♦
I was having a nightmare about the Smoke Men.
OK, said Alex. We’re on two mountain bikes. Because this was something he often thought about when he was falling asleep himself. We’re riding through a forest. It’s summer and I’ve got a picnic in a rucksack.
With bacon sandwiches, said Benjy, and a flask of tea and two KitKats.
We’re going faster and faster and suddenly we come out of the trees and we look down and see the tyres aren’t touching the ground any more.
Are they magic bikes?
They’re magic bikes and we’re flying and we’re getting higher and higher and we can see the fields and a river and a steam train and cars. There are birds flying underneath us and there’s a hot-air balloon and the people in the basket wave at us and we wave back and I say to you, ‘We can go anywhere in the world.’ He stroked Benjy’s hair. Where do you want to go, little brother?
I want to go home, said Benjy.
4: Monday
Richard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man. Hello trees, how are you this morning? Pop a couple of Nurofen into the river at Reading to cure everyone’s headache in London. He rinses his mouth with Corsodyl.
The intolerable loneliness after Jennifer left. The noises a house made at night. Learning the reason for small talk at forty-two. Going to the pub. He’d always thought of it as wasting time.
He spits out the mouthwash, sluices his mouth with cold water and pats his face dry with the white towel from the hot rail.
He turns and sees himself in the mirrored door of the cabinet, face still puffy with the fluids that fatten the face in the night, waiting for gravity to restore him to himself. They say you’re meant to see your father staring back at you, but he never does. He pulls the light cord and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.
♦
Alex hoists himself up and stands on the trig point. He is the highest thing for, what? fifty miles? a hundred? He turns slowly as if he is spinning the earth around him like a wheel, the ridges of the Black Mountains receding to the south, Hay down there in the train-set valley to the north. The wind buffets him. He imagines fucking Louisa against the bathroom door. Her ankles locked behind him, saying, Yes, harder, yes, the door banging and banging and banging.
♦
They’ve created the largest fiscal deficit in recent history.
Dominic regretted broaching a subject about which Richard seemed to know rather too much and Dominic too little, for whenever he ventured into the financial section of the newspaper a dullness stole over him as if the subject were protected by a dark charm woven to dispel intruders. So we elect a man who won’t admit to having any actual policies? But he was bowling uphill in fading light.
Down the table Angela was reading the Observer travel section. A message had slipped over the hill during the night. Missing U. Love Amy XX. If he never told her about Amy then he would always be the better parent, the better person, because he loved Daisy unreservedly. And there she was, coming in holding a bowl of cereal. People are greedy and selfish, she said, sitting down as far away from Melissa as possible, though it was only Dominic who noted the geometry. They just vote for people who promise to give them exactly what they want. It’s like children with sweets.
But she wasn’t talking about people. She was talking about Richard and she was talking about Melissa, wasn’t she?
But things improve, said Richard carefully. It’s a messy process but things do get better.
For who? said Daisy.
♦
None of them were greatly interested in the election except as a national soap opera in which the closeness of the result was more exciting than the identity of the winner. Individually, they were passionate about GP fundholding, academy schools, asylum, but none of them trusted any party to keep a promise about any of these issues. Louisa struggled to believe that she could change herself, let alone the world, and saving lives seemed to absolve Richard of any wider duty. Angela and Dominic had once marched in support of the miners in Doncaster and the printers in Wapping, but their excitement at Blair’s accession had changed rapidly to anger then disappointment then apathy about politics in general. Alex was planning to vote Tory because that was how you voted when you were the kind of person he wanted to be. Melissa affected a disdain which felt like sophistication and Daisy affected an ignorance which felt like humility. Benjy, on the other hand, was interested mostly in the fate of the tiger, the panda and the whale, and consequently more concerned about the future of the planet than any of them.
♦
Daisy had never really talked to Lauren till they were swimming for the school, up at six for seventy lengths at the Wheelan Centre before lessons. She was five foot eleven at sixteen, as graceful in the water as she was clumsy out of it, hunching her shoulders and speaking in a tiny voice to compensate, not quite a girl but not a woman either. She wore baggy clothes to deflect attention but when she was in her green Speedo Daisy was mesmerised by the length and whiteness of her legs and neck, the way you couldn’t stop looking at someone with a missing arm or a strawberry birthmark. She attached herself to Daisy with an eagerness that no one had shown since they were six or seven so that they inhabited a kind of treehouse world together. Something about Lauren’s size that made Daisy feel tucked away like a precious thing. Boys called Lauren a freak and kept their distance, though it was clear to Daisy that when she was older and more confident and they were less concerned about the opinions of their peers they would see that she was beautiful. Lauren responded by pretending they didn’t exist, even Jack who hated being ignored by someone who still read novels with wizards in, a scorn she returned in equal measure so that Daisy grew rapidly tired of being the prize in a pointless competition.
But Lauren was the only person who wasn’t fazed when Daisy joined the church. She should have been grateful, but…what was it? Lauren’s smugness about having won the competition by default? The unshakeable puppyish loyalty? So she pushed Lauren away and when Lauren clung on she pushed harder, for surely it was insulting if a friend refused to react to your feelings? She gave up swimming, stopped calling, stopped answering her phone. Lauren knocked on the door once and Daisy asked Mum to say that she was out, and she wasn’t sure which felt worse, the way she was behaving or Mum’s delight at her unchristian hypocrisy.