We go to the Joneses, laden with beer and wine and chips and a twelve-year-old bottle of Chivas that’s now eighteen years older than it was at the time of bottling. Barry was a New Year’s baby, and every year I give him the same bottle of Chivas that he gives back to me on my birthday in September. The label on the bottle is fraying at the edges and the cap is scratched and slightly dented. It was funny for the first two or three years; now it’s just habit, this endless swapping of a scruffy bottle of whisky that neither of us can bring ourselves to drink.
Barry and Lynn live a block away. In a normal suburb, getting there would have meant a short walk, but here among the oaks and the plane trees, here where financial accrual is declared loudly on plots with tennis courts and twenty-metre swimming pools, a walk is out of the question: here, we drive. Besides, Gabriel reasons, what if we were mugged and stabbed on the way home in the middle of the night? Which, I concede, is a valid point. So we pile into the Range Rover once we’ve loaded our share of the refreshments, drive for forty-three seconds. I ring the buzzer, wait for the wrought-iron gates to swing open, park behind a string of other four-by-fours in Barry’s second-gear driveway, unload ourselves and the pointless stuff we’ve brought. Hooked over my wrists in bags that bang against my crutches are three bottles of wine, the Chivas and a two-litre bottle of Coke; a sulky Gabriel is carrying two six-packs in a plastic supermarket bag. Tracy’s high heels force unnatural, bird-like little steps – or perhaps it’s the tightness of her jeans that’s preventing her legs from swinging from her hips. She’s carrying the heavy stuff – two bags of prawn-cocktail chips and a packet of pretzels – elbows in, wrists out, the packets pinched between thumbs and forefingers like dead mice. Gabriel, at sixteen, is hormonally incapable of walking beside his parents. It’s either fifteen steps behind, or rarely, as now, five steps ahead. In the yellow of Barry’s driveway lights I see him swinging the bag of beer at the end of his arm. I open my mouth to warn him of the likely outcome, but before I can form any words the bottom of the bag rips and the two six-packs crash onto the fake cobblestones.
“Oh my God,” says Tracy. “Are you all right, Gabe?”
I’m amazed.
The beer has landed miles from the boy; how could he possibly be hurt? My beers, on the other hand, are lying on the cobbles, hissing and foaming. Three of the bottles are broken; another is terminal, its contents squirting out from under the cap.
“Jesus, Gabriel,” I say.
“Don’t say ‘Jesus’,” Tracy says. Put your tits away, I want to reply, but I don’t.
I feel a Gabriel lecture coming on about the importance of considering the possible results of one’s actions, but he pre-empts me. “Sorry, Dad, but I’m not, like, clairvoyant or something.”
I hold my bags out to Gabriel. He looks at me, at the bags, baffled.
“Take them, Gabe,” I tell him. Then I get down on a knee and a stump, scrape the broken glass into the remnants of the broken bag. I open the screw-cap of a leaking beer, run my finger over the neck to check for splinters, and take a drink. It tastes flat and warm and strangely sour, so I empty it onto Barry’s driveway and add the bottle to the contents of the broken bag. Tracy looks on, a curl on her upper lip. I take the bag with the Chivas back from Gabriel, add the remaining beers, hook the bag over a wrist, stand up, make for the house.
Why we do this thing of carting stuff to each other’s homes, dragging these coals to Newcastle when we know that the hosts are unlikely to run out of beer, wine, soft drinks, chips – not tonight, not ever? I don’t know.
Petitely plump Lynn opens the door, gives us each a hug. I’m surprised, as always, at how well her body fits into mine. Her dark hair hangs loose, smells fresh. If she’s wearing make-up, I can’t see it. She takes the dripping bag from me, looks up with raised eyebrows.
“Don’t ask,” I say.
The La Vitas are already here, along with two other couples we don’t know. The Unknowns. Tony La Vita, third-generation Italian, second-level friend, now an A-list pizza chain king, together with his beautiful, terminally sad-faced wife, Julie. Barry takes the bags of alcohol from Gabriel, deposits their contents into the fridge and hands me a beer. I can feel the Unknown couples’ eyes on me. I know their expressions without looking at them: they’re slightly doe-eyed with sympathy, eyebrows and corners of mouths turned down. I know that each of them is burning to know how the leg was lost. I know they’re dying to make empathetic noises; they’re hungry for the details, hungry to mourn its loss vicariously, craving the story of the gore and the pain that wasn’t theirs, hoping that it never will be.
There are kids, of course, small ones and middle-sized ones, some in the pool, others watching the Disney Channel, the smallest tearing about, sensing an extraordinary night and testing to see what they can get away with. One of the boys hurtles around a corner and sets an expensive-looking vase rocking on its base. An Unknown mother shoots out an arm, sun-browned, gold-bangled, to stabilise it.
“Daniel! Grow up!” she hisses at the boy.
Be careful what you wish for, I want to warn her, but I don’t.
Shortly after Gabriel was born he contracted some kind of rotavirus, as young kids do, and I’d bitched about the lack of sleep to my parents. “Just remember. Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” my father responded. My epigram-laden, pipe-smoking father.
I glance at the growing problem that is my son. Peter hasn’t appeared yet, and Gabriel is leaning on the kitchen counter scowling into a glass of Coke. He looks like he is trying to compress his long frame into a small one, stands hunched, slouching, his shoulders rounded and his head hanging forward off his neck like a blotchy and too-heavy fruit. He looks on the verge of losing all control of his bones and his joints, and for a moment I wonder if this infrastructure might give way altogether, collapsing into a handful of pick-up-sticks that rattle to the floor. I want to berate him because a son should be someone who makes his father proud, is supposed to be a being who holds his head high and confronts the world face-on and is thrilled at the young blood that flows through his veins and the growing strength of his four intact limbs and his untarnished lungs and unscarred liver that process the clean air and the good food and the pure juices (Coke aside) that find their way into his body. I want him to be shaking a dry, firm hand with the adults. Want to watch him introduce himself with a smile and a strong voice and then stand around and join the banter with the confidence and wit that should be his. But Gabriel has nothing to give them, nothing to gain from them; to hide his thoughts in the sibilant bubbles of Coke is at worst a brief distraction, at best a temporary tactic for invisibility.
Meanwhile, Tracy has intercepted the aw-shame looks that the Unknown couples have been casting my way. She’s very good at this, distracts them with her oft-proven techniques, which include looking the women up and down sniffily and shoving her cleavage under the noses of the men. Barry drags us all away to the deck that looks out onto the galaxy of lights that define the Flats below, the lights of the little people, stretching to the black void of the ocean beyond. He has made a fire in a large steel contraption at the end of the deck. When its flames have calmed to coal,