He pushed the food around his plate, bumped and jostled as others cooked and ate in the small kitchen.
He could see out of the window the big graffiti saying “Polish out,” and could hear his wife chuck to the baby. He felt this loss of her happening.
“Wciąż się kłócimy,” he thought. We are always quarreling now.
He could feel the drudgery come round him the way it had become at home, as if it was something physical that could happen to you. The automaticness to just get through.
“It doesn’t change,” he thought. “Life stays the same, relatively. Unless you get one big chance to get yourself ahead, properly ahead, then it just stays the same.”
It was getting enough to make the next step, that’s all it was. They put what they could away, but it was hemorrhaging with what everything cost here. It was all relative. He believed it was just the next step, then he could change everything.
“I didn’t expect to be here for so long,” he thought. He meant the house. He looked at his wife. He could see she looked visibly older.
Hold drove the old van back. There was the sense that the van somehow hung together around him. The repairs Hold had made himself were all over and there were many patches of gaffer tape spread over the van like a kid who had come off his bike. He was never someone who had craved great amounts of money but it was tiring to not be able to afford simple things anytime, like a pair of new boots, or to have the money just to fix up the van.
Of course, there was always the dream of a fortune, just to make everything safe and fix up the place, but it was not a wistfulness in him. But now came this. This need for big money, or the house would go.
He pulled up by the trailer and got out and then rethought and leaned back in to pick up the fillets from the front seat, as the sun warmed in through the windshield. He took the fillets and went into his trailer and put them in the paper in the fridge and he looked down at some of the stray scales still on his hands and went into the shower.
The house had been Danny’s grandparents’, and as they had aged they had sold off the land and the bungalow they had built on it but had kept the old house. For the first ten years of their life, the place had been their universe, Danny’s and his, and Danny had been crushed by the selling of it. For a child, it was not possible that things could not be permanent. With the money from selling off the land, his grandparents had rented a small place in the village, and the old house decayed on the plot. The dream in the family was that one day they could rebuild it and move into it in a kind of reclamation, and it had been Danny’s great hope that he would be able to do this.
Danny was a dreamer. That is not to say he was not a determined man, but he was a man who set up great dream-like things all the time and had this refusal to accept the unlikeliness of them. Often in the sight of the big idea, Danny would overlook the processional steps you needed, the simple things to get somewhere. There was something childlike in this, but he had a great way of bringing you with him, so even when you knew the end was not possible you would get caught up in the getting there. It was a very contagious thing. There was something in his belief that was very contagious and made you wish you didn’t have an idea of reality sometimes. But the house was not an impossibility. The house just needed the hours spent, the materials gathered, the skills applied.
Hold came out of the shower and stood in the steam that roiled out of the small shower room and watched the motes of moisture catch the incoming light. Through the window he could see the house and there was, every time he looked at it, this recall of the promise he’d made. This unmovable, stone-built thing of it.
“Finish it for him. Finish it for Jake.” Hold had sat by the bed, his wasting friend seeming to desiccate before him, and him hardly able to take in the actuality of it.
He looked now at the way some of the limed whitewash was lifting, aged, off the wallstones and thought of his friend’s skin seeming to dry off, to flake away as he lay there. He looked out and saw that the stray cat had come to sit on the van bonnet for the dissolving warmth of the engine. He was always taking in strays; he preferred it to the responsibility of ownership.
“I want to give him something to belong to,” said Danny.
“I’ll do that,” Hold said. “I’ll do that thing.”
Since then, any money he had he put into the things he needed for the house, and it was coming, bit by bit. He had long resolved for it to be a far-off thing to achieve, but now had come the bombshell. Danny’s sister wanted her share of the money from the place. It was like she’d held out while Danny was alive, swayed by his promises that he’d find the money to buy her out. Then had come her divorce, and then Danny had gone. She needed the money, now. It was like this giant, final, impassable wall.
Hold had tried everything he could. He had submitted a business plan to the bank himself, for a boat of his own, the likely return after three and five years, all as it said in the book he’d bought. He had been cautious and harsh with the plan but the figures still looked good, but the bank had simply refused. You have nothing. We can’t lend without security.
His idea had been to borrow the money for the startup but to siphon some off and arrange to buy her out bit by bit, as the money came in. But Cara wouldn’t consider it. It was enough for her to know he had worked on the house for Jake. All these things he did were for Jake, they both had to believe that. It was academic anyway. He couldn’t raise the money.
He took a sliver off one of the fillets and took it outside and gave the sliver to the stray. He had to choke down this moment of sudden anger at knowing that the house was going to slip away because of the one thing he could not compete on, money, and that this castle they’d played in would be knocked down and rebuilt and sold off to the highest bidder, almost certainly as a second home. He saw the two of them inside, juvenile, the dangerous fires they had lit there in secret, the things they’d invented with great weaponry value hidden there, the plans they’d made, the first girlfriends they had brought there.
“I could change it, if I had just one chance,” he thought. “If just one chance came along.” He watched the cat eat the fillet, half bolt it, the way the opportunist has to take his chance. He felt this great draw, this need to go to them, and he knew that taking the fillets was just yet another excuse, but there was a magnetism working, as if he was sucked into the great void of his friend at this time. It was like he felt the need to apologize for his failure to keep the house, but could not find the words. In this sudden failure there was some sort of need to be close to them, as if he wanted some sort of forgiveness from Danny.
“I’ll take the fillets along,” he thought. “I’ll put out the shore nets. I could do with the space of the beach.”
The baby was being fed when the row broke out and he started to scream immediately when their voices went up and the other boy, too, started to cry. Started to cry just with the sheer completeness of everyone’s upset, his baby brother wailing, his mother covering herself angrily and reddening and launching into one of those shapeless female arguments that is just a letting go of all the exhausting little frustrations. And his father just emitting this great, weary uselessness at everything, as if it all fell on him, looking like he was taking in her words like they were something foul he had in his mouth and was deciding on whether to spit up.