Outside, four pretty girls-two of them from Rafi’s school-had appeared and gathered around the boy. Dressed in boots, miniskirts and numerous bits of bright bling, they stood close to one another, chattering about mobile phones. They were dressed a little extravagantly for the park, but one of them had rung Josephine earlier, who’d told them where Rafi was. He was a favourite among the girls at school. They’d come to see him play football.
“Did you see my goal?” he said.
He wasn’t looking at them but was aware, from the little amused smile on his face-which reminded me of my father-that they were looking at him. As they talked about his goal, he shook his head, as if at the daftness of all they had to say.
His pose was cool, his mussed hair looked good. His jewellery and clothes were always carefully chosen in H &M. The previous weekend we’d gone to the sales, where I’d been looking for clothes for myself, and returned with bags full of boy gear. He looked better than me in every way, more hip and stylish, and more handsome. That was how it had to be. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feel a pang of both bitterness and regret. Sometimes, all you wanted was to be fancied. Why had I always been less confident and far more anxious than he appeared to be? I couldn’t resist envying him the years of pleasure with women he had ahead of him.
The girls wanted to leave; they were nervous, convinced a man was watching them through the trees. They arranged to meet up later with Rafi at the shopping centre, their favourite place, where they’d help him choose new trainers.
“I know how to be cool,” he said to me on the way home. “And I don’t even wear designer, apart from the D and G belt, unless I’m really in the mood.”
I rang the bell of Josephine’s place, the house I’d lived in but never much liked. It was on three floors, with two rooms on each and a decent-size garden. At the back was the shed where Rafi played his drum kit and guitars, and where he held sleepovers. Regarding the place, I remembered one of my favourite jokes, which went: Why marry? Why not just find a woman you hate and give her your house?
“What are you giggling at, fat-old-man-now-out-of-breath?” Rafi asked.
“I can’t tell you. Didn’t I play well today?”
“You should be with the disabled.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re losing your hair, too. When you bend over, I can see your skull. It’s pretty horrible, bringing deep shame on our family.”
Today, as we’d left the park, he’d asked how much longer I thought he and I would be able to play football together, in the same team. The question surprised me: this sense of the future, of transience, seemed unusual in kids his age.
“You see, I’m twelve and have to start playing more seriously,” he told me. “I want to join a proper team. You can drive me there, but you’ll only be able to watch.” He adopted an American accent: “Punk, will you be sorry for what you’ve done, and will you live to regret it?”
As he waited on the doorstep in his football socks, banging his muddy boots against the wall, eager to tell his mother about the volley and knockin he’d scored, I decided to go into the house, if she didn’t stop me, to see whether anything peculiar was happening with her.
Occasionally I wondered whether I might start liking her again, but it wasn’t an idea I was enthusiastic about. The thought that occurred to me most regularly was that, if it weren’t for Rafi, we wouldn’t need to see one another. Of course I hated myself for wishing the boy away, as I wondered who I’d be and what other mistakes I’d have made if he hadn’t been born.
Josephine opened the door, and I stepped into the hall and followed her down the stairs, into the basement. She turned to look at me but said nothing.
Josephine and I had been arguing on the phone over Rafi’s education, and I have to admit I’d become a little agitated. He’d failed the entrance exams to two schools. These were highly academic places, and as Josephine said, the children there looked anaemic and stressed. I could only agree with her that these schools were expensive machines for turning out smart-white-boy clone drones. All the same, I had cursed the kid. Josephine pointed out that I hadn’t gone to such a place myself and refused to physically enter such schools. She also claimed I was being snobbish. I knew many parents whose kids had gone to those schools and couldn’t believe my own son hadn’t sauntered effortlessly through the gates. Apparently my competitiveness was making the boy rage and fume at home. He’d pulled his mother’s hair and argued about everything.
Josephine was right to emphasise that this was about his future rather than my own self-esteem, adding that I seemed to have turned into my father, who hadn’t been around and yet still expected us to be brilliant and successful. For my part, I had decided to stop my reproaches after asking Rafi rather aggressively, “So, what are you the best at in your class?” He’d thought about this a while before replying, “I’m the best looking.”
As a child, he’d liked his food separated on his plate. The beans couldn’t touch the potatoes, the potatoes couldn’t touch the fish fingers. Now I saw how pleased he was to see his mother and me in the same room, as he watched us closely, eager to see what was going on-investigating a marriage.
I sat at the dining-room table; Josephine brought me some tea. When she went to sit down, I noticed that Rafi had pulled her chair over, so that we were close together. He was making childish noises and gestures, as though pretending to be a baby for our benefit, to remind us that we were a family.
Josephine was a woman who said little; she had no small talk nor much big talk. As I was comfortable with silence, we might as well have been statues.
Her father the abuser: drunk, crazy, run over trying to cross a motorway, some poor fucker carrying the memory of this madman rearing up in front of him. And the daughter, petrified for life, burning with anxiety, as though a car were coming at her forever.
Left with the exhibitionist mother, what Josephine liked-and hated in herself-was to be anonymous and silent, as though she’d never been able to grow out of the idea that the well-behaved are the most rewarded. Many of my friends forgot her name. Both of her therapists did that, and she’d angrily left therapy almost as soon as she’d started. It was inevitable that someone like Miriam, who Josephine liked to call an “attention seeker,” would make her annoyed. This, I liked to point out, was how she recognised how competitive the world was, and that, by making yourself more attractive, or noisy, you might be able to arouse more curiosity in others.
I was looking at her, the silence standing in for all that we might say. As ever, her fingers were not silent, but they drummed on the table, almost frantically, as though there was something inside herself she was trying to make dance.
Meanwhile, a mob of enquiring voices babbled in my head. Perhaps we had both hoped, as it ended, for some explanation, for a day when the knot of every misunderstanding would be combed out, strand by strand.
“Why don’t you hold hands?” Rafi said, grinning.
“I don’t want to drop my tea,” I said.
We were both anxious about him growing up. Me, because I wished I’d had more children and lived with them-I liked it when he brought his friends to my flat-and her because she feared his growing independence and sexuality, which she’d encouraged in him even as it programmed him to move away from us.
I asked her, “Been going out? Seen anyone?”
If there was a pause before she answered, I knew she had taken a tranquilliser. Usually she took them in the evening with wine, reading the label aloud: “Do not operate heavy machinery,” “Keep away from children.” “That’s good advice,” I’d say. Anything with -pam on the end, as in temazepam, lorazepam or diazepam, she liked. Polythene Pam, I called her. But as she didn’t like to be dependent on anything or anyone, she had begun to ration herself.