Miriam is early. Ninety minutes early. She is sitting on the grass in the park, waiting for a man who is a stranger and not a stranger. This is new—waiting in the outside world for someone who wants to see her. Perhaps other people are used to this kind of thing? It’s highly likely. Other people are used to all kinds of things that Miriam has never tried. Lovers’ tiffs. Holidays. Bowls of pasta in Italian restaurants. Sex. She wonders if Matthew has had sex. It’s a little odd, thinking about your brother’s sex life, but having a sibling is another thing Miriam isn’t used to. Is the conversation between siblings different to other conversations? Can they read each other’s minds?
“Imagine that your head is a glass box,” Frances said to her ten-year-old daughter. “I can always see what’s inside it.”
“No you can’t.”
“I can. Your thoughts aren’t private, Mim.”
That afternoon Miriam bought a bobble hat to cover the glass box, and wore it every day until her mother flushed it down the toilet, which caused a blockage.
“Is this a bobble hat?” the plumber said.
“So what if it is?” Frances said. “What a woman flushes down the toilet is her own business.”
“Well I never. Can I take a photo?”
“No you cannot take a photo. Do you have a perversion?”
“Do you?”
Miriam realizes something. She doesn’t actually know what Matthew looks like. How will she recognize him? Her eyes will dart from man to man. Are you my brother? Am I your sister? She has no idea that Matthew will recognize her. He knows that she stayed inside her house for three years. How does he know what he knows? He talks to people. Like his father, he makes talking look easy. He’s a conversational pickpocket. It’s dialogical pilferage. It’s fancy talk.
She sits and waits and wonders what she will do for the next ninety minutes. She needed to get out of the house—Ralph was driving her mad with all his Parsley this and Parsley that and he wasn’t even cooking.
Matthew is spreading butter and raspberry jam on a slice of toast. He looks at his father, who is unusually quiet. They are all unusually quiet, even Alfie, who has just been informed that his dad was once married to another woman, and thanks to this horrible confusing out-of-the-blue union, he has a sister who is really really old (thirty-five). He’s already been to her house. He put postcards through her door. 7 Beckford Gardens—remember, Alfie? Matthew knew about the sister but didn’t tell him. He did this for Alfie’s own good because their father was waiting for the right time, even though there’s no such thing.
“Time has a life of its own, like the sea,” Matthew says.
“How did you know about her?” Alfie says.
“I overheard Mum and Dad talking about her before you were born.”
“Before me?” he says, because time before Alfie is inconceivable.
“Before you.”
“What time was it?” Alfie says, squinting at the kitchen clock.
“Sorry?”
“What time did you hear it?”
“I have no idea. It was late, though. Late at night.”
He was sitting on the stairs, holding an empty glass, and they were discussing a girl.
“I can’t imagine how that must feel,” his mother was saying.
“It’s awful.”
“Perhaps it’s not too late?”
“You haven’t met Frances. It just feels wrong, letting Matthew believe he’s an only child when he has a sister.”
A sister?
Silence. Matthew sat perfectly still. He shivered. It was January. He had only come downstairs for milk and a Wagon Wheel and now he had a sister. So where was she?
“When she was a baby she had this toy penguin. She held it so tight. She was scared, Angie, even then, I’m sure of it. Her little knuckles would turn white.”
“Don’t, Eric. You’re just upsetting yourself. You did what was best.”
“Did I?”
“You were only eighteen.”
“That’s hardly an excuse.”
“Did you get your Wagon Wheel?” Alfie says.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I think I just went back to bed.”
Alfie looks at Amy Pond. The look says: “Help me, Amy. Call Doctor Who. Take me back in time to erase the lady who is not my mum.”
“I can’t do that,” Amy says. She is soft and kind and Scottish. “Doctor Who doesn’t erase people unless they’re a threat to the human race.”
Alfie sighs. Naughty Amy! What a silly answer. Can’t she see he’s suffering? Under threat? And he’s part of the human race. He’s a small human being with a big problem and that problem is called turbulence. He knows what turbulence is, he saw it happen to an aeroplane on TV and now it’s happening to him. (“Is turbulence the same as flatulence?” he had asked his mum, shortly after the programme. “Well, they both involve wind,” she said, “but no, they are not the same thing.”)
“I’m going to meet Miriam today,” Matthew says.
“Why?”
“Because she should be part of our family.”
“Steady on,” Eric says. “She may not want to be part of this family.”
“Are you going too?” Alfie says.
“No,” Eric says. “Matthew arranged this himself.”
Eric and Angelina exchange a look of powerlessness, gratitude, bewilderment.
“Why?”
“Because I want to buy her a cup of tea,” Matthew says.
“Doesn’t she have tea at her house?”
“I have no idea.”
“Is she nice?”
“She sounded nice on the phone.”
Alfie stabs a block of butter with a knife.
“Alfie, please,” his mother says, grabbing the knife.
“Are you going to swap me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is she going to take my place?”
Eric stands up. He asks Alfie to do the same. Father and son face each other in the middle of the kitchen. Matthew and Angelina watch and eat toast as Eric picks Alfie up and spins him around. He tickles him, turns him upside down, says that’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard you crazy crazy boy, you’re stuck with us for life, do you hear me? They play the human aeroplane game, even though Alfie is a bit old for this now, and it’s a smooth flight with no turbulence at all, and the plane is giggling, it’s giggling really loudly, because the pilot is brilliant and he’s going nowhere.
And then Matthew has gone and the room is too quiet and no one is giggling any more.
