Blackheath E-Book

Adam Baron

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 475

Beschreibung

Holding a mirror up to contemporary gender politi and exposing the flaws and failures of so-called equal parenting, Blackheath is a moving and sharply comic tale of life-after-children, revealing the awful truth at the heart of modern family life: love is not enough. Amelia has everything: two perfect children, a successful husband who loves her, and a big house in London's affluent Blackheath. So why does she wake up one morning with a distaste for her daughter and an unexplained attraction to James, a dad she sees in the playground at drop off? James has everything: a happy marriage to poet and fellow academic Alice and two children they both adore, sharing the childcare and fitting it around their work commitments. James loves his children intensely, but caring for them during the week makes him feel like a failure, especially when the suited-up bankers and lawyers of Blackheath pass him on the school run, heading for the station and their real lives in the city. When his wife's star begins to rise, James is tempted back into his old career on the comedy circuit, looking for a way to cure his sense that something vital is missing. As the two couples' lives increasingly overlap, all four characters are thrown into turmoil, and the repercussions threaten to blow both families apart.

Leseprobe

Praise for Adam Baron

‘Fresh, honest, very funny, startlingly relevant. His is the male perspective on the modern female coven, its repressed ambivalence, its ambiguous sexuality, its deadly territories of parenting, school gate and domesticity; that he renders that perspective artistically, personally and politically with such wit and intellectual grace makes his novel a rare and complex commentary on contemporary middle class values. The great male American novelists have written passionately about domesticity, parenthood, marriage; there has been no English equivalent, just a hangdog pseudo-comic “dad” literature as disposable as it is dishonest. Adam’s book recalls Updike in his Rabbit years: sensual, involved, poetic, incorrect, and enthralling in its honesty.’

Rachel Cusk

 

‘Elegant, moving, intelligent and timely. A book by a man who understands women better than they understand themselves.’

Fay Weldon

 

‘Baron is a writer to watch.’

Sunday Telegraph

For F.V.F.

Contents

Praise for Adam BaronTitle PageDedication123456789101112131415161718192021222324AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

1

SHE FEELS NOTHING. There is an absence where love should be. A long, flat greyness. Another absence: guilt. For this is her daughter she is looking at. This pale, thin girl shovelling Cheerios, gabbing on about Mrs Friel and after-school club. Violin. Yet she feels no guilt at all for this lack of love, feels nothing in fact except relief. She stares as the girl finishes the startled little shapes and begins to spoon milk.

— Come on, she says. Someone says. Her. We’ll be late.

— It’s not even eight. We’ve got, like, an hour.

She doesn’t reply. Just gazes at the slim, naked-looking spoon her daughter leaves on the side of the bowl until the girl is standing there with her coat on.

— Mum! You’re not even dressed. What’s the matter with you?

In the enclosed, high-walled playground she looks around as though she’s never been there before. The children whirl like windblown litter. The adults cling in twos and threes, knots she’s been tangled in so often but shivers at today. Why? She frowns, watching as children touch base, remind, cajole, ask permission, while her daughter is lost amid the mêlée. She doesn’t care about this. She just wants to leave and she starts to do that but the crowd’s too thick, a last flood pouring through the playground gate as if getting to school is not something they do five days out of seven. She could push through but another thing stops her, the past like a raised sheet of glass. Reception. The very small ones, whom she hardly notices any more. They look like wind-up toys and their parents too are different. More focused, their energy heading down as they apply kisses like hats or scarves, faces riven with smiles, voices cut with chipper bonhomie. Did she feel like this with Niamh? Or, before, with Michael? That a piece of her flesh was about to be dragged off into some giant mincer? She turns, disconcerted, wanting now to see her own daughter and look inside for some echo. But the girl, in deep with the most tedious of her friends, is just hair, hands, too many limbs. Someone else’s child. The relief she feels now is total and she tries to leave again, though again she doesn’t make it.

She’s pushed back by a man. Another Reception father, late, blowing his cheeks out as he presses his child into the joggling line. And something happens, something light and startling… happens before she has even taken him in properly. She does that as the feeling grows, takes shape, firms itself inside her until she cannot pretend it is anything other than what it is.

She wants to fuck him.

It’s a simple thought. Clear and shiny, almost making her laugh. This man, two seconds old, she wants to fuck him or, more accurately, let him fuck her. He’s not tall – her height, though he’s handsome. Blond, cross-looking, leaping blue eyes and three-day stubble she can feel on the insides of her thighs. She stares at him, not worried he’ll see because he’s homed in on his kid, kneeling, making the boy laugh. When he stands she finds herself moving, doing so without thinking, which is so odd because she’s a person who, she knows, thinks far too much. She cuts through the Year One line as if it isn’t there.

— His bag, she says.

A moment. Face turning. He looks at her. Some grey in the stubble. Lips plump, a little like a woman’s. Saved by a jaw that’s firm and tight.

— I’m sorry?

— His bag. You’re holding it.

And he is. The green school bag he’s obviously carried there is still slung over his shoulder.

— Thanks. He laughs.

— My husband still does that. He gets home and I have to send him back if it’s book-change day.

— Thanks, the man repeats, and hands it down. Then the bell goes and the mess begins to straighten.

— What’s your name? she asks, pulling the man’s eyes back from his son. He’s reluctant, not wanting to miss a second of his boy. But he’s too polite not to turn to her.

— I’m James. Jim.

Her first disappointment. A dull name. Jim at uni, so swept by love of her he could barely move, three thrusts and come filling up her navel. But she smiles.

