Not that many people.
Just tell me, OK?
Jake, Donny, KC…
Fucking great. They’d save it, wouldn’t they, so they could stab her in the back. All those idiotic little vendettas. If she was only there, in person, to grab the phones out of their stupid hands.
♦
I didn’t think I’d be so upset when she died. Angela took a final forkful of Tibetan roast. Benjy was sitting next to her reading a tattered second-hand encyclopedia. She brushed the crumbs from his hair.
Ghastly way to go, said Richard. He’d arranged his cutlery at half past six. Your mind dying, your body left behind for other people to look after.
Other people? Meaning her.
God forbid that I go like that. He poured the last of his tea through the metal strainer. Over his shoulder a gaggle of nut-brown cyclists gathered at the counter, little black shoes clacking on the stone floor. Give me a massive cardiac arrest.
Hang on, said Angela. Hang on. Why was she doing this? I visited her every week for five years.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. He could hear the resentment in her voice but was genuinely confused. Surely the gift of the holiday itself had removed any residual bad feelings.
I know you paid for her to be in Acorn House, said Angela. And maybe that was more important than anything else. I’m grateful, I am, but…She was walking on cracked ice. Every week for five years. What good had it done, though? Her mother didn’t recognise her at the end.
I know, said Richard tonelessly.
And the person she really wanted was you. She could see the disbelief in his face. He’d expected this to be easy, hadn’t he? Rebuilding the family now the troublesome parent had been removed. Bruises and broken bones. She felt a childish desire to make it as difficult as she could. And you came, what? five times? six? She knew the exact number but she wasn’t going to admit to having kept score.
Richard was drawing little shapes on the tabletop with his index finger. She wondered if he was working out his reply on imaginary notepaper.
She’s dead, Angela. We can’t change anything now. Perhaps we should just leave it alone.
Benjy turned a page, oblivious to their conversation. Angela glanced over. The Romance of the Iron Road. A picture of the Flying Scotsman. I just wanted to hear you say thank you. There. It was out.
He laughed. Quiet and wry, but actual laughter.
Richard…? She felt as if she were talking to a child who had made some dreadful faux pas.
I was thirteen when she started drinking.
And I was fourteen.
But you left.
What? She really did have no idea what he was talking about.
When you moved in with Juliette.
The idea was so crazy that she wondered for the first time if he had some less pleasant motive for bringing them on holiday. I never left. I never moved in with Juliette.
OK, maybe not moved in. He hadn’t meant to bring this up. It was like contaminated earth; if you didn’t dig there was no problem. But you spent most nights there. He didn’t want to settle scores. He simply wanted things to be neatly folded and put to sleep. For the best part of two years if I remember correctly.
That’s simply not true. The couple at the nearby table had paused to listen.
Perhaps if I’d been better at making friends I would have done the same thing. He laughed again but more warmly this time.
That’s not the point. They had to stop this right now or God alone knew where it would go. She sat back and deep-breathed. Let’s call a truce.
A truce? said Richard. Is this a war?
Maybe now is the time for cake.
Without taking his eyes off the book, Benjy said, Yes, please. Can I have the chocolate one, please, with the white icing?
♦
Motor lorries carry heavy goods long distances; motor vans deliver parcels at our doors. Motor charabancs transport tens of thousands of pleasure-seekers daily from place to place, and motor coaches make regular daily journeys between towns hundreds of miles apart. We no longer see the horse-drawn fire-engine, with smoke belching from its funnel, dashing down the street.
♦
Ariel Gel Nimbus 11. Ridiculous names they gave these things. Richard loved the smell, though, plasticky and factory-clean. He laced the left shoe up and leant round to take the right from its tissued box. He felt bruised by the conversation with Angela, less by her feelings than by his failure to predict them. It had never occurred to him that she would feel embittered. His mother had hated him for looking after her, then hated him for leaving. Five years living with an alcoholic woman and no one had thanked him. If there was such a thing as the moral high ground it was surely he who occupied it. From the corner of his eye he saw, through the shop’s front window, a rat’s nest of black downpipes emerging from the upper storey of the house opposite. He rotated his body a little further towards the rear of the shop.
How much?
£79.99.
Reassuringly expensive.
The assistant seemed oblivious to his irony. But you had to have the best. Save £20 now and you regretted it later. He stood up and examined himself in the mirror.
How do they feel? The young man was ginger and plump and ill nourished with one of those increasingly popular asymmetrical fringes so that he was forced to lean his head to one side in order to see properly.
Good. They feel good. He squatted and stood up again. He remembered the day he left for Bristol, his mother yelling at him as he walked down the street with his rucksack, curtains twitching, like a scene from a cheap melodrama. Ideally he should have gone outside and run up and down but he wasn’t sure he had the confidence to carry it off. He jogged on the spot for ten seconds. I’ll take them.
♦
Angela stayed in the car. She needed time away from Richard and she couldn’t imagine another two hundred feet improving the view. A young Indian woman was fighting an orange cagoule. A little further away a man and two teenage boys were tinkering with an amateur rocket, three, four foot high, red nose cone, fins. The man knelt briefly beside it then stepped backwards and…Jesus Christ. A fizz like Velcro and the thing just vanished upwards. The boys whooped and waited but it simply didn’t come down. They swivelled, scanning the distance. Carried off by the wind, no doubt, but something magical about it still, a story for later. She looked back up the hill. Her family were dots.
Was he lying about Juliette? Or had he misremembered to alleviate his guilt? If only she could retort with hard facts, bang, bang, bang, but she had never really looked back, never thought these details might need preserving.