Dave creeps upstairs with the tray, his broad feet taking the strain as he goes up the groaning stairs. He goes carefully, mouth cracked. He pauses midway to let the trembling knife settle on the plate. On his tray is a midnight feast of breakfast sundries. They are either way ahead of the game or way behind it, he thinks to himself as he pads along the hallway, passing by the children’s rooms soft of foot.
‘Marmite for me, marmalade for Marina,’ he sings in a Louis Armstrong voice, kicking the door open with his toes. He sets the tray down on the bench at the end of the bed. His nightgown opens and his tackle sways free. He completes his burlesque with a hip thrust, sending his sack south circular, and she tells him to put it away. But he doesn’t, not until he gets a laugh from her.
Slipping in bed with their plates, he takes his slice and she takes hers and they savour them in quiet for a few minutes until the plates bear nothing but crumbs and he takes hers from her and puts both on the night table next to him. Marmalade meets Marmite when they kiss. ‘I love you,’ he says and Marina shifts a little bit beside him. It is her sign and he knows it well. He rolls on to his side, kisses her again and then moves on top of her. She can see stubble, the thinnest of horizons on the side of his face, and she places her hands on each of his shoulder blades. This is not new. They have been here a thousand times before. It doesn’t need to be new.
Afterwards, holding hands, they float on a raft into dreams of a velvet quality, action-packed, of derring-do and yet familiar too. Their eyelids flicker. He lies on his side and she lies behind him, nose to his back, then she turns over on to her other side and he turns and lies behind her, nose to her back, and so they follow each other on the path of the moon.
They grew up in the same village until they were eight and then his family moved away. Both of their mothers picked fruit in the fields – blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries, apples. When they first met it might have been at school, but she likes to think it was when she was sitting on her big frilly bum in her pram and the boy pushed a strawberry into her mouth. Or it might have been that they walked the length of a strawberry field on a warm day in June or July with red pulp, dirt and straw on their knees from where they’d knelt to take the smallest tastiest fruit from under the leaves.
Then they were greedy and dirty and happy and their mothers weren’t far away, busty and coarse, laying into each other roundly and raucously, and enjoying most of all slandering and deriding their men. Suddenly a mum would stand upright and call out a name and they’d both run back, hell for leather.
Marina’s mother, Lynn, was in a nursing home. She went to see her the week before, and spent an hour with her, the old girl in her armchair from home, sitting in the sunny part of the room, in wool hat and anorak, looking at the light and shadow on the wall. From her old mother’s bifocals came a glinting light, drawing from the open window to give a message in semaphore: I am nearly gone, goodbye, goodbye, farewell . . .
Marina wakes and sleeps and wakes, turns and finds sleep at last in a small space on the right of the pillow, just an inch square, and she passes through the gap in the hedge into the fields again and finds Davie already there, filthy. No one else is there, not even their children exist in that place. They spend the rest of the night there together.
Matt hates waiting for them to rise. He yearns. He yearns particularly on Sunday mornings and finds no solace in television or computer games. He wanders the house disconsolately, sitting in the cold kitchen looking at the mess his dad left behind the night before: breadboard sticky, crumbs underfoot, jars unlidded. He kicks the kitchen table and scowls at the clock, and goes back upstairs to fire up his computer and gets to work on his project for his granddad. ‘Project Death’, as he likes to call it, and he checks his MySpace messages from people all over the world, but mostly from the USA.
It seems there is a form of arsenic that is easy to take and can be purchased online, so he prints out the information. And it’s as the printer whirrs at seven in the morning, shuddering and clattering, that his father comes in, disgruntled, his eyes barely open, and he puts a hand on Matt’s chair and leans forward to squint at the computer screen. Matt can’t shut it down in time.
‘DIY Death? You what, Matt?’
So Matt has to tell him how Ken asked him to help him out of the world.
‘You what?’ says Dave again, coming to. And Matt’s unsure whether his father is slow, or whether he’s tired, or whether he’s in disbelief so the only thing he can do is put it simply.
‘He wants to die.’
‘You what?’
‘He doesn’t want to go into a home.’
‘I tell you what, M-M-Matt, this is absolutely beyond belief, isn’t it? M-m-my old man’s having my son buy him poison, lethal poison, online on the flaming Internet? What do you think you’re doing, killing your grandfather?’
Marina comes in. ‘What’s going on in here?’
‘He,’ says Dave, pointing at the son behind the fringe, ‘is only helping his grandfather top ’imself.’
The mother looks her son in the eyes as if to absorb the entire story in one look, so as to go ahead and protect him from his father’s anger; she steps between them. ‘It’s just the Internet, Dave.’