— Hello, James. Amelia. He’s new?

— Dom? This term. He tries to turn and look at the boy again but she fixes him, cool and casual, pretending not to notice his discomfort. Second intake. He was born in April…

— Michael was the same.

— Your son? He smiles now, relaxing. What year’s…?

— Now? He left – at real school now, as he calls it.

— So…?

— What am I doing here? She laughs. My daughter. She…

But for a second she cannot remember what year her daughter is in. Or, in fact, her name. She begins to stutter, about to make something up when the lines begin to move, as though a Dyson has started up. Reception is first and he does it, so un-English, just rips his eyes away from her. He shouts and waves until the line is out of sight, shifts to let another late child in, after which another woman takes him. Rachel Green, parent rep, hands waving like tethered birds as she talks to him about something they have clearly spoken of before. School clothes. PE kit. All of which spikes a sudden jealousy that swarms over her like a virus. It grips her belly with nausea, so lurching she can’t stop herself.

— I’ve got some, she says.

Their shoulders are turned from her. They’re in their own talk-configuration which they have to realign. It’s awkward but Rachel beams even brighter.

— Amelia! Niamh okay?

Niamh.

— Fine. Judith alright?

— Great, Rachel says, about to expand. Before she can, however, Amelia snaps her head back to James.

— Old school clothes. If you’re looking. Quite a lot. Michael’s old stuff.

— Oh.

— If you’d like it?

— If I’d…?

— Like it? Been meaning to bring it in for ages. Lots of sizes.

— Right. I mean yes. I’ll buy it from you, naturally.

— Nonsense. You may not even want it. Boys. They go through stuff. But some of it’ll be okay.

— Then thanks.

She smiles and nods but doesn’t go on. She wants Rachel Green away. She turns right back to her and grins into her over-made-up face until, awkward, she moves off to her dumpy daughter. When Amelia turns back to the man he looks uncertain. She ignores this and asks if he’s busy. Busy now. It startles him until she calms him with one of Rachel’s smiles, so full of wholesome mumminess he’s put right back at ease.

— Unless you’re running off to work. We’re just across the Heath. You could come and get them.

— I’m working at home today. Great, he says.

And they leave. She flashes another bright smile and receives one in return. As they exit the playground a voice calls out Mum! but she doesn’t look back.

Instead she leads the man up the Vale towards the flat expanse of grass that is Blackheath, where her children have had playtimes and sports days, Saturday football or cricket for as long as she can remember. Her house is on the far edge and she heads towards the windows, black as skull sockets, still chatting about clothes, the expense of them, what a waste it would be to buy them new. Again he protests that he wants to pay but again she tells him no, that a lot were given by other parents; that’s the way it works. She also insists that if there are any he feels are too worn he needn’t take them. All the while she is filled with astonishment at what she is doing, bringing this man back to her home. To fuck him. Astonishment too to hear the words coming out of her mouth, this talk of Heath trainers for summer and windcheaters with the logo on. For there are no clothes. She took them to the summer fair last year, something she is sure Rachel Green remembered.

— Coffee? she asks.

He’s standing in her kitchen. This man. James. He’s looking around and the first thing she can tell is that his house is not as big as hers. Something in the way he checks it out, not with overt jealousy, just the way he seems to notice and assess it. Unless he’s an estate agent. But he’s not, and it’s not the work-at-home comment that tells her. She couldn’t want to fuck an estate agent. After fifteen years of not wanting to fuck anyone but her husband. She wouldn’t have found herself wanting this with such certainty, before she’d even seen him properly.

— So what do you do… James?

— I’m an academic.

She looks for irony. Finds none.

— Right. What in?

— English.

— A professor?

— One day. Doctor.

— Doctor Jim. Like a picture book.

— Ha. Not sure three-year-olds would be interested in a character who spends half his life in the British Library.

He has spoken. Opened a small flap of himself, like the ones Michael and Niamh used to piggle open with tiny fingers. The picture beneath is one she likes. Funny, self-deprecating. Confident though, getting over her big house. She sticks a bullet in the Nespresso machine but instantly regrets it. Just as she knew he was not an estate agent, she knows he’s not a Nespresso man. He’s got one of those cinchwaisted stovetop things with burn marks up the side. She knows this like she knows her own name.

— They’re upstairs, she says, brightly.

Not her room. Can’t be. Not hers and Richard’s. She’s been taken out of her life, something that happened before she set eyes on this man. In the night perhaps, her moorings cut by some demon? She doesn’t know, just woke up like this as if from a dream. Or into one. She’ll think about it later, do the wondering, though she knows it’s a fact, a done thing she can’t deny. Not this nor any of the emotions ganging up to get inside her. But she hasn’t drifted away completely. Not in their bed, her novel spined, Richard’s pyjamas stuffed beneath the pillow. The spare room will be fine, though the mattress is springy. Will he mind, when he’s going over it in his head as she knows men do, replaying her tits, her arse? Will it occur to him that, as well as her two-kid belly, the bed could have been a touch firmer?

— A spare room, he says. What I’d give. Though my in-laws would be in it all the time.

— Tell me. Not that I don’t like them. Sometimes wish we’d never told them about it, though. Pretended it’s a cupboard.

— A loft conversion, he says, somewhat randomly. But we’re in a conservation area.

She begins to rummage in the built-in wardrobes.

After a decent interval on all fours, pushing boxes around, taking things out, putting them back, she emerges. Stands and winces.

— I’m really sorry.

— For…?

