‘I don’t care if he does die,’ he said. ‘I won’t go to the funeral.’ When they got home from picking up Laura at the station that evening, he was critical about the supper Astrid made; he didn’t like ‘fruit with meat’, he said, making a face at the lamb and apricot tagine. He sulked about the TV programme she put on, mocked the women on it so much she couldn’t hear it.
‘If they want to lose weight, why don’t they just stop eating?’ He sat in the armchair rather than on the sofa with her. He seemed stuck on the same page of St Augustine’s Confessions. He set it aside to moan that everything on the television was rubbish these days. Didn’t she think?
‘Hmm?’ He pressed her. She didn’t answer.
‘Over a hundred channels and nothing worth watching,’ said Laura, deadpan, ‘and pop stars that can’t play instruments.’ Curled up on the smaller sofa, she popped in her earphones.
When Astrid turned the television off and picked up a book, he said that books these days were written by victims for victims. As if life were a pity contest, he said. Darwin would be turning in his grave! What was wrong with being brave? he asked her.
When she failed to rise to that bait, he complained about her mood spoiling the evening. So she went to the kitchen to have a good time cleaning the fridge. ‘I’ve got my very own Ken now,’ she said to herself as she doused and soaped the glass shelf in the sink.
He tried to elevate Laura by telling her how much he’d read as a child, how he’d been top of the class without fail – and never for a moment bored – and the girl raised one eyebrow and took her Nintendo DS off to the kitchen.
He was left alone in the front room.
‘He reminds me of Granddad,’ Laura said to Astrid, taking up a wet cloth and wiping over the evacuated jars on the counter.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Boring.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s like when you go for a walk with Granddad, he has to say stuff to spoil it, about history or nature or the sound of the river being like music or something. I never answer him. But he still does it. He says stuff like, Oh, to think the Anglo-Saxons washed their socks here, or whatever.’
The front-room door banged against the wall as he came out to them.
‘Don’t you have any classical music?’ he asked, brandishing
Astrid’s iPod. He poured himself a glass of wine.
When Laura went up to her room, Astrid let him talk. They went to the conservatory so that he could sound off. She sat and listened with her hands clasped while he walked up and down, pointing at his reflection in the windows. First he expressed his moral outrage at having been ‘hi-jacked’ – he put it that way – over lunch, then he proceeded to console himself by taking the piss out of the old man. By way of conclusion, he announced that he was done with them, he was washing his hands of his family, for once and for all. It was final.
But he didn’t get from her the reaction he wanted. She seemed distracted, to his mind. Oh yes, she joined in with him and echoed his sentiments and shook her head in all the right places but she didn’t seem to fully get it. He had to put things in extreme terms for her to even begin to know how he felt. He had to keep going over it. He needed something from her, but he didn’t know what it was and neither did she, so he paced and gestured and fumed and she watched him.
‘Poor you,’ she said, at what was possibly the end of it. He checked her face for sarcasm, but there was that faraway blithe look on it that was so impenetrable. ‘I’m glad I don’t have this trouble with my parents,’ she said.
She was thinking whether she oughtn’t to empty the one bottle of Encona chilli sauce into the other. There were two in the fridge. Or she could just throw one away; it was manky, it didn’t look nice.
‘That’s a loaded comment!’ he said, eagerly following her as she slipped back into the kitchen.
When the phone rang, he leapt at it; he snatched it from the cradle. She knelt to wipe out the bottom compartment of the fridge. He came over and kicked her bum with his socked foot and pointed to the phone in his hand. She took a deep breath.
‘You daft old shit!’ he shouted. ‘You’re nothing to me. Well, and you, you’ve not been a father to me! Normal? Normal? How would you know what was normal?’
Then he put the phone back.
‘That was him,’ he said, pushing his hair back with his hand.
‘Ken.’
‘Yes. I thought so.’
Words failed him. ‘For fuck’s sake! Astrid!’
‘Shall we unplug it? Are we in for an evening of it?’
He sat down on a kitchen chair and looked suddenly defeated. He put his thumb to his mouth, and chewed the side of the nail.
‘You throwing that out?’ He nodded at the bottle she was sliding into the bin’s steel mouth.
‘Yes.’
‘Is it empty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t throw it away if there’s some left.’
‘Thank you, but I can manage the sauce bottles all by myself. What did he say?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. The usual.’ He shrugged. ‘Rubbish. I don’t know. I didn’t listen.’
Typical bloke, she thought. ‘Poor old you,’ she said.
