The precarious thinness of his white arms, all angles against the dark foliage.
‘Max.’
Nothing. No response. He was half-hidden, straddling the wall, his body turned away from me. Listening, I thought. Waiting, perhaps.
‘Max.’
He turned now to look at me, then at once looked away, back at the next-door neighbour’s house.
‘Foxxa,’ he said quietly.
‘Max-Man. Bed time. Down.’
‘But Dad, Foxxa …’
‘Bed.’
Max shook his head without turning around. I approached the wall, my hand at the level of his thigh, and reached out to touch his arm. ‘She’ll come home, Max-Man. She always comes home.’
Max looked down at me, caught my gaze, then looked back towards the house next door.
‘What, Max?’
No response.
‘Max?’
Max lifted his leg over the wall and disappeared. I stood for a moment, unnerved.
In the early days of our life in Crappy we had bought a garden bench. A love seat, Millicent had called it, with room only for two. But Finsbury Park wasn’t the area for love seats. We’d long since decided it was too small, that the stiff-backed intimacy it forced upon us was unwelcome and oppressive, something very unlike love.
The love seat stood now, partly concealed by an ugly bush, further along the wall. Standing on it, I could see most of the next-door neighbour’s garden. It was as pitifully small as ours, but immaculate in its straight lines, its clearly delineated zones. A Japanese path led from the pond by the end wall to a structure that I’d once heard Millicent refer to as a bower, shaped out of what I guessed were rose bushes.
Max was standing on the path. He saw me and turned away, walking very deliberately into the bower.
‘Max.’
Nothing.
I stood on the arm of the love seat, and put my hands on top of the wall, pushing down hard as I jumped upwards. My left knee struck the head of a nail, and the pain almost lost me my balance.
I panted hard, then swung my leg over the wall and sat there as Max had, looking towards the neighbour’s house. Seen side by side, they were identical in every detail, except that the neighbour had washed his windows and freshened the paint on his back door.
A Japanese willow obscured the rest of the neighbour’s ground floor. A tree, a pond, a bower. Who builds a bower in Finsbury Park?
Max reappeared.
‘Dad, come and see.’
I looked about me. Was this trespass? I wasn’t sure.
Max disappeared again. No one in any of the other houses seemed to be looking. The only house that could see into the garden was ours. And I needed to retrieve my son.
I jumped down, landing badly and compounding the pain in my knee.
‘You aren’t supposed to say fuck, Dad.’
‘I didn’t say it.’ Did I?
‘You did.’
He had reappeared, and was looking down at me again, as I massaged the back of my knee, wondering if it would stiffen up.
‘And I’m allowed to say it. You are the one who isn’t.’
He smiled.
‘You’ve got a hole in your trousers.’
I nodded and stood up, ruffled his hair.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not much. A bit.’
He stared at me for a long moment.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘it hurts like fuck. Maybe I did say it.’
‘Thought so.’
‘Want to tell me what we’re doing here? Max-Man?’
He held out his hand. I took it, surprised, and he led me into the bower.
The neighbour had been busy here. Four metal trellises had been joined to make a loose arch, and up these trellises he had teased his climbing roses, if that’s what they were. Two people could have lain down in here, completely hidden from view. Perhaps they had. The grass was flattened, as if by cushions.
Now I noticed birdsong, distant-sounding, wrong, somehow.
Max crouched down, rubbed his right forefinger against his thumb.
From