‘Thanks,’ Neil said. ‘Appreciate it. Really.’
He asked after Bimal.
‘Yes, very well, very well, thank you,’ his father said. ‘California agrees with him, as you know. And the children, they are getting their American accents.’
Neil hadn’t known that Bimal had moved to America. He nodded in assent but said nothing.
‘He was very proud of you,’ Bimal’s father said at last. ‘Very proud. Always showing me the stock prices in the paper, you see. All your comings and goings. Very proud indeed. But you know that.’
He held out a hand for Neil to shake, somehow bony and soft at once, like the carcass of a battery chicken, and after that it seemed too late to ask for details.
‘A real gentleman,’ he repeated. He turned and walked away, erect but slow, with a mechanical, arthritic gait. He seemed smaller than Neil remembered him.
Neil stood at the open front door. ‘Come on,’ he called up to Sam. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get on with it.’
Neil put the rattly crate into the boot of his car, along with the two urns. Sam sat in the front, playing with the windows and reclining his seat at its expensively glacial pace.
‘Are you, like, ’kay?’ Sam asked.
‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Course.’
He glanced over at Sam and saw that he was wiping his nose with his finger. At the end of every horizontal slash his hand circled up to wipe his eyes, too, finger for one eye, thumb around the other.
‘You?’
‘Course,’ Sam said.
Neil switched on the radio. Told y’all I was gonna bump like this. Sam turned it off.
He drove up through Stanmore, past the location of the golf course on which he and Dan had played pitch-and-putt as boys, Neil surreptitiously kicking his ball a few metres towards the hole whenever Dan, mighty Dan, turned his back. The land where the course had been was now a live-the-dream housing complex that had evidently missed its time. There was an advert on the fence, facing the dual carriageway. One corner of the plastic sheet had become unstuck and blown across the lettering: Still Six Units Remai
You were supposed to feel radically alone when the second one went, Neil knew. Finally orphaned; ultimately adult. That was what everyone said. No one left to forgive your mistakes, no generational buffer between you and your own death. No longer loved in that particular, enfolding way.
That wasn’t how Neil felt, as he and Sam drove over the edge of London, and he saw no point in pretending. He was no lonelier than he had been two weeks before; if anything he felt younger, lighter, childishly unburdened. You were supposed to feel a futile, belated regret for everything you hadn’t asked, everything you had been too timid or inhibited to bring up. That was another thing people said. There were indeed facts and episodes Neil found he would like to clarify, but it was gossip, really, that he coveted, not heirloom wisdom or five-to-midnight honesty. Not Do you love me? Or Are you scared? But How did you lose your virginity? Did you ever have an affair? Have you ever committed a crime? Smashed bottles and Don’t shit on your own doorstep and the phantom girlfriend in Maida Vale whom Brian had mentioned to Adam that afternoon in the nineties. Too late now.
Neil looked across at Sam. He was craning his head out of the window to catch the wind in his hair, as road-trippers did on television. They had the rest of the day together. Neil smiled.
He pulled off the dual carriageway into a narrow country lane. After a few minutes he parked beside a pond at the beginning of a village. Neil remembered the four of them coming to this place for picnics, although it was possible that they had only come once, one luminous recollection that his memory had amplified or wished into a habit. He retrieved the urns from the boot and strode towards a field where (he was almost sure) his mother had called On your marks, get set for fraternal races that Neil invariably lost.
‘Come on,’ he called back to Sam. ‘Sammy, come on.’
Sam loitered by the car, respectfully fastening the upper buttons of his shirt. Of the two of them, Sam had lost more, Neil saw. More of the less that he had.
Neil climbed over a stile and marched up the ramblers’ path at the side of the field. Glancing back he saw Sam attempt to vault the fence and fail. He turned around quickly so the boy wouldn’t know he had been seen. The field wasn’t as he expected and wanted it to be (cows and grass where Neil remembered wheat), and he realised, as he walked, that he didn’t know what he was looking for or where he ought to stop. Sam had fallen behind; Neil paused to let him catch up, sitting on the trunk of an old tree.
Dan had made it to the crematorium but vanished immediately afterwards, not troubling with excuses or goodbyes or bittersweet reminiscences or even a drink, leaving Neil in sole charge of both Sam and the ashes that had recently been Brian. Neil’s first instinct was surreptitiously to leave the urn behind, but one of the attendants had scampered after him, presuming the dereliction was an oversight, and he had been obliged to take it. Putting the thing in the bin felt like too much, even for Neil. Sam suggested the stretch of pavement outside the shop, which was after all the place Brian had spent more of his waking life than any other, a fourteen-year-old’s crazy and possibly illegal scheme that Neil had fleetingly entertained as reasonable.
Then he thought of the picnic place. The memory of it seemed to belong to someone else, inherited by the almost-forty Neil from some ancestor self, a figure who resembled and related to him as Neanderthals did to modern humans in biology-textbook sketches of the ascent of man. His childhood was a story about a person he only distantly knew; at the same time it contained incidents he could recall with an almost shocking clarity. The odour of damp at the back of the armchair when he hid behind it to filch a fresh-minted one-pound coin from his mother’s handbag, the leathery smell of her bag as he persuaded himself that she wouldn’t notice, or, if she did, that she would blame Dan. His reasoning and remorse on that day seemed nearer to Neil, as he sat on the tree trunk, than did the motives for more recent wrongs.
Sam caught up, perched alongside him and panted. Neil put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. When he regained his breath Sam stood up and in front of Neil, fidgeting — digging his hands into his trouser pockets, taking them out, entwining his fingers behind his back, replacing them in his pockets — from which Neil inferred that Sam thought this was the moment. It might as well be.
He stood and unscrewed the lid of his father’s urn, trying to think of something to say. In the end he settled on ‘Goodbye, Brian’, the valediction doubling as a petty revolt, since he had never called his father Brian while he was alive.
‘Amen,’ Sam said, and swallowed.
Neil rotated the lid. He meant to do it slowly, a picturesque hour-glass trickling, but he misjudged the angle and the consistency of the ash, and it landed in a clump at his feet. It seemed sacrilegious just to leave the stuff there — he had a premonition of a cow ambling over and lapping it up — so he and Sam found sticks and spread out the flakes until they resembled a burned-out campfire. Sam dug his stick into the ash and the ground below it to mark the spot. ‘Goodbye, Brian,’ he repeated.
Neil decided to keep hold of his mother until he thought of something more decorous to do with her. Walking back to the car he dredged or conjured up a picture of her sitting in an alcove of wheat in a summer skirt, her legs curled under her, her shoes kicked off. He might have distilled a picture of his father, but halfway back Sam found a chewed-up tennis ball, hemispherically bald where a dog had mauled it. He kicked the ball at Neil; Neil inexpertly returned it. They stained the knees of their trousers on the overlong grass at the verge of the field. Sam ran out of breath after a few minutes.