in one area, followed by DIYs and bleak boarded-up shopfronts in another. Truck-drivers congregated in a caff on a corner, sipping from steamy mugs, staring out morosely at the infrequent passing cars. Julia wondered where they had come from, where they were going. What did they do when they got there? Turn around and do it all again? Not surprising then that they looked so baleful, slumped over their coffee cups. Brian fiddled with the radio dials. Sam fell asleep.
A light rain slanted against the windscreen. The M4 snaked ahead, its grey lanes empty and forlorn-looking. It suited her mood. She looked at Brian from the corner of her eye. He had that fixed quality to his stare which she sometimes found a bit discomforting. He appeared to blank out for whole chunks of time. Since she had known him, there had been times when she’d felt that there was a vacuum deep within Brian, but the impenetrable glaze of nothingness in his eyes masked it entirely. A pie-chart with a slice taken, five minutes missing from a clockface. She attributed it to the fact that he was a surviving twin. Perhaps it was inevitable that there should be an enduring lacuna in the survivor. She couldn’t say; certainly Brian said nothing. He had had a twin; he died; end of story. Fell over a cliff. Matter-of-fact, just like that. Julia had laughed. It wasn’t intentional, but the way he’d said it was so perfectly in tune with her first introduction to Brian’s spartan homeplace – here is the house, here is the field, here is the cliff at the end of the field, here is the cliff at the end of the field which Noel fell over – that she had almost expected him to mime ‘here is Noel, falling over the cliff.’ She simply could not help herself: ‘Was he pushed or did he jump?’ Brian had glowered at her all day after that.
‘I’ll have to stop at the next service station for petrol.’ He cut across her thoughts.
‘Why didn’t you fill up last night?’
‘Didn’t think of it.’
‘If we stop it will wake Sam up.’
‘So he wakes up.’
She glared at him from the corner of her eye and silently mimicked his last statement with an exaggerated shrug. The shrug which had first attracted her to him. He was so casual. Nothing fazed him. Went into computers because he had had to put something down on the form to apply for the government student grant. Straight from the farm to bollocksing up other people’s computers for them. Milking cows or suckers, what odds? Same shit in the end anyway. Easygoing, hard-working, dumb guy. She had liked that. Thought it was honest. Only he’d turned out to be neither dumb nor particularly hard-working – easygoing, certainly. So easygoing, she thought, that when he walked, one buttock had to wait a second or two for the other to align itself. Easy like treacle pudding, horrendously sweet at first but then you became immune to the taste. Even grew to like it – but only to a degree, of course. She figured now that the very reasons you chose a partner were the same reasons you divorced them. Brian chuckled. He had caught her mimicked shrug.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You.’
‘What about me?’
‘You’re so sharp sometimes I wonder that you don’t cut yourself.’
‘Sometimes I do.’ She smiled in response and settled back with her eyes closed.
She would make an effort, a real effort, she decided. She would just let them all get on with it. Even if the sisters from Australia proved as ghastly as she expected. They regularly sent Brian photographs of themselves and their families framed in cardboard hearts, with little printed notes: G’day from Aussieland. ‘Oh God,’ she sighed aloud.
It was while she was Speech Therapist attached to the North Middlesex, eleven years ago, that she had first met Brian. He was installing the brand-new top-of-the-range computer system into the hospital. The same computer that caused her colleagues’ faces to redden and their fists to clench involuntarily over the next few years, every time it was mentioned. Brian swore that it had nothing to do with his inputting skills that the damn thing chose to offload its data in such an arbitrary fashion from time to time.
She had liked his smile, the way he chatted as amiably to the dinner women as he did to clerical staff. Liked the look of him too, the soft burr of his accent, the constant self-deprecation which usually conceals a healthy arrogance, but which in his case turned out to be warranted well enough. She had liked the fact that he had made a hundred assumptions about her too, felt inclined to prove to him that she was not the archetypical middle-class Hampshire lass he took her to be – even if she was. Moreover, she was a middle-class Hampshire lass (with thighs) fast approaching thirty, desperately busy, happy, ambitious, hectic, social – single. And single every Friday night with a skip of chips and a vat of Chianti.
Even back then, his lack of urgency, which she equated with lack of ambition, irritated her. There had been moments during the past ten years of marriage when the air around him irritated her simply because he was breathing it. Still, they had sort of stumbled into wedlock, though she had never quite figured out Brian’s motivation. He said he loved her. There was no reason to suspect otherwise. She said it too, on occasion. I love you. I wuv you. I weally wuv you. What was that supposed to mean? Until she woke up one morning to find that after ten years of acute, possibly terminal irritation, she had fallen in wuv with her own husband. Now that was scary.
Brian chuckled to himself. He could see Cotter’s spittle glistening quite clearly on the dangling rasher rind, while Cotter cast a slit-eyed glance around the schoolroom. Everyone kept their eyes and heads well down, except for Padraig in the back, of course. Brian was selected again.
‘Oy, you, Donovan. Put that in the bin there for me.’ Cotter sucked the rind into his mouth one more time, then wriggled it again. Brian opened one eye, holding on to the fleeting hope that maybe Cotter meant Edward this time. But the schoolteacher’s whiskey eyes were fixed on him. Edward snickered behind him – Cathal too – as Brian stood up with an inward sigh. He promised himself that he would puck shit out of them later in the yard.
Cotter did his usual trick, holding on to the rind for a second so that Brian’s fingers slid along the spittle before it was in his grip. Then Brian made a mistake: he turned his mouth down at the corners. He tried quickly to upturn it again, but he’d been caught.
‘Oh, now,’ Cotter said expansively, ‘oh, now, what have we here at all?’
Brian threw the rind into the bin and returned to his desk, but Cotter was in no mind to continue with the morning’s lessons anyhow, not with the hangover he had on him and now that he had some serious tormenting to do. Brian winced when he heard his name again.
‘Oy, Donovan. Up here, boy. That’s right … Stand here beside me and explain that little girly face you just did.’ Cotter did an exaggerated moue of disgust for the class, and they sniggered obligingly.
Brian picked them out one by one in his head as he gazed up at his teacher, rounding his eyes innocently. ‘I – I don’t know what you mean, sir.’ Just a little stutter for effect. Cotter liked stutters; mostly he laid off Edward for that reason. Stutters and stammers were suitably deferential, they showed a respectful hesitancy. All of Cotter’s children were hesitant, respectful and speech-impaired.
Brian weighed up the odds: on the one hand, slow crucifixion by whiskey withdrawal throughout the long day ahead of sums, catechism and English; on the other, instant gratification by means of extradition of torture into waiting repository of stupid boy who asked for it. Brian knew which one he would choose. He lowered his eyes humbly and awaited his fate. Cotter farted. That meant he was excited. Brian feared the worst. He looked up and followed Cotter’s sadistic gaze to the back of the classroom where