And she nearly comes out with this phrase: I haven’t shaved my armpits. She nearly says that right out, just throws it into the air, which would be it, wouldn’t it? Bridges burned. He’s looking at her quizzically and she nearly does it, but instead she explains that she thought the clothes would be there.

— Richard.

— I thought you said Michael.

— My husband. He was clearing out. I just remembered. He could have put them in the garage. He probably has but where they’ll be…? I could call and ask him but he has meetings in the mornings and never answers his phone so…

— It doesn’t matter. Another time. Just let me know.

And then they’re just standing there. Two people in a room. Looking at each other. The bed to the left of them, so wide and still and empty. So indecent as beds always seem to her, glimpsed through the doors of other people’s houses. Does he know? Has he guessed? Less than a second has gone by but she thinks he must have. He’s still got his coat on. Only then does she realise that. A Barbour, but one of the trendy ones in black. Keep it on, she thinks. While you fuck me.

His phone rings.

It is, of course, his wife. He pulls the phone out and she feels her lips part, aware that this is when she’ll find out if he knows what this is. What’s happening here. He smiles and turns a little in on himself. The smile grows as he chats with a casual openness that tells her that he does not know, that he has no idea, that the sign please fuck me that’s pinned to her forehead is invisible to him. She watches as he answers questions about a doctor’s appointment, then a nursery, recognising the name. Which tells her where he lives. She pictures the woman on the other end and can only know for certain one thing: she’s younger. Nothing else.

— Getting clothes for Dom. She’s… the needle jumps and she knows he’s forgotten her name… a woman from St Saviour’s, only she can’t find them. Really kind. I have but she won’t take anything. I’ll tell her. Bye.

And he hangs up. She smiles and walks past him, back down the stairs, feeling his eyes on her back as she follows, knowing, actually, that she’s almost certainly imagining that. He’s probably looking at the landing space. She fires up the Nespresso machine and they drink the coffee, on which he makes no comment, though he does talk about his wife and his children, his house and his work, doing so because she asks him detailed questions. Not that she cares about or even listens to the answers. She just wants him to be there. Not leave, though he does that eventually, extricating himself from her like a silent but very determined escapologist. She closes the door behind him and then runs upstairs to the spare room window, wondering if she was right. And she was. That nursery is in Greenwich and he said he walked there in the morning. She watches him stride that way across the grass until the distance scrubs him out.

Downstairs again she picks up his coffee mug. Stares at the place his lips have touched. She shakes her head and then notices her daughter’s bowl which, for some reason, is still on the table. She cleared the rest away that morning but not that. The spoon is still there, bowed upward, a few drops of yellowing milk collected in it. She leaves it, goes over to the sink. She washes his mug up and then dries it, before putting it away in the cupboard.

 

She’s back. Time has passed, though not a day. A day is something you can expand into, a space in which to set out. Not the shrivelled zone between nine and three-thirty, the room with no windows, the ceiling always moving down to crush her. She walks into the playground, early for the first time in years. Self-conscious as she heads to one of the chess tables near the back wall, as if everyone who sees her will know what she is doing there.

Which one will be his? Earlier, she paid no attention to the kid. Will she be able to guess? When Mrs Mason leads Reception out she looks at the first and the boy would fit. She begins to think she’s right but then comes one so blond, with such utter blue eyes, that there can’t be any mistake. She blinks, unable to pull her gaze from him, just as she wasn’t able earlier, with his father. The demeanour is similar: a little set apart, a little too serious for that age. Or any. She pushes herself up and moves forward, wanting a clearer glimpse, to see the moment they reconnect. But a greater surprise is waiting for her. The space fills and she edges through, relief and recognition lighting the faces of the children whose parents are already there. She turns, looking for him, amazed when the blond boy laughs and launches himself from the wall into the arms of a woman. Nanny? Not if he’s an academic and anyway the glee is far too great, wrenching open even this considered child. So this is her. The phone person. It has to be, though her hair is wrong. Dark, nearly black. When did you ever see a blond man like that with a woman with curly black hair? She wears glasses too, something so wrong she wants to pull them off. Pretty? No. Beautiful. A late beauty, finding her in her twenties, perhaps even later. Something secretive about her. Withheld. And no yummy mummy here, the scuffed poacher’s bag over the shoulder and the general rush speaking unequivocally of work. A teacher? No. But what? She turns and moves closer, honing in on the mac. It’s Jaeger – classic, expensive – and she’s thrown by this, made horribly insecure until ting: charity shop. The high street clothes beneath tell her this and, rather than soothing her, it actually makes her feel worse. No one she knows buys clothes from charity shops any more. Most of them probably never did. For some reason the Nespresso machine pops into her mind and she wants to break it into a thousand pieces, crush it until it’s unrecognisable. As for the mac, she wants to touch it, ask its price, if she can try it on.

— Wait. The word juts out of her lips.

She is the woman who met her husband. This information makes the woman nod, but there is more in there than recognition. Amelia is not what she was expecting, that being someone, she is sure, like Rachel Green. Sturdy. Sex all finished with, packed away in the loft. She is still polite however and very thankful, which Amelia bats back.

— Nothing to thank me for yet. Though I did find them.

— Great. If you bring them in, we –

— So if you’d like. I mean. Unless you’re busy. We only live across the Heath, she adds.

The woman nods. Blushes. Amelia is leading them out of the playground against a thin rush of late women, mock or real guilt etched into their determined faces, when she hears that sound again.

Mum!

— Forget my head. I really would.

The four of them walk across the Heath, their shadows dragging them towards the waiting house.

