Caroline gave him a hard little look, which he pretended not to see. The house smelt like a laundry, I noticed. There were drying clothes on all the radiators. Jack unsnapped an eyebrow ring and gave it to Samantha who examined it intensely.
‘Jack!’ she exclaimed, handing it back to him. ‘Another!’
‘I haven’t got that many I can do in polite company, sweetheart,’ he told her. I always felt awkward around children, as though they might vomit on me or ask me something appalling. Jack seemed suited to it. I suppose he was colourful.
Tony disappeared into the kitchen and returned with tea in sad mugs. Mine had faded Muppets on it. I took a sip. It tasted strange. I thought about the pranks on the building sites. Some of those had involved tea with added ingredients.
‘Milk powder,’ explained Caroline. ‘The little monster gets all the real milk.’
‘Not a monster!’ explained Samantha. ‘Jack’s got fings in his face.’
‘Things,’ Tony corrected her. ‘Not fings. And we don’t talk about people.’
‘Do,’ said Samantha. ‘Do too.’ She looked at Jack. ‘Mummy and Daddy talk about Sam,’ she said. ‘Not me. A bad one. Is she here?’
‘I think she might be,’ Jack said, looking at me. I could see him storing that one up for later use.
‘Here, I’ll put the television on,’ said Tony. ‘We like the television, don’t we?’
‘Jack!’ said Samantha, and then forgot she was standing and fell over. ‘Bump,’ she said, ‘ouch.’
Tony and Caroline exchanged a look. It was the sort of look you only get to exchange once you’re a parent. I like children, although I don’t think they fit in with my lifestyle. Being single makes having children difficult, especially for men. Caroline hoisted Samantha up and aimed her at Jack, and Tony ferreted the remote control from under a cushion and turned on the television. It crackled.
‘Growly,’ explained Samantha. ‘Jack? Whassit in the nose?’
Jack began to reach to his face, before being distracted by the television. I looked to see what had caught his interest. It looked like Dudley Castle.
‘Dudley Castle,’ the narrative informed us, ‘has not survived intact.’
‘What’s this?’ asked Tony. ‘Can’t be Time Team, that’s Sundays. And I can’t see anyone in a woolly jumper.’
‘They have a lot of woolly jumpers,’ said Caroline.
‘Only one each,’ said Tony. ‘Woolly jumpers and a small piece of pottery that they find every week because they take it with them. What’s this?’
‘Views of Dudley,’ said Jack, scanning the TV guide. ‘A documentary. Five sites of interest in Dudley.’
‘Five?’ asked Tony.
‘Well, it doesn’t specify who’d be interested,’ I said. ‘If it’s sites of interest to traffic light fans they could do it.’
‘Charity shops,’ suggested Jack. Samantha was still looking at him, entranced. I felt a pang of jealousy. She was my niece. Jack had a nephew of his own, and I didn’t see why my niece had to like him. I wasn’t even sure why I did.
The view on the television changed, passing from the view of the town to what looked like a dull row of houses.
‘And this is of interest, is it?’ asked Tony. Caroline shrugged.
‘Turn it over,’ said Samantha. ‘Tweenies.’
‘Hold on,’ said Jack, paying more attention to the screen than it seemed to merit. ‘Just a minute there, I want to watch this.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s interesting, you know? This is where we live.’ He tuned the rest of us out. Samantha whiled away the time by pulling at his piercings. The documentary spent a while dawdling around the row of dull houses, and then took in some other equally dull views, the old railway tracks down by Dudley Port, a set of new houses on the Russells Hall Estate, a grubby factory on Pear Tree Lane, the collapsed priory that lay in pieces behind the college. One or two other houses featured, but they could have been anywhere. Jack sat entranced.
‘Boring,’ said Samantha. ‘Boring on the telly. Tweenies. Tweenies.’ For the last word she used a register only available to small children and military experiments into sonic weapons, a sharp squeal that punctured your head like a frozen skewer.
‘Sorry, kiddo,’ said Jack, ‘I’ve been hogging the box.’ He turned over and we tuned in to the Tweenies, and very bright they were. Jack didn’t seem to be watching it, though. I was watching him. Tony was watching me, and so was Caroline. They were both watching me but in different ways and I didn’t want to catch their eyes. Jack was looking at the set, and absently fending off Samantha, but he wasn’t really with us. He’d gone into himself, I thought. In fact he’d gone much, much further.
Before long, we’d all be going there with him.
I
I’ve had more girlfriends than you might think likely. But they don’t stick around for long. They’re like summer colds: they turn up, send you light-headed for a couple of days, then two weeks of headaches and it’s all over. There have been quite a few of them and all but one of them have gone their own ways. There have been several, but in terms of time spent together they don’t add up to a single long-term relationship. That’s total time together. I’m not adjusting for moods and tantrums.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful here. It could be worse. Some people are surprised I’ve had a girlfriend at all, let alone one you could take outdoors in daylight. And they’ve been convenient. They haven’t overlapped. I’ve had friends with overlapping girlfriends and it always ends up with shouting. There are reprisals and cars have to be resprayed. It’s all too much trouble. I’ve stuck with girlfriends who don’t overlap, but they haven’t stuck with me.
I was in town getting a new bus pass, thinking about girlfriends. It was summer in Dudley: the time of year when the sky goes a brighter shade of grey. There seemed to be more young people than the year before, but there always seemed to be more young people than the year before. It was me, getting older. It couldn’t be many more years before I’d go out in the middle of summer in thirty cardigans and a flock of coats. I watched pretty girls teetering on the edge of adulthood, poised on the brink of stretchmarks and hoovering.
The travel centre is next to the bus stop, and it’s got a queue in it. The queue has been there since the travel centre opened, and it hasn’t got any shorter. The travel centre was moved to the bus depot five years ago. Before that, people had to queue in the town centre, where the travel centre used to be before it was knocked down so that the council could build some new public toilets by the market before the smell from the old public toilets led to an epidemic.
The queue isn’t there because the people working in the travel centre are slow. They’re not slow, they’re friendly and efficient. I’m biased about this, but take it from me, considering the sort of things they have to deal with they’re bright and lively. There are two young women in very crisp blouses with well-ordered haircuts. Straight fringes. Behind them is a door, and behind that you can see part of an office. An older woman sits in there and sometimes comes out and looks at everyone in the long queue the way you’d look at an unexpected boil on your scrotum. She has hair that’s been forced into a state beyond tidiness. It’s pulled away