Later, Uncle Joe brings out his fiddle. James has a hard English heart of his own, but it melts at the bouncing, tripping tones, timeless as birdsong, butter-knifing down the sad, swift decades. ‘I wish, I wish,’ sings Joe, in a cracked voice that suits the song perfectly, ‘I wish in vain, I wish, I wish, I was a youth again.’
James, slumped awkwardly on the same sofa that hosted his first kiss fifteen years earlier — Emma was her name — and on which he and Becks many times sat and talked and once made love, and on which he read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in one spellbound sitting, and on which, fuming after a family row, he first formed his decade-old resolution never to compromise, never to submit, and never to take his father’s advice, now with a glass of the old man’s Jameson in his hand, feels the pang of mortality.
This song nails crosses one and two. But it’s well-worn and trite, and affecting only when you’re drunk — and there is cross three. Nothing new: incitement and curse.
‘So. Mikey. How’s work? Good year?’
Big Vince, Mike’s dad, has litmus lips — blue when sober, they flush to a more conventional pink after a couple of pints. His blotchy skin seems half obscured under a permanent thin dusting of builders’ plaster. Yet despite questionable health he is immensely strong. A memory: Dad teaching him to saw timber when he was about twelve. Mike would do ten hard thrusts, and then his dad would bite through the same distance with a single smooth stroke. ‘One day, I’ll be able to do that,’ he thought then, marvelling at the mystery of manhood. He was wrong: at thirty-three, with as much manliness as he’s likely to acquire, he’s still a child. A crafty child, but a child nonetheless.
‘It was a pretty good year for me.’ On the coffee table is a dish filled with gold and silver: chocolate money.
‘How does it feel to be a big, swinging plonker? Isn’t that what you are now?’
‘I’m a trader. But I still just run Crispin’s system — I don’t make trading decisions myself.’
‘Funny bloke, that Crispin,’ muses Vince. ‘Drove a TVR but didn’t know how to change a tyre. Sold up and buggered off to Hong Kong. Who’d have thought my son’s entire career would come down to him?’ Mike doesn’t like the sound of that. Entire career. It’s early days.
‘I owe him a lot.’
‘How much? I mean, how much are they paying you these days? I’m your father — you can tell me.’
‘I’m doing well. I haven’t got my bonus yet.’
‘But you must have a sense.’ He stresses that word, showing big, sound, yellow teeth. For one Oedipal moment, Mike imagines his father’s enormous skull. The timber-sawing anecdote told at the funeral. He smiles nervously.
‘Dad, if you want to know whether I’m earning more than you, yes I am. So if you’re ever in trouble, let me know.’ He stands up. ‘Can I get you a mince pie?’
‘Insolent little shit,’ says his dad, perhaps half joking. ‘Never built so much as a Lego tower.’ Too true.
In a closed system, disorder must increase. Even Dan Mock’s father’s garage, Exhibit A, would, if locked up for long enough — a few centuries — exhibit some traces of disorder. A drip from a leaking roof, perhaps, scudding down the tiny drawer-fronts and causing their handwritten labels to run; or a draught rolling the well-sharpened pencil off the workbench and shattering the lead; or a mouse eating through the homemade pulley-based ceiling storage to bring a pressure washer or pair of trestles crashing down. Exhibit B is the human body: immeasurably higher pinnacle of order; same laws. The universe does not permit such anomalies to endure. Et cetera.
Dan did not expect the outriders of disorder to be already at his door, though his limp has, he thinks, improved. That doesn’t stop his dad noticing it immediately — Dan says he isn’t sure what it is but has an appointment to get it checked out. ‘Good,’ is Dad’s reply, with a concerned pat on the shoulder. He considers Dan to be a chip off the sensible old block.
Dan takes a walnut from the bowl on the sideboard and fits it into the nutcracker. He has a delicious premonition of the nut’s stout resistance, its sudden yielding to ruthless mechanics, the mysterious, brain-like kernel — its feel in the fingers and in the mouth — and the dry-mouth aftertaste. Then he remembers the weakness in his hands, quietly replaces nut and nutcracker in the bowl, and takes a foil-wrapped chocolate instead.
He can hear Natalie in the kitchen with his mum, attempting with a light, unobtrusive touch to prevent the usual culinary disaster. If he does have MS or Parkinson’s, her life will change too — he’s told her this. But she doesn’t seem worried.
There is one possibility he hasn’t discussed with Natalie: a disease his GP chose to omit from her list. Much worse than MS. Dan has looked up what the first symptoms are.
Just after four, lunch is served. God bless us, every one.
2012
13. Lifetime allowance
‘I wish for no misunderstandings, either in my favour or my disfavour.’
James F. Saunders fell in love on the bus last week — he’s now comfortable using that phrase: fell in love — but is recovering. It’s New Year’s Eve, and he’s back in Bay; Coventry has nothing for him. He sits on the chill concrete of the sea wall, back against a bollard, legs dangling.
The girl seated behind him on the bus, whose face he never saw and who was probably only fifteen or sixteen, told her friend that she didn’t consider her parents to be fully human, because they didn’t feel as intensely as she did. They were more like fish, she suggested. The friend giggled; the girl didn’t. It was an unexceptional thing for an adolescent to say. But then she added, ‘And the worst thing is, they know it’s true, because they were our age themselves once, so they know they’ve like slowly become subhuman, but they won’t admit it. Not even to themselves. I feel sorry for them.’
This girl will, in time, discover her assertion to be precisely correct. Adults are indeed subhuman. Burned out bureaucrats of the species. Of course by then, she’ll be one too. Won’t care to remember her youthful insight. For a writer, emotion is an engine of ideas and not vice versa. If James experiences fewer and feebler emotions as he grows older, inhabits a barren, worked-out emotional field, is it any wonder he has fewer ideas?
He throws a pebble into the sea, with a vague notion that it’s the right thing, the emotional thing to do. The act resounds with emptiness. A single gull flies high above, following the line of the coast, making steady progress towards an unstated but certain goaclass="underline" another reproach.
It doesn’t matter. There are methods, workarounds, by which old men can write great books. James walks slowly back to his lodgings. Flexes his fingers. For a subhuman to whom nothing comes naturally anymore, the novel is a test of intellect, guile, mettle; above all, memory. Bringing old emotion to mind. Project Q. Auld lang syne.
As Brenda’s train rushes northward past the snow-dusted Moors, she again watches for James. They did not avail themselves of the opportunity to meet up over Christmas. James’ texts have been petering out. Absence makes the heart grow cold, in Brenda’s experience.
Mike did the older brother thing, told her to be careful. A guy like Mike is never likely to understand a guy like James. She braced herself for more, especially as James pinched his fancy book, but that was it — be careful. The cocked ginger eyebrow. Thanks, Mike, but I’m twenty-eight.