‘Don’t start,’ Brian said. He had to scowl to suppress the little shiver of delight which coursed through him.
Surprising herself, she hugged him. Ah, baby, she thought.
He yawned and stretched. Thought: Got you.
Alarm bells were ringing. Julia swallowed a mouthful of bile and toothpaste and shouted downstairs: ‘Brian? Are you deaf? Sam’s got the alarm going again … Turn it off and give him his breakfast.’
In the hall, Sam added to the cacophony. Arsenal vs. Manchester United: ‘Goooal! Yes! Bergkamp has done it again. Yes! Yes!’
He was prostrate, punching the air with his fist when she flicked the alarm off and signalled him to the kitchen with a pointed finger, which he ignored. Brian was already there, crunching on toast while he read his horoscope in yesterday evening’s paper. He remained standing, however, just in case she thought he was doing nothing to help. Julia shovelled Coco Pops into a bowl for Sam, thinking that they might at least lend a uniformity of colour when regurgitated later on the ferry.
‘I don’t know why we have an alarm anyway.’ Brian flicked to the sports results. ‘I mean, nothing ever happens when it goes off, and besides, there’s nothing much to rob here, is there?’
Julia downed a glass of orange juice. ‘I guess the alarm is to ensure that no one discovers that fact, don’t you think?’ she said in a levelled tone. Her thin smile said: Failing accidents and breast cancer, thirty maybe forty years to go.
In the hall the ball thumped against the front door. ‘That’s it! Arsenal have clinched it with a mag-nificent goal. Arsenal two hundred and twenty-three to Manchester’s lousy two. And the crowd are going crazy …’
‘Alarms, shutters, infra-red lights and the like, all to advertise what you don’t have. It’s a bit nuts, you have to admit,’ Brian offered. He looked up. ‘I’ll bring the bags down, will I?’
Julia studied her fingernails. ‘You do that,’ she said. ‘And Brian?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I have never wished you a slow, agonizing, horrible death. I just want you to know that.’
As the car pulled away from the house, Julia took one last lingering look back. Her gaze took in the bleached winter bones of the magnolia tree in the front garden and the mellow red bricks of the double-fronted Edwardian house with its large white-framed, multipaned windows. The middle-class dilemma, she thought: more work, bigger house, more work, bigger house, more work, biggest house – death. Big house sold by son to pay for drug habit.
It really does sink, she realized, the heart; it was nearly in her stomach, on its way to her ankles. But there was no way out of it this Christmas – Brian’s sisters would be home from Australia, the first visit in fifteen years. Besides, for some reason entirely unfathomable to her, Sam loved the place. She had refused to accompany them last summer. Off they went – Sam waving goodbye at Heathrow from his perch on Brian’s shoulders – to the rain and wind and the absurdly contrasting stoical countenance of Brian’s father and his equally stoical dog. As it happened, they returned wearing two well-entrenched tans while she was wan and pale from a fortnight’s rain in London.
Sam was in a daze in the back. She craned her neck to check on him. He was staring out the window through bleary eyes. It was still a watery dawnlight. The streetlamps glowed orange against the pallid sky. Julia reached her hand back; Sam grazed it with his own, then contemplated the window again.
‘How long more?’ he asked.
‘We’ve only just left,’ Julia said. ‘Hours to go yet. Play a game of football in your head.’
She watched him in the rearview mirror while he mouthed a running commentary, legs twitching, head jerking from side to side, as he headed the ball into the net. She wondered if any passing drivers would have sympathy for them and the mentally retarded paraplegic in the back.
They drove on through dark, sleepy suburbs. A preponderance of Indian restaurants in one area, followed by DIYs and bleak boarded-up shopfronts in another. Truck-drivers congregated in a caff on a corner, sipping from steamy mugs, staring out morosely at the infrequent passing cars. Julia wondered where they had come from, where they were going. What did they do when they got there? Turn around and do it all again? Not surprising then that they looked so baleful, slumped over their coffee cups. Brian fiddled with the radio dials. Sam fell asleep.
A light rain slanted against the windscreen. The M4 snaked ahead, its grey lanes empty and forlorn-looking. It suited her mood. She looked at Brian from the corner of her eye. He had that fixed quality to his stare which she sometimes found a bit discomforting. He appeared to blank out for whole chunks of time. Since she had known him, there had been times when she’d felt that there was a vacuum deep within Brian, but the impenetrable glaze of nothingness in his eyes masked it entirely. A pie-chart with a slice taken, five minutes missing from a clockface. She attributed it to the fact that he was a surviving twin. Perhaps it was inevitable that there should be an enduring lacuna in the survivor. She couldn’t say; certainly Brian said nothing. He had had a twin; he died; end of story. Fell over a cliff. Matter-of-fact, just like that. Julia had laughed. It wasn’t intentional, but the way he’d said it was so perfectly in tune with her first introduction to Brian’s spartan homeplace – here is the house, here is the field, here is the cliff at the end of the field, here is the cliff at the end of the field which Noel fell over – that she had almost expected him to mime ‘here is Noel, falling over the cliff.’ She simply could not help herself: ‘Was he pushed or did he jump?’ Brian had glowered at her all day after that.
‘I’ll have to stop at the next service station for petrol.’ He cut across her thoughts.
‘Why didn’t you fill up last night?’
‘Didn’t think of it.’
‘If we stop it will wake Sam up.’
‘So he wakes up.’
She glared at him from the corner of her eye and silently mimicked his last statement with an exaggerated shrug. The shrug which had first attracted her to him. He was so casual. Nothing fazed him. Went into computers because he had had to put something down on the form to apply for the government student grant. Straight from the farm to bollocksing up other people’s computers for them. Milking cows or suckers, what odds? Same shit in the end anyway. Easygoing, hard-working, dumb guy. She had liked that. Thought it was honest. Only he’d turned out to be neither dumb nor particularly hard-working – easygoing, certainly. So easygoing, she thought, that when he walked, one buttock had to wait a second or two for the other to align itself. Easy like treacle pudding, horrendously sweet at first but then you became immune to the taste. Even grew to like it – but only to a degree, of course. She figured now that the very reasons you chose a partner were the same reasons you divorced them. Brian chuckled. He had caught her mimicked shrug.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You.’
‘What about me?’
‘You’re so sharp sometimes I wonder that you don’t cut yourself.’
‘Sometimes I do.’ She smiled in response and settled back with her eyes closed.
She would make an effort, a real effort, she decided. She would just let them all get on with it. Even if the sisters from Australia proved as ghastly as she expected. They regularly sent Brian photographs of themselves and their families framed in cardboard hearts, with little printed notes: G’day from Aussieland. ‘Oh God,’ she sighed aloud.
It was while she was Speech Therapist attached to the North Middlesex, eleven years ago, that she had first met Brian. He was installing the brand-new top-of-the-range