it was as though that breakdown had cracked a maternal shell and at last the properly adult Bobby was emerging.
Bobby came down the stairs two at a time. He was fighting with his tie as usual, and as usual Ben had to fight the urge to help him with it. Scorning to wear the ugly synthetic one that was issued by the station management, Bobby had an extravagant collection – one for every working day in the month – and liked to tie them in a Windsor knot worthy of a footballer, but the tying of the knot was a challenge. Shoelaces had always defeated him and he had worn loafers or Velcro-fastened trainers since the fifth form, but he would never accept defeat from a tie.
‘You just missed your conquest,’ Ben told him and Bobby blushed and turned aside to tear open a bag of the day-old pastries he brought home from work.
‘I said he had to clear off straight after his shower,’ he mumbled.
‘Yes, well, I think he got hungry on the way. Tea?’
‘Yeah.’
Ben filled him a mug. Bobby had to serve coffees all day in the station shop and the smell of the drink now sickened him.
‘Have you known him long?’
‘No. We met on Gaydar. He was minging, wasn’t he?’
‘Well. I couldn’t say.’
‘I only meant to have a drink really.’ Bobby turned, munching a stale croissant. ‘It was a pity fuck.’ He swore colourfully as he showered himself with crumbs.
&
nbsp; ‘The term is mercy fuck,’ Ben told him, trying not to offend him by laughing.
‘Whatever. It’s hard to say no,’ he said, brushing himself clean.
‘Hmm. He said to say bye, anyway.’
‘Huh.’
‘Heartbreaker.’
‘Shut up! He didn’t nick any of our stuff, did he?’
‘No. Bobs, you were careful, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Condoms and stuff.’
‘Yes,’ Bobby growled impatiently and sipped his tea. ‘No sex without socks. I’m not a kid.’ He tugged back a chair and sat down, slopping his tea, then peeled and ate a banana.
‘You’re going to be late,’ Ben said, glancing at the clock.
‘It’s fine. Ben?’
‘What?’
Bobby scratched himself below the table. ‘I think I need to come to your clinic thing.’
‘Why? Do you want me to take a look at you?’
‘No way!’ Bobby was horrified.
‘I thought you were careful.’
‘I was.’
‘So, what? Have you got a discharge?’
‘Eurggh! No!’
‘Soreness?’
Bobby shook his head but he scratched again with the hand that wasn’t feeding himself banana.
‘Do you itch?’ Ben asked.
Bobby nodded. ‘Started this morning,’ he said.
Ben grinned. ‘It’s crabs, Bob. Pubic lice.’
‘It’s really itchy, though!’
‘And it’ll get worse, front and back, if you don’t sort it. Here.’ Ben grabbed one of the free pads they were forever being given by drugs companies and a rival company’s pen. ‘Go to a chemist on your way to work – that one by the lights’ll be open – and ask for a bottle of this. Then you need to go to the Gents and dab it on with loo paper everywhere you itch. Everywhere you’ve got hair.’