2

WHEN JAMES GETS the call he knows what it is. Even before he sees Treetops flashing. The name just confirms it and he swears, gutted by a deep, drawing helplessness as his finger hovers over the red button. But he can’t do it. And he knows it. Instead he hits green and a sigh drops through him like an airliner.

Not a good day so far. Ida up twice in the night, the morning an overslept frenzy, a rabid hunt for socks, pants, clean trousers, ICT club money, then Dom’s phonics book, a last-minute find under the changing mat in the bathroom. The fucking changing mat. Alice helps him but she needs to shower so he doesn’t notice when Ida takes her clothes off. All of them, as he’s coating Dom, undoing the work of twenty minutes. He jams them back on in two, which she resists with silent determination and surprising strength, and then concedes wellies even though they’re Dom’s and way too big, her last lot thrown off the back of the Thames Clipper. Outside she wants to walk, slapping down the street like a clown, but it’s way too late for that. As he forces her, screaming, into the buggy, he feels like a prison guard in the execution room. With someone innocent. The opinion is shared by at least three passers-by, the daggers continuing all the way to Treetops with the howling, which he’s no time to calm. Nor has he time to wipe the parallel caterpillars of snot as they crawl into her mouth and which, in other children, leave him utterly disgusted.

The howling rises inside the nursery as he removes her coat, silently imploring one of the carers to take her from him. One does respond but it takes two to prise her off, grabbing as she does at his hands, his shirt, his ears and nose, eventually his hair, a clump of which he’s forced to leave behind. She makes a final lunge for him as he backs out and he wants to return, settle her, wants this desperately, but Dom’s going on about being late, serious, cautious Dom terrified of that, so he abandons her and flees, feeling ragged and tattered, bits falling off as her screams grab after him. They echo in his ribcage all the way to the Heath, only scrubbed out then by Dom. Who needs to crap. Now. Despite earlier implacable denials he really does and so they do it right there, in the stretching open, other parents filing past with eyes set firmly forward. The only thing to wipe him with is James’s handkerchief, which he leaves atop the result like a pall covering a tiny corpse.

Walking back is better. As he leaves the woman’s house, his lungs drag in air. He moves fast across the empty Heath, then faster, the feet of a man reconnecting with the world. His body begins to reshape. It’s no longer hunched over the buggy he’s left at Treetops, nor lopsided to hold Dom’s hand. He rolls his shoulders the way the osteopath told him and straightens his back, beginning to feel that yes, actually, he can do this. Morph back to his pre-self. And psychologically too, the shapes that have loomed huge since six a.m. begin to withdraw, others flowering from beneath: his job, his work, the emails he must deal with. And finally, from beneath that, the very centre of his professional intention, the mind of the American poet he’s been getting to grips with, the great mind he’s trying to unfurl in his latest book. By the time he gets home he feels as if he’s almost inside it, that its thoughts are melding with his own, driving him into the future.

But he’s been burgled.

For a split second James genuinely believes this. He tidied up last night. Now he just stares, barely an inch of floor space visible. He knew they’d been playing, but still. A long wooden train track runs down the narrow hall, complete with Lego tunnels and stations. He finds more Lego in the living room, cast like ancient, quaked stones. There’s a marble run too, a future city this until his footsteps on the floorboards send it crashing. Plastic food. Five different dolls. None, of course, with any clothes on. No sofa any more but instead a TGV loaded with a duvet, a Trunki, three old backpacks and a wooden cooker for the dining car. He spins round, almost unable to breathe, shaking his head to see that in less than an hour no area of their downstairs space has been left untouched.

And it’s not just the children.

Hurricane Alice has been through here. In the kitchen he finds marmalade. Tea caddy. Milk. Butter dish. All with their lids off. A single bowl – his and the kids’ are in the dishwasher – sits on the table, mortared by Weetabix, one of the white columns on its side spewing crumbs on to the table. Bread is concertinaed from the bag, half a drying pear on the chopping board. All that is missing is Miss Havisham sitting on one of the Tripp-Trapps. And back in the hallway it is worse. A scarf trails down the stairs as though Isadora Duncan has whipped upstairs for a piss. Two ankle boots lie on the floor like guillotined heads and three of Alice’s coats are slumped beneath the rack, all with their hang-ties broken. Something shameful revealed here, and not just about this woman. Two weeks is all they last, the little loops that hold women’s coats up. The contempt of their manufacturers is clear and in that moment he shares it. Does Alice think of him in Jigsaw? Picking up her fucking coats, trying to slouch them back on the hook, a task that is almost impossible? Of course she doesn’t, just as she fails to think of him in the morning, rushing out into her day. For does she not know that he has to do this? Make the place straight so he can work? Yes, because he’s told her, and it’s not the lost time that really knifes him but the simple, humiliating fact of having to tidy up after her. As if there isn’t quite enough of that shit in his world.

Hatred like a blade. Sharp and glimmering. And delightful, for it tells him what to do. Later. Five minutes before she’s home with the kids. He’ll get it out again. Marmalade, butter, everything. Even the Weetabix crumbs. She can fucking well clear up after herself. He’ll grab his running shoes, wait till he hears them outside and then head into the park.

He kicks things into corners, piles brightly coloured plastic into boxes, heedless of shape or match or function. He pulls up track and unloads the high-speed train, desperately trying to wrench his mind back to the New York School. Then gets twenty minutes’ reading done before Treetops calls and tells him about the chicken pox.