‘I could . . . I could . . . I mean . . . you couldn’t . . .’
‘Calm down. It’s just kids. Just a game. Isn’t it, Matt? They all do this sort of thing these days, Dave,’ she says with warm condescension. ‘It’s just . . . role play,’ she says finding a term she’s heard on the television. ‘It’s because of the Internet. They all do it. They all look up these things. Kids do.’
‘What – killing your grandfather?’
‘He asked me to.’
‘Things are going to change round here. The-the-that thing, that computer, right, that’s finished, done with, gone! And we’re going to get your hair cut!’
‘Oh fine. Sure! What’s that going to do? God, Dad, you’re so illogical.’
‘Turn that thing off. Right now!’
‘It’s not evil.’
‘That thing is bringing you up to be some sort of weirdo, some sort of . . . I don’t know. He sounds American, don’ ’e, Marina? I said to you, He sounds American. We need to get him a part-time job delivering the papers, or something. On a bicycle. So he can see a bit of the real world.’
Matt closes his eyes: Zen, think Zen. His MySpace name is ‘Zendudehastings’. The first part of it is massively hard to live up to at times.
‘OK. Let me explain it to you both. Granddad is scared of going into a home. He’s seen what you did to Granny Lynn and he’s worried about it. I don’t blame him. He’d rather die than go in one of those places.’
‘Granny Lynn is off her rocker!’
‘Well, you say the same about him.’
‘Only as a joke! Fuck me, this is like having some sort of double agent living in your own home.’
‘I believe in individual liberties,’ he stammers, borrowing something from school.
‘Oh, shit me, Marina. Do you hear this? It’s Che Flaming Guevara now!’
‘Look. Someone’s got to stand up for him, for his human rights.’ Matt catches sight of his father’s expression, and his mother stepping back, and he folds. ‘I was going to tell you about it at some point. I was just doing the research.’
‘See-ee,’ says Marina quickly, using the ‘e’s in the word to sound peace. ‘He was going to tell us about it!’
It’s clear that Che has left the room. Matt’s knees collide as he uses the chair’s pedestal, swaying left and right. ‘I said to him, They’ll find you somewhere nice. Mum and Dad will.’ He lifts his long-lashed eyes to them and throws his fringe back, and Marina’s heart lurches at the sight of his beautiful freckled face and perfect nose; its innocence decries the would-be goth and deathmonger. ‘And we looked some up but, Dad, honestly they’re really the pits . . .’ He checks the American inflection.
‘They’re shitholes, Dad. But even if they weren’t, it’s not what he wants and why should he have to go into one? He doesn’t want to die in a home or hospital; he just wants to go naturally. He wants to die his way. What’s wrong with that? Is it so much to ask?’
‘No, Matt,’ Marina moves forward to touch him. ‘No, of course it’s not but, love, you shouldn’t be looking up lethal poison on the Internet. Anyway. Anyway.’ She turns to flash fierce eyes at Dave. ‘It’s Ken who’s to blame, not Matt. It’s like what they call grooming. He shouldn’t have asked a child to do this.’
‘He’s daft in the head. Matt’s not.’
‘See! See! That’s what I mean!’
Having stood with a hand up at his head to shield her from his vision, Dave drops his hands and catches sight of Marina’s look now, and grunts. ‘I don’t mean he should be locked up or done away with, do I? He’s just old, Matt. And nutty. Gordon Bennett.’
‘Well. Is he even ill? Is Ken dying?’ Marina asks him sharply.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Could be. It makes sense of a lot of stuff.’ Dave turns round and presents his back to them, both hands on his head. They see his back rise and fall. When he turns back, he’s thin-lipped. ‘All right, Matt. All right, son. Leave it with me.’
We’re too soft on that boy, he thinks as he goes off to the shower. But he doesn’t know what to do about it. What Matt’s done, it’s just the kind of thing his brother would do, all high ideals and no common sense.
Over lunch, he snuck a look at his son and when his son snuck a look back, Dave gave him a wan smile of recognition and of love.
Dave couldn’t bear to have bad feeling in the air. It hurt him to punish his kids. It ate him up.
He offered Matt his crackling. He winked at Emily and told
Marina she looked nice.
‘That a new top, love?’
‘No, it’s old as the hills.’
‘So, Matt mate, maybe we could get tickets to go and see your, um, Chemical Romance people,’ he said, catching the drop off the spout of the gravy jug and making sure Marina saw him do it. ‘Just in time. Don’t wanna spoil the cloth.’
The best thing about Dave, as they all knew, was that he had not much in the way of pride. He didn’t want to be alone and he never would be.