While Miriam and Ralph are sleeping, the telephone rings. Usually it’s just Fenella, or someone wanting to know if Frances Delaney is at home. The people who ask for Frances are selling things, and Miriam knows this for certain because her mother only had one friend and his name was the headmaster.
It is not Fenella on the phone. It’s a man.
“Hi, is this Miriam Delaney?”
“It might be,” she whispers slowly, “or it might not. Are you aware that it’s one o’clock in the morning?”
“Is it? Oh God, I’m so sorry. I lost track of time. I—”
“Who is this please?”
“My name is Matthew Delaney.”
Now everyone’s a Delaney. Madness of a new kind. Does it ever stop?
“Are you about to tell me you’re my father?” Miriam says.
“Actually, I’m your brother.”
There is a long pause.
“Hello?” the man says.
Miriam takes a sharp intake of breath as though she is about to speak.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” she says.
“I think that’s a solid way to live,” he says.
“Why?”
“Better than being gullible.”
“You don’t know if I’m gullible or not.”
“That’s true.”
They sit there for a while, together and apart. She can hear noises in the background, like he’s moving his belongings from one place to another, books and magazines, that kind of thing. It’s a good guess, because he’s opening a sketchpad, putting it on his lap and letting the first few pages flop down over his knees. In his left hand, a phone; in his right, a stick of charcoal.
He’s more believable than Eric Delaney. Miriam couldn’t say why, he just is. Maybe this is a big scam and maybe it isn’t. She is curious and afraid. “Are you really my brother?”
“I’m your half-brother. You have another one too.”
“I have two brothers?”
“I’m twenty-one and Alfie is seven.”
Miriam tries to picture them, a man and a boy, connected to her in some way that has yet to be seen. She wonders which features they share, which characteristics, if any at all. “Do you have a mum?” she says.
“I do,” he says.
“Is she nice?”
“Most of the time.”
“Mine’s dead.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I thought both of my parents were dead. Now I’m supposed to believe one is alive.”
“It’s a mad world,” Matthew says.
Miriam remembers Fenella saying this once. She remembers her singing about finding it kind of funny, finding it kind of sad, then saying the whole of life was a bit like that, and she might put it on her gravestone. Here lies Fenella Price. She found it all kind of funny, she found it all kind of sad. Miriam takes the phone through to the living room, opens the curtains, sits on the sofa and puts a blanket over her legs. “Sometimes I think it’s too much,” she says.
“My dad’s a good man,” Matthew says, which seems like an ill-fitting response, but who is the judge of what fits and what doesn’t and what does a good fit look like?
“How do I know you’re who you say you are?” Miriam doesn’t really need to ask this question, because Matthew’s voice is unlike any voice she has ever heard. They are connected. She can feel it. There are some things you just know.
“Dad has your birth certificate.”
“Really?”
“He took it with him when you were a baby.”
A congested silence.
“What do you do?” she says.
“Do?”
“For money.”
“I work in a cinema.”
“You watch a lot of films?”
“Loads. I also draw sorrow and go on long bike rides.”
Miriam walks over to the window. She looks into the darkness, the bluish star-studded darkness. “I have a lot of sorrow,” she whispers.
“I’m sure,” he says, soft and deep.
“I used to work in a supermarket.”
“Did you like it?”
They talk about cheese, cold meats, what it’s like to work with the public. They discuss what his house is like (small) and what hers is like (dated but very clean). Miriam makes a hot chocolate, Matthew makes a Horlicks and they sit back down. The call goes deeper into the night until:
“I’d like to meet you,” he says.
“What about your dad?”
“Our dad.”
A pause. A sniff.
“Would you tell him?”
“Of course. Are you free today at all?”
Treacle strolls past the sofa. Miriam reaches down, makes a kissing sound, rubs her finger and thumb together, but Treacle ignores her. This cat is not a fan of Miriam Delaney, who looks at the cuckoo clock and imagines smashing it to pieces with her old hockey stick. This clock is partially to blame for everything that happened—it called time, hour after hour, without ever calling time. It was reliable and ineffectual, rather like her hockey stick, which lasted for years and never hit a ball.
“Today,” Miriam whispers.
“Why wait?”
“All right then. Where and when?”
Twelve miles away, a man is talking to his sister and she is right here, beside the window in the front room. She has been here all along.
I don’t know which is most terrifying, she thinks—believing you’re alone in the world, or discovering that you’re not.