When Jim gets like this, it helps to go and see him. He should have gone last week, should have checked on him the same day he talked him off the bus, instead of visiting Dad. But although it helps to see Jim, it’s also hard work and he has to brace himself for it. He’ll stay for a bit; long enough to have a chat and make sure there’s food, that’s all. It’s only a five-minute walk from the bus stop on Lord Street. He strolls past the war memorial and the station, glad to be outside and on his feet after another sticky day at the wheel.
Jim lives by Asda in a room in a big old house; a bedsit, or studio flat, as he prefers to call it. The house was probably nice once, before its front gardens were paved and jammed with unroadworthy cars and communal wheelie bins. Its bay windows add character, but the inconsistency of their coverings indicates decline: some are shrouded by grubby net curtains, others by roller or venetian blinds and, in one case, the glass has been shattered and replaced with a square of MDF and a few strips of cardboard secured by brown tape. A group of lads straddle the crumbly, red-brick front wall, sitting between the beheaded posts of redundant TO LET signs, lean and tired, shirts off, smoking as they soak up the last of the day’s sunshine. Polish, Darren thinks. Jim says they live upstairs, squeezed in like sardines. They’re picked up in minibuses, early, and taken to work in the meat- and fruit-packing units outside town. He nods to them as he turns into the drive.
The front door is open: someone has left it on the latch. Darren steps inside and heads down the tiled corridor to Jim’s door, which is also open. He leans in and announces himself by knocking on its thick layer of once-white paint. Jim is lying on the sofa, one that houses a pull-out bed which can be hidden away during the day, though he never bothers with the bed, preferring instead to curl up on the cushions. He is barefoot, dressed in striped boxers and a stained T-shirt, perhaps the same one he was wearing the other day. He waves and Darren enters, making a point of closing the door behind him.
The place is a shithole. It smells like an ashtray and the floor is littered with empties and jigsaw pieces. At first Darren tries not to stand on the jigsaw pieces, but it’s useless. The bundle of Jim’s duvet takes up the spare half of the sofa and Jim makes no attempt to rearrange it, so Darren sits on it, noting the cigarette burns on its cover as he nudges the lids of two jigsaw boxes with the toe of his shoe: a 1,000-piece Where’s Wally? and a 2,000-piece Mona Lisa. There was a time when he would have tried to retrieve and regroup Jim’s scattered jigsaws, momentarily comforted by the thought that he was at least putting something back together.
The telly’s on a rolling news channel. A couple of suited blokes are discussing Ebola while a ribbon of text runs along the bottom of the screen: air strikes targeting Islamic State fighters, possible negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, residents in Hawaii preparing for a hurricane – anyone’d be miserable listening to this all day.
Jim jabs the remote with a swollen finger. ‘I’d turn it off but it won’t bloody work,’ he says, as if it’s doing it on purpose, to piss him off.
‘Probably just the batteries. I’ve got loads at home. I’ll bring some, next time.’
‘It. Just. Won’t. Argh.’
Darren watches as, head bent, Jim continues to assault the buttons. Jim’s hair is like Becky’s, but yellower. Perhaps the cigarette smoke has stained it, along with his teeth and fingers. The skin on his elbows is scaly and white, scabbed so thickly in places that it looks like it could be lifted with the tip of a spoon, like the crust of a pie. Darren reaches across and rescues the remote.
He talks about the allotment and his latest job with Colin, a house clearance on Lancaster Road. In an effort to cheer Jim up, he makes self-deprecating jokes and exaggerates his and Colin’s ineptitude.
Jim picks an almost empty can off the floor and tips his head back to catch the dregs.
‘Your psoriasis tablets and those – you’re not supposed to, are you?’
Jim folds his arms and gazes past the TV, at the bare wall behind.
‘I’ve seen you, out and about. Wearing down the pavement. What’s up?’
He’s wasting his breath, Jim never listens – he just waits for his turn to talk. But it helps to calmly point out the bleeding obvious; it’s what Becky used to do.
‘Are you feeling stressed? It looks like you’ve been scratching – your elbows are a right mess. Shall we get a bin bag and get rid of some of this crap?’
