He caught a taxi at King’s Cross, then the train out of Marylebone, then another taxi home. (Respective fares: £12.50, £22.30 and £6. Receipts all neatly folded in his wallet. The taxman cometh, every January. Throw in a six-quid shoeshine at the station on his way in, the taxi he took to the office, three Pret coffees at two quid a throw and another five pounds something for the new issue of GQ and you saw how it seemed impossible for Alan to set foot out of the house without dropping a hundred quid.)
The house was blazing with light in the dark night (the fifteen-foot Christmas tree in the bay window of the lounge) and he was greeted by another pleasing sight as he came up the gravel drive – his son’s VW Polo. Alan sighed as he glanced at the mess in Tom’s car – it always looked like he was living in there – and slipped around the back of the house, coming in through the futility room, carefully hiding his gifts under a pile of clean towels, reflexively remembering as he did so that he’d forgotten to get something for Petra.
He came into the kitchen. ‘DADDY!’ Sophie cried, running across the room. Melissa was at the table, doing homework, Katie at the Aga, stirring something. ‘Hey, guys,’ Alan said, picking Sophie up.
‘I got a merit badge in spelling!’ she squealed.
‘Did you now? Hey, Mel, how’s tricks?’ He leaned down and kissed his elder daughter’s head. A noise of some kind was audible from somewhere above them.
‘It would not be possible for me to care less about the constitution of the United States,’ Melissa said, referring to the books and pad spread out in front of her.
‘Then you’d make an excellent lawyer over there,’ Katie said, coming across to peck Alan on the cheek on her way to the sink with a colander full of knobbly, oddly shaped carrots from the Abel & Cole box by the back door. (Was there any middle-class cliché they didn’t tick off? Alan sometimes wondered.) ‘How was town?’ she said.
‘Oh, fine. I might have to go off to Scotland for a couple of days in the new year though, on this bloody wild-food feature. Where’s the prodigal son?’
‘Upstairs,’ Katie said. ‘He got back this afternoon.’
‘He’s, uh, “jamming” with Craig …’ Melissa said.
Alan cocked an ear and indeed the noise from upstairs did resolve itself into some kind of twelve-bar blues motif.
‘Come and see, Daddy!’ Sophie said. ‘They’re really good!’ She stomped off, turning round in the doorway and putting her hands on her hips. ‘But they’re too loud!’
‘Tell the guys dinner in about twenty,’ Katie said. ‘Mel, you’ll need to clear your books off, darling.’
Alan reached into the fridge and took out three bottles of Corona then followed Sophie up the stairs and down the hallway to Tom’s bedroom, right at the back of the house. The music got louder, rock and roll, something like Elvis or Carl Perkins. Sophie pushed the door open and wagged her finger at them. ‘YOU BOYS ARE TOO LOUD!’ she shouted before running off down the hall towards her own room.
Craig was cross-legged on the floor playing Tom’s black Telecaster copy, a seventeenth-birthday present. It was plugged into Tom’s little practice amp through a cream-and-blue pedal. Tom was sitting on the edge of the bed strumming his acoustic guitar. They kept going for a minute or so while Alan – whose musical talents had never progressed much beyond the anti-rhythmic stabbings at the bass that had caused Craig to fire him from their first band all those years ago – looked on amazed and not a little jealous. Tom had started playing guitar at school when he was about twelve and had progressed into a decent, basic rhythm player; he could hold down chord patterns and play simple riffs. Now, with Craig playing over the top, he sounded transformed. Tom was knocking out a three-chord progression with energy and excitement while Craig filled in with little licks and fluid lead passages, his guitar drenched in a kind of swampy reverb or echo.
