Whenever Eliot paused in his speech, Miranda nodded politely. Eventually he fell asleep with his head on her shoulder, their hair mixing together. She made no move to disturb him.
I am good, Miranda thought. I am good, I am.
•
Mum was in Dad’s minicab and parked, probably illegally, outside the station at Faversham. I started to get into the car, but she got out first. “What’s this?” She picked up one of my arms and let it drop. She tapped my wrist, pinched my cheek, poked me in the stomach. “Did you leave the rest of you in Cambridge?”
Her hair was greyer. I forgot to look at her eyes. Instead I could see the smiling and the frowning she’d done while I was gone, her face quietly folding itself away into some scary distance. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I hugged her. She smelt of flour and vanilla.
“I made you a birthday cake,” she said. “In case you decided to have a birthday today. Remember that, eh?”
Inside the car I buckled up my seat belt, wanting to wrestle the tip of my tongue out of my mouth with my hands, to see if that would encourage sound. She didn’t seem to notice that I hadn’t said anything, not even hello. She looked over at me as she started up. She said, “You probably won’t be having any cake, though, by the looks of you. Cambridge has turned you bougie, hasn’t it. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea instead.”
At last: “Bougie? Are you really calling me bourgeois? What are you on about, Mum?”
Mum grinned. “Your figure’s all boyish now. You know, like one of those girls with skin from a makeup ad who goes off to a lovely house in Italy and has the most beautiful breakdown because the philosophy books she’s reading are too much for her brain.”
“Oh one of those girls,” I said. “And she lounges around in a lace nightie and a silk dressing gown all day. She is also called Cecily.”
“Or… Laura. Our poor darling Cecily-Laura couldn’t put away so common a thing as a piece of cake. It would… hurt her.”
Mum’s “posh” accent was hilarious. She was laughing at it before she’d even finished speaking.
“Oi,” I said. “I’m going to hurt that cake.”
“Hm,” said Mum.
“Jam and cream, yeah?”
“ ’Course.”
The cake was Mum’s best yet, but I ate more of it than I wanted to. I couldn’t have Dad shaking his head and thinking I’d changed. I sat cross-legged in front of the TV with Mum and Dad on the sofa behind me, watching EastEnders and eating so much cake I couldn’t taste it, licking cream off my fork to let them know I was still theirs.
“Mel’s coming round later. Leave some for her, will you,” Mum said, astonished.
We had a crowd at Christmas dinner, because Mum insisted that everyone come over even though there wasn’t that much room. Me, Dad, Mum, aunts and uncles (three of the former and two of the latter), and my cousins, Melanie, Sean, Adam and Abbie.
Abbie was eleven and kept saying that everything was “so weird,” We had rare roast beef and potatoes because none of us really liked turkey, and Abbie said, “It’s so weird to be having beef for Christmas dinner.” She also said, “It’s so weird not to have the fairy on top of the tree this year,” and “If you think about it, gravy is so weird.”
Sean’s and Adam’s dogs chased each other around the room — Sean and Adam said that the dogs weren’t allowed to have names, so when they were in earshot we just identified them by colour — the black one was Sean’s and the brown one was Adam’s.
When Adam and Sean weren’t around I whispered the dogs’ names into their ears. The black one was Puck and the brown one was Marco-Polo, because he had knowing eyes, as if he’d been around. I knew that Mel called Puck “Melchior” and she called Marco-Polo “Monty.” I don’t even know what Abbie called them. Without being sure why, Abbie, Mel and I agreed that nothing can live without a name. The dogs were confused, but patient, on the whole unusually sweet-tempered for Staffordshire terriers. Uncle Terry had brought them home to give my boy cousins something to keep them out of trouble. What Uncle Terry didn’t know was that Sean and Adam were trying to train their dogs to viciousness so that they could be taken to late-night dogfights in Gillingham. Apparently good money changed hands those nights. Sean and Adam kicked their dogs and subjected them to periods of hunger that were unpredictable in length and frequency. Sean and Adam set their dogs on each other round the back of Sean’s house and acted confused when Aunt Jan came out and asked what on earth was going on.
I’d known that they’d do these things even before Uncle Terry gave them the dogs — Sean and Adam were just like that somehow. If they’d lived in Victorian England they would have been the guys shouldering their way to the front of the crowd to get the best view at a public hanging. If you had to pay to see public hangings, they would pay.
Sean’s my age, and Adam’s two years older. I swear they’ve been skinheads since birth. Mel’s a year younger than me and is probably the only cousin of mine that I would even have contemplated introducing to Miranda. Mel is unflappable. She got her nose pierced because I dared her to, and almost immediately after that she became so sexy that her parents are all worried about her and are constantly asking where she is and where she’s going and who she’s with. Nothing tawdry, she just sits there and quietly smoulders, as if she’d quite like to be undressed. Dark blonde hair and narrow brown eyes. She sticks up for me when Sean gets stupid.
Some local British National Party bright spark had spent the week before Christmas posting leaflets into every accessible letter box in Faversham, and Sean had kept one to piss me off. So far I hadn’t given him a reaction, but in front of the TV after dinner, his tactic was working. It might have been because there was so little room — he, Mel and I were squashed together on the sofa while Abbie and Adam arm-wrestled each other for the remote in the space between their armchairs. Adam was clearly torn between exercising his obviously greater strength in order to watch the show he wanted to watch and the nobler option of letting Abbie win. He won, and Abbie jeered, “Do you feel like a big man now, beating an eleven-year-old at arm-wrestling, eh?”
“Do you know how many immigrants are living in the U.K. at present?” Sean read, for the fifth, sixth or seventh time. The leaflet featured clip art of a bulldog and a British flag on it. He was practically poking me in the eye with a corner of it.
“Sean, you’re so weird,” Abbie said. She fed the brown dog, Marco-Polo, with bits of beef she’d kept in her napkin. “Don’t, that meat is bloody. He’ll run wild,” I told her. I’d read about it in an article on keeping pet tigers, and it probably only applied to tigers, but I wanted to be sure that Abbie didn’t aid Sean and Adam in their pointless mission.
“We don’t know either,” Sean continued. “Neither does the U.K. government. The government lost track of immigration figures years ago.”
“Oh help,” Melanie said. “They’ll take all our jobs. Shut your face, will you, Sean.” She crumpled the leaflet up and threw it on the floor.
“Alright, Margaret Thatcher,” Sean said. He grinned at me. “You don’t take me seriously about that, do you, Ore?” I shook his head. His ears move when he grins. He’s my cousin and I don’t dislike him.