towards us. I can see that the B-string is broken, hanging useless off the head of the guitar, but he’s not deterred and launches into “Auld Lang Syne”, appallingly, belting out the lyrics I’ve never understood. Tuneless, meaningless. I’m surprised that the neighbourhood dogs stay quiet, because Lynn, Tracy, the Unknowns all join in the discord. I can’t, can’t let go like that, though I envy their lack of inhibition, their willingness to howl along with Barry’s jarring guitar. A glance at Gabe tells me he can’t bring himself even to watch; like me, he’s cringing and wishing that Barry would reach the end of the song.
When he does, we all clap and laugh.
“More!” one of the Unknown husbands shouts. “Encore!”
Barry smiles a “no” and leans the old guitar against the wall. “Always leave them hungry,” he says. He sits down next to me. “Actually, it’s the only fucken song I know,” he mutters. Encore Boy gets up and walks over to the guitar. He isn’t that steady, I hope he’s not driving. He picks it up, holds it left-handed, strums, opens his mouth to sing, sees I’m the only one watching, puts the guitar down again, rejoins the circle around the dying fire. Lynn and the Unknown wives have begun clearing things up. Plates with chop bones that still have pink attached, boerewors ends, shreds of salad. I’m pleased to see that the clean-up has started; I’d like to go home. But Barry disappears into the house again and emerges with a bottle of tequila, making my heart sink. If the world accepted honesty, if we could just say what we were thinking, I’d stand up and announce that I’ve had enough, I’m heading for bed. But I can’t, of course: any words of departure would be understood to mean that it’s been a shit party and I can’t wait to leave, now that the formality of twelve o’clock has come and gone. The devil is in the unsaid bits, in the gaps between the words and the spaces between the lines. So I resign myself to sitting around for another hour or so, to swallowing a shot or two of tequila, having another helping of dessert, talking more. Which everyone else seems to be doing very well. Some of the Unknowns are in stitches over a common recollection. Tracy is leaning in to an Unknown just a little too closely while he regales her with God-knows-what, making her laugh. She’s easily amused by other people. Barry is handing around shot glasses. Beyond the glass doors, I see Gabriel and Peter and the pretty girl sitting on barstools at the kitchen counter. Peter is on the right, talking and gesticulating. I know that he knows that his physique allows him to be comfortable: he has nothing to gain with the girl, and therefore nothing to lose. She is sitting between the boys, her eyebrows raised and a hand over her mouth in amusement or shock – I can’t quite decide – as she listens. Her back is turned to Gabriel, whose only visible means of support are the elbows he’s tucked behind him on the counter, the bony wings of a sad pterodactyl. He is looking at his jiggling foot, watching it as he flips an untied shoelace from one side of his shoe to the other, outside to inside, inside to outside. My son, my teenage son. I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him and slap him on the back of the head and tell him that soon I’ll no longer be able to hold him back from his friends and his beach parties. That the weight of a few more years will remove the zits and the clumsiness and will fill him out a bit and allow his brain to grow a little more so that he is better equipped to tell right from wrong. That he will then face a glorious, untainted future stretching like a blank canvas from his feet to the horizon – and I want to warn him that the canvas will be far less forgiving than his father ever was, because every mark he makes on it will govern the next mark, so he had better make every choice fucking count unless he wants to hit thirty-nine and a quarter looking over his shoulder, unless he wants to become the next generation’s forensic archaeologist and sift through a sandpit of past choices in the hope of finding the seminal potsherd, the traces in the coprolite, the original artefact of misdirection to understand where, when, how it all went wrong.
Tracy catches a heel between cobbles in the driveway, almost falls over. “Oops,” she giggles. Gabriel walks five paces behind me, scuffing his shoes. I’m thinking about squirrels and teeth. I’m thinking about how teeth are removed not from the heads of young people, but from the heads of old people, and I am trying to reconcile this with the fact that, at thirty-seven, my wife is hardly old. Or is she? In ancient times thirty-seven would have been a fine lifespan. If you hadn’t composed your first symphony by twelve or conquered Asia Minor by twenty-three, chances were you wouldn’t live long enough to do it. And here, in a tooth, was empirical evidence that the decay had begun – no, it began long ago and now was simply manifesting: today a splintered piece of enamel and old fillings and infected nerve-endings, tomorrow arthritis, frigidity, impotence, gallstones, strokes, incontinence, cancer, dementia, and the sneering looks of the young who cannot conceive how very soon it will all come to them. And squirrels; I have squirrels. Squirrels living in the roof, bent on destruction. Young people do not have squirrels, and if they do it’s somebody else’s problem – the parents’, the landlord’s.
Squirrels are an old person’s problem.
Chris and Sylvia
I put Schultz out, though his brown eyes implore me not to. Schultz now tolerated rather than adored, all greying chops and gas and bad breath. I make sure the windows and doors are secured, switching off lights behind Tracy and Gabriel as I go, turning on the alarm before I squeak-thunk my way up the stairs. Gabriel has retired to his crepuscular, doorless lair without saying good night. Tracy is in our bathroom, naked, rubbing vitamin oil onto the scars that run like fine white cords under each breast. She’s been doing this every evening for six months since the implants; I don’t have the heart to tell her that if the scars haven’t gone by now, they never will. I pee – one leg, one crutch, one dick – hoping that this simple act will purge my body of the evening’s excesses of beer and tequila, yet knowing that it won’t and that I’ll remember them well enough in the throbbing light of day.
I get into bed, lie there with a forearm over my eyes. Tracy emerges from the bathroom. I start making gentle sleeping noises and shift my arm a fraction so that I can spy on her from beneath it. Tracy has white stuff on her face, a bare Pierrot clown halfway through its make-up session. Her body has hardened over the years and is now gym-stringy and ungenerous, if not actually undernourished. Ribs join the sternum like the bones of a skiff above the too-large breasts, asymmetrical abs appear and disappear across her midriff as she breathes. She has taken to Brazilians; the welcoming, fluffy nest that she once shared so generously is now mean and tight-lipped, prickly to the touch, its cropped exclamation mark of hair contradictorily and disturbingly pubescent. She walks over to the mirror, checks out the flatness of her stomach from the side, runs her forefingers along the blades of her hip bones, turns to look at herself over her shoulder, cups her bum-cheeks in her hands and lifts them up slightly. The cheeks each produce a folded overhang of skin – flaccid rather than fat – against the top of her thighs when she lets them go. It won’t be long before she raises the subject of a bum-lift with me. But she won’t be doing so tonight. She is frowning, turns the frown on me.
“You were weird this evening,” she says.
“I’m sleeping, Trace,” I lie.
“You were thinking of Dalia.”
“Oh my fuck,” I say, more surprised that I actually hadn’t been thinking of Dalia at all than at the accusation.
“Of course you were. You always think of Dalia on New Year’s Eve.”
“Well, this year was different. She never entered my mind.”
“You were weird, especially at first. You only chilled after a few beers.”
I hear Gabriel’s voice in my head: Don’t say “chilled”, Mom.
“You know how I am with new people.”
“You’re thirty-nine, Chris. You’ve been meeting new people since you were two.”
“Well
