Tonight’s box, which he dragged under the light of the ceiling bulb, was a large supermarket fruit carton with SPAR in green letters along the side. Here, with a rush of whatever chemical such recognitions released into the blood, he discovered the pieces of an elaborate toy that must have been given when he was about seven, and Larry nine or ten: a lunar landscape made of moulded plastic, and a little spidery landing craft of great simplicity and delicacy that had once had a balloon attached to it, and which was directed on to the sheet of moon by small battery-powered fans. It belonged to a period that now seemed bizarrely remote, when space travel was front-page news and children kept scrapbooks with pictures of astronauts. No self-respecting child would waste time on such a toy now. For a start, there was no screen.
Under the moon, though from the same era, was a brightly coloured tin with a picture on the lid of a man in a smoking jacket holding a magic wand. Inside were three red cups, each smaller than an eggcup, and half a dozen pea-sized balls. A booklet illustrated with sketchy and perplexing diagrams explained how, by sleight of hand, the balls could be made to disappear from beneath one cup and reappear beneath another. To do this it was necessary to obtain the knack of holding a ball pressed inconspicuously into the crease of your palm. Alec tried it a few times; it was surprisingly difficult, but it was, he thought, the kind of trick that any good uncle should be able to perform, and he determined to learn it, thoroughly, and entertain Ella with it when she came over.
Other stuff: a school gazette from King Alfred’s with a grainy still of boys on sport’s day – small, ghostly figures, bizarrely intent, strung out across an enormous grey field. The finishing line, which might have given the picture some context, was out of shot, and far from being redolent of a summer’s afternoon, of youthful athleticism, the boys seemed to have been posed there to illustrate some idea of human futility. Farther on, another Xeroxed photograph showed a group of adolescents standing about with stick-on moustaches and frock-coats for a production of the school play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Alec had played Algy Moncrieff, ‘creditably’, according to the gazette, though all he could remember of it was the angry crimson mottle on his throat brought about by first-night nerves; the urge to bolt.
A box of Cluedo.
A card game called Pit.
A ‘spud’ gun in the style of an automatic, the spring action still functioning.
A Frank Zappa album, warped.
A hardback copy of Struwwelpeter.
Finally, stashed at the very bottom of the box, was an American girlie magazine from June 1977, Miss Valley Forge on the cover in a stars-and-stripes bikini and Davy Crockett hat. Inside – the month’s theme was American revolutionary ardour – other models pouted beside cannon or reclined on couches wearing only tricorn hats, or leered obediently from the froth of a Jacuzzi with a provocatively handled flintlock. All sexual promise had leached away from the images, as though they were time sensitive. The models, with their huge roseate breasts, looked as if they belonged to a super-race of wet nurses. All that was missing were the babies themselves, who should have been glimpsed in the background, crawling blindly over the basques and boas. It was hard to believe that these women, now perhaps winning glamorous grandmother competitions in Amarillo or Grand Rapids, had been among the cast of his adolescent fantasies. Their nudity roused no appetite in him now, but they reminded him – as almost everything did – that he had not had sex for eleven months, and that the last occasion, with Tatania Osgood, a girl who had slept with almost everyone he knew, had been so wretched it could never be spoken of, too bleak even to be converted into one of those humorously self-deprecating narratives of sexual failure that might have seemed, in certain company, endearing and funny. Fragments of the evening, a series of tableaux, adhered in his memory with a kind of malicious clarity. Tatania at the street door of his flat in Streatham holding a supermarket carrier bag containing two bottles of a wine called Tiger Milk. Tatania on the sofa of his little book-strewn sitting room, braless in a tight black dress and exuding a wantonness that was genuinely sad. Himself at 2 a.m. kissing her and trapping his fingers in the gusseting of her tights. The pair of them on the bed, she in tears as he tried to comfort her for a succession of cheating boyfriends. Then the act itself, a pleasureless dry wrestling, Mr Bequa’s TV jabbering away in the next room. And when at last the soft hammer of drink had sent her reeling into sleep, he had lain beside her listening to the thick of her breath, and thinking how the evening’s meanness and failure were part of a much larger failure, and that this was the price of his timidity; that he had earned such a night and would earn others by never having the courage to ask for anything better. He had had the urge then – still associated in his mind with the dawn tinkling of milk floats – to commit some act that would close the road behind him for ever, some extravagance of love, or something violent perhaps, murderous.
He carried the cup-and-ball game into the living room, then moved softly up the stairs and peered into his mother’s room to where she lay in the quarter-light as if in a body of water whose currents moved her limbs and slowly turned her face from side to side on the pillows. Her inhalations were like moments of hushed surprise, and in each breath it seemed she lost more than she gained. The sickness was weaning her off air, and however many good days she had when she could sit in the garden with a rug and drink Darjeeling tea and talk to her visitors, the process, the day-to-day business of dying, ran on relentlessly, a ferocious, semi-public labour. What sense did it have, beyond the workings of a certain crude biology? What good lesson could be learned from watching someone die? Was it just to throw you back harder against your own life, to make you see the necessity of getting on with it? a memento mori like the old gravestones with their skulls and sand timers and glib reminders that ‘soon you shall be as I am’?
He had tried once, shortly after Stephen’s accident, to believe in God and the overarching purposefulness of things. He had set aside time every day to say his prayers: twenty minutes in the morning and twenty at night, kneeling down in the approved manner with his hands clasped by his lips. He told no one about it, and it had felt good at first, a source of consolation and power that did not depend on anybody else, teachers or parents, people who might suddenly not be there any more. Then the two sessions had became one and the twenty minutes shrank to ten. He talked to God but God did not talk back to him. There was only the sound of his own voice, the childish litany, the discomfort in his knees, until finally, with a sense of getting out into the air again, he had given it all up. His father had reserved a special venom for religion, the ‘God-botherers’. Alec didn’t know if Alice believed. He hoped she did, though the last time he had seen her with Osbourne she had been ragging him, saying that she had turned into a sun worshipper, ‘a bit of an Aztec’, something that the reverend, sitting beside her wearing a pair of green-shaded sunglasses, seemed to think entirely compatible with modern Anglicanism. It was a curious fact, however, that she did, in certain lights, certain hours, her face puffed up by the steroids, her gaze refined by suffering, look more like a tribal elder of some delicate mournful people in the great plains or rainforests than a middle-class English woman, a retired headmistress, his mother, Alice Valentine.