rocked together for some minutes. A woman entered the toilet area and stood staring indecisively at them. A drunken mother perhaps? One of those drug addicts? Julia gazed up at her and laughed. She had to force her grip to loosen on Sam’s shoulders. He would show bruises tomorrow. When his crying subsided, she staggered to her feet, reached down and scooped him up. He clung to her. She covered his face with kisses and carried him out to his father.
Brian was standing beside the security guard. As Julia approached with Sam’s head nestled between her cocked head and her shoulder, a cry went up from the surrounding onlookers. She ignored them, she ignored the visible double take of the guard. She ignored the woman to her left who repeatedly made the sign of the cross over her breast. Gimleteyed, she approached Brian, who did not move, did not emit a sound or display a single, solitary show of emotion. He stood motionless, his hands by his sides, his face white and taut-looking. Sam turned and reached out his arms.
‘Dad,’ he said.
‘Sam.’
Julia felt life itself drain from her arms as she surrendered her grail to the outstretched arms before her. People clapped. The security guard moved to disperse them just like on the television. Sam was nuzzling the side of Brian’s face. Brian’s eyes met hers for an instant, then he hooded them and whispered something to his son. Julia swung past the dispersing crowd, the newly officious security guard, the glass doors, and as she headed for the car, she felt her shoulder bag slap against her waist in a rhythmical, rain-drenched adagio. She reached the navy blue estate and slumped against it. Inside, she could see the meticulously packed suitcases, the crates of wine, the well-concealed Santa boxes – Sam’s new bike, his puzzles, his stocking-fillers – and she felt entirely alone for a moment. As if in a way Sam had really been taken from her. She lifted her head and gazed at the approaching sight of Brian with his arms wrapped protectively around Sam. Even at this distance, she could see the tremors still quake through Sam’s otherwise limp body. She wrenched at the door, then remembered that Brian had taken the keys from her.
Julia was silent for so long that Brian instinctively knew that she was mouthing to herself first, the familiar litany of his past transgressions. He could feel little waves of sympathy emanate from Sam in the back. Brian stared blankly ahead. The trick with Julia was to keep apologizing, over and over again, in the same modulated tone and never to flinch or show her a wound, because if she saw a gash or suspected one, she would tear at it with her teeth. Brian cleared his throat, it was difficult to get the timing right in these matters. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said.
He could see her shoulders stiffen. Her palms clapped together silently. ‘It is one thing to try and bring up your son as best you can,’ she began, enunciating each word as if speaking to someone learning English, ‘but it is quite another to have to do so in direct competition with a father who would appear to have some sort of a death wish for his son …’
‘I am really sorry,’ Brian said.
‘What is it with you? Is this a macho thing between fathers and sons that I haven’t been told about – or are you just inconceivably stupid?’
‘I thought he was with you.’
‘Did you think he was with me the time you took him up the loft ladder in your arms?’ She flexed her lips. ‘You walked down that ladder – frontways – with a two-year-old child in your arms. A week later, you fell from that ladder yourself and broke your arm …’ Her foot was tapping. ‘Did you think he was with me the day I caught him running around the garden with a secateurs pointing up at his throat? Or the day I just happened upon you chopping wood in your father’s shed with your three-year-old son behind you, swinging – swinging, I say – an axe over his head? Hmm?… I didn’t hear you …’
Brian rubbed his jaw. This was a two-hour job, easily. He longed for Pembroke. Sam had covered his ears in the back.
‘This is going to be a bad one,’ Sam said.
‘Of course I have only myself to blame really,’ Julia continued. ‘I mean, you’d think I’d know by now that I must not under any circumstances, not even for one lousy fucking second of the day, allow my son out of my sight when his kamifuckingkaze father is around –’
‘Mum, you used the fu word. Twice,’ Sam interjected.
‘I know, Sam, and I apologize. Forget everything I’ve ever told you – you may, from now on, occasionally use the fu word. All right?’
‘I do already in the playground sometimes,’ Sam confessed soberly.
Brian observed from the corner of his eye the double tic of Julia’s features as she digested that bit of information. He felt a sharp spasm of love for his son, aware of what he was trying to do. But Julia was in mid-flow and would not be appeased until she had tasted blood. She was working herself into a frenzy, fisting the glove compartment and crashing her knees together.
‘… And another thing,’ Julia continued. ‘Sam is seven now. Old enough to notice things. I won’t have your father drinking from his saucer like he does, do you hear me? He can bloody well use a cup like the rest of us, at least while we’re there … And that dog – that dog is not to come inside the house while I’m in it – filthy, flea-ridden creature …’ She continued, without stopping for a breath, saying all the things she had vowed to herself that she would not say.
Brian adjusted the windscreen wipers to accommodate the sweeps of rain which made visibility almost negligible. He stuck his tongue in his cheek and tried to wander in his mind to a safer place. Instead, he thought of last Christmas. He had rarely been so miserable. A misery he could see etched on the faces of Julia’s parents and her sister also. Carol, Julia’s only sibling, younger by six years, had spent her time slipping into the kitchen after Brian, lighting surreptitious cigarettes and downing extra stiff measures of her Canadian rye so that she could fix a smile on her face before she returned to the living-room for yet another of Julia’s party games. Charades, Happy Families, What’s My Line … Evening after interminable evening. Julia had collapsed into bed each night, exhausted from entertaining. Brian had almost felt sorry for her, but he felt sorry for Richard and Jennifer too when he saw them put aside their newspapers with weary sighs and teeth-gritted smiles when Julia’s exhortations for them to join in grew steadily sharper and more demanding. There was something so desperate about the way Julia entertained, as if, in a way, she were following a manual, some guide to happy families, only she had missed out on a whole slew of the rules and could not allow for a moment’s silence.
It would not be such a bad thing, Brian always thought, to end up like Julia’s parents. They were mild, easygoing people, comfortable in company, comfortable with one another. While they took on. the forms of a cauliflower and a tortoise separately, together he saw them as a gentle sudsy lather, the kind his hands made when he rubbed them with those half-cleanser, half-moisturizer bars of soap. A dissonant note had struck him one evening when he tasted those suds in the bath. They looked so creamy, so enticing, but the reality was just like soap, bitter and harsh as any disinfectant.
Sometimes, he saw their eyes narrow in wonderment as they gazed at their eldest daughter, as if they could not quite figure out where she had come from. She was impatient with them. When her mother clapped her knees and said: ‘Shall we have some tea?’ Julia invariably snapped: ‘You want tea? Then make it – Just make it. It’s your decision.’ And Jennifer would flush most miserably, move to rise but Julia would be in the kitchen already, flicking the kettle on and crashing cups on to saucers, in an access of guilt, Brian understood. Once, Jennifer had whispered to Brian: ‘We should have called her Matilda,’ but that was the closest she ever came to
