When he re-entered the world they were changing trains at high speed, sprinting to another platform to catch a connecting train which left in two minutes. Halfway across the footbridge he remembered that he’d forgotten to pick up the metal thing. What metal thing? said Mum. The metal thing, he said, because he hadn’t given it a name. It was a hinge from a briefcase and later on Mum would call it a piece of rubbish but he loved the strength of the spring and the smell it left on his fingers.
Dad said, I’ll get it because when he was a child he kept a horse’s tooth in a Golden Virginia tobacco tin, and Mum said, For Christ’s sake. But Dad came back carrying the metal thing with seconds to spare and gave it to Benjy and said, Guard it with your life. And as they were pulling out of the station Benjy saw an old lady with long grey hair being arrested by two policemen in fluorescent yellow jackets. One of the policemen had a gun. Then there was another train travelling beside them at almost exactly the same speed and Benjy remembered the story about Albert Einstein doing a thought experiment, sitting on a tram in Vienna going at the speed of light and shining a torch straight ahead so the light just sat there like candyfloss.
♦
You hate Richard because he swans around his spacious Georgian apartment on Moray Place four hundred miles away while you perch on that scuffed olive chair listening to Mum roar in the cage of her broken mind. The nurses burn my hands. There was an air raid last night. You hate him because he pays for all of it, the long lawn, the low-rent cabaret on Friday nights, Magic Memories: The Stars of Yesteryear. You hate him for marrying that woman who expected your children to eat lamb curry and forced you to stay in a hotel. You hate him for replacing her so efficiently, as if an event which destroyed other people’s lives were merely one more medical procedure, the tumour sliced out, wound stitched and swabbed. You hate him because he is the prodigal son. When will Richard come to see me? Do you know Richard? He’s such a lovely boy.
In spite of which, deep down, you like being the good child, the one who cares. Deep down you are still waiting for a definitive judgement in which you are finally raised above your relentlessly achieving brother, though the only person who could make that kind of judgement was drifting in and out of their final sleep, the mask misting and clearing, the low hiss of the cylinder under the bed. And then they were gone.
♦
M6 southbound, the sprawl of Birmingham finally behind them. Richard dropped a gear and eased the Mercedes round a Belgian chemical tanker. Frankley Services 2 miles. He imagined pulling over in the corner of the car park to watch Louisa sleeping, that spill of butter-coloured hair, the pink of her ear, the mystery of it, why a man was aroused by the sight of one woman and not another, something deep in the midbrain like a sweet tooth or a fear of snakes. He looked in the rear-view mirror. Melissa was listening to her iPod. She gave him a deadpan comedy wave. He slid the Eliot Gardiner Dido and Aeneas into the CD player and turned up the volume.
♦
Melissa stared out of the window and pictured herself in a film. She was walking across a cobbled square. Pigeons, cathedral. She was wearing the red leather jacket Dad had bought her in Madrid. Fifteen years old. She walked into that room, heads turned and suddenly she understood.
But they’d want her to be friends with the girl, wouldn’t they, just because they were the same age. Like Mum wanted to be friends with some woman on the till in Tesco’s because they were both forty-four. The girl could have made herself look all right but she hadn’t got a clue. Maybe she was a lesbian. Seven days in the countryside with someone else’s relatives. It’s a big thing for Richard. Because keeping Richard happy was obviously their Function in Life. Right.
Shake the cloud from off your brow,
Fate your wishes does allow;
Empires growing,
Pleasures flowing,
Fortune smiles and so should you.
Some idiot came past on a motorbike at Mach 4. Richard pictured a slick of spilt oil, sparks fantailing from the sliding tank, massive head trauma and the parents agreeing to the transplant of all the major organs so that some good might come of a short life so cheaply spent, though Sod’s Law would doubtless apply and some poor bastard would spend the next thirty years emptying his catheter bag and wiping scrambled egg off his chin.
Dido and Aeneas. Groper Roper made them listen to it at school. Pearls before swine. Probably in prison by now. Don’t let him get you in the instrument cupboard. It was a joke back then. Interfering with children. Looking back, though, it’s Roper who feels like the victim, the taunts, those damp eyes, the kind of man who hanged himself in isolated woodland.
♦
Louisa was slowly coming round. Classical music and the smell of the cardboard fir tree on the rear-view mirror. She was in the car with Richard, wasn’t she. So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real. Her brothers, Carl and Dougie, worked in a car factory and lived six doors away from each other on the Blackthorn Estate. Not quite cars on bricks and fridges in the grass, not in their own gardens at least. When she visited they faked a pride in the sister who had bettered herself but what they really felt was disdain, and while she tried to return it she could feel the pull of a world in which you didn’t have to think constantly of how others saw you. Craig had revelled in it. The two worlds thing, Jaguar outside the chip shop, donkey jacket at parents’ evening.
Wales. She’d forgotten. God. She’d only met Richard’s family once. They liked you and you liked them. Had they? Had she? She’d trumped them by wearing too much black. Benjamin, the little boy, was wearing a Simpsons t-shirt of all things. She overheard him asking his father what would happen to his grandmother’s body in the coming months. And the way the girl sang the hymns. As if there might be something wrong with her.
♦
Richard had been seated next to Louisa at Tony Caborn’s wedding, on what she correctly referred to as the divorcees’ table in the corner of the marquee, presumably to quarantine the bad voodoo. Someone’s discarded trophy wife, he thought. He introduced himself and she said, Don’t chat me up, OK? She was visibly drunk. I seem to be giving off some kind of vibes today. He explained that he had no plans in that particular direction and she laughed, quite clearly at him rather than with him.
He turned and listened to a portly GP bemoaning the number of heroin users his practice was obliged to deal with, but his attention kept slipping to the conversation happening over his shoulder. Celebrity gossip and the shortcomings of Louisa’s ex-husband, the wealthy builder. She was clearly not his kind of person, but the GP was his kind of person and was boring him to death. Later on he watched her stand and cross the dance floor, big hips but firm, something Nordic about her, comfortable in her body in a way that Jennifer had never been. No plans in that particular direction. He’d been a pompous arse. When she sat down he apologised for his earlier rudeness and she said, Tell me about yourself, and he realised how long it had been since someone had said this.