ALSO BY NICK ALEXANDER
The Bottle of Tears
You Then, Me Now
Things We Never Said
The Photographer’s Wife
The Hannah Novels
The Half-Life of Hannah
Other Halves
The CC Novels
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
The French House
The Fifty Reasons Series
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye
Sottopassaggio
Good Thing, Bad Thing
Better Than Easy
Sleight of Hand
13:55 Eastern Standard Time
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015, 2019 by BIGfib Books
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published by BIGfib Books in Great Britain in 2015. This edition contains editorial revisions.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542018999
ISBN-10: 1542018994
Cover design by @blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration by Jelly London
CONTENTS
PART ONE: THE MARRIAGE
1
2
3
PART TWO: THE SON
4
5
6
7
PART THREE: JOAN OF ARC
8
PART FOUR: THE OTHER SON
9
10
11
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE: THE MARRIAGE
1
NOVEMBER
Alice slides the shoulder of the shirt over the end of the ironing board and slowly smooths out the creases, working the iron gently back and forth. In front of her, beyond the windowpane, the November rain lashes down, hammering the roses. They’d been so pretty in summer, but now, like everything else, like her, really, they are merely hanging in there, waiting for winter to pass.
From the lounge, she can hear the sound of a football match on TV. She flips the shirt over and starts on the other sleeve. She doesn’t mind ironing, in fact it’s probably the only household task that she enjoys. There’s something satisfying about turning that basket of jumble into piles of neatly folded order.
She smooths the cuff and thinks of the coming trip, for this is Ken’s best shirt, now ready for Mike Goodman’s funeral. There have been so many funerals recently and she’d love to be able to skip this one. She imagines herself standing up to say a few words. ‘Mike was always good for a sexist joke,’ she could say. ‘Mike never failed to turn up to dinner empty-handed! Mike could always be counted on to shock everyone with a good juicy racist remark!’
She glances back out at the rain, follows, briefly, the movement of a droplet as it makes its way down the glass. She wonders how long it takes to get from Birmingham to Carlisle. Too long. She’s dreading the drive. Hours and hours trapped in the car with Ken.
He scares her with his driving, always has done. He looks at you when he talks to you, that’s the thing, and on the motorway, she’d really rather he didn’t do that. Sometimes when he turns back to the road, he actually swerves as he corrects his trajectory, and she ends up being terse just to dissuade him from talking, just to stop him looking at her again. He gets angry in city traffic, too – turns into a monster, in fact. And God forbid that she insult his manhood by asking him to slow down! At weddings he gets drunk, so at least she can drive home. But at a funeral it’s unlikely. Three or four hours each way . . . At home she can move to another room or she can nip out to the shops. In the car, there’s no escape.
She drapes the shirt on a coat hanger, then fastens the top button. She unplugs the iron and crosses to the window to peer outside. She chews the inside of her mouth then turns back to face the interior, crosses to the fridge and, hoping for an alibi, looks inside. She needs to get out. This weather’s making her stir-crazy.
As she pulls on her coat in the hallway, Ken glances up at her briefly, but she can tell from his glassy-eyed stare that he hasn’t even assimilated the fact she’s going out. His mind’s on the match, and when his mind’s on the match it’s not available for anything else. It’s not so much that women are better at multitasking, she thinks, it’s that men can’t do it at all.
By the time she gets back, the match has ended and the presenters are discussing what went wrong. ‘You’ve been out in this?’ Ken asks, like a hypnotist’s subject suddenly back in the room now the football is over.
‘We needed bread,’ Alice explains, waving the carrier bag at him, then shrugging out of the wet coat. ‘And I needed the walk.’
‘It’s raining up there as well,’ Ken says, nodding, presumably at the out-of-sight television set. ‘In Manchester.’
‘Rain stopped play?’
‘No. Nearly. They played badly though. They were bloody awful, to be honest. Any chance of a cuppa?’
Alice thinks that Ken could get up and make his own cup of tea, that he could even, Lord forbid, make her one. ‘Of course,’ she says, managing to say one phrase even as she thinks the other. ‘I was just about to make one anyway.’
She’s pouring the water on to the teabags when Ken appears in the doorway. He leans on the doorjamb and looks at her blankly. He smiles but actually looks a little sad – it’s probably because of the match. Football is generally the only thing that elicits much of an emotional response in him these days.
‘They’ve started selling Christmas decorations at Tesco,’ she says. ‘Imagine that.’
‘A bit premature,’ Ken agrees.
‘I asked the woman on the checkout if anyone actually bought Christmas decorations at the beginning of November and she said I’d be surprised. I wondered how she could tell.’
‘How she could tell what?’
‘Well, how surprised I’d be!’
Ken frowns at her. He’s never quite grasped Alice’s sense of humour.
Alice squashes the teabag thoughtfully against the side of the cup. ‘Do you think Tim will invite us this year? Or should I plan to do something here?’
Ken shrugs. ‘We’re barely into November, love,’ he says.
