‘This is no reward, buster, OK? Tell me something. When you started that fire, couldn’t you see how it would end up? Couldn’t you see the kind of trouble it would get you into?’
Nothing from me. What can I say? It’s our second day in Devon, and I’m playing it cool. Even with all the doors open, the cottage smells foreign, like someone else’s bed. Outside, the sun is blazing. Time for a spot of cricket and some fighting in the streets. But I’m not looking for aggravation, not today.
‘Well?’
‘I suppose…’
‘I hope so. You’re not stupid, Tom, don’t try and pretend you are. You’re very full of yourself and you like flirting with danger. But think long-term for a moment. If you can’t persuade yourself out of such ideas now, what’s going to change? Are you going to be pissing about setting things on fire in ten years’ time?’
‘You’re going to be an older brother soon,’ Mum says, watching me, working on my conscience, convinced that I have one. ‘You may not want it, but that gives you a certain responsibility. I think you’re bright enough to know what you were doing. But I don’t know which is worse – the thought of you doing it with a degree of premeditation, or being so out of control, that you couldn’t stop yourself.’
‘I wasn’t out of control,’ I say quietly.
‘Right,’ says Dad. ‘And we’re not unaware of the way that the move’s tangled up in this. Maybe it’s a very selfish decision on our part, but it’s just for one year and sometimes…’ He searches for an acceptable argument.
Mum finds it for him. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘either way you choose, someone loses.’
‘I know,’ I say. I feel awkward now, I want this to be over. ‘I like change,’ I say. Which is true.
‘What I want you to remember,’ Dad says, looking at the Japanese-packaged box in my hands, still unopened, ‘is that you’d better think long and hard about the kind of decisions you make in the future. Colorful is one thing, but stupid is just plain stupid, do you understand me?’
So I use the camera. It’s great. This really is the video age. Nothing is real unless it’s digitized and stuck on YouTube. I point the camera at the family and suddenly they have meaning, although search me for what it is.
They smile a bit at first, then they forget about that and try to pretend I’m not there, which doesn’t work, of course – then, when they realize that I’m not going to go away, they start to look irritated, you catch a moment in their eyes that says, ‘I want to get on with things, I’ve got things to do, but I don’t want you watching.’ Why are they so secretive? Why is it even the smallest acts expose us to ridicule? On video, everything’s the same. Watching someone drink a glass of water is as private as watching someone pee. It makes you realize that we don’t see each other most of the time. We look, but we shut out the important stuff.
I know why I got this camera, and the baby knows too. I think he knows everything. He doesn’t care about any of this shit, he’s watched all the time anyway, nothing is private for him and he hasn’t learned to care yet. But already he understands a gift. He understands transactions, that’s what it’s all about. Jessie and I haven’t been raised to respond to tips and bribes, and he won’t be either – we know all the moral complications inherent in gifts (you don’t thank someone for saving your life, you hate the bastard for making you owe him so much).
I got this camera not to buy my future good behavior – Mum and Dad wouldn’t do that, they know I wouldn’t go for a deal like that. No, I got this camera because, by burning the stockroom, I eased the pain of a decision they wanted to make but knew I’d never agree to willingly.
8
Nothing much happens. We’re in the garden, Mum, Jack and me. Dad and Jessie are somewhere else, in the car. This is before the bathroom window, when I still thought I was the weirdest thing in my life. It’s another staggeringly hot day, this summer is sick, lurching between nuclear fission and bullet-hard rain. The weather is getting aggressive. I hate all that crap about global warming, but there have been three or four tornadoes spiraling over Europe this year and it snowed in Italy in July. The Italians probably love it; gives them a chance to get on with a bit of off-season football practice.
Mum is in the garden in her bikini. She looks different, now that Jake’s out here and not in her. Thinner, for a start, but also sharper, hipper if you like – more attuned to what’s going on, less of a heavyweight smiler.
She’s lying on the grass drinking Pimm’s and lemonade or something equally ridiculous, and reading an incredibly boring-looking book about social welfare. She takes all that stuff fairly seriously, being a lawyer, certainly a lot more seriously than Dad does. He’s a total cynic – but an optimist, too. Mum has her cynical side, she’s worked with too many hard-core villains and thugs not to, but she still holds on to a vain belief that the system is worth fighting for. I’d certainly want her on my side if I was stuck in a courtroom, but I’d like a bomb belt under my shirt as well. It’s all so fucking middle-class – I’m so fucking middleclass. There’s a conspiracy in this country. We all play our roles, even the yobbos in the streets just fulfill some middle-class nightmare, they don’t have any real ideas of their own. It takes an outsider to inspire genuine fear – someone whose skin is a slightly different color from ours, someone who doesn’t know the rules, even if he’s lived here a couple of generations; or maybe does know the rules and doesn’t give a toss. Then watch us. We’re wary as hell. I mean, these guys don’t know when to take their hats off. They could get serious, they might forget that some ponce in a wig referees the match, they might just go and whack him with a machete, and post it on the web.
Mum’s on the lawn, lying prone on a huge beach towel which follows the bumps and pockmarks in the ground. She’s covered in sun screen, I can smell her from here, and listening to some opera or other on her headset. Jake is lying murmuring in his sleep like a drunk on a binge, his lightweight wicker carrycot placed just inside the shade of the kitchen door. Every now and then, Mum looks up from her book, lifts an earphone from one ear and checks that he’s OK. He looks OK to me, he looks like he’s having wet dreams or maybe planning the baby-aspirin dealership that’s going to set him up. Jake looks like a survivor, but you never can tell. There are times when he looks small and helpless like any other baby, but I think he’s only faking.
Me, I’m so desperate for entertainment that I’m filming the little bugger. I could be down at the beach, getting tossed around by the waves they have down here. The beach is brilliant, I’ll say that for it – a great ridge of pebbles that drops like a shock down to the sea, throwing you off balance if you’re not ready for it, deliberately angled to send you careering into the water, unable to stop. Instead, I’m hanging around, hot as hell in my shorts, a little buzzy-headed from a glass of whatever Mum’s drinking, trying to kill time and look interested as I range my camera over sleeping Jake, the ants massing by the cracks in the step outside the kitchen door, the tangled grass beyond that, like ropey fruitand-veg stall matting, and Mum’s eyes scanning her book, darting up to look my way then ignoring me, her tits cupped in her untied bikini top, a trail of sweat running from the small of her back down a slight fold of her waist to the shadow between her stomach and the towel.