“Maybe you could draw Miriam a picture?” his mum says.
“Why should I?” Alfie says.
He sees her in the park, cross-legged on the grass with her hands on her lap. He walks over and stands beside her, staring at the top of her head. “Miriam Delaney?” he says, rather abruptly.
She jumps to her feet, startled.
His arms are wide open. After years without physical affection, he is the second person this summer to offer her a hug. Before she can make up her mind he lowers his arms and steps forward to kiss her on the cheek.
He is six feet tall. Wiry. Messy light-brown hair, brushed forward, long over the ears. Clean-shaven. Earnest.
“Hello, Miriam,” he says.
“Hello,” she whispers, forgetting that he already knows what kind of sound she makes. She waits for him to respond, to say sorry? or what? or speak up, but he doesn’t.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” he says.
“That would be nice.”
In the cafe near the park entrance, he chooses a table by the window and pulls out a chair for her to sit on. They order tea and egg sandwiches from a waitress in an old-fashioned uniform who is solemn and frilly.
Through the window, they watch two men playing tennis. Words do not come easily—this is not like the phone call a few hours ago.
“That was a good shot,” Matthew says.
“It was,” Miriam says.
“Do you play tennis?”
“No.”
“Me neither. I’m not very sporty.”
“No?”
“No. Do you have any hobbies?”
Miriam looks at him blankly. The silence is awkward, vertiginous, it feels like falling.
“I like box sets,” she says, finally.
“Me too,” he says.
They say something and nothing. They drink tea and eat sandwiches. A baby screams and they roll their eyes, pretending to mind the noise. (Miriam notices how his eyes are brown like hers.) They are shy and lost but Matthew has a plan, a way to bring them together.
“Would you like to go for a bike ride?” he says, when their plates are empty.
Miriam has never ridden a bike. She doesn’t own one. A bike ride? What an odd thing to suggest at a time like this. It’s disappointing too, because now she is feeling like she so often feels in the company of others: stupid, alien, out of her depth.
“I don’t know how,” she says.
“That’s okay. I’ll do the work.”
He’ll what?
“Would you like to see my bike?”
Not really, she thinks. I’d rather have a piece of cake and ask about your father.
Matthew leads the way across the park. It’s a relief to be outside, not face to face under bright lights in a room full of insistent waitresses who want to know things. (Would you like tea or coffee or cake or sandwiches? I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.)
Miriam buys a Mr Whippy with a flake for Matthew and a lemonade lolly for herself. As they walk past a small lake, she imagines that he is five and she is nineteen. Is this the sort of day they would have shared? A stroll in the sun, an ice cream, talk of bicycles? But he is not five and she is not nineteen. It is sixteen years later and he is telling her that he likes art, bikes, Oasis. He makes it look effortless, this listing of things, as though his self is solid and fixed and easy to explain. What else does he like? Charcoal, George Orwell, life drawing, Wallander, roast dinners and postcards.
He stops walking. “I sent you eight postcards,” he says.
“They were from you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was trying to make contact.”
“You could have picked up the phone.”
He blushes, looks guilty. “I got Alfie to post them while I waited in the car.”
A high-pitched whisper as his words sink in: “You’ve been to my house?”
He freezes. She looks so sad.
In her mind, Miriam shouts: This was a mistake. You’re crazy. I need Ralph. He’ll take me home. I need Ralph.
“I just wanted to reach you,” he says. “That’s why I sent them. And why I brought you this.” He rummages through his bag and pulls out a small wooden tree. He holds it upside down and points at the base. “Tree of Simplicity, see? Dad made it years ago. I kept it for you.”
Miriam takes the tree from his hand and inspects the wording: TREE OF SIMPLICITY. It is beautiful. Intricate. The tree is crooked. It has one tiny leaf, painted orange.
They walk on in silence, following a footpath along the edge of the park. As the path curves, it opens into a parking area for bikes. Right in the middle of the row, secured by two locks, is a tandem: two handlebars, two sets of pedals, two seats.
“What do you think?” Matthew says.
“There are many bikes,” Miriam says. “Which one is yours?”
“This one,” he says, tapping the tandem.
That cumbersome thing? A bicycle built for two?
“I can’t get on that.”
“Why not?”
“People will stare.”
“So?” he says, unlocking the bike.
What is he doing now? She watches him bend down and look inside his bag. He pulls out some kind of music player and a massive pair of red headphones. Miriam has never seen such ridiculous headphones. She would feel self-conscious wearing those, but he doesn’t seem to worry about such things. He—
Excuse me?
is putting the headphones on her head, adjusting them until they are tight. He presses something on the music player and slips it inside her pocket. Now she can’t hear anything. The world is silent. It’s nice. Until—
My God that’s loud!
He smiles at the tinny sound coming from the headphones. “Come on,” he shouts. He is sitting on the front seat, gesticulating towards the back. He wants her to get on. To get on now. “Come on!”
She does what he says. She gets on the bike. And they’re off. Four feet on four pedals. He’s steering, they’ve left the park, they’re cycling down the main road. Now they’re turning left, heading downhill and it’s so bloody fast, the wind is in her hair, he’s yelling woohoo! and she can just about hear him over the sound of Oasis, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, and there’s another woohoo, it’s wispy and small but definitely there, in her throat in her mouth, making its way out as she closes her eyes, as she kicks out her legs, and the woo is a whisper but the hoo is something else, it’s richer and bigger, part whisper part song, and this is her secret, just hers for now, the woo and the hoo and the speeding downhill on a bicycle built for two.