Seeing Craig on the floor like this instantly transported Alan back over thirty years, to the council-house bedrooms and creosote-scented garages of their youth, when Craig had seemed like a superman capable of anything, rather than an enfeebled tramp. Alan could see him now: his Peavey amp with the black grille and jagged silver logo (‘Bandit’) and his sunburst Shergold Masquerader, the same guitar Barney played in Joy Division, as they all drank Strongbow or Kestrel and called out for songs while Craig’s mum screamed up the stairs to ‘turn that bloody thing down!’ The hours, uncountable, that Craig had spent in his teenage bedroom playing along to records, putting the needle back again and again as he tried to get this or that exactly right, peering at photographs in the music papers to try and work out chord shapes, standing in front of the guitarist at gigs, trying to get it all. ‘“Eton Rifles”!’ someone would say. Or ‘Do “Pretty Vacant”!’, or ‘Gie us “Safe European Home”!’ (a short year or two later – a year being a century in your teens of course – it would be ‘“This Charming Man”!’ or ‘“Felicity”!’ or ‘“Walk Out to Winter”!’) and Craig would knock it out, not just the basic chords, not an approximation, but the exact part, the precise notes, making you think that Mick Jones or Roddy Frame himself was standing there. His amp had been so loud in those small rooms, the cider so sweet as the smoke of roll-ups and cigarettes stained the Artex ceiling above them, and their futures had seemed limitless, even in those dark days of Ayrshire under Thatcher. ‘The Touch’, Alan’s dad had called Craig, a reference to his guitar playing, when once at a Hogmanay party, rather than bringing forth the usual punk-rock stylings, Craig had silenced the room with a note-perfect acoustic version of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Feeling Groovy’. Alan’s dad had pointed heavily, drunkenly at Craig. ‘Aye,’ he’d said solemnly. ‘That boy’s got the touch …’ The nickname had stuck for a while.
‘Hey, Dad,’ Tom said getting up.
Alan’s initial thought as he hugged his son was, as ever when he hadn’t seen him in a couple of months, You little fucking bastard. Because, and this didn’t seem fair or possible, Tom had grown some more. The boy would soon be twenty and there was no longer any point in trying to deny it, or outflank it with a teased-up hairstyle or those boots Alan had with the quite high heels, because the results were definitely in: Tom was now taller than his father.
And this was real hinge-of-life stuff. Alan remembered how shocked he’d been to find some of his own graduation photographs, years back, when they’d moved out of London, and to see that his father was so much shorter than him in them. He’d never thought of himself as being taller than his father until the very end, but there he was: towering head and shoulders over the old man back in the early nineties. Would Alan and Tom look like that by the time graduation came along in a couple of years? Would Alan be a frail, teetering Yoda next to this hulking Skywalker?
And yet, strange though Tom’s continuing growth was, it never failed to astonish Alan how your children always seemed to be the right age, the correct age for maximum love. When you a have a three-year-old and you look at parents with, say, seven-year-old children you think something like Yeuuch, how can they love such giant brutes? Yet, when your child reaches seven this seems exactly the age they should be. And the same thing at ten, twelve and twenty.
‘Hey, Craig,’ Alan said, handing one of the three beers to Craig, the other to Tom. ‘So you two have met?’ Tom had been filled in about Craig on a couple of Skype calls over the past few weeks, when either he or Katie succeeded in pinning him down on a Skype call. (‘Wow,’ he’d said. ‘You’re quite literally helping the homeless?’) Mostly, like many long-distance parents, they kept up with his activities via stalking him on the social media profiles he had not yet succeeded in blocking them on. The Instagram account Katie still had operational under a false name showed a relentlessly hedonistic series of images: Tom and some mates suited and booted in some awful student kitchen, holding beers towards the camera, Tom and a bunch of girls doing shots in a nightclub, Tom and mates doing shots at a poolside bar on his lads holiday to Greece the previous summer, Tom and his mates doing shots at a bowling alley, doing shots at a gig, doing shots in tuxedos at some university ball, doing shots at … whatever.
‘Yeah,’ Tom said. ‘Craig got my delay pedal working again.’ Tom nudged the wee cream-and-blue box with his foot. Craig pressed the pedal down with the flat of his palm and snapped off a riff on the guitar. ‘Rockabilly?’ Alan said.
‘Aye, classic slapback echo you can do on the DD-3. It just needed soldering. Your boy here’s no a bad wee player,’ Craig said, switching the amp off, standing up. ‘Cheers.’ The three of them clinked beers. Alan lowered himself onto the overstuffed beanbag Tom had had for years.
‘And how’s tricks, Tom? Term end OK?’
‘Yeah, all good. I changed a subject.’
‘Eh? How come?’
‘Couldn’t stand the psychology module.’ Tom was reading PPE at Glasgow, his father’s alma mater. They’d bought a flat for him in the West End.
