A couple of weeks after embarking on his self-imposed regime George got a phone call from Brian.
“Gail’s mother’s here for a fortnight. So I thought I’d head down to the cottage. Make sure the builders have done their job. Wondered if you fancied joining me. It’ll be a bit primitive. Camp beds, sleeping bags. But you’re a hardy chap.”
Ordinarily he would not have wanted to spend more than a couple of hours in his brother’s company. But there was something boyish and excited in his voice. He sounded like a nine-year-old eager to show off his new tree house. And the thought of a long train journey, windy walks along the Helford and pints around the fire in the local pub was rather appealing.
He could take a sketchbook. And that big Peter Ackroyd Jean had given him for Christmas.
“I’ll come.”
28
Jamie vacuumed the carpets and cleaned the bathroom. He thought briefly about washing the cushion covers but, frankly, Tony wouldn’t notice if they were covered in mud.
The following afternoon he cut short the visit to the Creighton Avenue flats, rang the office to say he could be contacted on his mobile, then went home via Tesco’s.
Salmon, then strawberries. Enough to show he’d made an effort but not enough to make him feel too fat for sex. He put a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge and a vase of tulips on the dining table.
He felt stupid. He was getting worked up about losing Katie, and doing nothing to hang on to the most important person in his life.
He and Tony should be living together. He should be coming home to lit windows and the sound of unfamiliar music. He should be lying in bed on Saturday mornings, smelling bacon and hearing the clink of crockery through the wall.
He was going to take Tony to the wedding. All that bollocks about provincial bigotry. It was himself he was scared of. Getting old. Making choices. Being committed.
It would be ghastly. Of course it would be ghastly. But it didn’t matter what the neighbors thought. It didn’t matter if Mum fussed over Tony like a lost son. It didn’t matter if his father tied himself in knots over bedroom arrangements. It didn’t matter if Tony insisted on a slow snog to Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady.”
He wanted to share his life with Tony. The good stuff and the crap stuff.
He took a deep breath and felt, for several seconds, as if he was standing not on the pine floor of his kitchen but on some deserted Scottish headland, the surf thundering and the wind in his hair. Noble. Taller.
He went upstairs and showered and felt the remains of something dirty being rinsed away and sent spinning down the plughole.
He was having a shirt-selection crisis when the doorbell rang. He plumped for the faded orange denim and went downstairs.
When he opened the door his first thought was that Tony had received some bad news. About his father, perhaps.
“What’s the matter?”
Tony took a deep breath.
“Hey. Come inside,” said Jamie.
Tony didn’t move. “We need to talk.”
“Come inside and talk.”
Tony didn’t want to come inside. He suggested they walk to the park at the end of the road. Jamie grabbed his keys.
It happened next to the little red bin for dog shit.
Tony said, “It’s over.”
“What?”
“Us. It’s over.”
“But—”
“You don’t really want to be with me,” said Tony.
“I do,” said Jamie.
“OK. Maybe you want to be with me. But you don’t want to be with me enough. This stupid wedding. It’s made me realize…Jesus, Jamie. Am I just not good enough for your parents? Or am I not good enough for you?”
“I love you.” Why was this happening now? It was so unfair, so idiotic.
Tony looked at him. “You don’t know what love is.”
“I do.” He sounded like Jacob.
Tony’s expression didn’t change. “Loving someone means taking the risk that they might fuck up your nicely ordered little life. And you don’t want to fuck up your nicely ordered little life, do you?”
“Have you met someone else?”
“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”
He should have explained. The salmon. The vacuuming. The words were there in his head. He just couldn’t get them out. He hurt too much. And there was something sickly and comforting about the thought of going back to the house alone, smashing the tulips from the table, then retiring to the sofa to drink the bottle of wine on his own.
“I’m sorry, Jamie. I really am. You’re a nice guy.” Tony put his hands into his pockets to show that there would be no final embrace. “I hope you find someone who makes you feel that way.”
He turned and walked off.
Jamie stood in the park for several minutes, then went back to the flat, smashed the tulips from the table, uncorked the wine, took it to the sofa and wept.
29
Ray turned to Katie in bed and said, “Are you sure you want to marry me?”
“Of course I want to marry you.”
“You’d tell me if you changed your mind, yeh?”
“Jeez, Ray,” said Katie. “What’s all this about?”
“You wouldn’t go through with it just because we’d told everyone?”
“Ray—”
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“Why are you talking like this all of a sudden?”
“Do you love me like you loved Graham?”
“No, actually, I don’t,” said Katie.
For a second she could see real pain on his face. “I was infatuated with Graham. I thought he was God’s gift. I couldn’t see straight. And when I found out what he was really like…” She put her hand on the side of Ray’s face. “I know you. I know all the things that are wonderful about you. I know all your faults. And I still want to marry you.”
“So, what are my faults?”
This wasn’t her job. He was the one who was meant to do the consoling. “Come here.” She pulled his head onto her chest.
“I love you so much.” He sounded tiny.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to ditch you at the altar.”
“I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.”
