This is a thought Harvey has about himself around five times a minute, however, and so he overrides it with a gust of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray, flooding his aching taste buds with soursweet rain.
After the hit, trying to avoid the aspartame comedown, Harvey shifts his bulk around to the side of the bed and dials his home number on the telephone on the side table.
‘Mr Gold, how can I help you?’ a smooth, sonorous voice says. Harvey wonders, at first, if it is God, finally asking the requisite question, but then realizes his mistake.
‘Sorry, I forgot to dial …’
‘It’s nine for an outside number, sir.’
‘Yes. OK.’
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
Harvey thinks: everything?
‘No. Thanks.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
He clicks off, and dials again, adding the magic nine. And then at the last minute he remembers: five hours behind. His eyes flick to the hands of the faux-antique set on the bedside table: quarter to eleven. In England it will be just gone six – and then she picks up. He hears an airy silence, the rustling of sheets and blankets, before Stella’s ‘Hello?’ comes down the line, alarm penetrating her tone even though her throat is husky and clotted with sleep.
‘Sorry, darling … sorry. I forgot about the time difference. Go back to sleep.’
‘Harvey? Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Yes.’ He knows this is never true, but – not just with her, with everyone that asks it – you can’t go through it all, not every time, can you? No, I’m overweight, exhausted, I get these weird pains in my legs, I have constant low-level nausea, I have prostituted what tiny talent I have ghostwriting the lives of idiots, every woman I pass fills me with despair, my child has Asperger’s Syndrome, my father is dying and I deeply, deeply love my wife but can’t bear the idea that she is starting to grow old. And yourself?
‘Your dad … is he …?’
‘I haven’t seen him yet. No change, as far as I know. But look – what time is it there …?’
A shuffling sound. He sees the scene, familiar in his mind, the safety of the half-light, the day not started, her profile shifting towards the digital clock on her bedside draw.
‘Five forty-five.’
‘Yes. So sorry. Go back to sleep.’ He can feel, even across the wide swathe of water, how it’s too late, how his phone call has rushed consciousness up to her surface, like an air bubble floating from the deep.
‘No, it’s OK. I needed to get up early anyway. Jamie’s got the Montgomery Clinic …’
‘I thought that wasn’t until nine thirty.’
‘Yes. Well, I’ve got to wash my hair.’ In his mind’s eye, Harvey sees the process: her lying back in a full, scalding bath, her face surrounded by water, her curls spiralling away like sea snakes, the whole image a benign Medusa. When she rises out of the steam to work on her hair, her fingers on her scalp move with some precise feminine alchemy, so distinct from his soapy plonk and rub. Every so often, she rotates her head from side to side to prevent the liquid pooling in her ears. The intimacy of watching her wash her hair can feel at times overwhelming. And afterwards, when her hair is wet, falling across her face, before she lifts it into a towel – he does not know where to look. She feels too vulnerable, and his eyes too searching.
‘And I’ve got a lot of work stuff to do, as well, so it’s probably a good idea to get started …’
‘Stop trying to make it better for me.’
‘I’m not. I won’t get back to sleep now anyway. And however pissed off I am about that – which is, yeah, a bit – I’m also pleased, Harvey. To hear from you. I thought your plane must have crashed.’
He laughs, but knows she means it. Every time Harvey flies anywhere, Stella assumes his plane will crash. Her kisses, when he leaves, always have a force to them, impelled by a sense that this could be the last time.
‘That would have been on the news.’
‘The CIA might have been keeping it quiet.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They might have imposed a security blanket.’
‘I think the word you’re after is blackout.’
‘Oh, yeah. But it’s quarter to six in the morning. I can confuse blanket and blackout. Because I’d like both.’
‘How’s Jamie?’
He hears her rearranging the pillows.
‘He’s OK. He was happy enough after school yesterday. Only got upset at bedtime that you weren’t here. Did you read his note?
‘Note?’
‘His picture. I put it in your suitcase.’
He gets up off the bed, still holding the phone. ‘What, as a surprise?’
A soft beat, her patience diffusing. ‘No, I told you it was in there, yesterday.’
‘Oh sorry, I –’
‘It’s OK. You were in one of your nervous flaps when you were leaving. I knew you weren’t really listening.’
‘Hold on, I’ll go and have a look.’
‘It’s in the zip-up pocket. In the top bit.’
He goes over to the suitcase. It is there, a white envelope with the word ‘DAD’ written on it, in Jamie’s painfully immature handwriting. Inside is a piece of asymmetrically folded A4 paper, on one half of which Jamie has drawn a chess set. The figures are not arranged on the board, but around it. They are not rendered exactly, as they would be if Jamie was an extraordinary Asperger’s child, but randomly: it is difficult to make out which are pawns, and which are major pieces. They look like chess figures in the wind.
Jamie has not written anything to go with his drawing, but on the facing half, in Stella’s looping hand, it says: ‘Have a good trip, even though it’s for a sad thing. I love you. J xxx.’ Harvey holds the note in his hand, and feels his heart crack with love.
He comes back to the phone. Before he speaks, having heard him pick the receiver up, she says:
‘That’s exactly what he told me to write.’
‘It’s really nice. Did you suggest the chess thing?’
He says this knowing that both of them would rather their son had chosen the subject himself, thereby indicating that he has, of his own volition, noticed something about his father’s interests.
‘I may have done,’ she says.
She yawns. He sees their bedroom, dark
