‘Adam?’ Then, more stridently, ‘Adam — what are you doing?’
He succeeded, finally, in extracting a red biscuit tin from the junk. He balanced the tin on the lip of the cupboard, prised open the lid. These were Adam’s special, once-important things: the letter that had offered him his first big-time job in television, some billets-doux from Chloe, tied up in a pretentious snip of lace, some old photographs. He found what he was looking for. He replaced the box, jumped from the chair and made for the door, leaving the detritus of his raid scattered on the floor.
‘Adam, what…’
Back down the stairs, the late, mauve summer dusk shading to grey outside the window, a view he had always enjoyed but would soon leave behind, past the contaminated sofa and into the kitchen. He turned the photo over.
Two young men, almost equally foreign to him now, their arms around each other, gesticulating for the camera. Two young men who, naturally, had no idea what the next decade and a half would do to them; who had little idea what the next thirty-six hours would do to them, or what they would do in them. Adam felt affectionate, protective, belatedly apprehensive. He wanted to break through time’s thick, soundproofed glass, sit between them, behind the sign that said Faithful Couple, put an arm around each of them and tell them not to do it. But they wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. They were happy. They were together.
He grasped the upper edge of the photo between his thumbs, preparing to rip. I sometimes think… After a minute he stood on another chair and tossed the picture into the dusty, dead-insect limbo on top of the kitchen cabinet.
2008–10
Another thud from above, a few seconds after the first — the percussion, Neil figured, of something falling, then turning over or overbalancing. There was a scuffle of feet and the scrape of an object too big to carry being dragged across the floorboards.
‘Sam?’ Neil called up. ‘Sammy, you okay?’
No reply.
Neil came out of his parents’ room and took hold of the stepladder; its antique metal rungs wobbled as he climbed. He tried to remember the last time he had been in his father’s loft (the house and bedroom would always be Neil’s parents’, plural, but in his internal designation the loft was eternally and exclusively Brian’s, his mother’s closest approach to it, so far as he remembered, being to stand at the bottom of these steps and call down whomever was up there for lunch, peering up into the murk with an expression of adamant distrust). He trod carefully on the narrow steps, trying to weigh as little as possible. The madeleine aromas of damp paper and mouldy rubber assailed and stopped him halfway through the hatch.
Sam was kneeling in the beige glow of a single, unshaded low-watt bulb, his shirt smeared with a rich, well-matured dust. He was appraising an old black-and-white television — deeper than it was wide, three knobs, only ever three channels — which, Neil remembered, had been retired to the loft from service in his parents’ bedroom, but which before the purchase of their colour set had been the screen on which they watched the Cup Final in the lounge, he and Dan alternately fiddling with the aerial when the zigzagging interference got too much; the screen on which they watched the Grand National, Brian having closed the shop early and visited the bookies’ three doors down, placing a single pre-selected one-pound wager per family member, the boys clutching the betting slips as if they were enchanted parchments.
‘You can take it home if you want,’ Neil said. ‘Might still work. Take it, Sammy.’
‘Nah,’ Sam said, squinting at the alien bulk like an archaeologist at a sarcophagus. ‘No room. Stacy wouldn’t have it, would she? Look at it. Shame, though. All these old things. It’s like your own museum. Yours and Dad’s.’
‘Take something else, then,’ Neil told him. ‘Take anything you want. House clearers are coming next week. Never know, might be worth something.’
Neil’s turn to reckon his family’s life in things had come. A couple of archaic wooden tennis rackets, pressed between rectangular frames; an antediluvian computer, unrecognisable as a computer to Sam, and now, almost, to Neil, over which he and Dan had fought, viciously, no quarter asked or given, for seventy-two hours after it arrived one Thatcher-era Christmas, quickly forsaking its binary games for muddier diversions; a pair of binoculars in a scratched leather case; a deflated yellow dinghy, unused since it was launched on a frigid beach in Suffolk in the mid-eighties. In one corner were a pair of promising-looking trunks, which upon inspection contained only several decades’ worth of accounts for Collins & Sons… Sam didn’t have much that was truly his, but there was nothing among this junk that he could want. For reasons he couldn’t identify, Neil needed him to have something.
He watched Sam stoop to rifle a suitcase. The boy was only a couple of inches shorter than him, with an adolescent incongruity in his proportions (bulbous head, outsized feet) that suggested he hadn’t yet topped out; a trio of creases at the hems of his trousers charted their and Sam’s extensions like the rings of a tree trunk. When you looked at him from behind, or in silhouette, minus the pointillist skin and affected glower, he seemed much older.
In the end he took a yo-yo, though only, Neil knew, because he wanted to be kind. Sam creaked down the metal steps. Earlier, when Neil turned the light on, it had blinked into action as if from hibernation. This time — the last time — when he followed and flicked the switch, the bulb went off immediately.
The end. He closed the hatch.
In the bedroom, in the wardrobe, Neil found his father’s clothes, and on the adjacent shelves his mother’s clothes, more or less untouched, so far as he could see. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure Sam wasn’t there, pressed his nose into the fabric and inhaled.
Moth balls.
Do you cry when you think about it?
In the kitchen, beneath the sink, he found six dusty bottles of water, relics of an emergency supply that Brian had laid in, muttering about trade unionists, when a waterworks strike seemed imminent at the fag-end of the seventies. He put a paperweight, two vases and a few photos into a plastic crate. He could hear Sam moving around in Dan’s room, opening and closing the drawers, ransacking his father’s childhood. Dan had already pillaged the cutlery, plus a watercolour of a French harbour that Brian once hinted might be valuable, though Neil doubted it. In his father’s paperwork he discovered that the house had been remortgaged, five years before, around the time of Brian’s first stroke, in what the cheque stubs suggested was an eleventh-hour bid to keep Dan out of the gutter. Once he might have been aggrieved at the favouritism, but now he smiled at the secret, gruff kindness. Your brother knew from the beginning.
The doorbell rang.
‘Mr Hinds told me,’ Bimal’s father began. Neil tried to place Mr Hinds and failed. ‘I saw your car, you see. You don’t mind… I… He was a gentleman. That’s all, that’s what I… That’s all.’
Bimal’s father was wearing a suit, possibly the same, trademark garment he wore during their childhood. The skin above the bridge of his glasses was flaking, Neil noticed, white flecks on brown. He gawped around Neil as if he might be invited in, or be able to glimpse the corpse. Irritation rose up Neil’s throat — busybody, ghoul, vulture — but he suppressed it before it reached his lips. Behind his visitor, above the unchanged sequence of houses on the opposite side of the road, the sky was too blue, inconsiderately perfect.