‘If he didn’t put you down, I was going to make him eat something.’
She laughed, rotated her shoulders and put her hand to her neck as if assessing the damage. ‘I feel terrible, I have to go outside.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘In fact …’ She put her hand on my arm ‘… more than that, I have to go home.’
‘The tubes have stopped running.’
‘That’s all right, I’ll walk.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Whitechapel.’
‘Whitechapel? That’s eight, ten miles away.’
‘S’all right, I’d like to. I’ve got a change of shoes. I’ll be fine, it’s just …’ She placed both hands on her chest. ‘I need to walk this off and if I’m by myself I’m going to … crash into something. Or someone.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.
A moment passed. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘I should go and say goodbye.’
‘No.’ She took my hand. ‘Let’s make a French exit.’
‘What’s a French exit?’
‘It’s when you leave without saying goodbye.’
‘I’ve never heard that before.’
A French exit; no thank you for having me, no I’ve had a lovely time. To just walk away, cool and aloof. I wondered if I could.
The morning of departure we awoke at five thirty a.m. and said a fond goodbye to Mr Jones, who was to be cared for by our neighbours, Steph and Mark, for the month-long duration of the Grand Tour. We were always surprised by how much we missed Mr Jones. Even in canine terms he is basically an idiot, perpetually running into trees, falling into ditches, eating daffodils. A ‘sense of humour’, Connie calls it. Throw Mr Jones a stick and more likely than not he will return with a pair of discarded underpants. Monumentally flatulent, too — weapons-grade. But he is foolish, loyal and affectionate and Connie is entirely devoted to him.
‘Bye, old pal, we’ll send you a postcard,’ she cooed, nuzzling at his neck.
‘Don’t think there’s much point sending a postcard,’ I said. ‘He’ll only eat it.’
Connie sighed deeply. ‘I’m not really going to send him a postcard.’
‘No, no, I realised that.’ We had been wilfully misinterpreting each other’s jokes since Connie’s warning of departure. It hummed away beneath everything we did, however innocuous. Even saying goodbye to Mr Jones contained the question: who will get custody?
And so we roused Albie, for whom rising before eight a.m. was an infringement of his basic human rights, then took a taxi to Reading and crammed onto a commuter train to Paddington, Albie sleeping en route, or pretending to do so.
Despite my resolutions, we had argued the night before, in this instance about the acoustic guitar that Albie insisted on dragging across Europe — an absurd and impractical affectation, I thought — and there was the usual stomping up the stairs, Connie’s familiar sigh, her famous slow head-shake.
‘I’m worried he’s going to busk,’ I said.
‘So let him busk! There are worse things a seventeen-year-old can do.’
‘I’m worried that he’s going to do those, too.’
But it seemed the guitar was as essential as his passport. Needless to say it was I who bundled the case through the turnstiles at the Eurostar terminal, lugged it through security, crammed it into inadequate luggage space on the train as we took our seats where I began swabbing with napkins at the hot coffee now dripping from my wrist. There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in before you’ve even cleared security; grime on your collar and cuffs, coffee breath, perspiration running down your back, the luggage too heavy, the distances too far, muddled currency in your pocket, the conversation self-conscious and abrupt, no stillness, no peace.
‘So — goodbye England!’ I said to fill the gap. ‘See you in four weeks!’
‘We’ve not left yet,’ said Albie, his first words to me for twelve hours, then produced his Nikon and started taking close-up photographs of the bottom of his shoe.
Albie is dark, like his mother; his hair black, tangled and long, dangling into his eyes and scratching at the corneas so that I constantly want to lean across to brush it out of the way. Eyes large and brown and wet — ‘soulful’ is a word that gets bandied about — the dark skin around them the colour of a bruise. He has a long nose, a full, dark mouth and is, by all accounts, an attractive young man. One of Connie’s female friends said that he looked like a murderous ruffian in a Caravaggio, a comparison that meant nothing to me until I looked it up. But clearly there is a demand out there for late-Renaissance muggers with scrappy facial hair and consumption, because girls seem drawn to him, feel they can ‘really talk’ to him, and I’ve long since given up keeping track of the Rinas and Ninas and Sophies and Sitas for whom surliness, irresponsibility and poor personal hygiene are such irresistible traits.
But he is cool, they say, he is deep; people are drawn to him and in this respect, as in all others, he is his mother’s son. He is ‘not a natural academic’, according to his college tutor, ‘but he has wonderful emotional intelligence’, a phrase that made my teeth snap together. Emotional intelligence, the perfect oxymoron! ‘How do they test emotional intelligence? What qualification does that lead to?’ I asked Connie as we drove home. ‘Perhaps there’s a multiple-choice element. They put you in a room with six people and you have to work out who to hug.’
‘It means he has empathy,’ she replied dryly. ‘It means he has some awareness of and interest in other people’s feelings.’
And so it seems the only thing that Albie has taken from my side of the family is my father’s skinny height, yet he seems embarrassed and resentful even of this, with his round shoulders and stooped, loping walk, arms dangling, as if unable to manage the weight of his hands. Oh, and smoking, he’s taken that from my father, too. In consideration of my views on the subject, he smokes in secret, though it’s not a secret that he holds precious, given the number of lighters and Rizla packets he leaves lying around, given the smell of it on his clothing and the burn marks on the window ledge of his filthy bedroom. ‘How did they get there, Albie?’ I said. ‘The swallows? Smoking swallows, with their Duty Free?’ at which point he laughed and kicked the door closed. Oh, and as well as the emphysema, cancer and heart disease that he is presumably nurturing in that narrow chest, he suffers from a malaise that requires at least twelve hours of sleep, and yet is singularly incapable of commencing these twelve hours before two a.m.
What else? He is fond of T-shirts with absurdly low-cut v-necks so that his sternum is constantly on display, and he has a habit of withdrawing his arms through the sleeves and jamming his hands into his armpits. He refuses to wear a coat, an absurd affectation, as if coats were somehow ‘square’ or un-cool, as if there were something ‘hip’ about hypothermia. What is he rebelling against? Warmth? Comfort? ‘Let it go’, says Connie, as he strides out into some gale with his rib-cage showing, ‘it won’t kill him’ — but it might, and if it doesn’t then the sheer frustration of it all will kill me. Take, for example, the state of his bedroom, a room so filthy that it is effectively a no-go zone, an immense Petri dish of furry toast crusts and lager tins and unthinkable socks that will one day have to be sealed off in concrete like Chernobyl, and this is not just laziness on his part — no, real effort has gone into a situation designed to cause the maximum upset. To me! Not to his mother, but to me, to me, so that it is no longer simply a bedroom, it is a massive act of spite.