He fell into a preoccupied stupor, thumbnail in mouth, eyes bulging, and – since she could get away with it – she popped into the bin the almost-empty bottle of brown sauce as well. She liked filling the bin. It was a pleasure akin to shopping. Perhaps even guiltier. She treated herself to a spot of non-recycling protocol by putting them in the household rubbish too. There were all sorts of condiments that could go.
He got himself a new drink. He made sure she heard him unscrewing the bottle. He was having whiskey, rather ostentatiously. He would want her to comment, or ask if he wanted ice with it, so that he could say, No, I’ll have it neat. He knocked it back and made the proper noise, the sound a bus made before it moved off.
When they came back from the holiday, he told her, he’d change their phone number. He’d refuse to take calls from his brother; he’d break off with them all for good. He’d renounce them. And be done with it. His father was an arsehole and his brother, well, the truth of it was he was a loser. He’d called him a loser when the kid was only three years old and that’s what he was: a loser.
‘Who is?’ said doe-eyed Laura, in her PJs in the doorway, pulling a mermaid’s comb through her long wet hair.
‘Nobody,’ he said.
They had a laugh together upstairs, the girls, when Astrid took up the laundry and began sorting it in Laura’s room.
‘Fancy calling a three-year-old a loser!’ Laura smirked, holding up some beads to the mirror.
‘He’s upset. Poor Nick.’ Astrid patted the covers around her daughter’s face to frame it and kissed her nose.
‘ASTRID!’ he called upstairs. ‘ASTRID!’
‘Yes?’ They clung to each other; they could feel each other’s chest rise and fall, and they began to tremble with the wantonness of laughter.
‘ASTRID! SHALL I CALL HIM BACK AND TELL HIM WHAT I THINK OF HIM AND THAT NEXT TIME I SEE HIM IT WILL BE IN A BOX? NO, IT WON’T, THOUGH, BECAUSE I WON’T EVEN GO TO THE FUNERAL. SHALL I TELL HIM THAT?’
‘If you want to, honey!’ She stuck her nose in her daughter’s hair.
‘Mum.’ Laura pulled away, and splayed her fingers to check the nails she’d painted that day. ‘Mum. He’s so lost his cool, it’s like – freak out, man!’
‘I know! But he can’t help it.’
‘It’s like, whoops! There goes my charisma. I don’t know how you can fancy him. Why don’t you break up?’ She knelt up. ‘Hey. Then we could like move to London? So much cooler and we’d be nearer to my dad!’
On Monday Nick was back at work. By Monday evening he was saying that he was completely over it. On Tuesday he had a few drinks and went through it again with her and made a call to the old man, telling him not to call him ever again, then he did the whiskey-and-bus-noise routine, and on Wednesday night he came in miserable and just about jumped to grab the phone when it rang. His father must have slipped in something new, because Nick’s voice wobbled, and he seemed to gulp: ‘No, you did that! You did that!’
And when she asked him what he meant, he said he’d had enough of it all, he didn’t want to talk about it. He got himself a whiskey, finishing the bottle into a tumbler, and put on the television. She stood open-mouthed, looking at him with his feet up on the coffee table. He had his shoes on.
‘Nick! Shoes!’
‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘Go and look after your daughter, or something.’
‘Don’t be so rude to me! It’s not all about you, Nick! Not everything’s about you!’
‘Oh, fuck off, Astrid,’ he said.
Quite a lot was said between them, up and down the stairs that evening, and finally he withdrew and hid under the covers while she sat downstairs with the whiskey ostentatious.
When he came in the next evening, they were curt but courteous; they had Laura there to keep them on the toes of their manners, and neither said anything about the night before.
‘Would you like to eat now?’
‘If you do.’
‘Well, I’m not hungry – but if you are, we can.’
‘Sure. Whatever you want.’
Pushing past the pussyfooting pair, Laura went with a heavy ‘excuse me’ to the bread bin. She made herself a sandwich and left the spread a mulch of crumb putty with the knife stuck in it, upright.
‘I shouldn’t be eating bread all the time. No wonder I’m borderline obese,’ she said and went into the front room to watch television.
Astrid had imagined there would be an apology. She sat up in bed, with the covers at her chest, waiting patiently and in full make-up. He looked at her nightdress pointedly, and then began to undress. She watched him hobble about the room in between the open suitcases, pulling each foot out of his trouser legs, bobbing about as if he were on the deck of a keening ship. He removed his underpants without a care, showing her his arse fully; he draped them over the chair, then pulled back the covers and climbed in.
‘What?’ he asked, opening an eye to see her looking sideways at him.
‘Nothing.’ She turned out the light, pulled the covers up to her chin and wriggled down.
After a minute his hand felt for hers. In another minute, he was asleep.