longer glossy, flicked up. The scrotummy texture of her cheeks shameless on the slick screen of my Mac; not even middle-aged, grandmotherly rather.
The ravages. And so un-long ago.
And then my eyes play tricks: my memory of her superimposes itself onto the screen and I see the younger Kathy emerging, her eyes growing brighter and her skin smoothed out; I manage to hold the illusion only for a moment before the younger woman recedes and the elder returns, weathered and thickened and aged. And with it, the thought that this is exactly how people must see me. When I don’t feel like that at all, when I feel so much like the memory of me.
“Wha’ you doing?” Tracy asks me later. I look up and see that she’s still dabbing blood from her mouth. The red of it matches her lipstick, her nails.
What I’m doing is kneeling on the floor outside Gabe’s room with my weight on my good knee, keeping my balance with the painful end of my stump, attacking the hinges of Gabe’s door with an electric screwdriver.
“I’m taking his door off.”
“Why?”
“Because I told him that if he slams his door one more time, I’m going to take it off.”
Tracy lifts a Botoxed lip, shakes her head, minces off on her Louboutins, descends the stairs like a cautious antelope. Gabe is lying on his unmade bed with his arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling, iPod pummelling those so-fragile, once-perfect membranes in his ears. If you look at the maths of it, 3(½) ≠ us. Somewhere, there’s more, has to be more than the pieces of ourselves which we present to each other.
There was a time when Gabriel was young and malleable, virgin clay in my hands, a soft ball of possibility. It may not have been for a very long time, but while it lasted we’d sit on the carpet in front of the roaring winter fire and I’d teach him how to draw. Proportion: how the parts of the human body relate to each other; dimension: how to bring out shape from the flatness of things; perspective: horizon lines, vanishing points, foreshortenings, all the two-dimensional tricks of three-dimensional depth discovered by the Renaissance masters, perfected by Hergé. So why has he chosen to forget everything I taught him? On his walls are scratchy, insecure little works that crouch on lined paper in unashamed medieval distortion. I’m not so much concerned with the content – demons and monsters, reptiles with claws, maidens with the odd tit hanging out, a woman being poured out of a Coke can, a man carrying himself in a wicker basket, a levitating heart squirting cartoon drops of blood – as I am worried about how badly they are drawn, how his drawing style is deteriorating as he grows older. I’m concerned about the derivativeness: long flat horizons, stretched shadows, stolen directly from the Dali posters and postcards stuck on the opposite wall. I accept that it’s no longer cool to sit and draw with me, but why has the boy not taken on any of my expertise and experience; indeed, why has he thrown off what he once knew? You try to teach your kids two things: how to do some things better, and how not to do other things worse. You don’t expect them to go backwards from there.
We go to the Joneses, laden with beer and wine and chips and a twelve-year-old bottle of Chivas that’s now eighteen years older than it was at the time of bottling. Barry was a New Year’s baby, and every year I give him the same bottle of Chivas that he gives back to me on my birthday in September. The label on the bottle is fraying at the edges and the cap is scratched and slightly dented. It was funny for the first two or three years; now it’s just habit, this endless swapping of a scruffy bottle of whisky that neither of us can bring ourselves to drink.
Barry and Lynn live a block away. In a normal suburb, getting there would have meant a short walk, but here among the oaks and the plane trees, here where financial accrual is declared loudly on plots with tennis courts and twenty-metre swimming pools, a walk is out of the question: here, we drive. Besides, Gabriel reasons, what if we were mugged and stabbed on the way home in the middle of the night? Which, I concede, is a valid point. So we pile into the Range Rover once we’ve loaded our share of the refreshments, drive for forty-three seconds. I ring the buzzer, wait for the wrought-iron gates to swing open, park behind a string of other four-by-fours in Barry’s second-gear driveway, unload ourselves and the pointless stuff we’ve brought. Hooked over my wrists in bags that bang against my crutches are three bottles of wine, the Chivas and a two-litre bottle of Coke; a sulky Gabriel is carrying two six-packs in a plastic supermarket bag. Tracy’s high heels force unnatural, bird-like little steps – or perhaps it’s the tightness of her jeans that’s preventing her legs from swinging from her hips. She’s carrying the heavy stuff – two bags of prawn-cocktail chips and a packet of pretzels – elbows in, wrists out, the packets pinched between thumbs and forefingers like dead mice. Gabriel, at sixteen, is hormonally incapable of walking beside his parents. It’s either fifteen steps behind, or rarely, as now, five steps ahead. In the yellow of Barry’s driveway lights I see him swinging the bag of beer at the end of his arm. I open my mouth to warn him of the likely outcome, but before I can form any words the bottom of the bag rips and the two six-packs crash onto the fake cobblestones.
“Oh my God,” says Tracy. “Are you all right, Gabe?”
I’m amazed.
The beer has landed miles from the boy; how could he possibly be hurt? My beers, on the other hand, are lying on the cobbles, hissing and foaming. Three of the bottles are broken; another is terminal, its contents squirting out from under the cap.
“Jesus, Gabriel,” I say.
“Don’t say ‘Jesus’,” Tracy says. Put your tits away, I want to reply, but I don’t.
I feel a Gabriel lecture coming on about the importance of considering the possible results of one’s actions, but he pre-empts me. “Sorry, Dad, but I’m not, like, clairvoyant or something.”
I hold my bags out to Gabriel. He looks at me, at the bags, baffled.
“Take them, Gabe,” I tell him. Then I get down on a knee and a stump, scrape the broken glass into the remnants of the broken bag. I open the screw-cap of a leaking beer, run my finger over the neck to check for splinters, and take a drink. It tastes flat and warm and strangely sour, so I empty it onto Barry’s driveway and add the bottle to the contents of the broken bag. Tracy looks on, a curl on her upper lip. I take the bag with the Chivas back from Gabriel, add the remaining beers, hook the bag over a wrist, stand up, make for the house.
Why we do this thing of carting stuff to each other’s homes, dragging these coals to Newcastle when we know that the hosts are unlikely to run out of beer, wine, soft drinks, chips – not tonight, not ever? I don’t know.
Petitely plump Lynn opens the door, gives us each a hug. I’m surprised, as always, at how well her body fits into mine. Her dark hair hangs loose, smells fresh. If she’s wearing make-up, I can’t see it. She takes the dripping bag from me, looks up with raised eyebrows.
“Don’t ask,” I say.
The La Vitas are already here, along with two other couples we don’t know. The Unknowns. Tony La Vita, third-generation Italian, second-level friend, now an A-list pizza chain king, together with his beautiful, terminally sad-faced wife, Julie. Barry takes the bags of alcohol from Gabriel, deposits their contents into the fridge and hands me a beer. I can feel the Unknown couples’ eyes on me. I know their expressions without looking at them: they’re slightly doe-eyed with sympathy, eyebrows and corners of mouths turned down. I know that each of them is burning to know how the leg was lost. I know they’re dying to make empathetic noises; they’re hungry for the details, hungry to mourn its loss vicariously, craving the story of the gore and the pain that wasn’t theirs, hoping that it never will be.
There are kids, of course, small
