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‘Don’t provoke me, shiny-arse,’ he said.
I laughed and started to roll down my sleeve. ‘More chicken than Colonel Sanders…’
He was on his feet, rolling his sleeve right up to his shoulder. I had said the ‘c’ word. There was a tattoo of barbed wire around his biceps that had blurred with the years. We pulled the table that sat across my bed between us. As we placed our elbows on it, we could feel it sagging. It wasn’t really built for arm wrestling.
‘Bit springy,’ Keith said.
‘Stop moaning,’ I said. ‘Best out of three?’
He was on the verge of beating me for the second time when Lara walked into the room, carrying flowers and a portable DVD player. Her smile faded as she watched Keith force my arm down on to the little hospital table with a triumphant roar from him and a yelp of pain and defeat from me. Keith only stopped laughing when he saw my wife.
Lara stood in the doorway of the hospital room, holding the flowers and the DVD player, and staring at us as if we were a pair of big stupid kids. I looked at Keith, his meaty head hung low, and felt like blurting, ‘Best out of five, Granddad?’
But I stifled my anarchic laughter, and said nothing.
five (#ulink_6563b335-2db9-5896-96b8-7c58931fd83e)
There was a soft knock on the bedroom door and Ruby came in with a look of shy delight, carrying a breakfast tray.
I blinked back the fog of sleep as the smell of fried bacon filled the room. I could have sworn I had been awake all night long, fretting about how much time the doctors had given me, but I suppose I must have slept just before I was due to wake up. Ruby placed the tray on the empty side of the bed, where her mother slept. Orange juice. A still steaming mug of tea. Bacon. Two fried eggs. An incinerated sausage. ‘Welcome home. I cooked your favourite,’ she smiled.
Lara came into the room, already dressed, rubbing some sort of cream on her hands. The smell of my wife’s hand cream mixed with the smell of my daughter’s breakfast. They did not mix very well. We all looked at the tray, Ruby’s smile slowly fading.
‘That looks really good, darling,’ Lara said briskly. ‘But your father’s not meant to eat –’
‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, cutting her off as I snatched up the knife and fork. I grinned at my daughter and her face brightened. ‘You’re right. My favourite. Best meal of the day.’
Ruby frowned at the plate. ‘The sausage is a bit…’
‘Looks like a good sausage,’ I said, sawing into it.
‘Sausages are difficult,’ Ruby said. ‘Because they’re so thick.’
I nodded, not looking at Lara. But I could sense her folding her arms and choosing her words and getting ready to restore order. I didn’t need to look at her face to know what I would see there. And of course she was right. But she was also completely and totally wrong.
‘Any brown sauce?’ I asked, spearing my cremated banger.
‘Ah,’ Ruby laughed. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’ And she went off to get the brown sauce. Daddy’s Sauce, they used to call it when I was her age.
I looked at Lara as I chewed on my sausage. She smiled thinly at me. It was difficult for her. I knew she had my best interests at heart. When she spoke it sounded like the voice of reason in a screaming nuthouse. Calm, rational, quietly infuriated.
‘Have you been listening at all to these doctors? Have you heard a single thing they’ve said? Do you really want to clog up your arteries with the same old junk that you’ve been –’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, gulping down the badly burned banger. It left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But the bacon looked good. Tender, juicy.
‘It’s not fine. It’s stupid. It’s self-destructive. It’s just…’ She shook her head, as if she was giving up on me. But I knew she would never give up on me. ‘Is it because you’re afraid of hurting her feelings? Her feelings will be a lot more hurt if…’
She turned her face away.
‘Lara,’ I said, ‘come on.’ But she didn’t respond as I morosely sawed a piece off the bacon. Ruby came back with the brown sauce in one hand and little transparent shakers in the other.
‘Salt and pepper,’ she said. ‘I forgot that too.’
Lara turned on the pair of us. She put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder.
‘Your dad can’t eat this stuff, Ruby.’ Her words were gentle but insistent. ‘He can’t put salt on his food. Never again. Do you understand? He might as well put rat poison on his meals.’
‘Come on,’ I said. This was too much. ‘Salt’s not quite the same as rat poison.’
She gave me a frosty look. ‘You’re right, George. Rat poison would probably be healthier. There’s more fibre in it.’ She gave Ruby’s shoulder a gentle shake. ‘It’s great you made a meal for your father to welcome him home. It’s such a lovely thing to do. But, darling, you have to understand that things have changed.’ She looked at my breakfast plate and sighed. ‘He can’t eat this kind of stuff any more.’ The hand she had around our daughter dropped to her side. ‘It will kill him,’ she said quietly.
And I laughed. I had stopped eating, but now I began again. It was a bit cold by this time, and it got even colder when I smothered it in brown sauce. ‘One big breakfast is not going to kill me,’ I said, really tucking in.
