Carl — Michelle didn't like the name, it was Dave's choice. When he'd proposed it, she dropped a full mug of Nescafe on a white rug. Then she allowed it, saddling herself with this near homonym only out of a sense of overpowering guilt.
The childcare was a mess. Cath did some days, Dave others. They argued over both possession and abandonment of the baby. At work, flipping through budget forecasts, the figures blurred before Michelle's eyes, then cleared to reveal Carl howling on the floor, cold, naked and forgotten. She heaved with regret for the soft hours of counting tiny toes and patting silky skin.
Michelle didn't want her mother getting too close to the baby — Cath might suss out the secret. So eventually she succumbed to an au pair, hoping that this would impose order on the household. She did, sort of. The au pair was a plump, equable, Friesian girl called Gertrude. She was conscientious, she adored Carl, she didn't go out at night — preferring to low in the converted attic. Gertrude also spent a long time in front of the mirror, using up Michelle's concealer, which sadly, the chatelaine required for herself.
On the two afternoons when Dave looked after Carl he took the baby up on to the Heath. Dave put him in a sling under his bomber jacket, so that all he could see of Carl were metal teeth gnashing those alien features. Whenever he changed Carl, Dave was shocked anew by his skinny shanks … I was a chubby baby, Mum said, Noel and Sam were too … These legs … I don't like them. Yet he still loved the boy — he knew he did. He figured they'd recognize each other in time.
The legs extended and the sling was exchanged for a pushchair; so Dave perambulated, calling over to his unrecognizable son … Leave on right Parliament Hill, comply path down to Highgate Ponds, left Highgate Ponds, forward. . On the green ridge of the Hampstead massif, where oak and beech screened off the encompassing city, Dave could relax, and hear the swelling chord connecting him to his child. It was enough. On those evenings he talked civilly to his mother-in-law, had a drink ready for his wife when she came home from work. He bathed the baby, and foot-pumped him in his bouncy chair until he was asleep.
Watching Dave tenderly lift her son and bear him away to his cot, Michelle felt that while she could never love her husband, she could at least tolerate him … and that's enough, isn't it?
At last Dave got a fare, and better still he was heading northeast from Liverpool Street to Hackney. Dave dropped him off at Mare Street, then drove down to see his granddad. He parked up and headed up through the clattery core of Homerton Hospital. Rust seeped from metal window frames, there were sweet wrappers on the stairs, and furtive smokers in bathrobes were blowing their lung rot out of the fire doors. Mister Loverman, Shabba! Always makes me think about sex, this gaff, fuck my way out of death, only natural, innit. A dirty pearl of cotton wool lay on a nacreous tile.
Beside Benny Cohen's bed there was a bowl of curving, penile bananas. Mister Loverman … And Dave's great-aunt, who used to be a plain Rachel but was now Gladys. Weird to change your name at all but to change it to Gladys, that's fucking loony. She wore a thick overcoat and sagging stockings. Her feet were huge in basketball boots, her fleshy nose twitched in the gloom of the ward, dowsing for misery. 'Oh, David, David!' She collapsed on his leather chest. Dave felt bones and smelled mothballs. She's two steps from being a bag lady. He remembered her dismally neat maisonette in Leytonstone, the pathetic little drawers in her shoddy kitchen units, each one full to the brim with neatly folded brown-paper bags. She had eight cats. 'Your grandfather's going to cross over soon, David, cross over the Jordan.' … Which Jordan? He was looking at her shoes. Michael? Which holy rollers was it she's mixed up in?
He thought back to his wedding. Aunt Gladys had brought Benny over in a minicab from the East End. At the reception, held up West in a poncey restaurant none of them had liked, Aunt Gladys had buttonholed the guests, forcing on them leaflets headed 'Jews for Jesus'. Dave overheard her telling Dave Quinn, 'It's alright to follow the Redeemer even if you are one of the Chosen People, even if you've been bar mitzvahed. Don't believe the blood libel, my child, for we can all atone for His Sacrifice, we can all be anointed with his chrism and his love.' Dave was touched when Quinn — whom he always thought of as basically a moral-free zone — patted Gladys's shaky hand and said, 'Thank you, missus, I'll make sure I give it a good read.' Then tucked the leaflet away in his suit pocket.
A nurse bustled into the ward and advanced to the nubbin of life on the bed. First she checked the silvery nipple of her watch, then she adjusted the spigots that were attached to Benny's tubes. He stirred — his head was nut brown, wrinkled as a walnut. It looked as if it had been parboiled, coated in tar, then impaled on a cigarette. 'Shmeiss ponce,' Benny croaked.
'You what, Granddad?' But that was all — the old man's eyes were shut again.
Dave turned away. Outside the filmy window was a bit of Hackney Marsh, seagulls scrummed above a rugby pitch. Gladys joined him. 'I bin talkin' to 'im, readin' to 'im.' She withdrew a purple-bound volume from her coat; a golden angel blowing a stylized golden trumpet was embossed on its cover.
'You still with … with …' Dave couldn't bear to say it. '… that lot?'
'I'm fifty-five years of age,' Gladys lied, 'an' at long last after all me searching I've come 'ome to the true Church. I know now that Jews fer Jesus, well, it was justa way in, so to speak. Now I've made me choice, I'm a Saint, I eggsept the Doctrines and the Covenants.'
'A Saint?' Dave queried.
'A member of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, what you gentiles call the Mormons.'
'Bloody hell!' Dave expostulated and then again, 'Bloody hell!'
'There's no need to blaspheme, David, no need at all. P'raps if you'd had Christ Jesus in your life, fings wouldn't've got to this pass.'
'Whaddya mean by that?' Dave glared into Gladys's mad blue eyes. 'What's my mum been saying?'
'Only that … well … it isn't my place.' Gladys folded pious hands on her — book and held it in front of her belly.
'No, go on, it is your place, obviously.'
'Well, only that you and your 'Chelle ain't that happy — and I know it can't be good in the cabs eever what wiv this resesshun an' that…'
Dave drove back across town to Gospel Oak. He clonked through Dalston, past the burnt-out hulk of the Four Aces. What was that black geezer's name? Went in the nick there with a shooter — blew his fucking head off… Least Benny's dying in a private cubicle thing. With curtains … curtains, cubicles … shmeiss ponce. . thass it! The steam baths — that's what Benny was on about … the Porchester out west, that's where him an' his mates used to hang out … playing cards, snarfin' cheese sarnies and bowls of jelly and custard … Fat men. . all with gold jewellery … rings … ID bracelets. . they all smoked too … King Edward cigars … pipes, fags … I remember the shmeiss ponce … little fellow … Lewis Levy, who bilked his turn with the shmeiss. I'm too 'ot — that's what he whined, I'm gonna 'ave a seizure. . The others'd watch him scarper through the steam room, then when he'd gone they'd dump on 'im …fucking runt, fucking shmo, fucking chancer, dodgy little cunt, shmeiss ponce!