He’s there in ten. But she isn’t ill. Not his little Ida. He knows this as soon as he sees her, wrapped in the arms of the work experience girl. Her latest sucker. Nor has she presented any symptoms, he discovers, other than tears in large volumes, no doubt prompted by the sight of other parents coming to rescue their genuinely ill offspring. For a second he thinks about turning round and leaving her but he knows what he’ll get if he does. He has no choice but to put her coat on – she’s no problem with this now, by the way – and leave with her, his Little Wonder decent enough not to show actual glee until they’re outside, whereupon she cannot hide it any more. Part of him admires this ability to manipulate her external world but it has totally fucked his day.

— Shall we go shopping, then? he asks, knowing that if he restocks the kitchen he’ll feel, at least, as though he got something done.

— Playgroup.

— You can go in the trolley.

— Playgroup, she says again.

He should welcome this. Not the best result but by no means the worst because if she’d said park he’d have had to take her to the playground. And play with her. Constantly, just him and her, his mind not allowed to sidetrack for more than a second. Even pushing her on the swing he is told to sing to her, tickle her, tell her a story, push her higher, lower, and in the sandpit he is her toy, since he never remembers to bring one to trick her mind away with. Playgroup offers, in theory at least, the chance of release, the possibility of downloading her into the matrix of other children. It is, however, a peculiar sort of hell for him, and the first circle of this is the women.

He knew them once, the brilliant girls at uni, so much better prepared for the waiting world than he was, lithe and lean, jagging into life like reef sharks into a bait ball. They were dazzle, push, moments of pure future: until the Happy Day. And now they are bovine. Regardless of shape or size. Something has happened to them beyond the obvious and certainly beyond the necessary. Some trip-switch has blown, their insides as pappy as their poorly contained exteriors. Being with them, sitting on the floor – for some reason always the floor – talking, cutting paper-chains, is like eating barely tastable fudge. The music is a symbol of this for what would be wrong, while the kids are all playing, with Springsteen? A bit of Radio 3? But even when none of the kids is listening a jaunty litany of jingly shit dribbles from the stereo. The women don’t notice for they are endlessly chewing over the minutiae of their rescinded selves, as if the true welfare of a small human being could in any way be affected by a choice between Aptimel and Cow & Gate. The whole world is in crisis, but if he brings up the latest Greek bailout they will look at him as if he is insane.

Their attitude towards him is also problematic. They treat him as one of them. This – out of his own insecurity, he will admit – is another reason why he avoids the place if possible, for their inclusivity riles him. He is male. He also has, in his field, a pretty good job. Recently promoted to Principal Lecturer, he earns more than most people would imagine an academic does. Were his position to be advertised, several hundred people would apply, preparing lengthy presentations for an interview they’d punch the sky on getting. The structure of his working life, however, means that he can look after his daughter one day a week, something made easier now as he’s on a six-month sabbatical. It’s something he feels an intense need to reiterate to these living Henry Moores but they take no notice, unable or unwilling to entertain the concept that men and women can actually shuffle the home and work decks together. Instead they remain within their unshakeable assumption that he is that most loathed and pathetic of creatures.

A House Daddy.

There is one of these – wrong word – men when he gets to St Luke’s, the big Methodist chapel in which playgroup takes place. James sees him heading up the wide staircase as he manoeuvres the Maclaren through a snarl of buggies in the hallway so intense it looks like a fog incident on the M4. He recognises this one, though they are all essentially the same: over-nice, chummy failures who would have fallen right off the back of life were it not for a high-earning wife. How they live with themselves – wandering around in the clothing that is bought for them, drinking pints they didn’t earn – he has no idea, though most have a look in their eye that tells him they’ve shrunk down to inhabit the small space inside them that can cope with this. They’re like hard-up earls living in the servants’ wing, and what the go-getting gals they’re hitched up to get from their arrangement he cannot comprehend. What he does know is that he must at all costs avoid them, which he does when Ida scampers up the stairs into the Big Room. He splashes his pound into the Tupperware and makes for the windowsill.

He loves to watch her. No denying that, and doing so begins to compensate for his day’s loss, though this compensation in itself is problematic. Nevertheless he cannot be anything other than thrilled by the direct independence of spirit that sends her charging towards the plastic slide where an older boy, possibly three, is having doubts about the steps. After waiting for what seems to Ida like a decent interval – two seconds – she yanks him back down to the floor with a thump and makes a rapid ascent herself. The boy’s mother looks around for someone to enter this situation but he slips her gaze. He turns away further when Ida charges round to the steps again, thinking he’s actually doing the boy a favour. He’s going to have to fight for a job one day, show he’s got what it takes. This second battering he’s taking from Ida is of great future service to him, though his mother does not seem to agree and James can shirk it no longer. He goes over, pointedly not chastising Ida, just taking her hand and leading her over to the Wendy House. She contemplates this for a second: the entrance, the windows, the other children playing merrily inside. Then she enters it with the enthusiasm of a SWAT team.

James turns again, about to move back to his perch. But a woman he actually likes – or would if he ever found her in a context in which to like her – calls out to him. He finds himself drawn down into the floored sisterhood, an undulating circle that shuffles to accommodate him, surrounding him with acres of hummocky breast. His gaze rebounds like a pinball and he counts four nipples, one just inches from his left knee. Though it’s no longer in use, its owner seems to have forgotten about it and it just sits there, a tear of milk clinging on. His eyes can’t seem to pretend it isn’t there and he is fired by the urge to drag it into his own mouth, get it as far down his throat as it will go. Tip its owner backwards and tup her furiously, milk spraying up to the ceiling. Instead he just blinks as the Daddy appears, homing in on him, his earnest, goateed face nodding as he sits and begins to speak.