“It’s wedding nerves.” She ran her hand over the little hairs on his upper arm. “You remember Emily?”
“Yeh?”
“Threw up in the vestry.”
“Shit.”
“They had to send her up the aisle with this massive bouquet to hide the stain. Barry’s dad assumed the smell was Roddy. You know, after their stag night.”
They fell asleep and were woken at four by Jacob crying, “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy…”
Ray started to get out of bed but she insisted on going.
When she got to his room Jacob was still half asleep, trying to curl away from a big orange diarrhea stain in the center of the bed.
“Come here, little squirrel.” She lifted him to his feet and his sleepy head flopped against her shoulder.
“It’s all…all sort of…It’s wet.”
“I know. I know.” She carefully peeled off his pajama trousers, rolling them up so that the mess was on the inside then throwing them into the hallway. “Let’s clean you up, Baby Biscuits.” She grabbed a nappy bag and a fresh nappy and pack of wet wipes from the drawer and gently cleaned his bottom.
She put the fresh nappy on, extracted a fresh pair of pajama trousers from the basket and guided his clumsy feet into the legs. “There. That feels better, doesn’t it.”
She flicked the Winnie the Pooh duvet over to check that it was clean, then bundled it onto the carpet. “You lie down for a second while I sort the bed out.”
Jacob cried as she lowered him to the floor. “Don’t want to…let me…” But when she laid his head on the duvet, his thumb slipped into his mouth and his eyes closed again.
She tied the nappy bag and threw it into the bin. She stripped the bed, threw
the dirty sheets into the hallway and turned the mattress over. She grabbed a new set of sheets from the cupboard and pressed them to her face. God, it was lovely, the furriness of thick, worn cotton and the scent of washing powder. She made the bed, tucking the edges in tight so that it was smooth and flat.
She plumped the pillow, bent over and hoisted Jacob up.
“My tummy hurts.”
She held him on her lap. “We’ll get you some Calpol in a minute.”
“Pink medicine,” said Jacob.
She wrapped her arms around him. She didn’t get enough of this. Not when he was conscious. Thirty seconds at most. Then it was helicopters and bouncy-bouncy on the sofa. True, it made her proud, seeing him in a circle listening to Bella read a book at nursery, or watching him talk to other children in the playground. But she missed the way he was once a part of her body, the way she could make everything better just by folding herself around him. Even now she could picture him leaving home, the distance opening up already, her baby becoming his own little person.
“I miss my daddy.”
“He’s asleep upstairs.”
“My real daddy,” said Jacob.
She put her hand around his head and kissed his hair. “I miss him too, sometimes.”
“But he’s not coming back.”
“No. He’s not coming back.”
Jacob was crying quietly.
“But I’ll never leave you. You know that, don’t you.” She wiped the snot from his nose with the arm of her T-shirt and rocked him.
She looked up at the Bob the Builder height chart and the sailing boat mobile turning silently in the half dark. Somewhere under the floor a water pipe clanked.
Jacob stopped crying. “Can I have a polar bear drink tomorrow?”
She pushed the hair out of his eyes. “I’m not sure whether you’ll be fit for nursery tomorrow.” His eyes moistened. “But if you are, we’ll get a polar bear drink on the way home, OK?”
“All right.”
“But if you have a polar bear drink, you won’t be able to have any pudding for supper. Is that a deal?”
“That’s a deal.”
“Now, let’s get you some Calpol.”
She laid him down on the clean sheets and got the bottle and the syringe from the bathroom.
“Open wide.”
He was almost asleep now. She squirted the medicine into his mouth, wiped a dribble from his chin with the tip of her finger and licked it clean.
She kissed his cheek. “I have to go back to bed now, little boy.”
But he didn’t want to let go of her hand. And she didn’t want him to let go. She sat watching him sleep for a few minutes, then lay down beside him.
This made up for everything, the tiredness, the tantrums, the fact that she hadn’t read a novel in six months. This was how Ray made her feel.
This was how Ray was meant to make her feel.
She stroked Jacob’s head. He was a million miles away, dreaming of raspberry ice cream and earth-moving machinery and the Cretaceous period.
The next thing she knew it was morning and Jacob was running in and out of the room in his Spider-Man outfit.
“Come on, love.” Ray pushed the hair away from her face. “There’s a fry-up waiting for you downstairs.”
After nursery she and Jacob got home late on account of having stopped to get the polar bear drink, and Ray was already back from the office.
“Graham rang,” he said.
“What about?”
“Didn’t tell me.”
“Anything important?” asked Katie.
“Didn’t ask. Said he’d try again later.”
One mysterious call from Graham a day was pretty much Ray’s limit. So, after putting Jacob to bed, she used the phone in the bedroom.
“It’s Katie.”
“Hey, you rang back.”
“So, what’s the big secret?”
“No big secret, I’m just worried about you. Which didn’t seem the kind of message to leave with Ray.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t in terribly good shape when you turned up the other evening, what with my back and everything.”
“Are you talking to anyone?” asked Graham.
“You mean, like, professionally?”
“No, I mean just talking.”
