‘I heard the radio, and I remembered how you used to cook with that music on, and then I knew.’
She smiled. ‘I still do.’ She folded her cigarette up in the ashtray. She’d smoked less than half of it. ‘Talking of that, are you staying for dinner?’
‘I need to stay the night.’ He watched her face. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only tonight. Then I’ll be gone.’
‘Need to?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Need to.’
She took another cigarette out of her pack and looked at it as if she thought she might learn something from it. They were exactly the kind of cigarettes he would’ve imagined she smoked. Extra slim, extra mild. 100s. A delicate garland of flowers encircling the cigarette just below the filter.
‘You never told me anything, did you?’ she said.
‘You don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘you really don’t.’
‘That’s not giving me much say, is it?’
‘You lost the right to that a long time ago.’
This time she stubbed her cigarette out as if it was alive and she wanted it dead. ‘You’ll never forgive me, will you, for throwing your stupid radios away.’
‘I’m not talking about radios,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about you pretending I didn’t belong to you, you being ashamed. You still feel guilty about it. If you didn’t feel guilty, you’d already’ve thrown me out. But you haven’t and you won’t,’ and he looked at her, ‘because you’re guilty.’
She banged her glass down so hard it cracked. And she held on to it, the skin stretched tight between each knuckle. ‘Stop telling me what I feel and what I don’t feel, for Christ’s sake. What do you know about what I feel? You don’t know a thing.’ She let go of the glass, looked down at her hand. She’d gashed the mound at the base of her thumb. Blood slid along the fine grooves on the inside of her wrist.
She stood at the sink and ran cold water on to the wound. ‘I’m making hamburgers for dinner,’ she announced suddenly, without turning round.
She dabbed at her cut with a piece of paper towel. He couldn’t remember seeing her bleeding before, or hurt, not ever. Dealing with this damage to herself, she seemed tentative and clumsy. There was a despair about her, a kind of fatalism, as if she might at any moment throw in the paper towel and sit down on a chair and simply bleed. He stood up and fetched the first-aid kit from the cupboard. He placed it on the draining-board beside her.
‘Thank you,’ she muttered.
He watched her opening the kit and thought: I know a thing about you. Her drinking, her smeared face. A looseness in her head that could only be tightened by love. You’ve always chosen the wrong men, or let the wrong men choose you. Your life’s been one mistake after another. I’m only one of them.
She stuck a plaster over the cut and moved to the chopping-board. She lit a cigarette and put it straight in the ashtray. Then she began to chop onions. The cigarette burned all the way down to that delicate garland of flowers, she didn’t touch it once. When she’d finished the onions she reached for the whisky bottle and held it up to the light. Half an inch left. She tipped it into her glass, no soda this time. She stood the empty bottle on the floor.
‘If you want something to drink, there’s wine in the fridge,’ she said.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I don’t drink.’
The smell of meat and onions frying began to load the air. He realised he’d eaten nothing all day.
‘Smells good,’ he said.
She crossed the room and opened the patio doors. She didn’t seem to have heard him.
They ate at the kitchen table. Afterwards they watched a movie on TV. It was about killer ants. There was one part where the ants were swarming across a blonde girl’s thigh while she was sleeping. A man, the hero, presumably, was standing on a beach with a gun in his hand.
Jed turned to his mother. ‘You seen anything of Pop?’
‘Oh, you know. He drops in from time to time.’
‘If you can call smashing the door down dropping in.’ Smiling to himself, Jed looked across at his mother and was surprised to see that she was smiling too.
They were both smiling, both at the same time.
She poured herself another glass of wine. ‘You know, you weren’t really a mistake.’
He was looking at the TV again. The blonde girl had just woken up. She was screaming.
‘You weren’t,’ she said. ‘We wanted you.’
‘Maybe I wasn’t,’ he said, ‘but you made me feel like one.’
She sighed and sipped her drink. ‘I was too selfish, but that still doesn’t mean you were a mistake.’
He nodded.
The hero was running up the stairs, but it was too late.
The blonde girl was dead.
His mother cleared the plates away, then she went and stood in the doorway looking out into the night. The wind swelled and the trees in the yard shook like tambourines. One of the patio doors slammed against the outside wall.
‘It’s going to storm,’ she said.
The wind pushed at her hair. A silence seemed to swoop down, and lightning burned the air behind her white. She seemed to have been drawn round haphazardly in black pencil. It made her look as if she would never move again. As if she would always be alone. In that moment he could see why they might laugh together, and why they might cry. Then she was pulling the doors shut, reaching up to fasten the bolt at the top, bending down to fasten the other bolt near the floor. She turned to him, her face dark with the effort. ‘I’m going up to bed now.’
‘What time do you go to work?’
‘About eight.’
‘Could you wake me?’
She nodded. ‘Goodnight, Jed.’
‘Goodnight.’
That green sky he’d seen earlier, it was over the house now, loud and poisonous. He was drawn to the window. Thunder hid the sound of planes. (Or maybe they weren’t taking off tonight, maybe the weather was too bad.) Lightning flattened itself against the glass, a face with no features only inches from his own, a boy shouting from a balcony. He stepped back into the room.
There was nothing much on TV, but he watched it anyway. Like water, it ran into every compartment in his head and left no room for anything else.
He went to bed at eleven. As he climbed the stairs, the rain came with a sudden loud sigh. The roof shook under the weight of it. He passed his mother’s bedroom. There was no strip of light under the door. She must already be asleep.
At three his eyes clicked open. He dressed in darkness, crept downstairs. The storm had passed on. It was quiet. A thick grey light lay on the furniture like a coat of dust. He felt his way into the lounge. There, in the corner, was the bureau desk that had belonged to his father. If he remembered right, the gun would be in the bottom drawer. He tried the drawer. Locked. Somehow that was encouraging. He reached underneath to see if the bottom could be removed, but it seemed solid. He’d have to force the lock. But what with? He crossed the hallway to the kitchen, returned with a pair of scissors, a chisel, some garden shears. He tried the scissors first. They bent. The shears next. Too big. He inserted the chisel into the gap and worked it back and forwards until he had leverage, then he began to push the handle of the chisel downwards, away from the desk. He could feel the sweat all slippery on his forehead and his throat. A crack suddenly, and he fell back. He thought the chisel had snapped, but it was the lock. He put the chisel down, pulled the drawer open and began to feel around inside. A pile of papers. A roll of Sellotape. More papers. It had to be there. Then his hand closed around a rectangular box.
He lifted the box out of the drawer and carried it to the window. He opened the lid. Grey light spilled along the smooth, tooled grooves of the gun. It had belonged to his brother, Tom. Tom had brought it round during the days when Pop kept showing up outside the house at night and shouting threats.