Darren asks these questions in a lilting, cheerful voice he probably should have used when Clover was a baby. The one time he went to the Mother and Baby Group – ‘and Father’, someone added hastily, on his arrival – he was struck by the way everyone spoke to their babies, almost as if they were singing. He’d thought it might help to go to a group, but it didn’t, it just made him feel as if he was doing it all wrong. Although he never went back, he did a bit of actual singing afterwards, at bedtimes, in case it was important. Just him, by himself, before Colin gave him the ukulele. Mostly hits from the 1990s; he found a few cheerful staples: ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’, ‘Roll with It’ and ‘Three Lions’. Clover seemed to like it.
‘You don’t want Clover to see you like this, do you?’ he asks, shaking his head, effectively answering his own question.
Jim finally stops staring at the wall. ‘Have you finished boring the shit out of my arse?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Question for you.’
‘Go on.’
‘When was the last time you picked Clover up and carried her?’
Darren is surprised to realise he can’t remember, and he braces himself – sometimes Jim says stuff that makes him feel sick; Jim doesn’t just get under his skin, he digs a tunnel and drives a bus down it.
‘So, one day you were carrying Clover around, right? And you put her down, yeah? And then you never picked her up again. Never. Ever. And you didn’t tell her it was the last time you’d ever pick her up, did you? You didn’t explain. You just stopped doing it.’
‘What?’
‘I’m saying there was a time, a very last time that you ever carried her, and you don’t even remember it.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘No, not the way you’re saying it, you’re making it sound –’
‘True is true.’
This is not helpful. There is a new separateness in the way he and Clover belong to each other. At home he has started to step around her, hands hesitating on either side of her bony shoulders, hanging in the air like a pair of brackets. When they are outdoors there is room to resurrect the old physicality; to loop an arm through one of hers or swing his hand around her waist. Outdoors, she has the space to lean in or spin away, to clasp him back or evade him with a playful push – it’s up to her. So much of the intimacy has ended: the carrying and the tickling, the piggy-backing and the fireman’s lifts. Colin has stopped, too. They haven’t conferred, it just seems to be time. Jim’s relationship with Clover is different. It is punctuated by winks and nudges and the pulling of daft faces. There’s no point in trying to explain, no point in talking to him at all when he gets like this. It’s a matter of resisting the impulse to shout, and coming back later in the week for round two.
‘It doesn’t matter how you say something, as long as it’s the truth,’ Jim continues. ‘Not that you’d know the truth. Not if it grew legs and chased you.’
‘Stop being such an arse crack.’ Darren stands and rubs his hands together in a busy, I-was-just-about-to-leave way. ‘Right, is there anything you need?’ He steps over the cans and into the kitchenette, where he checks the fridge. It’s brimming with cheap lager, but there’s also a packet of ham, a carton of milk, a six-pack of cola and a box of eggs. The cupboard beside the fridge houses a half-empty multipack of crisps and a couple of tins of baked beans. ‘No? I’ll be off, then,’ he says. ‘Next time I’ll bring some batteries.’
As Darren opens the door to let himself out, Jim mutters, ‘I’ve got toothache.’
‘Well, take some painkillers and phone the dentist.’
There’s a bus stop right outside Jim’s, but the walk home will give him twenty minutes to decide whether things have reached the stage where he has to do something. It’s difficult – sometimes Jim has a social worker and sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes he takes medication and sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes there are meetings and care plans and sometimes there aren’t; sometimes Darren goes to the meetings – just so they realise someone is watching – and sometimes he doesn’t. His kindness comes in bursts and he tires quickly. It was easier in the early days, when it seemed as if it was going to be more of a sprint than a marathon. He is tired. And he has discovered that tiredness is not the bottom of it; there are moments when his resignation subsides and he tumbles into a shaft of anger. He is not as good as Becky. Not as patient or kind, not as understanding.
He increases his pace as he approaches the hill of the railway bridge. He has been enjoying the newness of returning to an occupied house. Years ago, after work, before he collected Clover from Edna’s or Dad’s, he occasionally sneaked home in search of echoes of his old life. He eased the front door open, as if by not startling the house, he might catch it reminiscing. But he never heard Dune FM playing; never smelled food cooking or saw the post stacked on the side in tidy piles of catalogues, holiday brochures and the surveys Becky used to complete in exchange for the chance to win £100.