“Of course I’m talking,” said Katie.
“You know what I mean.”
“Graham. Look—”
“If you want me to butt out,” said Graham, “I’ll butt out. And I don’t want to cast any aspersions on Ray. I really don’t. I just wondered whether you wanted to meet up for a coffee and a chat. We’re still friends, right? OK, maybe we’re not friends. But you seemed like you might need to get stuff off your chest. And I don’t necessarily mean bad stuff.” He paused. “Also, I really enjoyed talking to you the other night.”
God knows what had happened to him. She hadn’t heard him sounding this solicitous in years. If it was jealousy it didn’t sound like jealousy. Perhaps the woman with the swimming cap had broken his heart.
She stopped herself. It was an unkind thought. People changed. He was being kind. And he was right. She wasn’t talking enough.
“I’m finishing early on Wednesday. I could see you for an hour before I pick Jacob up.”
“Brilliant.”
30
Toothbrush. Flannel. Shaver. Woolly jumper.
George started packing a suitcase, then decided that it was not quite outward bound enough. He dug Jamie’s old rucksack out of the roof space. It was a little scuffed, but rucksacks were meant to be scuffed.
Three pairs of underpants. Two vests. The Ackroyd. Gardening trousers.
This was his kind of holiday.
They had tried it once. Snowdonia in 1980. A desperate attempt on his part to remain earthbound after the horrors of the flight to Lyon the previous year. And perhaps if he had had stouter children or a wife less addicted to her creature comforts it might have worked. There was nothing wrong with rain. It was part and parcel of getting back in touch with nature. And it had let up most evenings so that they could sit on camping mats outside the tents cooking supper on the Primus stove. But any suggestion of his that they go to Skye or the Alps in subsequent years had been met with the rejoinder, “Why don’t we go camping in North Wales?” and gales of unsympathetic laughter.
Jean dropped him off in the town center just after nine and he went straight into Ottakar’s where he purchased the Ordnance Survey Land-ranger map number 204, Truro, Falmouth and Surrounding Area. He then popped into Smiths and bought himself a selection of pencils (2B, 4B and 6B), a sketchpad and a good rubber. He was going to get a pencil sharpener when he remembered that the outdoor shop was only a couple of streets away. He went in and treated himself to a Swiss Army knife. He could sharpen his pencils with that, and be prepared to whittle sticks and remove stones from horses’ hooves should the need arise.
He arrived at the station with fifteen minutes to spare, picked up his ticket and sat on the platform.
An hour to Kings Cross. Hammersmith and City line to Paddington. Four and a half hours to Truro. Twenty minutes to Falmouth. Then a taxi. Assuming the seat booking worked between Paddington and Truro and he didn’t find himself squatting on the rucksack outside the toilet, he could get a couple of hundred pages read.
Shortly before the train arrived he remembered that he had not packed his steroid cream.
Not that it mattered. It was a treatment for eczema. Eczema was a trivial thing. He could be covered in the stuff and it wouldn’t be a problem.
The phrase “covered in the stuff” and the attendant image were not ones he should have allowed to enter his head.
He looked up at the monitor to see how long it was before his train arrived but saw, instead, a disfigured tramp sitting on the adjacent bench. The near side of his face was composed entirely of scab, as if someone had recently worked it over with a broken bottle, or as if some kind of growth was eating its way through t
he side of his head.
He tried to look away. He could not. It was like vertigo. The way the drop seemed to be calling you.
Think of something else.
He twisted his head downward and forced himself to concentrate on five gray ovals of chewing gum pressed into the tarmac between his toes.
“I took a trip on a train and I thought about you.” He sung the words quietly under his breath. “I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you.”
The disfigured tramp got to his feet.
Dear God in heaven, he was coming this way.
George kept his head down. “Two or three cars parked under the stars, a winding stream, moon shining down…”
The tramp walked past George and zigzagged slowly down the platform.
He was very drunk. Drunk enough to zigzag onto the line. Too drunk to climb back off the line. George looked up. The train was arriving in one minute. He pictured the tramp keeling over the concrete lip, the squeal of brakes, the wet thump and the body being shunted up the rails, the wheels slicing it like ham.
He had to stop the tramp. But stopping the tramp would involve touching the tramp, and George did not want to touch the tramp. The wound. The smell.
No. He did not have to stop the tramp. There were other people on the platform. There were railway employees. The tramp was their responsibility.
If he moved round the station building to the other platform he would not have to see the tramp dying. But if he moved to the other platform he might miss the train. On the other hand, if the tramp died under the train it would be delayed. George would then miss the connection to Truro and have to sit next to the toilet for four and a half hours.
Dr. Barghoutian had misdiagnosed Katie’s appendicitis. Said it was stomachache. Three hours later they were whisked through casualty and Katie was on an operating table.
How on earth had George forgotten?
Dr. Barghoutian was a moron.
He was massaging an inappropriate chemical cream into a cancer. A steroid cream. Steroids made tissue grow faster and stronger. He was massaging a cream which made tissue grow faster and stronger directly into a tumor.