For a second James smiles, desperately wanting the guy to have seen his thoughts. Say shit man I feel it too. Don’t you just want to fuck some of these squashy babes sometimes? He hasn’t though and James is depressingly certain that he is about to talk about football. Attempt a re-up on his low stash of manhood. He sighs. He knows little about the game and cares less. He’d actually rather join the discussion on potty-training to his left, though in the event he is saved from doing either.

— Hey, guys, the woman says, not waiting to be asked, but entering the circle and making it her own.

It is her. Thomasina Davis. The Queen of Royal Hill (Alice’s tag). The woman the others defer to for her total acceptance of, and dedication to, her role. She is MUMMY. Organiser of NCT clothing sales and certificated multi-member babysitting groups. She wears motherhood like a commando, a belt clipped full of Velcro wipe packs, drink bottles and raisin-box holders. She astonishes by losing her baby-weight in days and affects a martyrish, unconcerned personal style, the tear in the knee of her sweatpants making her look, from across a room, as though she lives on an estate. She is actually the wife of a money ghoul, one of the cheek-nicked zombies James sees at Greenwich station when he’s going in for a nine o’clock lecture. She, for James, is the worst. Her Dulux niceness makes his flesh crawl, sure, as he is, that every sentence she ever utters is in some way self-serving, if only you had the time to figure out how. She’s launching in now, multitasking that with fishing out a biscuit full of organic sugar for her kid, beginning to talk about Alice as she raises her elbows to pull her exquisitely cut golden hair into a ponytail. About how lucky Alice is. Able to work because she’s got James who can chip in with the childcare. James smiles at the conceit, the implicit self-deception. For Alice is not lucky. What she is is brilliant, driven, which is why she can work and work well in a job that compels her. Unlike this woman who, just like the House Daddy, has found herself to be not, essentially, up to it. An actress, he believes she’s told him in the past, though he suspects that actually means high-end-waitress-stroke-panto-extra, and anyway she’s long since cut for the safe haven her physiology was always going to offer. James thinks of the men she probably dated in her twenties, the proto-Jeremy Ironses, the RSC Edmunds and National Mercutios, all without a penny to their names. Is it Nige she’s married to now? Colin? Whatever he’s called, he’s a six-foot barrel of pure tedium who looks as though he might be her accountant, but who has in fact given her a four-bedroom house in the Ashburnham Triangle and two kids, every second of whose lives she plans with sweet, ruthless efficiency. The perfect mother whom her teenage children will have dreams about beheading.

— My God! He laughs.

It’s Ida. She’s at the painting table. Quite, quite naked. The circle turns to watch as she pats neat and very colourful handprints all over her chest and tummy. And then, very carefully, over the clothes of the child next to her.

 

Alice doesn’t ring until seven-fifteen. He’s had his running kit on for two hours. He should be Googling divorce lawyers but he’s not because he doesn’t mind, not in the least, and nor has he re-trashed the kitchen. Something has changed in him. His daughter has melted his soul, dragged him so totally into her world that he’s developed Stockholm Syndrome. They’ve spent the day feeding ducks, riding scooters, getting told off in the Maritime Museum. Two whole hours in the sandpit. Now they’re on the sofa with a bottle and Maisie, who has visited her local library to find a sparkly book about fish twenty-three times in a row.

— I hate you, is what he says.

— But in a nice way?

— True. Still hate you.

— Don’t blame me. Please. I’m…

— Sorry? Apologies for Alice are self-pulled teeth so he decides to help her out. You know you shouldn’t leave the place like that and never will again. You have plans for my godlike phallus that will make up for any suffering you have caused me.

— Got it. And as for being late, you’ll understand because you met her.

— I did. And I have a question.

The big, charmless house looms into view, the smooth granite kitchen with its appliance museum.

— This church school lark. How the hell are we ever going to deal with the niceness?

3

SHE’S BREATHING. Doing it consciously, in, out, trying to take control of at least one element of her life while thoughts run amok inside her as if she’s some gatecrashed party. Earlier she felt as though she was being swept away but she didn’t mind that. Now she’s scared, utterly bewildered by the state she is in. Three more breaths, each like a lifted weight, and she walks over to the sofa.

— Niamh, darling, turn that off. Tell me about your day. How did violin go?

And the girl does it without complaint. Sensing something. Zaps Tracy Beaker and starts talking about Grade Six.

They just followed her. How easy is this, she thought, turning off the alarm. She asked them to come and they came. Like lambs. There’s a power here that she’s never considered before. You ask someone to come home with you and they do, unwilling or unable to say no. She got an insight into child-killers and estate agent rapists. Asked if Alice would like tea but the woman said no, coffee if she had it.

— Sorry, machine’s on the blink.

— Tea, then, that’s fine. Thank you.

Odd that she asked for something that wasn’t offered her. Was that rude? Gauche? Knowing she was just finding reasons to belittle the woman, Amelia told herself off. It’s refreshing, she thought. Polly Bridge always makes instant and I drink it. Why the hell do I do that?

The woman removed her mac and hung it on the back of a barstool.

