I think you’re finished …’
‘I know.’
‘Well, what’s keeping you then? Away with you to bed.’
‘I’m thinking of a poo.’
‘Have you got one?’
‘I’m thinking of it.’
‘Go and sit on our toilet.’
Sam shook a few last drops and flushed the toilet. ‘It’s gone back up,’ he said.
‘Hands,’ Brian said.
Sam gingerly dipped his hands into the bath-water suds. His father leaned across to kiss his cheek. Sam wiped the wet cheek with his pyjama sleeve. ‘Fly is a word without a vowel in it,’ he said.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I’m only saying.’
‘Bed. Now.’
‘Your willy looks all squishy.’ A final yawn and he was gone.
Brian looked down. He had not realized he had been in the bath that long. He sighed and lay back. Contemplated the knots and gnarls on his raised feet for a moment. Strange thing, the body. Lived in for a lifetime yet there were parts of it, the back of his head for instance, the middle of his back, his scalp, that he had never really seen except in an unsatisfactory fashion in the mirror. This was, of course, quite apart from all the internal bits. The ridiculousness of self was a thought that had often struck him, as a member of a large family, which in turn had led to the affirmation of self in the smallest and most curious of ways, like his pepper consumption. Even now, Brian could not eat his food unless it was practically concealed beneath a black frost of pepper. He wondered if Teresa, the youngest, still spat into her plate before she began to eat. Quite probably. They had all managed to devise ways to repel nimble, filching fingers from their dinner plates … Feet pounded the stairs, but they ravished the master bedroom. He was safe for a while yet. In the en-suite bathroom, Julia quickly shunted out of her clothes and stepped under the shower. She decided against washing her hair, it was too late. She turned the shower off and grabbed a towel, checking the cabinet above the sink as she dried herself for any last forgotten items. The ladyrazor. And an anti-cellulite cream, brown gunge caked around the stopper, which wouldn’t work now anyway even with a blessing from Rome.
She sucked her stomach in and turned sideways. Her breasts were still full enough, quite large and round with tight compact nipples. In the mirror, the left breast always looked larger but Brian pretended not to notice. She reached for the tweezers and plucked a couple of straying hairs around each nipple, then a couple more above her top lip. She lifted her eyebrows without raising her brow, to see what her eyes looked like without the sagging eyelid flaps. With everything sucked in, pulled up, and her eyes looking slightly surprised, she could see what she was like in her twenties. With a sigh, everything collapsed, thirty-eight again.
The skin was still good – cream with the odd curdle. Nothing special about the lips – they functioned; by contrast, the cheekbones were high and almost anachronistic. Blue eyes, just on the turn, a dulling around the cornea. Remortgaged blonde bob – a clone in the schoolyard and Sainsbury’s. She thought about Brian resplendent in his bubbles for the past two hours and waited for the little spring of irritation to well up, but it didn’t. Instead, something fell inside her, a weight, a charge, and she felt herself opening. It was strange how that could happen. Most of the time she felt irritated. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, her cervix would widen and she would feel confused.
On a straight run approaching a green light, he braked in anticipation of a change; for the same reason, she pressed her foot to the floor. After ten years of marriage, this was the most significant difference she could cite if they ever had to face a divorce court. Not less than everything – she smiled ruefully at her own reflection, and wondered if she would know herself if she met herself in a crowded room. The features were familiar, of course. But expressions were entirely a different matter. What did she look like laughing? Crying? Sad? She had no idea. She was really a composite of someone else’s perceptions. The thought saddened her for a moment. Then the thought of the two weeks ahead saddened her even more, stretching out like the concept of purgatory Brian had grown up with. A spartan fortnight full of everything her middle-class credenda told her was character-forming, wholesome and true, but which in reality inevitably proved to be wearisome, harsh and boring.
Sam was asleep when she tiptoed into his room with the towel around her. She could see his face from the crack of light which the landing offered, and his head: a miniature universe. Beside him lay the spaceship, contrived to tug at her heart, which was by Sam’s and Brian’s standards made of granite or something entirely extra-terrestrial, a Plutonic ice-ball. Sam snuffled in his sleep. Brian hummed from the bathroom. They were so entirely dependent on her. Awake, asleep, she ruled them. She gazed at the spaceship. It was full of tiny men and women. For a moment, she swelled like a god.
Sam’s dark hair stood up, electrocuted. His long eyelashes cast spiky talons on his cheeks. He was plump, like Jennifer. Julia could see him, years from now, like some tiny Nero, all white curls and cherubic smiles, fiddling while London burned as she, maternal mentor, looked on approvingly. Sam snored. She went to him and stroked the demerara freckles along his cheekbone. He sighed. All softness and light and complicated layers which gave voice to the man he would become. A man. Sam. It was an impossibility. He was too innocent to belong to either sex. She bent to kiss him and his curled fist opened slightly to indicate that he knew she was there.
Thus far, a self-contained little boy, content in his singularity, with an adult vocabulary holding forth in a high-pitched squeak. The gusts of her anger sometimes pinning his ears back, making him blink before she uttered a word. His silent disapproval thereafter sending her panting to the fridge for comfort.
He resisted her embrace for a moment, as she knew he would. But then plump arms wound around her neck and he breathed sweet, unpolluted breath on her. She felt ashamed of her own scent. He tugged at her neck and inhaled deep within her hair.
Outside his room she stood for an instant recalling his first day at school. She had stood by the classroom door and watched him melt into an alien world of masculine declensions that she could never decipher for him. Nudges and back thumps and rushes for the door, each boy trying to outdo the other. The girls huddled in sinister little groups of twos and threes, the boy group swelling to encompass more and more until they heaved in one great throbbing caterpillar, chewing up the playground. She was excluded. After years of being there, the only thing, the only one, she had to be satisfied with nothing responses.
‘What did you do today?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Who did you play with?’
‘No one.’
‘Where did you play?’
‘Nowhere.’
She had found it extraordinary that he was already inculcated in the language of silence, of non-committance, of secrecy, at the age of five. What was there to hide at five? Everything, it appeared. Even more secrets now that he was seven. Sometimes, she felt envious of the silent vocabulary that passed between father and son.
‘Sam.’
‘Dad.’
Everything reasserted by the vocalizing of one another’s name. Sometimes, she felt very alone, stretched