‘You don’t want the salt, I guess,’ Ruby said, clutching the transparent pots to her chest, as if I might suddenly try to snatch them away from her.
‘Not necessary,’ I said, picking up a slice of toast, and feeling the slither of lavishly applied butter running across my wrist.
My wife and daughter stared at me as I jauntily consumed my big breakfast. As if they were obliged to watch this ritual. As if it was important.
As if they were witnessing the condemned man eating his last meal.
Ruby was in her bedroom.
I knocked, of course, and knocked again until I was given a half-hearted invitation to enter. There she was, at her desk, her head bowed before the computer screen as if in prayer.
‘Thanks for my breakfast,’ I said.
She nodded in response, not looking at me. I looked around for somewhere to sit. There was only her single bed and the chair.
‘You all right?’ I said.
She nodded again, her brown hair falling over her face like a curtain.
‘Can you shove over a bit?’ I said, and she automatically shuffled her bum sideways on her chair. I am a big man but she had always been a skinny kid and there was still just about room enough for two of us on that chair. Luckily she is built like her mother, the dancer, rather than her father, the fat bastard.
‘Something bad is going to happen,’ she said, so quietly that it felt like she was saying it to herself. Because she did not look at me.
I touched her shoulder, patted it. We were so close that I could smell the shampoo she had used in the shower.
‘Nothing bad is going to happen,’ I said. ‘I promise you, Ruby.’
She shook her head, not believing a word of it. ‘Something bad. Something very bad. It’s coming.’
‘Look,’ I said, really needing her to believe me. ‘I have great doctors. I am on the best medication that they can give me. And I feel good.’ I leaned back in the chair and looked at her profile. Her mother’s face, but with hints of me – a big forehead, the long upper lip – that somehow looked better on her than they ever did on me. ‘I’ll be fine, angel.’
And she looked at me.
‘Not you, Dad,’ she said. ‘The planet.’
When the house was finally empty I went into the living room to retrieve the pack of cigarettes that I had hidden.
I was grinning like a maniac, all pleased with myself, because I was finally about to get the hit I was craving, and because the pack was secreted in such a good place – behind the coals of the fake fire that we had at the bottom of our chimney. Nobody would ever look back there.
My smile didn’t fade until I stuck my hand behind the coals, felt around the gas pipe and fished out my fags, seeing the tiny holes that someone had drilled through the pack, destroying what was inside.
Whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to take out the cigarettes. They had just pushed a pin, or whatever it was, into every corner of the packet, the way a magician shoves swords into his magic box, in a careful, all-encompassing frenzy.
Because they didn’t want me to die.
I took out one useless cigarette and examined it. It sagged as if in submission, lovely golden tobacco spilling out of its pierced white paper. I tossed the pack in the rubbish bin and went upstairs, wondering who cared that much.
The floor of Ruby’s bedroom was scattered with clothes, schoolbooks, and random bits of technology. Tiny headphones. A battery charger. An electric toothbrush, still vibrating. I picked it up, turned it off and placed it on her desk. The movement jolted her computer to life, and a screen-saver appeared of our blue planet seen from space.
You could still glimpse the earlier stages of her childhood on the walls. Scraps of posters of grinning actors and long-disbanded boy bands were just visible beyond the more recent additions of the planet in flames, or alternatively, in deep-freeze. BECOME PART OF THE SOLUTION, one of them urged. I stared at the slogan for quite a while.
Then I had a little look in her desk, and there was more archaeological digging to be done in there. Did she keep her High School Musical ruler and her Barbie pencil sharpener for nostalgic reasons, or just because she couldn’t be bothered to throw them out? I had a good rummage around but there was nothing that could obviously be used to destroy her dear old dad’s emergency fags.
So I thought it was probably my wife.
A pin, I thought. A brooch. Something sharp. She kept her jewellery in the bedside table on her side of the bed. There was not much. Just a blue Tiffany box with the bits and pieces that I had bought her over the years. A gold charm bracelet with two lonely heart-shaped charms, one that said IT’S A BOY and the other that said IT’S A GIRL. And there was a string of pearls with a broken clasp. And a silver heart on a chain. So nothing in there.
But there was another box of jewels that had belonged to her mother. I didn’t feel good about looking in there, but I looked anyway, suspecting that the deed could have been done with the pin on one of those old-fashioned brooches that women used to wear.
It was a red plastic box with this sort of carpet material on top, in the design of some roses. Even I could see it was corny.
The lid was half-broken, and inside were indeed lots of old-fashioned brooches. There was one in the shape of a butterfly, another made out of some greyish metal, pewter maybe, with a picture of a deer looking over its shoulder, and another featuring a gold model of Concorde. This last one had a long sharp pin, but somehow I knew that Lara wouldn’t use her mother’s jewellery to destroy my cigarettes. There were also three rings. An engagement ring with the tiniest diamond I had ever seen. A plain gold wedding band. And what they used to call an eternity ring.