Niamh was a delight. Amelia has to admit this. She took charge of the boy, of Dominic as his mother called him, asking him what he’d like to do, if he wanted a biscuit and milk which is what she has when she gets home, though not chocolate ones because it’s not the weekend. He followed her but was not submissive, engaging her with direct seriousness on the subject of biscuits, the occasions such as birthdays or bank holidays when chocolate ones can be eaten on a weekday. She realised that he was bright and exceptionally so, a future head boy, she thinks now. She’ll have to tell Mrs Frith, though Mrs Frith has an eye to all these things. She wonders if Niamh will be head girl next year, which has been spoken about, and at the mere thought it’s there again, the horror of her, made suddenly worse because of the other knowledge that she can now see sitting just beneath it like the answer to a question that took ages to arrive. It’s been weeks. Months even. Building. Snapping at her daughter. Criticising her. More and more irritated by her very presence, like watching her in the Nativity, that stupid poem, embarrassed by her prissy, do-good forthrightness, wishing she’d just shut up. The feeling growing until it became too strong to deny, a transformation she was aware of but refused to believe in until it left her here. Wherever here is. There is a metallic bitterness in her mouth and she pours herself a tumbler of water.

She’s older than Alice. Six years? Seven? Not a lot really but she feels like a different generation, that she has travelled over hills this woman has not and they are hills she’ll never revisit. She feels like this about James too, though they are exactly the same age. She knows this because of Google, and the Monday Mail email from school. Only three Jameses in the parent list and she knows the other two. James Peterson. She found him on the UCL website, his CV announcing that he was born in seventy-five. Yet he’s like his wife, a young parent, feeling it all rushing through him. Trying to catch up with it all rather then watching it trailing away.

They drank tea. Alice engaged with Niamh, who began to show off, though not much. Dom asked to play on the iPad he spotted but Alice diverted this, asking Niamh if they had any felt tips. The two children then sat together at the kitchen table as if they were still in class. Amelia wanted to tell them to argue, rebel, demand the fucking iPad, more biscuits, and chocolate ones too. They have so much faith in us, she thought, as they sat there quietly. So much faith to do just what we tell them. They don’t know us. What would it be like for them if they knew us? Is that why she’s never felt quite comfortable with the other parents at St Saviour’s, has never really shown herself? Is she worried that, somehow, it would all trickle back here?

The clothes were in a Laithwaites box. They’re on some plan, a case every three months, tasting notes neither of them look at. When she got back from Lewisham she took them all out of the packaging and scrunched them, dragged them around on the floor. She didn’t have time to sew labels so she wrote ‘Michael Leigh’ in marker pen in the back of the white polo shirts and on the trouser labels. Was it obvious? She thought yes but calmed herself with the knowledge that neither James nor Alice, nor anyone, knows what has happened to her. What is obvious to her would seem incredible to anyone else. That she would do what she has… it would make them think she was insane.

— I threw the grotty stuff away. Didn’t want you taking it to be polite. But go through them. Don’t take them all if you don’t want. Most will be too big but he’ll grow, won’t he?

— Yes, Alice said, confirming the charity shop guess by her keen, appraising scrutiny. She went through the things quickly, putting them in piles with expert fingers, after which she once again offered money. Again Amelia told her no and she finally gave up trying, asking for a plastic bag though it took two to contain them all. They then stood, for what was there to keep her now? Amelia hunted for some other offer to make, a net to wrap around her. Then she hunted for the reason she wanted to do this: with James the reason was obvious but she had no desire to fuck his wife. Not that she’d ever had a desire to do this with a woman but today nothing would surprise her. So what was it? Michael. The arrival of her son – she didn’t want to face that on her own but she didn’t know why. And then she did know and it horrified her. She was dreading the feelings she might have for him. Or not have.

Her firstborn. They lie if they say this doesn’t matter. A little boy squirming on her chest all red and blue and so completely furious with her for what she’s done to him. Every moment of her life with him has been an effort to make up for that blame-cry, including this last year’s negotiation of his grunts and blunt dismissals, as if he’s taken that project on the Australopithecus too seriously. And now? In spite of the fact that he seems to have become a monster, the idea of a dead grey flower in her heart in place of that vice grip was enough to make her tremble, in a way it didn’t with Niamh. She couldn’t be alone when he came through the door. She looked at Alice and saw that she was losing her, knowing she wouldn’t wriggle politely like her husband but just announce that she had to leave.

— Mummy, I need the loo, said Dominic.

A break. Something to crack the moment, pregnant with imminent departure. She’d take the boy. Show him where the bathroom was and in the meantime think of a plan. An invite to supper? Not the adults, just the child, which wouldn’t sound clingy? I have some lasagne for Niamh and Michael, so if…? She could present it as an upstairs thought, a change of location idea, tossed out lightly like a petrol-station frisbee.

— This way, Dom, she said.

Did they go on their own at four? She thought so but she honestly couldn’t remember. Children were about the now; they were like a drug in that regard. She was about to ask but something told her not to. When he scampered up the stairs behind her she didn’t just point out the door to him but pushed it open, watched him trot in, no shame nor any desire for privacy in this moment. She watched as he lifted his green St Saviour’s jumper, keeping it in place with his chin. He pulled his trousers and pants down and she gazed at him, at his lithe, perfect bottom, his pale gushing spout. His son. The product of him, ineffably beautiful, more so than her own children ever were, and not just his product either but hers too, the thought burning her with jealousy as a mid-market scent intruded and a hand rested on the door jamb.

— You alright, love?

— Yes, Mummy. Don’t worry, go back downstairs.

— Okay, then. Make sure you wash your hands.

— I always wash my hands.

— I know.

Alice’s face, smiling into her own, suddenly grotesque like a carousel pony’s. She turned from it, shaking herself out on to the landing as she led them downstairs.