He stops at the top of the bridge. Leans up against the warm of the wall for a moment and glances at the ripening blackberries growing in tandem with the tracks, not entirely reconciled to the way the present shunts and rearranges memories so all that came before, even the good things, leads to this sunny evening in August, to him, heading home to Clover, on her own.
Clover is already watching Bake Off when he gets back. She glances up at him from the recliner, skin golden brown and freckled. People used to say she looked like Becky when she was small, but the resemblance has lessened as she has grown – a matter of both sadness and relief. Although it’s not quite as fair as her mother’s, her wild hair has been bleached by the sun and is getting there. Such impossible hair, spiralling and bright, like the shiny ribbon people wrap around presents and curl with scissors; the kind of hair people want to stroke. He remembers buying Super Noodles when she was little because they were shaped like her hair. He’d mix them with a jar of passata and whatever was cheapest on the deli counter – salami, pepperoni or ham, back when they had the cutting machines in the supermarket and you could ask for just two or three slices. Then he’d top the curly mountain with grated cheese; pizza-pasta, that’s what he used to call it. It’s been a while, he’ll have to make it again, she’d like that.
‘Did you remember your suncream today?’
‘Course.’
He glances at the scar on her knee. The skin has zipped neatly shut and is darkening in the sunshine. Girls her age shouldn’t be shaving their almost invisible body hair – it’s far too dangerous. The horror of hearing her yelp and subsequently discovering her in the bathroom, bleeding, razor in hand, is not something he can easily forget.
‘Have you watered?’
She nods.
‘Had some tea?’
‘Yeah. I did beans on toast.’
‘Good girl. I’ll make myself some toast in a minute – oh, I found some colouring books in the recycling pile. You should probably keep them. You might want them one day.’
‘They’re really old. From Mrs Mackerel. They’ve been in a cupboard at her church for centuries.’
‘I’ve left them on the side for you, just in case.’
‘All right. How’s Uncle Jim?’
‘Oh, you know.’
‘He’s not himself?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Kelly called.’
‘Did she?’
‘She said to tell you that she booked a lane at Premier Bowl for her and the boys and some of their friends tomorrow evening. But the friends can’t come. And she wants to know if we’ll go instead.’
‘Hmm,’ he says, pretending uncertainty. ‘What do you think? Fancy a bit of bowling?’ He mimes a shot. ‘Str-ike! Could be fun . . .’
‘All right.’
‘But?’
‘She can be a bit . . .’
‘Much?’
‘I don’t mind her messing with my hair while she’s cutting it.’
‘She’s just trying to be nice.’
‘But I don’t want to go for a manicure.’
‘All right.’
‘Or a facial.’
‘Okay.’
‘And I don’t want a Katniss braid.’
‘I’ll tell her.’
‘No you won’t.’
Kelly is usually good at talking to people, she does it all day – Going anywhere nice on your holidays? Shall we try a different colour? And she’s got kids of her own. But her boys are younger than Clover and there’s something easy and animal about them. They’ve always liked Darren; perhaps they like anyone, everyone.
‘She isn’t used to girls. That’s all. What do you want me to do? Reckon I should shout, “GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY DAUGHTER”?’ he asks, mimicking the Australian in their favourite YouTube video, the man who yells, ‘GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY PENIS!’ at the police while they’re trying to arrest him.
The unspoken penis dangles for a moment. Maybe he shouldn’t joke about things like that any more. Perhaps it’s inappropriate.
‘Yeah, I reckon you should,’ she says. ‘Do it just like that, Dad. I dare you.’ And then she laughs. Which helps.
After he’s wolfed a couple of slices of toast and downed a cup of tea, Darren sits on the couch and watches the rest of the programme. The best part is the showstopper, the fancy thing the bakers have to make at the end. This week, it’s a 3D biscuit scene. He is gobsmacked by their creations: a train, a sea monster, even a bloody carousel! When it’s finished, he goes into the kitchen and roots about. He heads back into the lounge holding a baking tray upon which he has placed two knives, a packet of Biscoff biscuits and the jar of Biscoff spread.