‘Eh? You can do that?’ Trying to understand the make-up of degrees these days was far beyond Alan. In his day you picked a subject, did it for three or four years and then sat your finals. Nowadays, modules, dissertations, continuous assessment … who had the attention span? Still, he felt he should make some comment here. ‘Shouldn’t we have discussed this?’
‘OK then,’ Tom said, playing along, knowing well his father’s monumental laziness when it came to anything education-related. ‘What do you think about the move from psychology to criminology within a PPE degree, Dad?’
‘Fairs,’ Alan said, using one of Tom’s favoured expressions to admit defeat.
‘Anyway, I told Mum. She said “fine”.’
‘Oh good.’ Alan said this in a ‘we’re all done here then’ tone.
‘Did you two meet at Glasgow?’ Tom said.
‘At school,’ Alan said.
‘I dropped out of uni,’ Craig said.
‘To become a pop star,’ Alan said.
‘Ach, hardly.’
‘I googled your band,’ Tom said to Craig. ‘There’s a few songs up on YouTube. Pretty good.’
‘Ach, it was a long time ago.’
Sophie appeared in the doorway, hands planted on hips again. ‘MUMMY SAYS YOU HAVE TO HAVE DINNER NOW!’
‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ Alan said.
‘I am NOT mine Fewreerr,’ Soph said. ‘I’m sitting next to Tom!’
‘I thought Craig was your favourite?’ Alan said, getting up, draining his beer.
‘Tom,’ Sophie said firmly, taking her brother’s hand.
‘That’s me told,’ Craig said.
All six of them around the kitchen table, Katie, Alan, Craig, Tom, Melissa and Sophie, the rain lashing off the windows now as they ate winter food: pork shoulder braised in cider (broccoli bake for Melissa) with dollops of mash and carrots slowly cooked in butter and sugar. Wine all round, even a splash for Sophie, topped up with 80 per cent sparkling water – her ‘special’ cocktail, to celebrate Tom’s homecoming. Lana Del Ray played softly – a compromise choice following fierce debate between the kids, with Tom wanting an indie compilation, Melissa some hip hop and Sophie arguing passionately for either Minecraft songs or Katy Perry. (Though to be honest her ‘argument’ amounted to shouting the words ‘MINECRAFT’ and ‘KATY PERRY’ over and over.)
The conversation ranged over guitars (Tom and Craig), to the unfairness of not getting to stay the whole weekend at her friend’s house for some party (Melissa), to whether Applejack could beat Twilight Sparkle in a race (Sophie, with a spirited contribution from Tom), to Katie and Alan discussing their upcoming meeting with the accountants about their joint tax bills.
Tax. A difficult area. While neither of them could be described as Tax-Me-Daft Red Clyders, it was fair to say neither Alan nor Katie were entirely comfortable with the concept of tax dodging. Minimising the amount you paid within the law was their preferred route. They’d never have an offshore trust but they’d happily put through any conceivable claimable expense. They’d never set up a Dutch shell company but there had been that thing the other year where – on advice from their accountants, after Alan had received an unexpectedly large royalty cheque – Alan had set up a new limited company and then sold some ‘assets’ (his books) to the company as a way of deferring tax or something. (A bit like asking directions, Alan always zoned out after the accountant’s third sentence.) They were assured it was all perfectly legit but it had felt like sailing as close to the edge as they wanted to get. They’d bought the flat in Glasgow’s West End for Tom through the company. And with an unexpected windfall from Katie’s father. Some dividend or other.
‘Tax-dodging scumbags,’ Tom said jovially.
‘Hear, hear!’ Melissa said.
‘For the millionth time, Tom,’ Alan said, ‘there’s a difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.’
‘Mmmm,’ Tom said. ‘A legal one. If not a moral one.’ Under siege, from their own bright children.
‘You’ll find those distinctions get blurred as you get older,’ Katie said.
‘Aye, true enough,’ Craig said. ‘I remember back in the band days. We got offered all sorts of money for adverts at one point. Laughed at them. Turned them all down. No way were we selling out. God, I could have done with that money recently I’ll tell you.’
‘What products was it for?’ Tom asked.
‘Och, nothing nasty. A car. Some juice drink. It was hardly banks or the Sun.’
