left, his father never hit him. Afterwards, when he did, it was without warning, or nothing Futh noticed in time. It was like when birds flew into windows with a sudden sickening thud, and then having to look at the bird lying terribly still on the ground outside, perhaps only dazed but probably hurt or broken in some way.
Futh tried not to get under his father’s feet. Sometimes he stayed outside, sitting on top of his climbing frame until it was so dark he could not see the ground underneath, and the lawn could have been an ink-black lake or just a big nothing into which, jumping down, he would drop. He was safe out there – but in the darkness he could always see the bright square of the kitchen window.
Watching his father wandering around the kitchen, picking things out of the fridge and sniffing them, looking in the cupboards and opening a tin, lighting a hob, Futh would know when it was time to go in for supper. If he waited too long, the supper would go cold and everything would be spoilt. Or, watching his father sitting alone at a bare table, he would know to wait until his father went out before going in and putting himself to bed.
In the other direction, over the fence at the bottom of the garden, was Gloria’s house. Futh had been friends with Gloria’s son Kenny since the first year of junior school, even though they had little in common. Futh was not really a people person, while Kenny always had girls or a gang of boys around him. Kenny played football and army while Futh was in the school library waiting for breaktime to end. Kenny went orienteering with his father, and could build a bike from scratch. When Futh took his own bike apart and could not put it back together again his father refused to help. In the end, Futh put all the bits – the gears and the chain and the pedals and so on – into a box in the shed and kept them there thinking that one day he would know how to do it.
Kenny and Futh used to stand at their bedroom windows at lights out, facing one another across their back gardens, each with a torch, flashing messages through the darkness. It was like Morse code except that it didn’t mean anything. Kenny would flash-flash-flash and Futh would flash-flash-flash back; Kenny would flash-pause-flash and Futh would send it back. Eventually, the game would stop. It was, for Futh, like looking at a lighthouse on the horizon at night. There was this flashing of light and then nothing, and you waited for the next flash, looking at where the light had been and where it would be again but you were looking at darkness.
When eventually no flash of light interrupted the darkness, it meant that Kenny was in bed, and then Futh got into bed too. In later years he would take the torch under the covers with him and read the sometime banned literature from his mother’s bookshelves.
Halfway through junior school, Kenny left – his father moved out and Kenny went with him. It happened suddenly, with nobody telling Futh that Kenny was going or that he had gone, and Futh spent some nights at his bedroom window waiting to see Kenny’s torch, wielding his own, flash-flash-flash, like a mating signal, receiving no reply.
Futh did not see Kenny again until Christmas. They met at the butcher’s. Gloria, coming into the shop and standing in line behind Futh and his mother, said hello. Kenny had already gone to wait outside and Futh joined him. Futh asked Kenny why he had left, and Kenny looked at him as if he were stupid and said, ‘I went with my dad.’
‘But why did your dad leave?’ asked Futh.
‘Well, he couldn’t stay,’ said Kenny, ‘knowing about the affair, could he?’
When primary school ended and Futh’s mother left and Futh began to spend his free time sitting on his climbing frame in the dark, he found himself thinking about Kenny, whom he had not seen in the two years since their meeting at the butcher’s. He looked at Kenny’s empty bedroom window, underneath which Gloria ate her supper alone in the kitchen.
She never seemed to have friends over, female friends like his mother had, who used to gather in the living room or on the patio in good weather, and sometimes his mother played a favourite song, her favourite singer, and started dancing, while he played by himself nearby, told to stay out of the way, getting as close as he dared, mesmerised by the noise and the perfume and the minidressed legs of his mother’s friends. Gloria had not been one of them.
He got to know Gloria’s habits. When she came into the kitchen to prepare her evening meal, she would turn on the radio. She would open the back door to call in the cat and feed it titbits from her plate while she was eating. When she finished, she would clear up and then, leaving the radio on, she would go upstairs to take a shower or a bath, and he would see her, the vague pinkness of her, fragmented by the bathroom window’s bobbled glass. She would come back down in her nightie, sit at the kitchen table and have a drink or two. She would feed the cat again, maybe take out the rubbish, or, in that summer of drought, soak her garden with the hosepipe in the dark. Alone in a street full of parched and pale lawns, while neighbours’ plants wilted and died, Gloria’s garden was lush.
The back door opened and Gloria appeared on her doorstep with a rubbish bag, but instead of going to the bins she walked onto the lawn, coming his way in her nightie, bringing the rubbish bag with her.
Leaning against the fence, she said, ‘All on your lonesome?’
Not knowing what to say, Futh said nothing.
‘Me too,’ she said, twirling the rubbish bag in her hand. ‘I could do with some company.’
‘I’ve got to go in soon,’ said Futh.
Gloria looked over Futh’s shoulder at the house, at the lit kitchen window. ‘What you and your daddy need now,’ she said, ‘is a nice holiday. That’s what I did when my husband left me. I went off on holiday. After a fortnight of sunshine and cocktails, I wasn’t even thinking about him.’
Futh, hearing his father calling him, turned around and was beckoned inside. When Futh turned back, Gloria was already walking away with her rubbish bag.
‘What did she want?’ asked his father, as Futh stepped into the kitchen.
‘She just came over to talk to me,’ said Futh.
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she was lonely.’
‘I don’t want you talking to her,’ said his father.
There were bowls of oxtail soup on the table. They sat down and ate, and Futh, through the curtainless window and across the dark back gardens, saw Gloria’s kitchen light and all her downstairs lights go off. A minute later, he saw her bathroom light go on again.
There was a curtain rail there, above the kitchen window. When they moved into this house, when Futh was seven, his mother had measured up for curtains, but she never got round to making them before she left. She had planned to paint the house from top to bottom, but had only done the landing when she stopped and did no more. Most of the pictures she brought from the old house were never hung, and the flowerbeds were planted but then grew wild.
His father, polishing off his oxtail soup, standing and reaching for his slip-on shoes, said, ‘I’m going out. Finish up, it’s your bedtime.’ When he opened the kitchen door, the cold night air came in and stayed when he was gone.
Gloria’s bathroom light went off and Futh saw Gloria coming into her bedroom. He shovelled his soup, chasing the last bits of meat around the bottom of the bowl. He saw her in front of her dressing table mirror, checking the look of herself in her nightie, touching her hair. She went back out onto the landing. A moment later, the light in the downstairs hallway went on, and when it went off again Futh stood quickly, put his empty soup bowl in the sink and went to bed.
He