‘Here,’ he says, ‘look at this.’
Clover watches as he unfastens the jar and smears two blobs of Biscoff spread on the tray.
‘I’ll just . . . hang on . . . yeah, like this.’ He stands two biscuits upright, facing each other. Then he pastes spread on to the underside of a third biscuit, which he places on top of the other two, like a roof. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You, too. Get building.’
When the tray is smeared in spread and populated by a series of triumphal biscuit arches, Darren purses his lips, dog’s arse tight, like the lady on the programme, and does his best posh voice.
‘Now, Darren, what have you made for us today?’
Clover grins.
‘I’ve made Stonehenge. Out of a packet of biscuits and a bit of Biscoff spread.’ He lifts the biscuit roof off one of the Stonehenge arches and breaks it in half. ‘That’s a lovely snap,’ he trills, crumbs spraying out of his mouth as he pronounces, ‘Well done, Darren! It’s a good bake.’
Clover laughs and he gets his phone out of his pocket and takes a photo of her holding Stonehenge, evidence that she was happy, to show her later, should he need it.
Once Clover is in bed he gets a beer out of the fridge and calls Kelly. She’s had a drink – drinks, in fact. A couple of glasses of wine, she tells him. It’s been one of those days. The boys are in bed, though, she adds.
He puts his phone on speaker and rests it on the arm of the recliner. Kelly talks like she drives: quickly, changing gear at the last minute. Her voice zips out of his phone sharper, thinner, but otherwise it’s almost as if she’s there in the room with him, chatting as the sun steers past tips of the trees at the top of the bank and slips beneath the railings.
‘. . . and the thing with you, Darren, if you don’t mind me saying – which I’m sure you don’t, you’re a good listener, aren’t you? – you don’t get all fidgety when someone’s talking to you, and I like that about you, I do – but the thing with you is . . . remember the time when I’d just started school and there was a boy in my class – I can’t even remember his name now – who kept following me around and calling me Smelly Kelly? God, I was only four – and I was used to Colin teasing me, that’s what brothers do – but this was different, meaner somehow. So I didn’t know what to do, and I remember one lunchtime you followed the boy for a bit and gave him a taste of his own medicine, and he stopped after that. Anyway, the thing with you is, you’re not a walkover, but you don’t say much, do you?’
‘Well . . .’ he says.
‘Do you remember that?’
‘Not –’
‘So,’ she begins again, and he senses a gear change. ‘Today Tyler asked if he could make his own toast and I said yes – they’ve got to learn to be independent some time, haven’t they? And do you know what he said? He said, “Do I put it in portrait or landscape?” Portrait or landscape! Can you believe that? God, I felt old.’
He smiles. One of the surprising things about adulthood is how few people accompany you there and what a relief it is to occasionally talk to someone who knew the child-you and the teenaged-you; someone who has seen all your versions, every update, and stuck with you through all of it. That’s really something.
‘. . . knackered by the time I fetched the boys from Mum’s.’
‘Did you carry them at all, today – Tyler and Dylan?’ he asks.
‘You mean actually pick them up?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Probably. Hang on . . . yeah, I did, but Tyler’s getting big for it now, he’s like a little tank – why?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘You all right for tomorrow? Did Clover tell you?’
‘Yeah.’
This is where he should mention Clover’s hair; say that Kelly is not to offer to braid it like the girl from The Hunger Games. Or stroke it. Or try to pass on free samples of Frizz Ease treatments. But he can’t.
The hair thing started when, years ago, before she married and had her boys, Kelly came round to babysit so he could go out for a drink with Colin. She’d looked after Clover before, but hadn’t ever put her to bed.
When he got back later, slightly soused, Darren popped upstairs to check on Clover. Her face was clenched and blotchy, as if she had fallen asleep crying.
‘Was everything okay?’ he asked, downstairs.
‘I gave her a bath,’ Kelly said. ‘I just wanted – she’s got such lovely hair, and I thought it would be . . . You haven’t got a hairdryer. Unless you’ve . . . unless there’s one somewhere in the middle bedroom? I’m sorry. I wasn’t snooping. I popped my head around the door, but then I saw . . . and I . . . I just assumed you’d sorted it all . . . Would you like some help with it?’