‘Dad did an advert,’ Melissa offered, helping herself to a second glass of wine. Bold for a sixteen-year-old.
‘Did you?’ Craig said.
‘A few years back. Just a cameo. Supermarket Christmas ad.’
‘You were rubbish,’ Melissa said.
‘Sell-out,’ Tom said.
‘As I have no interest in becoming an actor your words cannot hurt me. Anyway, Tom, how’s things with the flat?’
‘All fine.’
‘No crazed mass-invite Facebook parties of late?’
‘No. Well …’
‘That’s our money, remember.’
‘Grandad’s money more like,’ Melissa muttered. It was a rare, and slightly too savage, reference to the fact that Katie’s family wealth was occasionally helpful to them.
‘We earn our own money, Melissa,’ Katie said.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Alan said.
‘Come on. Grandpa gave you the money to buy Tom’s flat.’
‘That’s not entirely the whol— OK. Enough wine for you.’
There was an edge to the conversation now. Craig kept his head down and concentrated on his food. Sophie said ‘No arguing!’ and wagged her tiny finger at them. Alan had noticed this recently – Melissa got a little more belligerent, a little more aggressive, every time Tom came home. It was as if this was increasingly the way she defined herself in his presence: Tom was laid-back and gregarious, by some distance the easiest of their children (so often the prerogative of the first-born), so Melissa cast herself as the spiky, provocative one. The roles that the order of our birth assigns us, Alan thought. There was also, clearly, a showing-off-in-front-of-Craig element that had crept in in the last couple of weeks. Although it would, of course, be suicide to mention this to a teenage girl.
‘Oh, calm down, Dad,’ Melissa said.
‘Don’t do that, Melissa,’ Alan said.
‘Do what?’
‘Attack someone and then, when they defend themselves, accuse them of losing their temper. It’s a really tedious tactic.’
‘Oh, I’m tedious now, am I?’
‘Jesus, Mel,’ Tom said, exasperated now.
‘I said the tactic was tedious, not you.’
‘OK, let’s move on.’ Katie. ‘Craig, can you pass the carr—’
But Melissa: ‘Uh, maybe it wasn’t, like, a tactic?’
‘Uh, do you come from, like, the Valley? Are you going to, like, the mall?’ Alan said, using the rising inflection at the end, his standard tactic when someone of Melissa’s generation did the American sitcom-speak thing.
‘People talk this way now.’
‘What people? The people on a dumb American sitcom?’
‘Oh yeah, everyone’s dumb except you.’ Melissa, it seemed, was absolutely determined to have the last word, a trait Katie would no doubt have pointed out she shared with her father.
‘OK, Mel, that’s enough.’ Alan caught some kind of smirk passing between Melissa and Craig. This touched something primitive and patriarchal within him, something ludicrously Victorian, him, the provider, being disrespected here at his own table. Fuck this, he thought as he reached for the suicide button. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop showing off in front of Craig.’
‘Oh PISS OFF!’ Melissa said, cutlery clattering onto her plate.
‘HEY!’
She pushed herself up from the table and stomped off. Alan got up to follow her but Katie said, ‘Leave it, Alan,’ in a tone that brooked no argument.
‘Melissa’s mad,’ Sophie said.
‘Oh, Melissa’s always bloody mad about something,’ Alan said with far more casualness than he felt, draining his glass.
There was a fractional pause before Tom said, ‘Bloody kids, eh?’
Alan grabbed some plates and carried them to the dishwasher. He began stacking the machine, continuing to do a very good impression of someone who was wryly amused by what had just happened. In reality the blood was pumping behind his eyes and he felt light-headed with rage. That smirk they’d shared. He struggled to remember the last time he’d been this enraged at his own dinner table. The last time he’d been this enraged full stop. There was something unnerving about the experience, about what he was feeling right now. That sense of being belittled and outmanoeuvred and made to lose your temper, it … it was like being a teenager again. It was like he used to feel around Craig.
Sitting outside the Costa the next day, out on one of his walks, wrapped up warm in one of Alan’s parkas, sipping a macchiato, Craig turned the page in his journal (the last section he’d begun was headed ‘Cocaine?’) and began a new section called ‘Tax?’. He’d need to read up on this a bit more.