I closed the box, taking care with the damaged lid, and I put it back where I had found it, feeling the eyes of my wife’s dead parents on me. And then I went to my son’s room.
It didn’t look like a teenager’s room. It looked like the room of a forty-nine-year-old accountant. Nothing on the floor. A neat stack of schoolwork on his desk. His computer turned off. Tomorrow’s white shirt waiting on a wire hanger on the handle of the wardrobe. Bed made with military precision. A small bookcase with neat rows of paperbacks. I pulled one out and flicked through it. A phrase leapt out at me, stopped me in my tracks. The ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. I looked at the cover. Blue skies. A fifties car. Two men, smiling, their faces half in shadow. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I put it back, noticing the Swiss army knife sitting on top of the books. I began pulling it open.
It had a tiny screwdriver and assorted thin blades and sharp points that could be used for removing a stone from a horse’s hoof, or for destroying someone’s emergency cigarettes.
He really loved me.
The little bastard.
Then I saw the hat. It was hanging on the back of the door, with the leather jacket that Rufus wore when he wasn’t wearing his school blazer. It was a woollen hat, but with a little rim at the front, so it looked like the kind of hat that a jockey would wear. Except it was made of wool, so it wouldn’t be much good if you fell off a horse.
I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked pretty good.
Raffish. Devil-may-care. And younger. It definitely made me look youngish. Young.
The rest of my clothes didn’t really match the jockey’s hat. My baggy polo shirt. My dead man’s chinos. Socks the colour of pewter. They were shown up by the hat. They were humiliated by the hat. They looked old and tired. Over and done. Ready to be chucked out. I was going to have to do something about my wardrobe.
Then I heard a key in the front door and I quickly headed for the stairs, smiling innocently as Lara came in. I helped her carry the shopping bags into the kitchen. She hugged me and kissed me and made me a cup of tea.
‘Why are you wearing that ridiculous hat?’ she said. When we had finished our tea she took me out for a very gentle walk in the park. As if I were a toddler, or a dog.
Or as if I might break.
In my dream I was sleeping by the side of a woman who was wanted by a million men. This phenomenal woman, this fabulous creature, this prize.
And when I awoke it was true.
‘George,’ Lara said. ‘No, George.’
But I would not be denied. She knew that look. Even in the darkness of the early hours, with only a drop of moonlight creeping around the curtains, she recognised that look in my eyes.
Cunning, amused, slightly bashful.
The look of love.
I edged across to her side of the bed and took her in my arms. I kissed her on the mouth. I knew that mouth and I had missed it. I had missed all that side of things, I realised. Our mouths did not want to let go. They fit well. Somewhere Lara’s mother radar searched for the sound of our children.
But Rufus was out and Ruby was sleeping.
‘George, George,’ she said, offering one last chance of a cooling-off period. ‘Are you sure that we should be doing this?’
I was sure.
Then she didn’t say anything else, not even my name, and we loved for the first time in months. And that would have been fine, that would have been great, that would have been enough, but then later we woke, or at least came halfway out of sleep long enough for another slower, easier, less desperate meeting.
And then – somebody pinch me – yet again when it was just before morning and the room was still full of night, and now the urgency of the first time was back again – and I mean both the first time that night and the first time ever. And it was the way it is at the very beginning, when you just can’t get enough of each other, when you can’t believe your luck, and the night goes by in a blissful blur of heat and exhausted sleep and gathering light.
I was sleeping on her side of the bed when she got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear the birds and see the white edge of dawn around the windows. I needed to sleep now, I really needed to sleep. I was worn to a frazzle. But I opened one eye when Lara came back and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘What?’ I said.
She touched my face. ‘Just checking.’ She smiled.
I rolled over to my side of the bed and closed my eyes.
‘Checking what?’ I said into the pillow.
That made her laugh.
‘Checking it’s you,’ she said.
six (#ulink_e1843ce3-7b8b-5516-8e5b-f03b49eb0e53)
A few people stared at us as we walked into the Autumn Grove Care Home. An old lady in a chair who had just been taken for a Sunday afternoon wheel around the park. Her middle-aged son and his two teenage children. A porter I didn’t recognise.
Then the woman on reception smiled and said hello, and they all looked away. But we got that all the time. My wife and I were one of those couples that people take a second look at, without ever really knowing why. But I knew why.
It was because we didn’t seem to fit.
Lara was so small and pretty, and she still had that dancer’s grace, that ease in her own body. Whereas I was so big and lumbering and, well, not exactly ugly, but my nose has been broken twice – once by a Friday-night drunk who threw a traffic bollard in my face, and the other time while we were rolling around on the pavement as I arrested him. It gave my face a bent, damaged look, as though there were a lot of miles on my clock and I was likely to fail my MOT. Actually, now I think about it, ugly is exactly the word.