He shook his head, once. No, underscored.
‘Okay. I just . . . you’re my friend . . . and I . . .’ She lifted her hands, surrendering easily. ‘So I called my mum and got her to bring a hairdryer round. I’ve got a diffuser – they’re good for curly hair. But when I turned it on, Clover went mental. She shouted, “Hot, hot, hot!” and ran away. I thought she was messing at first. I made her sit on my knee. And she howled. Then I tried to coax her into it. I offered her a treat, but she got dead angry with me. How do you dry her hair? You don’t take her out with it wet, do you? Her little head will get cold.’
‘She doesn’t go out with it wet. I’m not stupid.’
She was upset. And he’d had a few. That was how it happened, he thinks. She sat down and they talked about the salon where she’d been working since she finished her NVQ, about her plan to open Kelly’s Cuts one day, and Colin’s joke that it sounded more like a butcher’s than a hairdresser’s. He remembers all that, but he doesn’t remember how she came to unbutton her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her nipples sat on the bony stave of her ribs like a pair of crotchets. His hands hung limply by his sides until she lifted them and placed them on firm skin, marbled like wet plaster. He tried not to think of Becky, whose naked body had been creamy and soft, so soft.
He was careful; they were mates and he didn’t want to spoil things. ‘Shall I . . . Is it okay if I . . . There?’
‘Hmm.’
‘And –’
‘Hmm.’
‘Do you –’
‘Yes.’
‘This okay?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Is it all right if I –’
‘Darren?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Thank you,’ he said afterwards. And he knew it was wrong, even before she scrunched her face and curtsied.
‘No, thank you, Darren.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he added, immediately aware he’d got that wrong, too.
He called her in the morning to make sure things were all right between them and was relieved when she was herself: chatty, casual.
The next time she babysat, she kissed him on his return. Or maybe he kissed her. Either way, it started in the hall and she finished it – finished him – on the dining-room floor.
He went out with Colin more frequently. Sometimes he’d say he was tired and pick up a couple of beers on the way home. One night, as she sat on the kitchen worktop, legs around his waist, head resting on his shoulder, she said, ‘We could go out for a drink some time.’
‘I’ll get Edna to have Clover.’
‘Colin’ll do it.’
‘Edna won’t mind – that way Colin can come, too.’
She unwrapped her legs and arms. Slid off the worktop. Closed her zip and fastened her buttons. ‘I don’t want to go for a drink with Colin. I want . . .’
He willed her to stop before she spoiled everything, and she did stop, for a moment.
‘Maybe you should ask Edna in future,’ she said. ‘That might be better for everyone.’ She didn’t offer to babysit again. And he didn’t ask.
Kelly carries on talking. He listens to the sound of her voice rather than the individual words: the up and down of it, the light and bright of it, until, eventually, she says goodnight and, alone in the dark and quiet, he dozes off in the recliner.
He wakes in the early hours, tiptoes up the stairs, pees, strips down to his pants and slips into bed. Too hot, he kicks off the covers and lies there, thinking about the way Edna stopped him a while ago as he passed her house on his way home and congratulated him for telling Clover about the Facts of Life. It was also his responsibility, she announced, to teach Clover HOW to be a WOMAN. In fact, she’d been in the bookshop, the lovely, old-fashioned one in town, and had seen a book called exactly that: How to Be a Woman.
He rolls on to his side and stuffs his arm under the pillow. It might help, that book. Might fill him in on a few things. Let him know what to expect and what he needs to cover. Even when you think you’re doing well, you miss stuff. He remembers years ago when Clover started doing swimming lessons at school.
‘Can you teach me how to do a towel-hat on my head?’ she asked.
‘A what?’
‘A towel-hat. In a pile.’
‘You mean a turban?’
‘Yes, one of those. All the girls do them after swimming, in the changing rooms.’
It was something he hadn’t thought of, and there’s bound to be a shedload of other stuff. He should be prepared. It helps, that feeling of having stuff at his fingertips, should he need it. It really helps.