‘I think we’re still allowed to envisage events that haven’t happened yet, even in November. They haven’t made that a crime yet. And what about Matt? Do you think Matt will come home for Christmas?’ She pours the milk.
‘I doubt it,’ Ken says. ‘He didn’t bother last year, did he?’
‘Here.’ She proffers the mug.
‘Thanks.’
‘He was in Sydney last year, so it wasn’t really an option,’ Alice points out as Ken turns away down the hall. ‘But now he’s in . . .’ She lets her voice fade away and exhales slowly. Because Ken has vanished from view. ‘Spain maybe?’ she mutters. ‘Or is it France?’ She glances at the countertop and wonders where Matt’s most recent postcard has got to.
She imagines Matt sleeping under a bridge somewhere, like that singer he used to go on about all the time. The one who killed himself. Nick something. She has always feared that Matt will somehow end up badly. Perhaps it’s just because every pop star he ever worshipped was dead. Nick
Drake, that was the one. And that chap from The Doors. There was the guy from that Australian band, too, and the one from Deaf Tiger or whatever they were called. He talked about dead pop stars so much that she knew all their names, became quite the expert. Tim liked ABBA and ELO. He liked bright bouncy music that even she could sing along to. Whereas Matt was always drawn to the dark side. Dead poets with miserable songs. The Smiths – that was another one. What was that song he used to like? Something to do with being run over by a double-decker bus. He used to sing it all the time; he sang it so much that she knew all the words as well. She became quite a trendy mum at one point, thanks to her boys.
But, yes, it’s hard to wonder about Matt’s future, hard to think about his whereabouts and not feel concerned. It’s almost impossible to picture him contented and happy somewhere, not when he’s spent his life pulling the plug on anything that looked like it was about to be remotely successful.
She remembers Matt aged thirteen, proudly presenting his report card to them. He had been graded ‘C’ for every subject. ‘C’ meant average, he declared, and he seemed as proud of that fact – of the universal averageness of his grades – as he had ever been of anything. It was as if being average was a new pinnacle of achievement, as if it beat, hands down, the straight ‘A’s that Tim had been getting. Ken had disowned him over that report card, had told him he was no longer his son. Which was harsh, admittedly, but they’d wanted him to do better, that was all. They’d been afraid for him, even then.
Alice sips her tea and remembers Matt’s graduation from university. Or rather, the absence of his graduation. How she had been looking forward to that! She takes a teaspoon and taps the rounded back of it against a thumbnail. Yes, thinking about Matt makes her nervous. Sometimes it makes her short of breath. Occasionally she fears that she’s slipping into an actual panic attack.
‘Don’t think about him then,’ Ken tells her if she ever admits that she can’t breathe properly. ‘Think about Tim instead.’ And of course, Tim has done so much better than Matt. But for some reason, thinking about Tim doesn’t make her feel that much happier, and it definitely doesn’t stop her worrying about the other one.
‘It’s over!’ Ken shouts from the lounge. ‘You can reclaim your sitting room. The coast is clear!’
‘Oh joy!’ she murmurs. She glances at the clock. It’s almost time for Coronation Street.
It’s the day of the funeral, and Ken, wearing black suit trousers and a white singlet, is at the top of the stairs looking down. ‘Where’s my shirt?’ he asks.
‘Oh, I tied it to the television aerial,’ Alice replies. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘The television aerial? What?’
Alice sighs. ‘It’s in the wardrobe with all your other shirts.’
‘The white one’s not there.’
‘It is.’
‘Only it isn’t.’
Alice tuts and climbs the staircase. It’s nine already and they should have left by now. She crosses the bedroom to the open wardrobe, swipes the shirt from the rack and pushes it into her husband’s arms as she leaves the room.
‘Huh,’ Ken exclaims, ‘. . . must’ve been hiding.’
‘Only from you,’ Alice murmurs, pausing on the landing. ‘Now can we please get a move on? You know how stressed you get when we’re late anywhere. All we need is a bit of traffic or some bad weather and—’
‘We’re sure to get plenty of both,’ Ken says, now buttoning the shirt.
‘I know,’ Alice says. ‘That’s my point.’
By the time Ken has checked the locks and looked for the map, by the time he’s found and jingled his keys, then lost them and then found them again, it’s 10 a.m.
‘Ken!’ Alice protests, one hand on the latch. ‘We’re really going to be late.’
‘We won’t,’ Ken says. ‘It’s easy to make up a bit of time on a long journey like this one.’
At the end of the street, as Ken waits to pull out into the traffic, Alice spots a length of tinsel draped across the top of the ‘open’ sign in the Chinese takeaway.
A minute later, as they drive past the golf course – transformed into a lake by all the rain – she asks, ‘So how do I find out if Tim is inviting us for Christmas without sounding like I want him to invite us?’
She glances at Ken enquiringly and he turns to face her just long enough for her to start to feel nervous. ‘Please look at the road occasionally,’ she says.
‘Don’t start that already. We’ve barely left the house.’