Throughout the lasagne she stayed quiet, cold, withdrawn, wishing to hell she hadn’t asked them. Why did she? she wondered, as she washed up, loaded the dishwasher, emptied the washing machine, poured extra milk, put things in the diary from Niamh’s school bag, fished out thirty quid for Olga whose day it was tomorrow, stowed shoes, set up the music stand, took two phone messages for Richard, tipped custard powder into a pan? And why did the stupid woman agree? She wanted them gone. Wanted to scrub the house after they had gone, for it was a filthy thing now, made filthy by them. No, by her being there with them, so garishly innocent in their familial new-ness, the pair of them only just hatched. She wanted to take the surface cleaner and spray it over herself, scour her skin with wire wool, plunge the toilet brush down her throat until she gagged. The image of them, the happy mother and the little boy calling back over his shoulder to talk to her, would not leave her neon mind.

— Niamh, she says when, finally, she has managed to get them out of there. Tell me about your violin.

A painful crunch of tyres from outside. Doors. Bleep. Two male voices, split by an octave, heading towards the house.

4

SHE JUST CAN’T WAIT to see him. The mere idea cracks a smile across her face as she lopes down Hyde Vale with Dom, her cold, bare feet slapping hard on the pavement. Normally it’s the kids who in absence make her want to rush into the immediate future. Speed it up somehow. But not today. Poor James. Desperate to get on, his longed-for sabbatical such golden space, only to find the house the way it was. Treetops calling. Sucked into the mum-fug she still has to endure herself one day a week. She often thinks of him when she’s inside it, wondering how he negotiates it all. Why does it have to be like that? Not the kids’ fault. No, she tells herself, as she shakes a small stone off her naked left sole, it’s Greenwich. Money has swept in like a slow tide, smoothing everything out to an emptiness.

The image pleases her, momentarily takes her thoughts away from him. When he opens the door however her desire returns, is so complete she wants to lock the kids in the kitchen and drag him upstairs. What she does do is cop a quick, barely hidden feel through his running shorts, the repercussions of which are visible for a good twenty minutes. When will the kids notice this kind of thing? Fortunately it’s gone by the time the three of them are in the bath together, the sight of which, from the loo seat, is almost too much to bear. As Ida secretly fills a plastic jug from the cold tap and tips it over James’s head from behind she knows that she’s done it, that she has absolutely everything she ever wanted in life. And not just in this half either because something happened today. Something wonderful and extraordinary though which, for just a short while longer, she needs to keep to herself.

James gets out last, a thousand rivers tumbling down his hard, hairy body. Ida insists that Mummy dry him too, an idea he agrees with, holding his arms right up in the air the way Dom does, squirming when she tries to do his hair. Amid the laughter it comes back again, of course, and she hides it, quickly, behind the towel.

— Pyjamas, she says. The lot of you.

Over supper they control themselves. Part of the game they play. To enact civilised ritual while the bungee cords tighten. She loves this feeling, loves having dinner with him generally, loves it so much in fact that if she’s ever asked that dinner question at parties she always says him. There is always something to unpick, lay out between them, use their twin minds like chopsticks to put into place. Today there is the added element of that promise she made plus his blue-striped pyjamas which are given an erotic charge by the fact that she’s still dressed. It sends her back to the first time, that flat of his in Brighton. In that tiny bathroom, adding lipstick then blotting it off again with loo paper, hoping to hell that finally this serious, blue-eyed man might be about to kiss her. Then coming out to find him naked. Not cooking, as she’d left him. Starkers. Standing by the window, three o’clock in the afternoon, staring at her.

When she can take it no longer she pretends to drop a piece of penne. Sees that he buys it. She ducks down beneath the table to retrieve it and emerges in his lap, smiling up at him, her tongue reaching into his fly. He laughs mid-mouthful and she pushes herself up, tries to snog him while he’s still chewing, almost making him choke with laughter as he pushes her away and swallows. She undoes two buttons from his top, slides both hands into the hard warmth of him, biting his bottom lip now, al dente, perfect. He sighs and sits up straighter, his forehead pressing hard on hers as his thumbs run down over her cheekbones. His cupped hands lift her chin, eyelashes flicking her lips before he feathers her throat with kisses that leap beneath her skin to rush and fizz and then explode inside.

What happens then is not of their doing. Their bodies re-emerge from the subterranean caverns they have retreated to, retaking ownership of them and their thought-out world. Chairs are tipped, clothing removed as if burning. Walls and cupboards seem to step aside for them so that they are now on the kitchen floor, against the hall wall, now on the rug in the living room, sensations refusing to respect the boundaries of their skin, instead running back and forth between them. She grabs his face, frustrated that by kissing its broad lips she will not be able to see it. She does kiss him but wrenches herself free immediately, staring into dancing eyes, then his clavicle and chest, and that cock again. They wrestle, fighting but in perfect agreement, her wrists above her head and his teeth on her jugular, her breastbone and then, very slowly, her left nipple. A metal rose seems to bloom in its centre, cutting through the skin, followed by another in her right and then the fight shifts once more, their habitual struggle commencing for the most coveted role: pleasure-giver. He wins. Three fingers and his tongue inside her then his mouth on her belly and then her chest again, arms beginning to hitch her legs up when she rolls out and pulls him to his feet. They pound the stairs like Indiana Jones and she pushes him on to the bed, getting him inside her in two, hard thrusts. He claws at her as if resisting, bucking and shifting, his chest rising until he is sitting up, and she is sitting on him. And this, she knows, is the configuration they will be in when time ends. This fuck picture will spin out into the endless blackness for creatures in other times and dimensions to find and wonder at forever.