‘I’m sorry. But the idea of your ploughing two tonnes of Renault Mégane into a shop full of people makes me slightly nervous. I’m funny that way.’
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘Want to what?’
‘Go to Tim’s place? For Christmas?’
‘I suppose so,’ Alice says. ‘Compared to the alternatives, I suppose it’s preferable.’
‘What alternatives?’
‘Well, there’s always the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. But I still prefer Tim’s place, I think. Just about.’
‘If you want to go then, just ask him. Why does everything have to be so complic—’
‘I don’t want him to feel obliged, is all,’ Alice interrupts. ‘And Natalya was very frosty last year. Do you remember how frosty she was? Actually, frosty’s not the word – she was arctic. She was antarctic.’
‘Yeah,’ Ken says vaguely. He’s momentarily distracted by the heavy traffic on the roundabout.
Alice runs a film of last Christmas through her mind’s eye. And yes, Natalya had been very prickly. She had left the sprouts Alice had prepared in the fridge – a special River Cottage recipe with chestnuts it had been, too. She had ‘forgotten’ to defrost the chocolate log they’d brought as well. Fridges and freezers – that’s how chilly things had been.
‘You know, she never once wore that scarf I bought her,’ Alice says. In fact, it’s a general rule that nothing Alice and Ken have ever given them has ever been seen again. Perhaps she has a black hole in her chest of drawers, Alice thinks. Perhaps it just sucks things up and casts them into a parallel universe where they join Ken’s missing socks.
‘Not that you know of,’ Ken comments, checking his mirror as they merge on to the A38.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m just saying that as we’re not with them twenty-four hours a day, it’s hard to be certain that she’s never worn the scarf.’
But Alice is certain. She’s perfectly certain. And it was a nice scarf, too – a very nice turquoise cashmere scarf. If Natalya didn’t want it, then she would have liked to have worn it herself. It’s particularly galling when you give people nice gifts – things that you don’t dare buy for yourself – only to see that they never use them.
Perhaps it’s because Tim and Natalya are so well off these days. Perhaps anything Alice and Ken buy just pales into insignificance against the rest of their wealth. Perhaps they need to up their game this year, gift-wise. Then again, it’s not like Natalya makes much effort. She gives Alice a bottle of perfume every year without fail, and it’s never even perfume that Alice likes. She only wears Yves Saint Laurent’s Parisienne, and she’s told Natalya that enough times. Though never at Christmas. That would be rude. Alice has lost count of how many full bottles of perfume she’s given to Dot, how many she’s taken to the Oxfam shop.
‘Well, I still think she was a bit off last year. Tim was funny, too. Do you remember all that fuss about the missing Champagne glasses? As if it mattered what kind of glasses we were drinking out of.’
‘It was very expensive Champagne, apparently,’ Ken says.
‘Oh, it taste so dee-fferrent from prroper glass,’ Alice says, rolling the ‘r’s, mocking Natalya’s Russian accent.
‘I think they were just getting on each other’s nerves. It happens in a marriage. Especially at Christmas.’
And yes, it’s true. It happens in a marriage. Ken has been getting on her nerves for fifty yea
rs now and no doubt vice versa. She wonders again why Ken was so determined to marry her. It hadn’t been for her wit, that’s for sure. He can barely tolerate that. She had been pretty enough, she supposes. But there had been prettier girls out there. It’s a strange one, because she’s never been able to detect much pleasure in the arrangement, not on Ken’s side. Not on either side, really.
Marrying Ken had not been Alice’s first choice. In fact, it hadn’t really felt like a choice at all. Her grandparents (whom she’d never met – they’d died by the time she was born) were Jews who’d fled Russia in the late 1800s. They’d arrived in Norwich and then in the Midlands as penniless refugees.
Despite widespread myths about the wealthy, successful, businesslike nature of the Jewish people, they’d remained pretty much paupers their whole lives, right up until their premature deaths in their forties. Poverty and persecution do not a long and happy life make, it would seem.
Alice’s own parents, her mother no longer officially Jewish (she had seen how dangerous that could be) and her father of Irish extraction, had suffered terrible deprivation during their childhoods and had barely managed to drag themselves out of the gutter by the time Alice came along. Her father was a street cleaner, so in some ways he was still very much in the gutter.
Though Alice herself had never known hunger, she had grown up with the terrifying all-pervading knowledge that poverty was never far away. Her parents had lived as if destitution were imminent, hoarding tins of food in the cellar and worrying, to the point of near-insanity, about every political upheaval, every downturn, every distant conflict . . . It didn’t take much, they told their children, over and over, for everything good to vanish. All it took was an injury or an illness, or another economic depression – all that was needed was another Alexander the Third, or another Hitler for that matter, and they’d all be scrabbling around in the dirt all over again.
By the time Alice hit nineteen they’d been pushing her to marry for a while. Marriage was about the only hope that people like her parents had for their daughters, and they were concerned, unnerved, by the lack of suitable suitors and by her ever-deepening friendship with Joe. Joe who came from the wrong side of the tracks in so many ways.
The Other Son Page 1